Many Anglo-Americans articulated the view that the Indigenous peoples of North America, or at least some of them, were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Stories of the dispersion of the lost tribes can be found in the Bible's 1–2 Kings, both Isaiah and Ezekiel prophesied their future regathering, and many Christians anticipated that their regathering and conversion to Christianity would precede Christ's Second Coming. The Hebraic Indian theory, as Elizabeth Fenton calls it, was a sincerely held “mythology” (8) that Anglo-Americans used as a “justification of settler colonialism” in North America (2).

Old Canaan in a New World is a literary analysis of select deployments of the theory rather than an exhaustive account of the countless writers that elaborated versions of this theory. The first three chapters examine its development from seventeenth-century England to the antebellum United States. Chapter 1 focuses on Thomas Thorowgood, whose Iewes in America (1650) and Jews in America (1660) represent the first major English-language exposition of the theory. The chapter also discusses the theory's refutation by Hamon L'Estrange and the more ambivalent responses of the religious and political leader Roger Williams and the missionary John Eliot. Chapter 2 divides its attention among the trader James Adair's The History of the North American Indians (1775), a hefty compilation of ostensible similarities in the cultural practices of southeastern Native and Jewish peoples that the trader compiled in opposition to eighteenth-century polygenism, and two Americans who used the wealth of ethnographic detail in Adair's book to support their own claims, the author Ethan Smith and the Jewish-American journalist Mordecai Manuel Noah. Chapter 3 examines Elias Boudinot's A Star in the West (1816), the most important U.S. elaboration of the lost tribes theory, and the appendix to the second edition of A Son of the Forest (1831). In the latter, the Pequot Methodist William Apess repurposed long passages (much of it unattributed) from Boudinot's book, which had been aimed at increasing U.S. missionary efforts, to castigate U.S. injustice and, Fenton argues, to establish Indigenous claims to chosenness and “primal Christianity” (88) that owed nothing to colonizers.

The final three chapters analyze several “critical responses” (12) to the theory in the nineteenth-century United States. Chapter 4, probably the book's strongest chapter, focuses on the often misunderstood place of the theory among Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon chronicles the migrations of several Hebraic peoples to North America but, explicitly, not the lost tribes. Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saints speculated on the location of the lost tribes, however, suggesting another planet (a view voiced by Smith and one of his wives, the poet Eliza Snow) or in an as yet undiscovered part of the earth. Chapter 5 considers James Fennimore Cooper's The Bee-Hunter; or, The Oak Openings (1848), which features a missionary proponent of the lost tribes theory in Michigan Territory during the War of 1812. When Indigenous people executed the hapless missionary, Fenton argues, Cooper dispatched a theory that undermined “vanishing Indian” stereotypes (144). Chapter 6 touches on nineteenth-century Mound Builder and hollow-earth theories in an analysis of DeWitt Clinton Chapman's Beyond the Verge: Home of Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (1896), which does not cast North American Natives as the lost tribes but frames the possibility of both becoming eventual Christians. Fenton does not make a strong argument about why the lost tribes theory declined, though she points to Indian removal and Protestant abandonment of the theory in response to its prominence among Latter-day Saints (197). A brief coda addresses continuing interest in the lost tribes, arguing that contemporary efforts to use population genomics for “the recovery of ‘lost’ histories and ‘vanishing’ lineages” (209) resembles the work of the scholars she has examined in her book.

Old Canaan in a New World is especially effective in demonstrating the “malleability” (12) of the Hebraic Indian theory, particularly with respect to the varied ways those who used the theory understood its theological significance. While some, like Boudinot, deployed the theory to motivate missionary work and hasten the millennium, others, like Joseph Smith, placed the gathering of the lost tribes in a more distant future. Fenton's analysis of Thorowgood's emphasis upon probability, which she connects with the near-contemporary wager by Pascal, and Boudinot's stress on accident in coming to his theory are likewise illuminating. Much of Fenton's analysis is so sharp that I found myself wondering how she would interpret Hebraic Indian theories—Indigenous, African American, and white—that fell outside her gaze.

Yet, in some ways, the book falls short on entwined issues of contextualization and argument. Fenton recognizes the tremendous influence of Adair and Boudinot, but she devotes less attention to their books and their contexts than to subsequent engagements with them, and Cooper's Bee-Hunter receives more attention than each despite much of Fenton's analysis having little to do with lost tribes. There is also some awkward organization. For example, Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (1823) appears a chapter before Boudinot's Star in the West (1816), though Fenton notes that the latter “clearly inspired” the former (73). Fenton only rarely draws connections between writings and the uses authors or readers put them to (other than more writing). Mordecai Manuel Noah's attempt to build a refuge for Jewish and the continent's Indigenous people not far from Buffalo is a notable exception. Finally, for a book ultimately about representations of Indigenous pasts and futures, Fenton does not sufficiently address the contexts of (so-called) philanthropy or ethnology. She makes clear that claims of putative similarities between the languages and customs of Native and Jewish people were inaccurate, but she gives the reader no context to appreciate how such claims related to other ethnographic knowledge then in circulation. Fenton claims that “as the United States ramped up its efforts to remove Native populations . . . the question of human origins faded into the background of national concern” (197), but the 1820s–1850s was a period of intense and proliferating theorization in philology, archaeology, and craniology.

That said, for historians interested in how different Anglo-Americans used the theory or in the different forms the theory took from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Old Canaan in a New World is a good place to start.