Mordecai Manuel Noah. Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Mordecai Manuel Noah’s discourse gives a hallowed antiquity to the origins of America, identifying the Native American Indians as descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Noah also took the opportunity in this address to assert his Jewish restorationist sentiments, predicting that “Syria [i.e. Palestine] will revert to the Jewish people.” Zionist sentiments stated a half-century before Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat and more than a century before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.