John Wilson (8 June 1799, Kilmarnock, Scotland – 22 January 1870, Brighton, England) was one of the ideological architects of British Israelism alongside Richard Brothers.
Wilson commenced studying at great length in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin in 1837. Within a year, he was giving a series of lectures which developed an audience. He published a book of his lectures in 1840 with the title Our Israelitish Origin. There he claimed that the peoples of Israel made their way across the continent of Europe to the British Isles. He brought evidence to bear from works by Diodorus and from Ptolemy, supporting the earlier history of the Israelites. He studied the works of Rawlinson, Herodotus and Josephus and quotes extensively from Sharon Turner.
His lectures attracted the attention of Charles Piazzi Smyth (Astronomer Royal for Scotland and one of the first Pyramidologists) amongst others.
It was in John Wilson's house in St Pancras, London that the Anglo-Israel Association was founded in 1874.
On the death of Wilson's daughter in 1804, his MSS passed into the possession of Rev. A. B. Grimaldi.
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“It was a very lonely spirit that looked out from under those shaggy brows and comprehended men without fully communicating with them, as if, in spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its visions of duty where no man looked on.... This strange child of the cabin kept company with invisible things, was born into no intimacy but that its own silently assembling and deploying thoughts.”
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