The Appalachian Jew

Tag: hidden Jews

  • The Melungeons: Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Hidden Jews in Southern Appalachia – Part 2, Present-Day Melungeons

    Present-day Melungeons

    So who are the Melungeons today? There are major disagreements among Melungeon descendants as to who can claim to be a real Melungeon and what ethnicities can be found in the DNA of “real” Melungeons.

    The Melungeons who live in Hancock County, Tennessee and Wise County, Virginia claim that they are the only true Melungeons alive today. However, I am using the broader definition of possibly hundreds of thousands of people whose families have hidden their heritage or are not even aware of their heritage.

    To this day, the word “Melungeon” is used as a pejorative. In the past, the darker-skinned Melungeons who had been classified as Free Persons of Color lost their right to vote, to serve on juries, testify in court, and to receive public education. The knowledge that Melungeons are known to be tri-racial stops many modern Melungeons who look very “white” from accepting their ancestry. I proudly claim my Melungeon and Jewish heritage, but I have close friends who will not utter the word Melungeon even though they, too, are of Melungeon descent.

    How does one know one is a Melungeon? There is no actual proof, no paper genealogy.

    Families had the custom of giving children the same names. Related families with the same surname would, for example, all give the name John to a son. There could be five or six men named John Jordan, all of about the same age, all living in the same county.  

    Historically, as many as three or four families would often intermarry and then move as a group from one frontier region to another where they would continue to intermarry for three or four more generations. This occurred in my family, as the Prince, Berry, and Earle families in Virginia intermarried, migrated into the Carolinas prior to the American Revolution, and continued to intermarry into the late 1800s.

    Families often avoided the census or lied to the census takers. People researching their family history today sometimes will be able to discover quite a bit about their male ancestors but find that their female ancestors are genealogical “brick walls.”  In many families, it appears to be the female lines through which the Jewish heritage comes.

    For many people, the decidedly Mediterranean appearance, that doesn’t mesh with family stories about being 100% from the British Isles, causes them to wonder about their heritage. DNA testing then shows relatively high percentages of Iberian ancestry. And some people develop medical conditions that are found primarily in Mediterranean populations.

    Strange, non-Anglo given names are often found in Melungeon families. In my own family, for many generations, there always was at least one daughter with the middle name of Parazaide.

    Certain surnames appear over and over in families of Melungeon descent, and these names can be found in published lists. Several of these surnames are in my own family.

    And finally, many people just begin asking older relatives. At least three decades ago I asked my father directly if we were Melungeon, and his strange answer let me know we were. Similarly, his insistence that we were almost 100% English and a little “Black Dutch” was my first clue that we were, in fact, of Sephardic Jewish descent.

  • 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).