Orígen de Los Americanos
Orígen de Los Americanos
By: Menasseh Ben Israel
The Hope of Israel by Menasseh ben Israel is an important work for understanding the intersection of Jewish and Indigenous history in the early modern Atlantic world. Published in 1650, the book engages with Antonio de Montezinos’s account of encountering Indigenous people in South America whom he believed to be descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Menasseh incorporated this account into a much broader discussion of Jewish dispersion, prophecy, and the whereabouts of the tribes of Israel.
This aspect of Menasseh’s thought is particularly significant because it is often overshadowed by his better known role in European Jewish history as a rabbi of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community, a Hebrew printer, an intellectual connected to Christian scholars, and an advocate for the readmission of Jews to England. *The Hope of Israel* was itself important to that effort. Menasseh presented the dispersion of Jews throughout the world as connected to biblical prophecy, and his arguments attracted the attention of English Christian thinkers who believed the presence of Jews in England had religious significance. The work therefore belongs not only to the history of Jewish thought about the Americas, but also to the story of the campaign that eventually led to the return of an openly practicing Jewish community to England.
