The is a

fringe theory A fringe theory is an idea or a viewpoint which differs from the accepted scholarship of the time within its field. Fringe theories include the models and proposals of fringe science, as well as similar ideas in other areas of scholarship, such a ...

that appeared in the 17th century as a hypothesis which claimed the

Japanese people The are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Japanese archipelago."人類学上は，旧石器時代あるいは縄文時代以来，現在の北海道〜沖縄諸島（南西諸島）に住んだ集団を祖先にもつ人々。" () Ja ...

were the main part of the

Ten Lost Tribes The ten lost tribes were the ten of the Twelve Tribes of Israel that were said to have been exiled from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire BCE. These are the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, ...

of Israel. A later version portrayed them as descendants of a tribe of Central Asian Jewish converts to

Nestorian Christianity The Church of the East ( syc, ܥܕܬܐ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ, ''ʿĒḏtā d-Maḏenḥā'') or the East Syriac Church, also called the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Persian Church, the Assyrian Church, the Babylonian Church or the Nestorian C ...

. Some versions of the theory applied to the whole population, but others only claimed that a specific group within the Japanese people had descended from

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

Tudor Parfitt Tudor Parfitt (born 10 October 1944)
Encyclopedia.com is a British historian, wri ...

writes that "the spread of the fantasy of Israelite origin ... forms a consistent feature of the Western colonial enterprise", stating,

It is in fact in Japan that we can trace the most remarkable evolution in the Pacific of an imagined Judaic past. As elsewhere in the world, the theory that aspects of the country were to be explained via an Israelite model was introduced by Western agents.

Researcher and author

Jon Entine Jon Entine (born April 30, 1952) is an American science journalist. After working as a network news writer and producer for NBC News and ABC News, Entine moved into print journalism. Entine has written seven books and is a contributing columnis ...

emphasizes that DNA evidence excludes the possibility of significant links between Japanese and Jews.

Origins

During the

Age of Discovery The Age of Discovery (or the Age of Exploration), also known as the early modern period, was a period largely overlapping with the Age of Sail, approximately from the 15th century to the 17th century in European history, during which seafari ...

, European explorers attempted to connect many peoples with whom they first came into contact to the Ten Lost Tribes, sometimes in conjunction with attempts to introduce Christian missionaries. The first person to identify the Lost Tribes with an East Asian nation was João Rodrigues (1561–1634), a Jesuit missionary and interpreter. In 1608, he argued that the Chinese descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. He believed that the Chinese sages

Confucius Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...

and

Laozi Laozi (), also known by numerous other names, was a semilegendary ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Laozi ( zh, ) is a Chinese honorific, generally translated as "the Old Master". Traditional accounts say he was born as in the state of ...

took their ideas from

Judaism Judaism ( he, ''Yahăḏūṯ'') is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilization of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organized religion in the ...

. Rodrigues later abandoned this theory. In his ''Historia da Igreja do Japão'' he argued that Japan was populated in two waves of immigration from the mainland, one group originating from Chekiang (

Zhejiang Zhejiang ( or , ; , also romanized as Chekiang) is an eastern, coastal province of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Hangzhou, and other notable cities include Ningbo and Wenzhou. Zhejiang is bordered by ...

), and the other from

Korea Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republi ...

. According to Parfitt, "the first full-blown development of the theory was put forward by

Nicholas McLeod Nicholas McLeod ( fl. 1868–1889), in some accounts called Norman McLeod, was a native of the Isle of Skye, Scotland known for his theory that the Japanese people descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. Tudor Parfitt describes McLeod as...a S ...

, a Scot who started his career in the herring industry before he ended up in Japan as a missionary". In 1870 McLeod published ''Epitome of the Ancient History of Japan''. According to Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, MacLeod had been a missionary who spent decades in Japan and Korea "searching for the true Israelites". and ''Illustrations to the Epitome of the Ancient History of Japan'', claiming that the Japanese people included descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who formed the aristocracy and traditional priestly castes. Evidence cited for this theory included similarities between the legends of

Emperor Jimmu was the legendary first emperor of Japan according to the '' Nihon Shoki'' and ''Kojiki''. His ascension is traditionally dated as 660 BC.Kelly, Charles F"Kofun Culture"Moses, the presence of "Portuguese-Jewish" racial features on some Japanese, and similarities between

Shinto Shinto () is a religion from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes call its practitioners ''Shintoist ...

and Judaism.

Impact in Japan

These theories had little impact in Japan, although recently they were translated into Japanese and published in Japan. Other books, by Joseph Eidelberg (1916 – 1985), which claimed to support these theories, were translated to Japanese, sold in over 40,000 copies and covered in a Japanese Television series of seven episodes. However, in 1908, Saeki Yoshiro (1872–1965), a professor at

Waseda University , mottoeng = Independence of scholarship , established = 21 October 1882 , type = Private , endowment = , president = Aiji Tanaka , city = Shinjuku , state = Tokyo , country = Japan , students = 47,959 , undergrad = 39,382 , postgrad ...

, published a book in which he developed a variant on the theory. Yoshiro was an expert on Japanese

Nestorianism Nestorianism is a term used in Christian theology and Church history to refer to several mutually related but doctrinarily distinct sets of teachings. The first meaning of the term is related to the original teachings of Christian theologian N ...

. Saeki theorised that the

Hata clan was an immigrant clan active in Japan since the Kofun period (250–538), according to the history of Japan laid out in '' Nihon Shoki''. ''Hata'' is the Japanese reading of the Chinese surname ''Qin'' () given to the State of Qin and the Q ...

, which arrived from Korea and settled in Japan in the third century, was a Jewish-Nestorian tribe. According to Ben-Ami Shillony, "Saeki's writings spread the theory about 'the common ancestry of the Japanese and the Jews' (''Nichi-Yu dosoron'') in Japan, a theory that was endorsed by some Christian groups." There is no evidence available, including modern DNA analysis, to support this hypothesis. A recently published study into the genetic origins of Japanese people does not support a genealogical link as put forward by Saeki.

Impact elsewhere

The Japanese-Jewish common ancestor theory has been seen as one of the attempts by European racial scientists to explain Japan's rapid modernization, in contrast to that of the other "inferior" or "degraded" Asians, especially the Chinese. The theory itself, however, was taken in different directions.

Jews in China

The same year the book by Saeki on the theory was published an article promoting yet another version of the theory appeared in ''

Israel's Messenger ''Israel's Messenger'' (), also known in Chinese as ''Youtai Yuebao'' (), was an English-language newspaper published in Shanghai from 1904 to 1941. It was established by N.E.B. Ezra, who served as the paper's Editor-in-Chief for more than 30 ...

'', a magazine published by the Shanghai Zionist Federation. Whereas McLeod had claimed that the priest caste and ruling class of Japan were descendants of Jews, the article published by the Shanghai group offered a more proletarian version of the theory. Shillony writes that:

Its author claimed, contrary to what McLeod had written, that it was the outcasts of Japan, the
Eta Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...
(or Ety as the article rendered the term), who were the descendants of Jews.Shillony, p. 137

The author of the article said that, like the Jews in the West, the Japanese Eta were hard working people, especially associated with the shoemaking industry who also lived in

ghetto A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished ...

s, "not that the Japanese compel them to do so, but they seem to prefer to be isolated from the rest of the population". The author also claimed that the Eta observed Jewish customs: "In the ghetto of

Nagasaki is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. It became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hidden Christian Sites in th ...

, for example, the Ety observe the

Sabbath In Abrahamic religions, the Sabbath () or Shabbat (from Hebrew ) is a day set aside for rest and worship. According to the Book of Exodus, the Sabbath is a day of rest on the seventh day, commanded by God to be kept as a holy day of rest, as G ...

very religiously. Not only do they not work on that day of the week, but they do not smoke nor kindle fires, just like the

Orthodox Jews Orthodox Judaism is the collective term for the traditionalist and theologically conservative branches of contemporary Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as revealed by God to Moses on M ...

." According to Shillony, "This ludicrous and totally groundless story was neither challenged nor refuted in later issues of the magazine."

Christian Zionism

Ben-Ami Shillony also describes a letter subsequently published by the same magazine, written by Elizabeth A. Gordon, a former lady-in-waiting to

Queen Victoria Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was longer than that of any previ ...

who was also a prominent

Christian Zionist Christian Zionism is a belief among some Christians that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 were in accordance with Bible prophecy. The term began to be used in the mid-20th century in ...

. Gordon attempts to link Japan to

British Israelism British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is the British nationalist, pseudoarchaeological, pseudohistorical and pseudoreligious belief that the people of Great Britain are "genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendant ...

, particularly the view that the British royal family were of Israelite descent. Gordon was well known in Japan, where she was researching

Shingon Buddhism Shingon monks at Mount Koya is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asia, originally spread from India to China through traveling monks such as Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra. ...

, which, she claimed, had Christian origins. In her 1921 letter she adopted a "fantastic chain of reasoning" to prove that "the meeting between the Japanese and British crown princes signified the long-awaited reunion of Judah and Israel". Gordon had some influence at the time in Japan.Shillony, pp. 137–138.

Origins

Impact in Japan

Impact elsewhere

Jews in China

Christian Zionism

See also

References

Further reading