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
SpanishJews 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 Virginiania, 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.â€
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 Virginiaa. 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 Quakersâ€), 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
Jewsbuilding 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.eduList 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.htmJames
Adair, Adair’s History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Williams
(Johnson City, Tenn.: The Watauga Press, 1930). Originally published
London,
1775.