Japanese-Jewish common ancestry theory

The Japanese-Jewish common ancestry theory is a fringe theory that appeared in the 17th century as a hypothesis which claimed the Japanese people were the main part of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. A later version portrayed them as descendants of a tribe of Central Asian Jewish converts to Nestorian Christianity. Some versions of the theory applied to the whole population, but others only claimed that a specific group within the Japanese people had descended from Jews. Tudor Parfitt writes that "the spread of the fantasy of Israelite origin ... forms a consistent feature of the Western colonial enterprise", stating, It is in fact in Japan that we can trace the most remarkable evolution in the Pacific of an imagined Judaic past. As elsewhere in the world, the theory that aspects of the country were to be explained via an Israelite model was introduced by Western agents. Researcher and author Jon Entine emphasizes that DNA evidence excludes the possibility of significant links between Japanese and Jews. During the Age of Discovery, European explorers attempted to connect many peoples with whom they first came into contact to the Ten Lost Tribes, sometimes in conjunction with attempts to introduce Christian missionaries. The first person to identify the Lost Tribes with an East Asian nation was João Rodrigues (1561–1634), a Jesuit missionary and interpreter. In 1608, he argued that the Chinese descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. He believed that the Chinese sages Confucius and Laozi took their ideas from Judaism. Rodrigues later abandoned this theory. In his Historia da Igreja do Japão he argued that Japan was populated in two waves of immigration from the mainland, one group originating from Zhejiang, and the other from Korea. According to Parfitt, "the first full-blown development of the theory was put forward by Nicholas McLeod, a Scot who started his career in the herring industry before he ended up in Japan as a missionary". In 1870 McLeod published Epitome of the Ancient History of Japan.