So How Come the Indians Don’t Eat Matzoh on Passover?

Few early settlers were as interested in Indians as William Penn. He studied the local Lenape’s customs, culture, diet, religion and language and wrote about his observations.

Historians say Penn’s essay on the Indians provided valuable and astute information.

Well, no one is perfect. Even a scholarly Quaker can made mistakes. Penn thought the local Indians were actually Jews.  

”. . .I am ready to believe them of the Jewish Race, I mean of the stock of the Ten Tribes,” he wrote in 1683.

And then Penn presents arguments and observations to back up his startling theory. He says, like the Jews, the native Americans have a lunar calendar. “They offer their first fruits. They have a kind of Feast of Tabernacle. Their mourning is a year.”

The Lenape language – like Hebrew - can say a lot in one word by adding prefixes and suffixes, he added.

Penn even thought Indians looked Jewish. “I find them of like countenance and their children of so lively resemblance that a man would think himself in Dukes Place or Berry Street in London". (Jewish areas of London at the time) 

One aspect of his theory that Penn got right, when explaining how one of the lost tribes of Israel got here, was by pointing out the closeness of northeast Asia to North America.