• He held that both the lost Israelite tribes and the Tartars migrated to the New World, but that they remained distinct. Others championed one or the other idea about the racial origins of the Indians of the Americas. The Bible gives hardly any clue of what happened to the ten northern tribes after Assyrians took them into captivity in Assyria. The apocryphal book of Esdras says the escaped Assyria and traveled to the distant land of Arzareth, usually interpreted to be a corruption of Hebrew eretz akheret, 'another land,' or later identified with Tartary. Tartary in those days vaguely meant everything from the Caspian (or even the Black) Sea all the way to the Bering Strait, identified with the ancient Scythia. Richard W. Cogley, "Some Other Kinde of Being and Condition": The Controversy in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England over the Peopling of Ancient America, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 35-56.

Bibliography:

• The Hope of Israel (London 1650).
  • He held the messianic belief that when the Jewish people would be completely scattered across the face of the earth, they would at last be repatriated. He accepted the testimony of Antonio de Montezinos, a conversu, who reported his encounter with a group in the region of Columbia that spoke Hebrew and claimed descent from the lost tribe of Reuben.