“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.

It cannot be my purpose here to summarize the westward developments that produced Watauga, Nashville and the other experiments in pioneer government, culminating with the Republic of Texas. All these landmark events spun off splinter movements after the tide of history moved on and left pockets of people behind that are today known or suspected to be Melungeon. Mostly it was the nucleus of people in East Tennessee and Kentucky and surrounding areas that continued to identify as Melungeon, as shown in the following census taken from an article by Bette Sue McElroy in Northeast Alabama Settlers, vol. 22 (Oct. 1983)—it is not known why she did not include East Tennessee or Wise County, Va.: 

Melungeon Communities in 1950

Dr. Beth Hirschman (who is from Kingsport) assembles the primary records in her forthcoming book Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America, where she focuses in particular on Freemasonry and Melungeons’ Primitive and Old Regular Baptist religious practices. Jack Goins showed at Fourth Union that the earliest documented use of the word “Melungeon” appears in church minutes from Big Stony Gap—a significant clue. Hirschman suspects that all of the following phenomena can be traced to the Jewish element in Melungeon culture: 

• cousin marriage (to continue secret home worship),

• “raising seed” to a brother by marrying the widow, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber and other Mediterranean first names (such as Elzina),

• strict naming patterns preserved generation after generation, secret names and nicknames (often a Christian name like Brook corresponding to a Hebrew one, Baruch),

• high incidence of familial Mediterranean fever and other diseases,

• stark blue or green eyes often combined with dark complexion, expertise in metal working,

• foot washing and immersion similar to the ritual mickve,

• starting the day at sunset,

• Saturday morning worship services,

• Freemasonry,

• avoidance of pork (a kosher rule relaxed very early in the New World, probably because the earliest population had no cattle and so hunted wild deer, buffalo and swine),

• ritual slaughter of animals,

• use of homemade wine in services,

• hatred of things Spanish (political, not cultural),

• aversion to Catholicism,

• lack of art or icons in temples,

• alignment of houses of worship, courthouses and cemeteries toward Jerusalem,

• Hebrew grave symbols,

• avoidance of oaths sworn on New Testament,

• the Appalachian zither,

• dinner on the grounds,

• preference for coffee over tea, and

• deviled eggs. 

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