Prior to the 20th Century, it was the opinion of many writers such as James Adair, Elias Boudinot, Timothy R. Jenkins, Thomas Thorowgood, William Penn, and Ethan Smith that the American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel; and this certainly is a very plausible way of accounting for the peopling of the new world, and for some circumstances, such as customs and traditions remarked among its inhabitants.
In 1837, Mordecai Manuel Noah published "Discourses on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of Lost Tribes of Israel." The fact that Major Noah was a Jew himself, familiar with Jewish customs and practices, gives him perhaps greater credibility than other well-known pre-20th Century writers on this topic.
It is supposed that these lost tribes marched from the banks of the Euphrates to the northeast of Asia, some remaining by the way in Tartary and China. From the various parts of Asia it is believed that the more enterprising and persevering went on gradually advancing by degrees to its northeastern extremity, till they arrived at Behring's Straits, where, during the winter, it would be perfectly easy to cross over to the nearest part of the Continent of America, a distance of about than fifty miles.
In support of his theory, Noah notes that in the apocryphal book of Esdras, of great antiquity, it is said that "the ten tribes...were carried away prisoners out of their own land, led away captives, and...carried... over the waters, so they came into another land."
Regarding Jewish temples in the New World, Noah writes: "Take, for example, the description of the temple at Palenque, which Lord Kingsborough, in his travels, not only declares was built by Jews, and is a copy of Solomon's temple, but which, no doubt, is precisely the model of the temple described by Ezekiel."
Noah was convinced that their similarities, along with the opinions of other authors such as McKenzie, Bartram, Beltrame, Smith, Penn, Menassah Ben Israel, the Earl of Crawford, Lopez de Gamara, Acosta, Malvenda, Major Long, Boudinot and Catlin, all eminent writers and travellers, all go to prove that the "ten lost tribes" were the progenitors of the Indians.
