What is the origin of Christian Identity?
It’s an offshoot of British Israelism, a nineteenth-century ideology claiming that the British, not the Jews, are the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. British Israelism was imported into North America in the late 1800s and the early years of the twentieth century, influencing William Cameron, editor of automaker Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent, who published a book entitled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which blamed Jews for everything from Christ-killing and Satanism to communism and capitalism. By the late 1930s, Christian Identity had evolved from British Israelism into a full-blown antisemitic theology. The 1944 novel, When?: A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future, by “H. Ben Judah,” distributed by the British-Israel Association of Greater Vancouver and popularized by Wesley Swift, a Ku Klux Klan member and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ — Christian, was one of the first tracts to propose one of the centr
