European vision: Lost Tribes

II Esdras: 13:2-13, 40-42:
“And, lo, there arose a wind from the sea, that it moved all the waves thereof. And I beheld, and, lo, that man waxed strong with the thousands of heaven: and when he turned his countenance to look, all the things trembled that were seen under him. And whensoever the voice went out of his mouth, all they burned that heard his voice, like as the earth faileth when it feeleth the fire. And after this I beheld, and, lo, there was gathered together a multitude of men, out of number, from the four winds of the heaven, to subdue the man that came out of the sea. . . .

“He sent out of his mouth as it had been a blast of fire, and out of his lips a flaming breath, and out of his tongue he cast out sparks and tempests. And they were all mixed together; the blast of fire, the flaming breath, and the great tempest; and fell with violence upon the multitude which was prepared to fight, and burned them up every one, so that upon a sudden of an innumerable multitude nothing was to be Percéived, but only dust and smell of smoke: when I saw this I was afraid. Afterward saw I the same man come down from the mountain, and call unto him another peaceable Multitude. And there came much people unto him, whereof some were glad, some were sorry, and some of them were bound, and other some brought of them that were offered. . . .

“Those are the ten tribes, which were carried away prisoners out of their own land in the time of Osea the king, whom Salmanasar the king of Assyria led away captive, and he carried them over the waters, and so came they into another land. But they took this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a further country, where never mankind dwelt, that they might there keep their statutes, which they never kept in their own land.”

His personal agenda—if Colón had one beyond self-promotion—is murky from the record, and historians argue even over the man’s religion and ethnicity. It’s been suggested, plausibly, that he was an ethnic Jew converted to Christianity and seeking a new home for Spain’s Jewish population.

The Jews had been expelled in a wave of ethnic cleansing that followed the Moors’ defeat, and not even the Christianized Jews (despised as marranos, “pigs”) were safe. Only the king’s intervention, for example, had saved Santangel—himself a marrano—in 1491 from the prosecuting Spanish Inquisition, which Ferdinand’s own wife, Isabella, had set up. The Inquisition was just, in fact, entering its most vicious phase under Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. The expulsion deadline fell the day before Colón departed, and the expedition’s crew included five known ethnic Jews, including the navigator and Colón’s personal physician.

There is a Jewish connection with Colón’s interest in geography as well. Fascinated all his life with the idea of destiny, Colón kept a “Book of Prophecies” where he scribbled references to Old World religious texts dealing with “isles afar off.” A favorite, for him as for other Europeans, was the Jewish apocryphal book II Esdras, which claimed that the ten tribes of Israel abducted by the Assyrian empire, about 738 BCE, had been deported to a land “over the waters.” From there they had exited the Euphrates River and traveled a year and a half to “a further country, where never mankind dwelt.” They were led by a man “that came out of the sea.”

If Colón did identify his islanders privately with those long-lost Jews, he was the first in a line of Europeans who would make the same—genetically mistaken—connection. Until recently, this was Europeans’ most popular assumption about New World natives, taken for granted by the colonizers (see, for example, SACRED CALENDARS MERGE) and stretched into a religion by the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see ‘THE GREAT WHITE GOD’). For the Jews he might find in India, Colón even took with him a Hebrew-speaking linguist, Luis de Torres—another Jew, who had converted to Christianity just before the trip. Colón, himself, often marked his private papers with a page-top inscription that was an abbreviation of besiyata d’ishmaya (“God willing” in Aramaic), an invocation still used by Jews today.

With or without Jews and Christians, Colón apparently did expect to find “the earthly paradise” somewhere in the area. Eden, he theorized, would be encountered at the end of a “prominence like a woman’s nipple” on the stem end of a world that was not round (as usually reported) but pear-shaped. In 1500, after entering a tropical outflow of fresh water off today’s Venezuela, he matter-of-factly reported that paradise lay somewhere up the Orinoco River. (Later generations of Europeans would look for golden cities there.)

Yet there is nothing in the record to suggest Colón even tried Hebrew on the Taino people he met in the Caribbean Sea. And although Torres spoke 12 languages, none of them was Arawakan, linguistic family of the Taino—a limitation that did not prevent them from producing dialog for Colón’s journal (See ENCOUNTER). Instead, Colón presents the islanders, endearingly, as a people from before the Old World’s “Fall” and expulsion from paradise, a Jewish origin story that Christianity (along with Islam) had adopted as its own, a background that Europeans generally presumed to be universal.

Colón’s islanders are naïve, and naïvely good. Unacquainted with iron, they cut themselves on the sailors’ sword blades; they are “guileless . . . are not acquainted with any kind of worship, and are not idolators. . . .” Without benefit of Christianity, they nonetheless practice something like a Christian charity and a disregard for worldly goods:

“They never refuse anything that they possess when it is asked of them; on the contrary, they offer it themselves . . . and whether it be something of value or of little worth that is offered to them, they are satisfied. . . .”

Not only are they friendly, even “timid to a surprising degree,” but:

“I have also established the greatest friendship with the king of that country, so much so that he took pride in calling me his brother, and treating me as such.”