Description
Smith, Ethan. View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America. (Poultney, VT: Smith & Shute, 1825) Second Edition, Improved and Enlarged. (Sabin 82539, Gilman p. 253)
Exhibiting Chap. I. The destruction of Jerusalem. Chap. II. The certain restoration of Judah and Israel. Chap. III. The present state of Judah and Israel. Chap. IV. An address of the Prophet Isaiah to the United States relative to their restoration.
Duodecimo. x, [2], 13-285 pages. Hardcover. Original full calf with red label on backstrip. Backstrip divided into six segments by five gilt double horizontal lines.
Condition: Good. Covers are separating but still attached, with heavy wear to the extremities. FFE partially detached. Foxing throughout. Minor spotting on top and edge of text block.
Provenance: Bookplate for C. C. Casler of Port Huron and holographic ownership markings of Victoria Sutphen dated June 24, 1932 on front pastedown as well as E. Holbrook (likely Eli Holbrook) of Saratoga Springs dated November 20, 1825 on FFE (most likely the original owner).
“Ethan Smith (1762–1849) was a New England Congregationalist clergyman… who wrote View of the Hebrews (1823), a book that argued that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. His position was not uncommon among religious scholars, who based their history on the Bible.
“Historians including Fawn McKay Brodie, a 20th-century biographer of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, suggest that View influenced the Book of Mormon (1830), because of the strong “parallelisms” found between the two….
“When writing View of the Hebrews, Smith lived in Poultney, Vermont, a town with a population less than 2000. Living there at the same time was Oliver Cowdery, who later served as Joseph Smith’s scribe for the Book of Mormon. From 1821 to 1826, Ethan Smith was also pastor of the Congregational church that Cowdery may have attended with his family. Larry Morris, An LDS scholar, has argued that “the theory of an Ethan Smith-Cowdery association is not supported by the documents and that it is unknown whether Oliver knew of or read View of the Hebrews.” In her biography of Joseph Smith, Fawn Brodie wrote, “It may never be proved that Joseph saw View of the Hebrews before writing the Book of Mormon, but the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence.”” – Wikipedia
“Smith’s speculation was inspired by the apocryphal 2 Esdras 13:41, which says that the Ten Tribes traveled to a far country, “where never mankind dwelt”—which Smith interpreted to mean North America. During Smith’s day, speculation about the Ten Lost Tribes was heightened both by a renewed interest in biblical prophecy and by the belief that the aboriginal peoples who had been swept aside by European settlers could not have been the same as the ancient people who created the sophisticated earthwork mounds found throughout the Mississippi Valley and southeastern North America. Smith attempted to rescue Indians from the contemporary myth of mound builders being a separate race by making the indigenous people “potential converts worthy of salvation.” “If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel,” Smith wrote, “American Christians may well feel, that one great object of their inheritance here, is, that they may have a primary agency in restoring those ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel.'”” – Wikipedia
A rare book, OCLC lists only three copies of this edition.
