British-Israel Theory

A theory tracing British origins in the Bible, with implications for national status and destiny.


The British-Israel theory was the most prominent of a number of theories about the Lost Tribes. As related in the Bible, the northern kingdom of Israel, comprising ten of the tribes reputedly descended from the patriarch Jacob, was destroyed by Assyrian deportations in the eighth century b.c. The deportees were transferred eastward and probably assimilated. However, the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:21–24) assumes that their descendants still have a corporate identity and will someday be reunited in the Holy Land with descendants of their southern kinfolk, namely, the Jews. In this passage, God promises that “my servant David” will be king over the whole community. A belief in a large body of ethnic Israelites surviving in some remote land is attested much later by the Jewish historian Josephus. Their existence has continued to be a tenet of Orthodox Judaism.
Some Christians have not been content to leave the matter indefinite. They have tried to locate and identify the lost Israelites, who, it must be presumed, wandered beyond the bounds of the Assyrian Empire. The underlying idea is that God’s covenant was with all twelve tribes, and since his promises cannot be canceled, the northerners must exist somewhere. They have been found, with the aid of tenuous linguistic and historical clues, in Afghanistan and Japan and even America.
The British-Israel theory pressed such scriptural arguments further. It was foreshadowed by Richard Brothers (1757–1824), but the main development came long after his time. Exponents drew attention to prophecies of the Chosen People enjoying visible divine favor, power, and greatness. That could not be said of the Jews, who, when the theory was taking shape, did not even have a homeland. God’s promises must therefore have been fulfilled in the other branch of the Chosen People. These promises fitted Britain when its empire was flourishing, so the British had to be the long-lost northern Israelites.
To confirm the equation, ingenious speculations traced the Lost Tribes, by various routes, to northwestern Europe and the British Isles. For instance, Assyrian inscriptions called the northern Israelites the people of Omri, after one of their best-known kings. The name could have been modified into “Khumri,” and this could have been the origin of “Cimmerian” (applied in antiquity to a nation in southern Russia, doubtless Israel on the march) and “Cymry” (applied to the Welsh, doubtless part of Israel in its new country). A more direct argument was that

the word British sounded like the Hebrew b’rit ish, meaning “covenant man.” Legendary genealogies were invoked to link British royalty with King David. British-Israel theory was strongly Protestant and stressed, as proof of the British people’s “chosen” character, their break with the pope, their translation of the Bible, and their distribution of it through their overseas possessions.
For a time, in spite of so much that was fanciful, the prophecies seemed to be working and pointing to a glorious future. One result of World War I was that Britain took over Palestine and sponsored the Zionist program of Jewish settlement. The two branches of the Chosen People were being brought together in the Holy Land, just as Ezekiel had foretold. The heyday of the British-Israel theory was in the 1920s and 1930s. Early in 1936, the accession of King Edward VIII, known to his intimates as David, fulfilled the word of God about “my servant David.” Soon, perhaps, Ezekiel’s next chapter would also be fulfilled. This predicted an invasion of the Holy Land by the evil northern ruler “Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal”—surely a reference to Soviet Russia, Gog being Stalin, Meshech and Tubal being Moscow and Tobolsk. Some British-Israel advocates, with support from Pyramidology, expected an event of crucial importance in September 1936. Nothing particular happened. Shortly afterward, King Edward abdicated. Soviet Russia became otherwise engaged. In the next few decades, British rule in Palestine ended, and so did the empire itself. Everything had fallen apart, and the prophetic texts that supposedly established Britain’s Israelite character were no longer relevant.