French Israelism
French Israelism is the belief that people of Frankish descent are also the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and it is often accompanied by the belief that the Merovingian dynasty is directly descended from the line of King David.
One of the earliest scholars who claimed that he could trace the ten lost tribes of Israel to France was the French Huguenot writer, Jacques Abbadie, who fled French Roman Catholic persecution and later settled in London, England. In his important 1723 work, The Triumph Of Providence, he wrote:
The claim became the foundation for the Priory of Sion hoax created by Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey in the 1960s, and it was further popularized in 1982 with the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and in 2003 with The Da Vinci Code.
