YOU WILL NEVER FIND THE TRUTH

“Covers” for Judaic communities included the Huguenots, Quakers, Freemasonry, the Scottish clan system, Ulster Presbyterianism, Primitive Baptist churches and even Catholicism (in Maryland). Many persons of Semitic looks explained their dark features by saying they were “Black Dutch,” or “Black Irish,” or “Black Douglas,” “Black MacDonald” etc. The War of Jenkins Ear and later the return of Florida to Spain in the 1780s, with fears of being burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition, produced a panic among New Christians (descendants of Jewish converts) and crypto-Jews in the Old Southwest and brought an inrush of colonists to Tennessee. For many reasons, Tennessee was always regarded as the Jewish homeland in America. People like John Adair, arriving with his family in Baltimore in 1753 made a beeline for the Holsten River. He later lent his storehouse to provision the Cumberland settlers under James Robertson. But with the failure of the State of Franklin and such schemes as the Yazoo Land Fraud, hopes for a true homeland soon focused on Missouri, Arkansas and Texas farther west. Once Spain was eliminated as a player north of Mexico and the Spanish Inquisition had ground to a halt (1820), Jews in America as in Britain slowly began to return to the open practice of Judaism (though usually without benefit of a haham, or rabbi, Hebrew school or synagogue, it would seem). Though they regarded America as their permanent new home, with little yearning for Israel, and had a desire to be observant and rekindle their heritage, their weakness in religious instruction and lack of connections with religious prevented them from producing spiritual leaders of their own. The first synagogues west of the Alleghenies were in places like Frankfort and Wheeling. A final gasp of crypto-Jewish behavior can be traced in the careers of outlaws Frank and Jesse James (originally Hyam, the same origin as the New York intellectual family that gave the world William James, the typical American philosopher and Henry James, the novelist), the “last Cherokee warrior” Zeke Proctor and the Lumbee folk hero Henry Berry Lowrie. According to Elizabeth Hirschman, who has researched Jesse James’s genealogy, not only was James a Melungeon but he was ‘line-bred’: most people in his family for several generations, including himself, married first cousins (surnames Cole, Poor, Mims, Hines, Thomason, Woodson, and Gardener). Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan obscured a proud legacy and left the “Melungeons” a mystery even to themselves. Such, in broad outline, is the story of Portuguese Jews’ search for a promised land on the American frontier—called in their code “the Nation.” Genealogy and genetics have revealed it, but much exacting historical work needs to be done to document the movement’s driving forces, inspiration, connections, chronology, financing, legal maneuvers, promotional tracts and records.