Footnote: Very common for Cherokees and Muskogeans from WEST of the Ocmulgee River to have some Jewish ancestry

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

Several people wrote me on LinkedIn with questions about their mixed Southeastern Native American and Jewish ancestry. From now on, I will have to give first priority on income-producing, professional contracts like this video for the nice folks in Mariposa County, California, but will try to answer yesterday’s questions with a brief perspective from history. I am not an expert on either genetics or genealogy, so please don’t write me with questions about your ancestor in 18th century Virginia!

Let’s make it clear. No Pre-Columbian Semitic skeletons have been found in the Americas to date. We are talking about the Colonial Period. Semitic and Muskogean Indian skulls are quite different. Even I can instantly see the difference. Creek and Maya skulls have traits inherited from the Denisovans or “somebody” way back when. Both are different from the Nordic and African skulls that predominate in historic Southeastern cemeteries.

Modern Southeastern Native Americans are NOT the same people, genetically, as their indigenous ancestors in 1500 AD.

I first became aware of the prevalence of Jewish DNA in Cherokees ten years ago, when working with Marilyn Rae on the translation of Charles de Rochefort’s book then the publication of two books, The Apalache Chronicles, plus Nodoroc and the Bohurons. Marilyn had a Scottish family name and grew up very close to where I formerly lived in the Shenandoah Valley. Yet, Marilyn was a direct descendant of the last hereditary principal chief of the Cherokees, Pathkiller.

Marilyn and her daughter took DNA tests. She only had a trace of Native American ancestry and it was Florida Apalachee (Southern Arawak). YET, she had twice the Sephardic Jewish DNA markers of her former husband, who was a practicing Sephardic Jew!

She had no known Jewish ancestor since Pathkiller. That means that Principal Chief Pathkiller was basically, a Jewish man, who had a great-grandmother, who was captured in Florida on one the many slave raids made by the Cherokees down there during the early 1700s.

The Cherokee elite knew that they were Jewish and so only intermarried amongst themselves. Many descendants of the famous Vann family in Oklahoma have no Native American DNA. That means the Vanns of the late 1700s and early 1800s, were Scottish Jews, pretending to be Native Americans.

It was a similar situation among Late Colonial Perid Creeks. After the Apalache Kingdom collapsed around 1700 AD, the Bemarin family took control. The Bemarins were called “Brim” by British colonists.

Bemarin is a French Sephardic Jewish family name. Bemarin family members or their descendants furnished all the Principal Chiefs until the Trail of Tears. The men were given Hebrew names such as Malachi and David.

Both Creek mikko William McIntosh and his good friend, Cherokee Principal Chief Charles Hicks, were 1/4th Jewish. McIntosh’s mother, Senoia, had a Medieval Hebrew name. It was derived from the name of the Sephardic angel, Senoy, who watched over young children. His name was often carved on cradles.

Alternative explanations of your Jewish heritage

There are four probable origins for Semitic DNA markers, if you consider yourself a Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Alabama, Kansa or Koasati descendant. Jewish ancestry is rare among Eastern Creeks and the Seminoles, who are primarily descended from the Itsate and Apalachete Creeks in Eastern Georgia, western South Carolina and western North Carolina. Those of us from east of the Ocmulgee River rarely have Jewish ancestry, but have lots of weird heritage like Itza Maya, Panoan from Peru, Sami, Finnish, Polynesian, Basque and Northwest Iberian.

(1) You have Sephardic Jewish ancestors, who to came to “New Jerusalem” in the late 1500s and 1600s. New Jerusalem theoretically stretched from near Macon, GA (Jerusalem) to Dahlonega, GA (same latitude as Lake Galilee).

Their original plan was to build a new temple on Browns Mount near Macon, GA. The location has approximately the same latitude as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Remember the government of the Kingdom of Apalache required ALL single Europeans, whether male or female to marry indigenous spouses. Eleanor Dare, a widow, was married to the provincial mako (mikko in Muskogee) of the Nacoochee Valley.

(2) You have Sephardic ancestors, who were allowed to mine gold, silver or gems in the Kingdom of Apalache. They also were required to marry indigenous wives. Many in Northeast Georgia migrated down the Chattahoochee to western Georgia. Those in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina moved to north-central and northwest Alabama . . . particularly along the Black Warrior River near Jasper, Alabama.

However, there were still Jewish villages in SW Virginia and NE Tennessee, when John Tipton and John Sevier led wagon trains of settlers from the Shenandoah Valley to NE Tennessee at the end of the American Revolution. Sevier himself was of Basque-French Protestant ancestry.

(3) You have ancestors, who were traders among the Southeastern Indians. It is believed that the majority of these traders were of Jewish ancestry, although most took Scottish, English, Irish, French or Dutch family names. Most traders married Native American women to facilitate good relations with their clients.

Trader and writer, James Adair was from an Ulster Jewish family. He could speak four dialects of Hebrew. His wife was half-Jewish and half-Chickasaw from the Chickasaw town of Ustanauli in northwest Georgia. His father-in-law was a Jewish trader.

(4) You are partially descended from a Jewish family, who converted to Roman Catholic or Protestant Christianity. In subsequent generations, they forgot their Jewish heritage. Many forcibly converted Jewish families left Spain for the New World. At least 73% of the crewmen on Columbus’s first voyage were Conversos . . . including probably, Christopher himself.

Calvinist Protestants in Scotland, Ulster, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland were particular hospitable to Sephardic refugees. Seventeenth century leaders in Scotland and the Netherlands openly recruited and paid for the transportation of Sephardic Jewish families to their nation as a strategy for economic development.

Particularly, in Scotland and France, the Jewish families changed their names to be in the form of the local language. Future generations, when they migrated to North America, forgot their Jewish heritage. Two famous Sephardic descendants on the American frontier were Daniel Boone (Scotland) and David Crockett (France).

A good example of ancestral amnesia is the prominent Morel family of Savannah. During the Colonial and Anti-bellum Periods they also owned Ossabaw, Wassau and St. Catherines Islands, GA. The Morels considered themselves French Huguenot refugees, who had done good in the New World.

Check French references, though, and you find out that the original name of the Morel families in France was Morelos. Most of the converted Protestant Morels left France after the 1685 Edict of Nantes, which took away most of their civil rights. The Jewish Morels stayed for the most part. However, most of them were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

Politicized modern American history

Of course, your Jewish ancestry could have come in more recent times, but generally, descendants are aware of 19th, 20th and 21st century mixing of Jewish and Christian families. Contemporary text message generation, pseudo-journalists assume that because there was rabid anti-Semitism by Southern White Trash, during the early 20th century, it has always been that way for all Southerners. That could not be further from the truth.

New York, South Carolina and Georgia welcomed Jewish immigrants. Most colonies didn’t. The three oldest synagogues in the nation are located in those states. It’s that Dutch, French and Scottish Calvinist tradition of friendship with Judaism. Savannah welcomed a boatload of Sephardic Jews, a few months after it was founded.

During the 1800s, there was a strange regional contradiction in bigotry. The South was increasingly poisoned by the abomination of enslaving African-Americans, but openly welcomed Jewish citizens as Scotland did in the 1600s and 1700s. The only ports open to Irish Catholics during the Great Potato Famine were Charleston and Savannah. They were recruited on the docks of Savannah to work on Georgia’s new railroad system. It was owned by the State . . . hey, that’s socialism!

There were never any Jewish or Irish Catholic ghettos in the South, because they quickly assimilated into the countryside. Remember, Scarlett O’Hara’s family were Irish Catholics.

By the time of the Civil War, the contradiction even extended to Native Americans. Jewish and Native Americans in the Confederacy could serve as officers in the army from the beginning and as high officials in the government. They were considered full citizens. Native Americans would not be citizens of the United States until 1924. Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, a Jew, was one of the most powerful leaders in the Confederacy. Prior to that he had become the first Jew to be elected a US Senator, who had not renounced his faith. The second Jew to serve in the US Senate was David Levy Yulee from Florida.

So . . . yes, there was a lot of mixing going on back then . . . now you know.