Board: Message Boards > Topics > Religions and Religious > Jewish > Sephardim and Sephardic Judaism URL: http://boards.rootsweb.com/topics.religious.jewish.sephardic/37/mb.ashx Subject: Donald Panther-Yates - Research Overview of Sephardic Colonial Southeast USA Author: Donalyn_Snelling Date: Saturday, May 11, 2002 Classification: Query Surnames:
Dear Donalyn, Well, you are storing up treasure in heaven by taking on the new Sephardim list. I will try to make some posts and help however I can. You have my permission to repost anything I have written for other lists. I get involved in controversies and sometimes forget to send news to "friends" as well as "foes." Maybe a good beginning would be some letters giving an overview of my research, which I will paste below. It could be a good starting point, I am thinking. Thanks for writing and stay in touch. Honor to your lodge, Don Panther-Yates Letter from Dr. Elizabeth Hirschman, January 14, 2002 Dear Sir/Madam: Professor Donald Panther-Yates and I are collaborating on a multi-phase investigation of Sephardic settlement in the Southeastern United States. Genealogical, genetic and historical evidence strongly suggests that Spanish Jews and Moors fleeing the Iberian peninsula arrived in the Americas from the mid-1500's onward, forming the first non-indigenous communities in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas. In several instances they formed not only trading alliances, but also social alliances, with the Native Americans, intermarrying with them and intermingling their traditions and cultures. Professor Yates has an outstanding set of credentials for pursuing this research. As an active member of several Native American tribal associations, he has ready access to Indian lore, culture and informants in the Southeastern region. He also possesses superb training as an archivist and historian. Further, his language skills will serve as an invaluable resource for interpreting the Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Cherokee documents we will be examining. The research we are undertaking has the potential to substantially alter the prevailing view of American colonial history and to cast the heritage and contributions of significant figures such as Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin and many others in an entirely new light. Your support of our collaborative effort is greatly appreciated, and I am certain it will be rewarded many times over by the recognition brought to your university. Yours truly, Elizabeth C. Hirschman Professor II of Marketing Rutgers University School of Business Letter from DPY to whom it may concern, Dec. 18, 2001 ...I am collaborating with Elizabeth Hirschman, author of Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America, to document Southern Sephardic families’ motives for migrating to Tennessee and Natchez about the time of the American Revolution. My part concentrates on some unifying threads in settlement of the Cumberland Gap area; the dynastic marriages of Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw chiefs with Sephardic traders; and certain large mercantile and manufacturing operations in the Ohio valley, including the origins of Procter and Gamble. I have recently contributed an article on the Indian trader-author James Adair’s crypto-Jewish identity to the magazine Southern Cultures.... Research Proposal: The Search for the Promised Land Histories of American Jewry, including Jacob Rader Marcus’ classic and comprehensive survey, tend to emphasize the Ashkenazis. For the colonial period, scholars focus on prominent individuals and primarily East Coast congregations. One critic has pointed out that the story of American Jews is “New York-centric,” and that the New York community is largely self-absorbed. Little work has been done to tell the story of the Sephardic diaspora in an American context, though everyone acknowledges the dominant role Sephardim played in Jewish American life until about 1840. Jews in the South, the Ohio valley and along the Mississippi receive short shrift in most accounts. Genetic testing by Hammer and Greenspan has conclusively solved the mystery of the Melungeons, an Appalachian people long considered a Moorish-American Indian-Negroid triracial isolate. They are predominantly Sephardic Jewish, with traces of American Indian and little, if any, Negroid blood. An example is my Cooper family, which has been traced back to a family of Indian traders in Charleston in the seventeenth century with connections to Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Proprietor of the Carolinas. Though the Coopers married chiefs’ daughters among the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee to cement trade relations, they otherwise preserved a strict identity as Portuguese Jews, intermarrying for over ten generations only with others “of the Nation.” Allied surnames include: Looney (Luna), Blevins, Sizemore (Cismor), Davis, Dougherty, Burkes/Burges, Bunch/Benge, Proctor, Ross, Sevier, Lackey, Adair, Martin, Nichols, Ferris/Pharess, Green, Gibson, Lovelace/Wallace, McKee, Yates, Lowrey, Francis, Piles, Denney, Houston/Austin, Troxell and Montour. In collaboration with Elizabeth Hirschman, a marketing professor at Rutgers and author of Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America, I am piecing together the attempts of Sephardic émigré groups arriving primarily in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah to “gather the dispersed” and build anusim communities, first in the coastal lowlands and later in the Appalachians and on the Spanish frontier in Arkansas, Missouri, Natchez and Texas. We expect to publish a compelling social history of these “forgotten Jews” under the working title The Search for the Promised Land in Tennessee and Texas (1763-1836). The background to these events includes the creation of a converso class in the Iberian peninsula and New World, the Spanish Inquisition (active until 1820), ‘ghettoizing’ of Italian and French Jews, the messianic movement in the Ottoman Empire and earlier attempts to create autonomous Jewish communities in Livorno, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, London, Glasgow, Recife, Curacao and Barbados. In North America, we are most interested in the Halifax settlements, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Purrysburgh, Germanna, the Lost State of Franklin, Transylvania, the Watauga “Country,” the Cumberland Settlements in Nashville, Natchez and Port Gibson, and the Republic of Texas. In addition to trading empires (some of which survive today as department store chains like Neiman Marcus), Southern Sephardim established large operations in land development, banking, pig iron export and foundries, road building and railroading, ferry and keel boat operations, cotton plantations, munitions and gunsmithing, potash, saltpeter and coal mining, salt works, and glass and china factories. Study of the unique family papers in the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati will undoubtedly yield important insights into the business connections of Sephardic Jews in the Ohio valley. An example is the Myers Family Papers (1766-1908), which contain personal and business correspondence, account books and invoice books of Moses Myers, a merchant of Norfolk. It is no accident that the oldest Jewish communities west of the Alleghenies were in places like Louisville, Jonesborough, Wheeling, Natchez, Cincinnati and Montgomery. After living in the Shenandoah Valley, on the Natchez Trace, in Sumner County and Grainger County, Tennessee, Wayne County, Kentucky, and the Cherokee Nation, my fourth-great-grandfather Isaac Cooper died in Monongalia County, (West) Virginia. His name appears as the first in the “History of Rabbis in the Wheeling Area.” Vital to fleshing out his story will be the opportunity to peruse the records of the Congregation Leshem Shamayim, which are held in the Marcus Center. I am also interested in finding out if his wife, Nancy Black Fox, the daughter of a principal chief of the Cherokee, converted to Judaism. Cemetery records and circumcision records will help confirm the patterns of migration and intermarriages that Hirschman and I are documenting. These are often included in the records of the various synagogues gathered together in Cincinnati. Other “covers” for migrating groups of Sephardic Jewish families were the Quakers (especially Daniel Boone’s “Fighting Quakers”), Freemasonry (Scottish Rite, introduced to Charleston), certain Huguenot groups and the austere brand of Baptists still found today in the Melungeon heartland around Newmans Ridge and Coeburn, Virginia. Reconstruction in the South and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan obscured a proud legacy and left the Melungeons a mystery even to themselves. Genealogy and genetics have revealed the surprising story of Southern Jews building forts, towns, factories and roads on the western frontier. Following on the heels of Brent Kennedy’s book The Melungeons, Elizabeth and I are now seeking to sketch the movement’s driving forces, inspiration, connections, chronology, financing, legal maneuvers, promotional tracts and records (including literary products). Once people realize the full extent of the Sephardic Jewish contribution to American Indian culture, the exploration and exploitation of the western frontier, and the very foundation of the United States, prominent men’s biographies will have to be rewritten and much of American Jewish history will have to be revised to include Sephardic Jews’ peculiar contributions to the melting pot. Donald N. Panther-Yates, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Public Relations Georgia Southern University P.O. Box 8091 Statesboro, GA 30460 Tel. (912) 681-5801 Fax (912) 681-0822 e-mail: dpanther@gasou.edu List of References Family Tree DNA Genealogy by Genetics, Ltd., Houston, Texas. Dr. Bennett Greenspan, President and CEO: http://www.familytreedna.com/ Michael F. Hammer, Karl Skorecki, Sara Selig, Shraga Blazer, Bruce Rappaport, Robert Bradman, Neil Bradman, P. J. Warburton, Monica Ismajlowicz. "Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests." Nature 385 no. 6611 (January 2, 1997), p. 32 Elizabeth Hirschman (Professor I of Marketing, The Rutgers University School of Business, New Brunswick, N.J.), Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America (MS, copyright 2001). N. Brent Kennedy, with Robyn Vaughan Kennedy, The Melungeons. The Resurrection of a Proud People. An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America. Second, revised, and corrected edition (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997). Daniel T. Pasher, “The New Jerusalem: The Jewish-Indian Hypothesis & Christianity in America” (copyright 1999-2000). Available online at http://www.carleton.ca/~mwtyrrel/54-100/ Rick Aharon Chaimberlin, “Crypto-Judaism in America,” from Petah Tikvah (Door of Hope), Vol 16, No. 2, 165 Doncaster Road, Rochester, NY 14623. Available online at http://www.nashuanh.com/bmy/Crypto.htm James Adair, Adair’s History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (Johnson City, Tenn.: The Watauga Press, 1930). Originally published London, 1775.
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