‘The strange and beautiful love story of the Maori and the Jews’

Welcome to the strange and beautiful love story of the Maori and the Jews.

Right to left: the Reverend Hayley Ace, her parents and her husband Timothy Gutmann[Missing Credit]

Ace’s sense of mission marks her as a bit unusual in the UK, but many Kiwis would quickly recognise a familiar theme.

Just as the New Zealand-born minister’s warm skin tone unmistakably reflects her Polynesian heritage – along with a particular sense of confidence often described here as mana wahine, denoting the strength and authority of a Maori woman living at full tilt – so does her philosemitic warmth.

Around 20 per cent of the overall New Zealand population is officially estimated to be of Maori descent. While the precise number may be slightly exaggerated for domestic political reasons, there’s no disputing the pivotal presence of the country’s original Polynesian inhabitants, who probably began arriving in what’s called the Land of the Long White Cloud, or Aotearoa, sometime in the 1200s.

Ace hails from the country’s verdant far north, from where her parents travelled in the late 1980s to do missionary work in Kenya and then on to East Anglia. And while her personal Jewish awakening came in part from marrying a man of Jewish background – the couple share six children as well as a foster child – she acknowledges that it also taps into a much broader cultural story.

Although not be quite as tight as it used to be, the wider cultural relationship between Maori and Jew has proved notably enduring over much of New Zealand’s history, dating back even further than the nation’s founding in 1840.

As Ace marvels with a smile, almost as soon as the Christian missionaries began arriving from England, bringing with them the great Bible stories, her own people so often “recognised so many of our own legends, our own stories about God – they were all the same, but with different names”.

Especially when it came to all those biblical maps and legends involving the ancient Israelites.

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The first explicit link drawn between Maori and Jewish identity was made by English missionary Samuel Marsden. Fresh to the “brawling land” in 1819 and with a heart set on converting the natives, he quickly conflated local folklore with the biblical texts he was distributing with their indigenous recipients. Marsden became convinced that the Maori had evolved from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Influenced by the stereotypes of Jewish identity prevalent at the time, the Anglican minister rustled up a widely published study of the two groups, highlighting several intersecting points, including trading skills, similarities between Maori elders and rabbis, and a shared conception of God.

Another report of the era highlighted 38 near-identical religious attitudes between Old Testament Jews and Maori. Included in the list of customs were burial, menstruation and conduct in warfare.

Arthur Thompson, a self-styled anthropologist of the era, asserted that Maoris had “Jewish noses”, thus reinforcing the imagined Semitic connection. But it was Marsden’s views that found particular favour among both the Maori and the country’s much smaller Jewish communities. By the mid-1800s, it had become common for Maori tribes people to declare themselves “Israelites” or “Jews”, often using the transliterated terms Tiu or Hurai.

In the 1830s, the warrior-priest Te Atua Wera founded an entire movement based on the belief that Maori were one of ancient Israel’s lost tribes. His followers, many already converted to Christianity, promptly reconverted back again, redefining themselves as “Jews”. They believed that the settlers’ religion had rendered them strangers in their own cloud-draped land.

Notably, the greatest distribution of Bibles in the new colony had coincided with the period of greatest Maori dissatisfaction with their colonial overlords, in particular the grinding decades of land confiscations and other privations that would continue well into the last century.

No matter that modern genetic evidence would thoroughly debunk the theory of any far-flung connection, for the ten known Maori religions, the Old Testament connection introduced by missionaries was enough; an unintended end in itself, rather than merely as any gateway to Christianity.

(Left to right) Samuel Marsden, warrior-priest Te Atua Wera and Te Kooti Rikirangi, who styled himself as a Jew[Missing Credit]

The New Zealand religious scholar Bronwyn Elsmore, author of Mana From Heaven, observes that the image of God was perceived quite differently by colonisers and the colonised.

While inter-tribal wars had decreased markedly by the 1830s, with missionary teachings often used as justification, the Christian God, as a father-figure and peacemaker, did not find much purchase among the Maori.

“The glimpse shown in Exodus 20, however, presented a different image – of a God who laid down rules to be kept and who was feared for his power and justice.”

Te Ua Haumene was a prominent tribal warrior during the land wars of the mid-1800s who liked the sound of that.

The founder of the Hauhau church identified himself in a trance as Moses and, on occasion, went by the name Te Ua Jew, a “peaceable Jew”.

For the few mainstream Jews living in the country at the time, this was just as well: Haumene’s forces – formidable in battle, as Maori battalions have always tended to be – were known to have specifically spared the lives of Jewish traders in the towns they captured.

Some Maori went a little further than that, too, the genetic traces of their far- flung romantic intermingling are still in evidence in 2026.

One of the country’s best-known Maori leaders, Mark Solomon, from the South Island’s Ngai Tahu tribe, traces part of his paternal ancestry back to a Jewish whaler grandfather who blew into the South Seas from Nantucket. The leading filmmaker and artistically cuddly cactus Taika Waititi, whose films include the Oscar-winning dark comedy Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnorak, also goes by his birth name Taika David Cohen, and sometimes describes himself in interviews as a Polynesian Jew.

A haka in Queensland, New Zealand, and the Jewish-Maori film-maker Takia Waititi[Missing Credit]

Another major Maori historical performer who styled himself as a Jew was Te Kooti Rikirangi, founder of the Ringatu religion in the 1800s. Ringatu means “the upraised hand”, referencing the priestly blessing of the Cohens. His followers memorised lengthy passages from the Bible, reciting them perfectly, as Jews chant from a Torah scroll; their worship services were held on the 12th of each month, possibly in reference to the 12 tribes.

Even in 2026, like in Judaism, the Ringatu Church still awaits the messiah – a similarity that inspired the late Maurice Shadbolt’s spookily semi-fictional account of its founder, Season of the Jew.

Other traces of historical fascination with Jewish culture remain. Three Maori settlements are named Hiruharama, or Jerusalem, the best-known of which lies a few hours north of the capital Wellington.

Your writer knows a bit about this hamlet, having made the obligatory pilgrimage to soak up its undoubted charm.

Turning off the curvy state highway at the Mount of Olives, one drives along scraggly back roads, past rolling green fields and the fern-fringed banks of the mighty Whanganui River, before the shining settlement on a hill – replete with a piercing church spire and rugged Maori meeting house – eventually comes into view.

Originally, the sparsely populated destination served as a destination for orphans and abandoned kids to be cared for by Catholic missionaries, working alongside the local Ngati Hau tribe. In the intervening years, thanks in no small part to the magic of its name, Jerusalem has also become a draw for the artistically young and restless, camping out as many do in nearby Egypt.

But why stop there? Other nearby hamlets and small towns, all historically Maori, include Babylon, Bethlehem, Canaan and Judea. Talk about maps and legends.

Clockwise from far left: Bo Ace with an Israel supporter; the writer David Cohen with his Israeli friend Uzi Keren at Jerusalem, New Zealand; the writer looking towards the Maori settlement; a haka[Missing Credit]

In the 1980s, the decade when Hayley Ace was born, many Maori political leaders began strengthening connections with the Jewish world by aligning themselves with the founding of Israel as a modern state.

Their arguments for national self-determination – seeking greater influence over New Zealand’s governance, or even advocating for full Maori control – have often drawn parallels with the Zionist movement, explicitly so in the case of the campaigner Donna Awatere, author of the influential book Maori Sovereignty.

Since October 2023, however, the old narrative has become less amiable for some Maori, who these days might be more inclined to riff on passages by authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates rather than the Book of Isaiah.

Influenced by the stridently left-wing Maori and Green parties, which between them hold about 21 opposition seats in New Zealand’s 123-member parliament, a small but growing number of Maori have adopted a less conciliatory stance towards Israel since the outbreak of the Gaza war.

The country’s Green party, in particular, argues that Palestinian Arabs were the original inhabitants of modern-day Israel, casting Jews as mere Yoni-come-latelies.

One of the party’s leaders, Marama Davidson – herself a Maori – continues to take an active role in pro-Palestinian events, boarding a “peace boat” bound for Gaza in late 2016 to highlight what she calls the Israeli-imposed struggle of Palestinian women.

More recently, Davidson was among the most prominent politicians to denounce the country’s snappily dressed foreign minister Winston Peters (another Maori parliamentarian, who studied Hebrew while at university), after his “morally repugnant” announcement that New Zealand would not be joining nearby Australia in recognising a Palestinian state.

Dr Sheree Trotter is one local Maori who isn’t buying the new narrative. A fellow of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, she says her longstanding advocacy for the Jewish state has been spurred by politicians such as Davidson posturing as “an indigenous woman standing alongside the indigenous women of Gaza”.

Like Ace, Trotter remains “very concerned about the way our people, the Maori people, are being co-opted into this Palestinian narrative, based on a false sense of history and a lack of understanding of the Jewish connection to the land”.

Local Maori Dr Sheree Trotter[Missing Credit]

The author of the recently published Zionism At The Ends of the Earth (Jewish Lives Press), she helped found the Indigenous Embassy in Jerusalem, the 100th diplomatic mission to be established in the country, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

The new embassy, which opened in 2024, claims support from indigenous leaders from around the world, including Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Hawaii, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Taiwan and Tonga, along with Native American communities and paramount chiefs from Southern Africa.

Trotter says she is cautiously optimistic that initiatives such as these show it’s not the end of the affair for the Maori and Jews.

“It is under the radar, but it is happening and it is spreading,” she says firmly.

“Maori are a very passionate people. Once they understand something and their hearts are captured, then they are going to be passionate.”

Especially when it involves swimming against the tide.