The Appalachian Jew

Month: August 2025

  • The Melungeons: Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Hidden Jews in Southern Appalachia – Part 1

    The Melungeons: Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Hidden Jews in Southern Appalachia – Part 1

    Conversos- Jews from Spain and Portugal who, to escape torture and death, converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition of the 14th and 15th centuries; also refers to their descendants

    Crypto-Jews – Those who outwardly converted but maintained Jewish traditions in secret

    The Inquisitor’s tribunal

    Melungeons

    When the English and Scots-Irish first began to explore and settle the Southern Appalachians, they reported encountering a strange people with distinctly European features but darker skinned than Northern Europeans, speaking strange languages, and claiming to be Portuguese and sometimes Jewish.

    These mysterious people, known as Melungeons, may have settled the Appalachian wilderness as early as 1567, forty years before the Jamestown settlement and over 150 years before the English and Scots-Irish began to move into some of these areas.

    No one knows exactly when the English and Scots-Irish settlers first “discovered” the Melungeons, although Melungeon numbers were substantial by the time John Sevier, who later became Governor of Tennessee, encountered them in 1784.  

    There are accounts of Melungeons in the Alleghanies in 1654 and also in the Carolinas as early as the mid-1600s. By the 1750s, they were speaking a broken form of English and had English or Scottish surnames, but were claiming a Mediterranean heritage, usually Portuguese but also Spanish.

    Also unknown is the origin of the term Melungeon. It has been suggested that the word comes from an Arabic word meaning “cursed souls” or from the French word “mélange” for mixed race. Melungeons were described as being a dark skinned, reddish brown-complexioned people with fine European features, dark eyes, and dark hair. They spoke strange languages and did not fit completely into any of the traditional racial categories that existed at the time: white, black, mulatto or Indian. When the first U.S. census was taken in 1790, many Melungeons were designated as FPC, Free Persons of Color. In subsequent years, many Melungeon families attempted to avoid the census takers altogether.

    By the 1800s, Melungeons in many areas had intermarried with incoming European settlers, runaway slaves and surrounding Native American tribes to the extent that families “became” Indian or black or white. Those with fairer skin were able to hold onto their bottomlands in Appalachia and prospered. Others retreated higher into the mountains.

    Many Melungeons lost their roots and the knowledge of their ancestry and heritage, but in the past few decades many Melungeon descendants have rediscovered and embraced that ancestry.

    Modern DNA studies have shown that Melungeon descendants are a tri-racial group with European, Native American, and African ancestry. When first encountered, they claimed to be of Mediterranean descent, specifically Portuguese, and today, many Appalachian people of Melungeon descent are finding that they do have Jewish ancestry from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

  • Defining Appalachia

    Defining Appalachia

    For people not from Appalachia, the very word Appalachia conjures up images of poverty and backward, uneducated people who speak strangely and make a hardscrabble living farming or working in poultry plants, textile mills, logging, or coal mining.

    But it is and always has been much more than that.

    I grew up in Appalachia, spending my childhood here with grandparents who were born in the early 1900s and a great grandmother who was born in 1880. I grew up in a small town in a prosperous, educated family, but the old stories, music, and folkways were passed down to me. As a young adult I moved away but returned thirty years ago as my daughter was entering high school, and since then I have lived even further into the hills than when I was a child.

    Back in 2012, when I began blogging, the first post I ever published was Why I Live in the Woods, which explains the reasons I love it here.

    Appalachia is a geographical region that, according to the U.S. government’s Appalachian Regional Commisssion, is made up of 423 counties in 13 states.

    Cultural definitions of Appalachia: Burgundy color –  Always included in Appalachia. Red color –  Usually included.  Salmon color – Sometimes included. White color – Rarely included,  physically contains the Appalachian Mountains or associated features; not culturally Appalachian The blue dotted line encloses the counties included in the ARC definition.

    Many social media creators who post about Appalachia define Appalachia as being only eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina. But if you ask almost anyone who grew up or now lives in any of areas on the above map colored burgundy, red or salmon, they will say they are from Appalachia. (I grew up in Hall County, Georgia, full of poultry processing plants and known as the Poultry Capital of the World, which is in the salmon-colored area, but I now live in White County, Georgia which is in the burgundy-colored area. My daughter and her family live in Whitfield County in northwest Georgia, full of carpet mills and known as the Carpet Capital of the World.)

    Much more than a geographical region with stunning natural scenery, Appalachia is a cultural region influenced by European, African, and Native American traditions. (And many people carry the DNA of all three.) There are unique storytelling traditions, superstitions, folklore, traditional musical styles, and crafts. People from other parts of the country think there is one Appalachian dialect, but in fact, there are many differences depending on the area in which people live. People in northwest Georgia speak differently than people in northeast Georgia. I can hear differences depending on whether people are from Northern Alabama, Western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina, or eastern Tennessee.

    Religion always has been important in the region, and churches can be found on almost every corner in small towns, along every highway or county road, and at many crossroads. However, a little-known fact is that Jews have been here since the beginnings of settlement, and many Southerners, like myself, are discovering our Jewish roots.

    In this blog, I hope to explore Appalachian heritage, Jewish heritage in Appalachia, and what it means to live as a Jew in Appalachia today.