The Sephardic Right of Return
And a very long digression about a very bad book.
Portugal offers–and Spain used to offer–full citizenship to proven descendants of Spanish Jews (or Sephardim, though the term is both over and underinclusive) who were forced out of the Iberian peninsula during the Inquisition.
I must have assumed that the applicant needed to be Jewish, either observant or with some very recent family history of observance. Wouldn’t you? But that is not so. If you go through the correct channels, you need merely descend from an Iberian Jew. You being a Transnistrian Wiccan from a long line of Transnistrian Wiccan is evidently no barrier.
A Sample Application
About a year ago, I had the opportunity to review the application packet of a friend of a friend. It was prepared by a professional genealogist, and the customer paid for it. And indeed, it was professionally done. There were no bald attempts at fraud, and the line was carefully proven back to the supposedly Sephardic ancestor. But at the key ancestor himself, all pretense at genealogical rigor was abandoned. Instead of primary sources and careful, hedged suppositions, there was family legend, wild conjecture, and (heavens preserve us) online family trees.
I’ll try to give you the flavor. The applicant was an American and a gentile. His ancestors in the relevant line were your basic southerners, a mix of Scots-Irish highlanders, English lowlanders, the occasional wildcard. This genealogist “proved” that one of the possible wildcards, a man whose surname was a relatively uncommon but not unheard of English first name, was surely of Sephardic Jewish heritage, and that he had come to the Virginia colony most likely from the port of Genoa. Before that, the family was in the Netherlands, and before that, Spain. Q.E.D.
I’d love to enumerate the problems, but I don’t remember the specifics. I do recall a few things. First, some highly faulty evidence that the immigrant himself was Jewish. I remember something about his daughter or granddaughter having a Jewish-sounding middle name. But born at the beginning of the 17th century to a family of little evident status, it is incredibly unlikely she had any middle name at all. And indeed the genealogist cited no primary sources, just some very questionable mug books from over a century later.1 I also recall something about a family tradition to the effect that the immigrant or his son married a Jewish woman from a wealthy family. First of all, doesn’t that just as easily cut the other way? Why would the tradition be that his wife was Jewish but he was not? Second, and I shouldn’t have to say this, but family traditions are not genealogical proofs. They are leads.
But let’s say the man was of Jewish origin. That gives us one Jewish man in Virginia in the early 1700s of unknown parentage. How do we fill the gap between this guy and Inquisition-era Iberia? Of course you can’t!2 It’s a kind of res ipsa loquitor argument but it utterly fails on that basis. Does the fact that a man came from a Jewish family in Virginia mean his ancestors were expelled from Spain? I’ll take that one: no. At minimum, we need to bridge a good 150 years of history. If he’s from Italy, why couldn’t he be Italkim? They were found throughout Italy, and especially in the Papal States. And if he was from the Venetian Republic, he was probably Ashkenazi. To be fair, a Jew from Genoa would more than likely have been Sephardic. But there’s no evidence that this immigrant came from Genoa, just family legend.
I guess the best circumstantial case would be if he were (a) Jewish; and (b) came from England or Amsterdam–i.e., a place in which the majority of the contemporary Jewish population were of Sephardic origin. Then, if I were the Portuguese synagogical authorities, I might see my way to conferring citizenship on the lucky descendants. But that’s a hypothetical–the guy wasn’t Jewish. And! And. If the evidence of his Judaism were anything but rock solid I would take a known English origin to be a heavy blow against the theory.
That was quite a digression!
The point is that there’s a lot of subpar genealogy going on in the Sephardic realm. If you want Portuguese citizenship, then now’s the time! Quick, before they figure it out. Though it’s quite possible they don’t care. A below replacement birth rate will do that to a country.
Anyway, it got me thinking. How many Europeans of recent Christian heritage could complete the citizenship application to the satisfaction of the Portuguese government? Consider that you do not need a confirmed Jewish ancestor, but only some hand-wavy suggestions that someone might be Jewish. They don’t need specifically to be Sephardim, but you may again need some vague indicia of that background. And they certainly don’t need any connection to Iberia. The fact that they are vaguely Jewish and even more vaguely Sephardic will take care of that. And to be fair, that’s one of the less objectionable suppositions. Sephardim come from Spain. It’s in the name. Doesn’t mean they were among those expelled, but let’s set that aside.
My sense is that quite a lot of us would qualify. I’ve got an Italian ancestor by the name of Montesion. That’s weird, right? A consonantal ending in Southern Italy. A history of Spanish occupation in the area. And the literal meaning “Mount Zion.” Maybe that’s enough, even though the family’s last known coordinates were in the middle of the Apennines in 1690.
Listen, I don’t want to put anyone on blast here, but I know who’s causing these problems. In fact, the idea that the Virginia settler above may be Jewish comes directly out of a book. It was published in 2012 and its called Jews and Muslims in Colonial America: A Genealogical History.
A Very Bad Book
The book is neither genealogy, nor history. Discuss. Let me start. This book is unalloyed garbage. It is full of the kinds of howlers that two minutes or less of Googling could have prevented (or dare I say a basic working knowledge of colonial history). Daniel Gookin was quite a prominent Puritan settler. He may not be as well-known as he used to be, but by God the man still has a Wikipedia page. You will note, if you care to click, that he was born in Ireland of English parents. That’s not uncited Wikipedia garbage, that’s a fact. There are baptismal records and everything, and the Gookin family can be traced back several generations in Kent. It is perhaps a variant of “Cokayne.” It is not a variant of the German “Guggen,” and even if it were, it has absolutely nothing to do with the common Ashkenazy surname Guggenheim. And yet the authors of Genealogical History suggest it might! Just a suggestion, they might say. But there are good and bad suggestions. “You might want to brush your teeth twice a day” is a good suggestion. That the name George Washington may be derived from the Spanish Jorge Washingtonez is a bad suggestion. A bad hypothesis. A bad everything.
What else? Here’s what else:
They suggest the names Jacob Abrahamsen and Denys Isaaksen are indicative of Jewish ancestry. Because–hey, Abraham begat Isaac begat Jacob! Those guys were in the Bible. And yet I’m finding it troublingly easy to dredge up about 1000 more 17th century Calvinists who took their names from the Old Testament. That was kind of their thing. This is not the equivalent of a modern-day Jake Abramowitz and Dennis Isaacs.
On that note, the authors suggest most of the Dutch patroon class was of Jewish origin. The van Cortlandts, the Rensselaers, the Philipses, et al. Naturally! Scotland gets some action, too: did you know that Livingston comes from Levinston, which means “Levite’s town?”3 What an incredibly normal name for a medieval Scot to adopt, given all of the Levitical villages in the Scottish lowlands.4 I’m being sarcastic!
More fun/butchery with Dutch onomastics: the common given name “Teunis” is not actually a diminutive of Antonius. It’s a direct reference to the North African city of Tunis. There were many Sephardim in Tunis. Therefore anyone named Teunis was probably Jewish. I’m not even going to bother trying to reconstruct the logic here. Stuff like this makes me wonder if we’re all being trolled.
Just read this: “in order to understand the sea change suffered by the ancient Jewish name Phoebus to English Phillips (and Scottish Forbes and Frobisher), with stages along the way as Pharabas and Ferebee and Furby, one must have an appreciation for the synthesizing religions of the Roman Empire…” I’m just going to stop it there, you get the picture.
Patrick Henry’s mother was Jewish. At least according to my wife’s waggish, caddish, and oversharing ancestor, the diarist William Byrd. Indeed she was of the family of Esau.” Surely he couldn’t have been making some sort of…what do you call it? Joke?
On the subject of Willam Byrd, guess what? Also Jewish.
George Fox’s mother was also Jewish. That’s based on her maiden name being Lago, and I guess that’s a weird name, and we don’t know for sure where she was born. More impeccable logic.
Do not use this book as a source. It makes a mockery of serious genealogy. Its claims are ludicrous. I am more and more convinced it’s some sort of gargantuan prank.
Alas I fear the poison has already done its dread work. Some of the ideas in this book–and I have a feeling Donald Yates (now Donald Panther-Yates) is the wellspring–have begun to seep into the mainstream.
Witness the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper. Dana Goodyear profiled him in The New Yorker back in 2019, and it was a fascinating and arresting piece. I am very impressed with the guy. But any time a journalist mentions genealogy or a subject’s family tree, you can be certain I’m going to (a) nitpick it; and (b) remember it forever. Goodyear dropped a little genealogical gracenote in her profile of Cooper, the sort of which rarely makes it into 21st century journalism. Here in the 21st century, we scoff at the idea that a person’s ethnic or deep family background explains anything about them. For that sort of thing to make it past the editors, I assume it must carry some deep personal meaning to the subject himself. And indeed, Cooper seems to harbor a strong sense of his “part Cherokee and part Jewish” ancestry. It comes up again and again.
I won’t dwell on the Cherokee angle. That’s for another day. But Goodyear is kind enough to tell us exactly how the “part Jewish” thing came about. Cooper’s ancestor was “Reuben Cooper, a Portuguese-Jewish metal merchant who came to the United States [sic but you know what they mean] in the 17th century.” And it wasn’t just him, but a long lineage of part-Cherokee, part-Jewish families intermarrying in the backwoods. I feel the presence of Donald Panther-Yates, whose own North Carolina ancestry is apparently made of the same stuff. In fact, I suspect the photographer’s wife, who researched his genealogy, stumbled upon Yates’s online work, but then mistakenly told Goodyear the immigrant ancestor was named Reuben. In fact, per Yates himself (in his webtree entitled “Jewish Cherokees”), the immigrant ancestor was Robert Cooper, from Stratford upon Avon. Any number of elements of this tree could be wrong, and likely are. Yates has given us no reason to trust his research. Suffice it to say, there is absolutely zero reason to believe this man or his descendants were Jewish. Not “family traditions,” not “naming patterns,” not “DNA Testing,” the very shaky foundations on which Yates builds his book.
Who were these people really? Perhaps Melungeons (now known to be the descendants of the unions of free blacks and white indentured servants in the early colonial South), but Yates has given us no reason to trust him on that point either. I wouldn't want to be the one who tells him, but Yates should be made to squarely confront what is apparently his worst fear: he is a white American whose ancestors came from the British Isles. He may have a small bit of Cherokee and African DNA. And that’s very cool! And terribly interesting, from a genealogical perspective. But that does not make him Cherokee or African (and I know I’m on shaky ground here, so allow me to leap to safety). He is most definitely not Jewish.
Readers. Prove me wrong. Are there any proven “crypto-Jewish” lineages from colonial America? Observant Jews who married into gentile families (a la the Meyers ancestors of the poet Robert Lowell) do not count.
You know the 19th century tomes called something like “Representative Men of Jo Daviess County,” with two or three columns of biography, lithograph portraits with a waxy slip paper in front them, and reproductions of the subject’s signature? Those are mug books. They are great resources for the biographies of your ancestors, much less so for the names and biographies of their ancestors. It is a little remarked upon fact that–at least for serious family historians–our ancestors probably knew less about their own distant ancestors than we do.
Slow down, that’s not quite true! What if he were demonstrably Jewish and his name was Mendoza, or Abrabanel, or Suares? Then you’ve got yourself a can’t-miss argument. I remember the immigrant’s name. It was not evidently Hispanic and in fact it took the form of a common English given name, such that if it weren’t English (and it may have been), it could have been Anglicized from almost any country in Europe.
Scotland, the great Tel Aviv of the north. Are you confused by this? Does this not accord with your puny knowledge of history? Our authors have you covered; they published When Scotland was Jewish in 2007.
“Levite’s town” strikes an ironic chord, surely unintentional, given that the tribe of Levy, being the caste of ritual and votive work in ancient Judaea, was deliberately scattered amongst the territories of Israel with no land of its own.