Edward Hine

Edward Hine (10 Feb 1825–15 Oct 1891) was an influential proponent of British Israelism in the 1870s and 1880s, drawing on the earlier work of Richard Brothers (1794) and John Wilson (1840). 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 from the fact of our being Israel."

Career

A bank clerk by profession, Hine claimed that he had been inspired by a lecture given by Wilson in London, which he heard at the age of 15, but he himself did not publish on the topic for nearly thirty years, giving his first public lecture in 1869 (Barkun 1997, p. 10). For several years Hine published a weekly journal, The Nation's Leader, and a monthly magazine, Life from the Dead (from 1873 onwards). He founded "The British-Israel Identity Corporation" in 1880.

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 point 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 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.).

Influence

Hine's ideas thus influenced the nascent Anglo-Israelite movement in the United States, where they are still advocated by some Christian white supremacist fringe groups, which turned to antisemitism, Clifton A. Emahiser's "Church of True Israel" identifying the Anglo-Saxons as the true Israelites and the modern 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, followers of 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 an 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

Hine also published a journal in the 1870s entitled Life From the Dead: Being a National Journal Associated with Identity of the British Being Lost Israel with John Cox Gawler.

Literature

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