1/1, March 1890-1900 (27 numbers in 7 series). $2.00 for 4 issues of approximately 260 pp. each. As Totten extended his research he issued revised versions of the issues, so series 5, no. 20 is a revised edition of series 1, no. 1. This was a series rather than a journal proper, consisting in extended studies of a single issue:identifying the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel with the “Anglo-Saxons” (a term carefully hedged about to include the “better sort” of Irish descended from the Tuatha te Danaan and the Tribe of Dan) and illustrating their path in Biblical prophecy toward the imminent coming of the millennium. The series was the last hurrah of that sort of antiquarian history represented earlier in the century by Godfrey Higgins and the like, which sought to explain the concealed truths and patterns behind the labyrinthian maze of historical facts, usually by learned appeal to homophones and naive etymologies. This antiquarianism was an exacting and intricate endeavor and required a basis in classical languages and current scholarship that would make it impossible to practice now. Totten (1851-1908) was from an old Mayflower-descended family that had long served in the American armed forces. He was a graduate of West Point and served in the army as a lieutenant in the Apache campaigns and then accepted a position at Yale University as an instructor in military tactics (where he was one of the first to advocate war gaming). Totten first presented his ideas in the local newspapers and then tried in vain to find a publisher. Failing that, he started his own company and began to publish his ideas to subscribers. He began the series with a Kiplingesque paean at century’s end to the success and power of the Anglo-Saxons and their colonies in their march across the world. They were “a gathered people; great, not numbered among the continental nations, of superior influence in all international councils, and with a commerce whose ports close not day or night, and a flag which, lifted as an ensign to the world, greets the sun from clime to clime around the globe, and possessed of a thousand other marks of greatness that to-day are Anglo-Saxon only.” He then revealed the great secret embodied in the journal’s subtitle: the answer to the “Saxon Riddle.” “It is a startling statement, and yet one founded upon ample evidence, that The Anglo-Saxon Race is the literal, lineal, and blood descendant of the Ten Tribes of Israel, whom Shalmaneser deported into Media circa 721 b .c ., and who thereafter, and hitherto, have been so completely lost!” This idea of “British or Anglo Israel” did not originate with Totten, and had originally been an element of the emerging medieval kingdoms’ efforts to distinguish themselves from lesser neighbors by claiming descent from illustrious historical forerunners, like the English story of Brutus of Troy and the Scot’s claim of descent from the Egyptian Princess Scota as well as from Japheth, the son of Noah. In Britain the notion of the Britains as direct blood descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes had burgeoned after 1840 and expecially after the 1870s. See the notes under Banner of Israel, Leading the Nation to Glory, etc. Totten in the 27 volumes of the seriesl gave the theory its most thorough airing and integrated it with a millennial expectation of the Coming Man, the Coming Crusade and Israel Redivivus as the Anglo-Saxons rose to world dominance and restored Israel to Jerusalem, coupling these explanations of Biblical and universal chronology and cycles, the meaning of Biblical measurements and those of the Great Pyramid (C. Piazzi Smith wrote the introduction to the first volume of the series), the symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States, prophecies of the Scepter and Lion of Judah (the heraldic blazon of England) and the supremacy of Israel, etc. All of this was buttressed with vast tables and charts of dates, Biblical citations, and genealogies, learned discussions of a new system of gematria (assigning proper decimal values to Hebrew letters—though Totten, surprisingly, knew little Hebrew), and genealogies of the descent of the House of David through Tea Tephi, King Zedekiah’s daughter and ward of Jeremiah, as “Empire Took its Westward Way.” Reviewers were not impressed with the success of Totten’s arguments but praised the diligence of his research and his style in presenting it. The series was reprinted (usually called Our Race Quarterly) by the publishing company in 1909-1917, after Totten’s death, and again in 1941 in conjunction with the publishers of Destiny. From 1893 until 1907 the series had as its companion Our Race News-Leaflets, which Totten published as a “Monthly Letter to such as are interested in the Signs of the Times.” Totten’s ideas and research had great influence on Herbert W. Armstrong’s Plain Truth and Howard Benjamin Rand’s Destiny (q.v.).

Category: Occultism, Anglo-Israel.