This chapter discusses cultural, historical, and literary encounters toward a consideration of disciplinary encounters. It introduces and discusses early modern materials in which Jewish imaginings of indigenous others are framed by Sephardic diasporic histories and identities and by the popularity of ten tribist theories. The chapter argues that Jewish projections, representations, and fantasies of Indianness often assumed distinct expression within it, precisely because of Jews' vexed place within Christian Europe. It concentrates on Jews, who, in the process of imagining their own possessive relationship to the continent, would adopt and adapt myth of the Jewish origins of the New World. Jewish fantasies of indigenization offered further ways to explore the collision between Jewish tribalism and modern, Enlightenment universalism. The chapter suggests that literary Jewish-indigenous encounters tell less about Jewish or Native identities and histories and more about the disruptive and even transformative possibility both might pose to the superintending ideological structures within which they operate.

It was not until the ninth century that significant numbers of Scandinavians were converted to Christianity, but some knowledge of Christian beliefs and rituals had reached Scandinavia much earlier. By the beginning of the ninth century the Franks had subjected and forcibly converted the Saxons south of the river Elbe. In 819, the Franks helped Harald to regain power in an uneasy partnership with Godfred's sons. This made it possible for Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, to lead a mission to Harald's part of the kingdom. The first king to be baptised in Scandinavia was the Dane, Harald Gormsson, who proclaimed that he had made the Danes Christian on the huge runic monument he had erected at Jelling. By the end of the eleventh century Christianity had begun to affect all levels of Scandinavian society. Numerous churches had been built, many of them by landowners with clergy who were, in effect, their servants.