Tudor Parfitt writes that "the spread of the fantasy of Israelite origin ... forms a consistent feature of the Western colonial enterprise",[1] stating, It is in fact in Japan that we can trace the most remarkable evolution in the Pacific of an imagined Judaic past.
[5] 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".
[8][9] and Illustrations to the Epitome of the Ancient History of Japan,[10] claiming that the Japanese people included descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who formed the aristocracy and traditional priestly castes.
[18] The Japanese-Jewish common ancestor theory has been seen as one of the attempts by European racial scientists to explain Japan's rapid modernization, in contrast to that of the other "inferior" or "degraded" Asians, especially the Chinese.
[19] Whereas McLeod had claimed that the priest caste and ruling class of Japan were descendants of Jews, the article published by the Shanghai group offered a more proletarian version of the theory.
Shillony writes that: Its author claimed, contrary to what McLeod had written, that it was the outcasts of Japan, the Eta (or Ety as the article rendered the term), who were the descendants of Jews.
"[20] Ben-Ami Shillony also describes a letter subsequently published by the same magazine, written by Elizabeth A. Gordon, a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria who was also a prominent Christian Zionist.
In her 1921 letter she adopted a "fantastic chain of reasoning" to prove that "the meeting between the Japanese and British crown princes signified the long-awaited reunion of Judah and Israel".