Marco Volpato

Marco Volpato (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa)

PhD Project: “The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the Origin of the American Indians in the 16th Century.”

My dissertation project deals with the Ten Lost Tribes Myth in the 15th and 16th centuries with a particular focus on the Jewish-Indian Theory. This theory was postulated in the 16th century between Spain and the New World and claims that the American Indians came from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. These Tribes became a mythical community after Shalmaneser V and Sargon II deported them from the Holy Land to Assyria in 8th century BC, and all trace of them was lost.

The aim of my research is to show the diffusion of the Jewish-Indian Theory in the 16th Century by focusing on the authors and places that were connected with this belief. In doing that, I will examinate the interactions of prophetic and messianic themes between Chistians and Jews in Early Modern Spain. I will also show, on the one hand, how these tribes were used to explain the ancestry of the American Indians and, on the other hand, how the Jews were used as the “existing category” to describe the unknown natives, who could be integrated into European biblical history through the Jewish-Indian Theory.

Supervisors: Stefania Pastore and Mercedes García-Arenal