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Thomas Ernst Neumark-Jones (1841–1912) was born to German emigre parents in Hampstead, London. He attended Benjamin Jowett's Balliol and was exposed to the teachings of the philosopher and Christian mystic T. H. Green at an impressionable age. Little is known of his middling years, but by the 1890s he had come under the influence of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, through whom he was initiated into the mysteries of the Occult East. After Blavatsky's death the Theosophical Society was splintering into rival factions, so Neumark-Jones travelled to India for a period of years to seek her new reincarnation. It was Neumark-Jones' contention that Blavatsky had personally instructed him to look for her in the body of a Pondicherry street urchin, a claim hotly contested by Annie Besant and Edward Maitland.

By 1895 Neumark-Jones was back in England, publishing the occultist journal Kayfabe. The journal attracted a number of highly regarded writers from the Rainbow Circle of British intellectuals, including L. T. Hobhouse and Leo Chiozza Money. The journal was never profitable, but was funded with subscriptions raised from the breakaway Palmer's Green Theosophical Lodge.

Neumark-Jones never attracted a large following for his own branch of Theosophy, but was rumoured to have influential followers in the government of Herbert Asquith. Toward the end of his life he returned to India, and died in Pondicherry in 1912, where he was buried.

The Tamil Nadu spiritualist and holy man Sri Kamaljeet Gill claimed to be the embodiment of the street urchin foretold in Blavatsky's prediction to Neumark-Jones, but his claim was never successfully verified.