Anglo-Israelism

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The Anglo-Israelism (also British-Israelism ) is mainly in the United States spread theological special doctrine that the British and other north European peoples of the ten lost tribes of Israel descended.

Content of teaching

The Bible reports that the people of Israel, originally made up of twelve tribes , came to life after the death of King Solomon in 926 BC. BC split into two different kingdoms ( 1 Kings 12.20  EU ). The northern kingdom of Israel consisted of ten tribes, the southern kingdom of Judah with the capital Jerusalem of two. The two tribes of the southern empire still exist today as Jews , but the ten northern tribes were established after the Assyrian conquest in 722 BC. Resettled ( 2 Kings 17.6  EU ) and lost their identity.

Anglo-Israelism assumes that these lost tribes are identical to the Scythians and have moved on to northwestern Europe and that the British and Anglo-Saxons are descended directly from them. The first representatives concluded from this that at the end of the story these peoples would inhabit the promised land of Israel together with the Jews . Later representatives taught that the Jews had lost their promises and that therefore the "Anglo-Saxon", namely "Christian" peoples were the sole heirs of all the promises of the Old Testament .

symbol

The Scottish coronation stone Stein von Scone , which was under the coronation throne of the English kings in Westminster from 1296 to 1996, is of particular importance for Anglo-Israelism . It is said to be the stone on which the head of the biblical Jacob rested when he dreamed of the ladder to heaven ( Gen 28: 10-22  LUT ).

history

For the first time, a British Israel theory is said to have been represented in 1649 by the English lawyer John Sadler (1615–1674) ("The rights of the kingdom"). In 1840 the Irish Reverend John Wilson published a book entitled Lectures on our Israelitish Origin (about lectures on our Israelite origin ), in which he extended this theory to other "Teutonic" peoples, mainly to Germany, Italy, France and the Switzerland. He believed that they were descended from different tribes of the Scythians , which in turn came from the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Anglo-Israelism did not become known to a larger circle until 1874, when Edward Hine , who had heard a lecture by Wilson in 1840, wrote a book called Forty-Seven Identifications of the British Nation with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel (about: 47 equations the British nation with the lost ten tribes of Israel ), in which he equated the British Empire of the time with the biblical Israel of the Old Testament.

Hine and his followers were not anti-Semitic ; on the contrary, they wanted the “ Anglo-Saxon people” to one day join the tribes of Judah and Levi in ​​the “ Promised Land ”. He believed that this connection would herald the return of Christ .

In 1884, Hine decided to bring the movement to the USA in order to reveal their true identity to Americans of European descent, but initially had no success. In the 1920s, turned to Howard Rand in 1928 the Anglo-Israelism to, National Commissioner of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America (about: Anglo Saxon Federation of America ) was and in 1937 the publishing Destiny Publishers ( determination or election ) founded that still published some of his works.

Rand interpreted the Old Testament in such a way that the Jews had not only been separated from ancient Israel, but had even left the “true” tribes and were therefore no longer God's chosen people. The white "Anglo-Saxon people" of predominantly European descent are the true chosen people of Israel. However, this form of election did not yet have any strictly racist features, but only united its followers in the belief that they could claim God's promises for themselves.

The supporters of Anglo-Israelism are not organized but live their faith in their traditional church congregations. Estimates of the number of followers therefore vary extremely: from 2000 to 100,000.

A variant of Anglo-Israelism is the British-Israel theory of Herbert W. Armstrong , on which he built his special community " Worldwide Church of God " in 1934 , which broke away from his inheritance after his death and is now an evangelical free church . The followers of the old teaching founded the United Church of God in the spring of 1995 . In the Northern Ireland conflict , William McGrath, a supporter of Anglo-Israelism, founded Tara , a loyalist Protestant paramilitary organization.

However, more extreme views of Howard Rand's teachings were adopted early on by the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi groups ( Nazi supremacist groups ) and shape the racist-anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement.

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