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For further reading, please visit
Sephardim.com or Kulanu at
http://kulanu.ubalt.edu/. As an
interesting aside, my father-in-law Dr. F.
M. Grimwood of Pensacola, who is Elzina’s
younger brother and grew up like her in
rural north Alabama near the Tennessee line,
ticked off several items on a similar list,
including the custom of throwing a silver
coin into a baby boy’s first bath water. He
was also able to produce a picture of
himself at an early age about 1920 wearing a
kipah (small cap for prayer) as his
parents sent him to church (an austere
Pentecostal denomination known as Camelite,
Carmelite or Campbellite)! He remembered
that an aunt sang in the Jewish temple.
Otherwise, he was raised with no knowledge
of his Jewish background.
It may be objected that if there were
crypto-Jews on the frontier, why did they
leave no monuments such as temples and
cemeteries. We know of one suspected stone
temple built in 1756 in the Shenandoah
Valley. Whether it still stands, I do not
know, but its endowment is commemorated in a
stone slab seven feet long placed over the
grave of John McKee in Timber Ridge
Cemetery, near Lexington, Va. John McKee was
born 1703 in Glasgow and died 1773.
According to the inscription, he made his
way to Ireland and thence to America,
arriving in the Valley of Virginia by the
time he was 33 or 34. He “brought with him
the spirit of religious liberty, as his main
object seems to have been to colonize and
build a house of worship.” One may rightly
wonder why, if it was Presbyterianism he
wished to practice, he did not remain in
Scotland or northern Ireland, where that
denomination was tantamount to the official
religion. Davidsons, Porters (a “Portuguese
family” from Saponi territory about Fort
Christanna) McCorkles, Coopers, Houstons,
Baileys, Kennedys, McClungs and Alexanders
were involved. Gen. Sam Houston’s father
donated the land for the “church.” As for
the Alexanders, they were earls of Stirling,
having arrived in Scotland around 1500,
quickly become allied with the Forbes
(Feibush) family, and the branch in question
then having immigrated to Maryland, where
some of them are buried in Jewish-owned
cemeteries. Other members went to Charleston
and Savannah and joined both the Masons and
Sephardic Jewish communities in those
cities. (See charts 1, 6 and 7 in Malcolm H.
Stern, Americans of Jewish Descent. A
Compendium of Genealogy.) Alexanders
were also involved in the extremely
lucrative Caribbean-Mediterranean triangular
trade of Panton, Leslie & Co. headquartered
in Spanish Pensacola. As Scotsmen and
Protestants in one guise and Jews or
Spaniards in another, they received entrée
to ports like Havana as well as Glasgow,
Amsterdam, Cadiz, Gibraltar and the Barbary
Coast.
The popularity of the Alexander name among
Jews is explained by a passage I shall
transcribe from Robert Graves, The White
Goddess (p. 84):
"According to Josephus,
when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the
outset of his Eastern conquests, he
refrained from sacking the Temple but bowed
down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the
High Priest's golden frontlet. His
astonished companion Parmenio asked why in
the world he had behaved in this unkingly
way. Alexander answered:'I did not adore the
High Priest himself but the God who has
honoured him with office. The case is
this:that I saw this very person in a dream,
dressed exactly as now, while I was at Dios
in Macedonia. In my dream I was debating
with myself how I might conquer Asia, and
this man exhorted me not to delay. I was to
pass boldly with my army across the narrow
sea, for his God would march before me and
help me to defeat the Persians. So I am now
onvinced that Jehovah is with me and will
lead my armies to victory.' The High Priest
then further encouraged Alexander by showing
him the prophecy in the Book of Daniel which
promised him the dominion of th East; and he
went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah
and made a generous peace-treaty with the
Jewish nation. The prophecy referred to
Alexander as the 'two-horned King' and he
subsequently pictured himself on his coins
with two horns. He appears in the Koran as
Dhul Karnain, 'the two-horned'. Moses was
also 'two-horned.'"
I believe there was a practicing
Jewish-Indian-Melungeon hazzan
(Jewish community functionary) in Wayne
County, Kentucky, active from the 1790s
to the time of Indian removal. My 4th
great-grandfather Isaac5th Cooper was a fifth generation Sephardic-Jewish-Choctaw born about 1775 in Rowan Co.,
N.C. who died before 1845 in Monongalia
Co., Va./W.Va. His grandfather, William
Cooper, acted as Daniel Boone’s scout
and planted the first corn crop in
Kentucky. Isaac married Nancy Black Fox about 1795 in Tennessee, daughter of Chief Black
Fox and Attakullakulla’s daughter
sometimes called Melba, all from Echota, the Cherokee capital. Cooper
was a soldier and possibly also a
gunsmith and iron worker. He is named in
the List of Taxes and Taxable property
in the bounds of Capt. (William) Bean's
Company, returned by William Stone,
Esquire, in 1799. This was in Cherokee
country along the Holston River and
Clinch Mountain in Tennessee, later
Grainger County (so-called Watauga
Country, or State of Franklin). William
Bean Sr.'s was the first white cabin in
those parts, the center of an apparently
older Melungeon
settlement near where the “overmountain
men” met at Sycamore Shoals to muster
for the Battle of Kings Mountain. Beans
Station on Clinch Mountain was later a
notable inn and fort, the largest stage house between New Orleans and
Washington City.
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Cooper acquired his property from Elizabeth
Bean and Robert Blair. Elizabeth
Bean was the widow of William Bean,
Jr. who died in Grainger Co. in
1798. Her maiden name was Blair; she
remarried to a Shaw. Capt. William
Bean was a son of the famous Mrs.
Lydia Russell Bean whose life was
saved by Nancy Ward,
the Cherokee Beloved Woman; his
first marriage was with Rachel Ball. He
married Elizabeth Blair in Tennessee
in 1782. The Bean-Blair-Cooper deed
was all "within the family," for
these are related Sephardic Jewish
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(as confirmed by DNA analyses). Through
her connection with the Beans, Nancy
Ward introduced the first cattle, swine,
dairy products and looms into the
Cherokee Nation. In 1807, John Francis
(of another famous Indian trading
family), first reported the discovery of
saltwater along the Big South Fork of
the Cumberland River. This initial
discovery was reported to be "near the
mouth of Bear Creek, where Richard
Slavey now lives." Francis and Slavey
petitioned the State Legislature, and in
1811, received a Grant for 1000 acres,
conditional upon their production of a
1000 bushels of salt. John Francis
received another Grant just South of the
1000 acres for the same purpose; Marcus
Huling, working with Col. James Stone
(namesake of Stones River, where Black
Fox had a “hunting camp”), sank another
saltwater well, on the sight of
Francis's other Grant; Stephen F. Conn,
Martin Beaty, and a host of other
people, including Isaac Cooper, became
involved in these enterprises in several
different ways. This activity started a
series of law suits, lasting up into the
1830's, as well as the accidental
sinking of the world's first oil well.
The Francises were also intermarried
with the Coopers, as were the Troxells,
Carters, Denneys, Blevinses, Burkes,
Farrises, McCorkles, Gregorys, Adairs, Wallace/Lovelaces and
Nichols/Nicholases. next
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