Edward Hine

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Edward Hine (1825-1891) was a proponent of British Israelism in the 1870s and 1880s, drawing on the earlier work of Richard Brothers (1794) and John Wilson (1845). Hine for several years published a weekly journal, The Nation's Leader, and a monthly magazine, Life from the Dead (since 1873). He founded the "The British-Israel Identity Corporation" in 1880. A bank clerk by profession, Hine claimed to have been inspired by a lecture by Wilson, which he heard at the age of 15, but he did not himself publish on the topic for nearly thirty years, giving his first public lecture in 1869 (Barkun 1997, p. 10).

Hine went as far as to conclude that "It is an utter impossibility for England ever to be defeated. And this is another result arising entirely form the fact of our being Israel."

David Baron in his The History of the Ten "Lost" Tribes (ch. 2) cites claims identifying Hine himself with the "Deliverer" announced in Romans 11:25:

Are the British people identical with the lost Ten Tribes of Israel? And is the nation, by the identity, being led to glory? If these things are so, then where is the Deliverer? He must have already come out of Zion. He must be doing His great work; He must be amongst us. It is our impression that, by the glory of the work of the identity, we have come to the time of Israel's national salvation by the Deliverer out of Zion, and that Edward Hine and that Deliverer are identical

Hine in turn inspired Edward Wheeler Bird, who however came to see Hine as a rival rather than an ally. The main ponint of contention between Bird and Hine was that the former tended to identify all Teutonic peoples as descendants of the Israelites, while Hine reserved this status for the Anglo-Saxons (interpreting the name "Saxons" as "sons of Isaac"), preferring for Germany the the role of Assyria. As the institutions created by Bird began to obscure Hine's success in Britain, Hine turned to the United States in search of a new audience. (Barkun 1997, p. 10f.).

Hine's ideas thus influenced nascent Anglo-Israelism in the United States, where they are still advocated by some Christian white supremacist fringe groups, paradoxically turned to antisemitism, Clifton A. Emahiser's "Church of True Israel" identifying the Anglo-Saxons as the true Jews and the actual Jews with the Canaanites which must be exterminated according to Jewish law:

Maybe Great Britain is unaware that the Canaanites are the “Jews”, as we have the same problem in the United States today. Yahweh commissioned Israel to completely exterminate every Canaanite on the face of the earth, thus we better know for sure who they are. (Emahiser, p. 33)

Likewise, the Christian Identity movement claim that they are descendants of the Biblical Israelites, whereas the Jews are the children of Satan (Ould-Mey p. 11). This development is a peculiar inversion of the motivation of Hine, who was in fact a philo-Semite (Barkun 2003, p. xii.) The Worldwide Church of God of Herbert W. Armstrong also perpetuated Hine's identification of Germany with Assyria, adding the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust with the destruction of Israel by Sargon II, into the 1980s.

Works:

  • England's Coming Glories (1880); 2003 reprint, ISBN 978-0766128859.
  • The British Nation identified with Lost Israel (1871)
  • Seven Identifications
  • Twenty-seven Identifications
  • Forty-seven Identifications (1878)[1]

[edit] Literature

  • Robert Roberts, Are Englishmen Israelites? (debate with Edward Hine, Birmingham 1919)
  • Robert Roberts, Anglo-Israelism Refuted (1879) [2]
  • Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. "Anglo-Israelism".
  • A Darms , The Delusion of British-Israelism: A Comprehensive Treatise (1938)
  • Marie King, John Wilson and Edward Hine (Destiny Magazine, January 1948) [3][4]
  • Clifton A. Emahiser, reprint of Hine's IDENTITY Of The Ten Lost Tribes Of Israel With The Anglo-Celto-Saxons with commentaries, Clifton A. Emahiser’s Teaching Ministries[5][6]
  • Mohameden Ould-Mey, The Non-Jewish Origin of Zionism, International Journal of the Humanities (2003).
  • Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (1997), ISBN ISBN 0807846384.