The Origin of the Lost Tribes Theory

I've written here about the lost tribes theory before. According to the lost tribes theory, American Indians are somehow the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
Of course I don't have exact numbers, but suffice it to say that some form of the lost tribes theory was accepted in much of Europe and the English-speaking world in the 1600's and 1700's.

How did the lost tribes theory originate?

Lynn Glaser sets out to answer that and other questions in his introduction to a reprint of a book that promoted the lost tribes theory in 1650.

The book has been made available via Google books:
Indians or Jews?: An Introduction to a Reprint of Manasseh Ben Israel's The Hope of Israel

Glasser's summary of many years' history makes sense to me.

...the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews of Palestine, and...two heretical offshoots of Judaism, Christainity and Islam, waxed great and became the dominant religions of Europe and the Middle East. Presently hostility among Christians, Muslims, and Jews was whipped up by their respective priesthoods. Being the fewest, the Jews suffered the most in strife, and soon began to wish that there were a powerful Jewish state somewhere to which they could go for refuge, or which could at least give them some protection. The wish was father of the thought, with the result that by the seventh century [the 600's], rumors circulated about a mighty Jewish kingdom in the East.

In other words, explorers were looking for the lost tribes of Israel long before they became aware of the Western Hemisphere. On page 58 Glaser writes

As missionaries and travellers covered more ground they constantly were uncovering new people with strange customs which needed explaining and announced that they had discovered the Ten Lost Tribes. The Jewish Encyclopedia devotes three pages of small print to listing them.

So it wasn't just Indians. There was a list three pages long of ethnic groups believed to be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

And it all started hundreds of years before European explorers found their way to Turtle Island.

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