Jewish Indian Theory Essay

As Jews we are raised to understand the story of how the world came about and where the Jews fit in. This idea has been discussed about from the creation of the world, and the creation of the first humans, until time today. Sometimes we forget some crucial events in the history of the Jews, such as the existence of the 12 tribes or the Tower of Bavel and what affect it had on the world.

There are two biblical stores that are important to understanding the Jewish Indian Theory. The first one, the tower of Bavel, tells the story of people determined to build a tower tall enough to reach God. God punished them by creating different languages that resulted in it being to hard to communicate with one another. This created diversity among people with different languages and creation of different nations. The second one is that Yaakov, one of our forefathers, 12 children each fathered a separate tribe. Throughout the Torah we become accustomed to the 12 separate tribes and the connection people had if they were from the same tribe; later in the Torah the Jews were described as one nation, but we shouldn’t forget that we were once separated into 12 tribes.

Pokin discusses ideas about the 12 tribes and the Tower of Bavel and its connection to the Jewish Indian Theory. Two questions are raised up by Edward Winslow that sums up a main part of this essay. He questions “what has become of the ten tribes of Israel?” and “where did the American Indians come from?” He proposes a connection of both these questions that one of the ten tribes of Israel became known as the Indians. This uncertainty and speculation regarding who and where did the Indians comes from, largely existed because of the Jews past as the 12 tribes and the Tower of