APPENDIX.
ARE WE THE TEN TRIBES?
By the Late HORATIUS BONAR, D.D.
(Reprinted by permission from The Sunday at Home, October, 1880.)
That the inhabitants of Great Britain are Israelites is a modern theory which has been widely spread. Its defenders have invented a large number of resemblances or "identifications," on which, in the absence of authentic history or national tradition, they rest their proof.
The languages of our country—Saxon, English, Welsh, and Celtic—have no affinity with the Hebrew; but that is made of no account. The history of the many tribes of which our nation is composed—whether Teutonic, or Saxon, or Caledonian, or Latin, or Scandinavian—is totally distinct from that of any of the tribes of Israel; but authentic history is in this case wholly set aside.
The manners and customs of our nation, both religious and social, have not the slightest resemblance to those of Israel; but this is quite ignored. The physiognomy of our countrymen—whether they are English, or Welsh, or Scotch, or Celtic, or Norwegian, or Norman—is the very opposite of Eastern, the Israelitish face being a marked contrast to the British; but that is reckoned of no consequence.
The names of men, women, and places in our land are not Hebrew or Semitic at all, but are traceable to another class of languages altogether; yet this weighs nothing. The occupation of our land by certain tribes, who we now call the Aboriginal Caledonians, or Britons (long before the Ten Tribes were carried captive to Assyria, and who, therefore, could not be Israelites), is passed by. The grand story of an Israelitish emigration from Assyria into Great Britain, whether by sea or land, we are not told, and there is neither history nor tradition nor local monuments to confirm it. And yet, when was there ever an emigration in which the emigrants did not carry their language, their religion, their manners, their dress, and their national traditions with them? This the identifiers of Israel with England have not considered. The Two Tribes in their dispersion over wide Europe carried their worship, their language, and their manners, into every European city, and synagogues exist to this day which were set up centuries before Christ, and every European Jew can tell for certain that he is a descendant of Abraham, and lives apart from the Gentiles around; yet, if the Anglo-Israelite theory be true, the Ten Tribes poured in upon Great Britain and settled themselves there, drove back the Aborigines, but left their religion, their books, their priesthood, their language, their names behind them, like cast-off clothes, in order to prevent themselves from being identified, as if ashamed of their ancestry. It must have been with Israelites that Julius Cæsar fought; their queen, Boadicea, not a Hebrew name, and their general, Caractacus, not a Hebrew name either: these Israelites must have set up the Druid religion in the island, and to them we must owe Stonehenge and similar relics of antiquity.
There is no evidence in the Bible, or in history, or tradition, for any such Israelitish emigration. Such a flood could not have passed over Europe, either north or south, without leaving some trace or being mentioned in history. If some two or three millions of Israelites did pour into this remote and barbarous island of ours, it must have been before the Romans came; and such a flood of Easterns must have made it a populous island, which certainly it was not.