When the indigenous people of the Americas were recognized by the Protestants of Europe as descendants of the lost tribes of the Hebrews, Menasseh ben Israel, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, petitioned Cromwell toreadmit Jews into England (The Hope of Israel, 1648)

 . The book he wrote was more a public relations gesture than an attempt at a scholarly demonstration that Indians were Israelites. He knew Puritans coveted the crown of the New Millennium they said their Messiah would award to the Christian sect who united all peoples, including the Jews and Indians, in one faith and one country. The synagogue to which I belong in Savannah, the third oldest in America, is named after this influential book—Mickve Israel. While no act of reentry was passed, Jews began to trickle in as aliens with limited rights, and throughout the Georgian period they exerted a strong influence on trade, monetary and foreign policy, wisely keeping behind the scenes. Probably the gains they managed to win from Britain’s Parliament were partly the result of a covert bond they experienced with the scions of certain old British crypto-Jewish families. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1^st earl of Shaftesbury and one of the Lord Proprietors of the English colonies, was a secret Mason and suspected crypto-Jew. It was his secretary John Locke, the philosopher, who drafted the famous articles of religious toleration for the South Carolina colony in 1675. Shaftesbury fell from grace because of his opposition to James’s marriage with the Spanish enfanta and died in exile in Amsterdam. A religious congregation began to form in London about this same time, led by Spanish-Portuguese Jewish merchants, who delicately called themselves “People of The Nation.” The symbol of the Sephardic presence, Bevis Marks Synagogue, just celebrated its 300^th anniversary last year, with Prince Charles as a guest of honor. He said he had never noticed this architectural masterpiece before. That was because it was built on a side street in the Financial District, facing in, so as not to attract notice or give offense. By settled policy, even the monuments of crypto-Jews were unobtrusive. Incidentally, London is the origin of the expression “Duke’s mixture,” something I often heard from my Melungeon mother. Dukes Fields in East London contained the teeming multitudes of poor immigrants of every nationality. It was there that the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue rose. 

In British ports of call such as Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Newport, Charleston and St. Eustachius, Jews could become citizens of the land in a legal process called denizening, even vote, serve in the armed forces and hold office, unlike in Mother England. For Jews, this opened the door to an extraordinary series of efforts to migrate to the New World and build communities for themselves. Merchants, hatters, carpenters, iron-workers—they arrived in the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and Savannah. Many later blended with the Indian nations in the interior. In some cases—among the Lumbees, Pamunkey and Cherokee—Sephardim families took over the tribal hierarchy. Jewish Cherokee chiefs such as Will Webber, John Ross, George Guess, John Looney, George Lowrey and Sam Houston signed treaties, wrote laws and constitutions, and led their people westward to Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. A Sephardic Jew, Luis Moses Gomez, fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition, came to New England, made a pact with the Mohican Indians and built Gomez Mill House in Newburgh, N.Y., the oldest surviving Jewish residence in North America. Gomez was also the first parnas (president) of Sheareth Israel, New York’s oldest synagogue. The subsequent story of these “big city” Jews is detailed by Stephen Birmingham in his delightful book The Grandees. They financed and fed George Washington’s army, thus winning the War of Independence, and gave the world Saks 5^th Avenue, the Saxe-Coburg ruling dynasty, Waldorf-Astoria, Barnard College and a host of other institutions
 

FIG. 4. LUIS GOMEZ TRADING WITH THE INDIANS (from an old woodcut). His choice of building site for his trading post honored a sacred spot where six Indian paths converged and powwows were held. Sephardic rabbis of New York and Newport issued responsa (juridical opinions) enjoining Jews not to mistreat Indians, considering they might be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. American and Caribbean Jewish law condoned marriage between Jews and Indians, and the progeny of such unions were ruled to be Jewish. See “The Oldest Jewish Residence in the USA,” Fact Paper 30, Hebrew History Federation Ltd,  Gomez House was erected in 1714.

FIG. 5. THE “SCOTS-IRISH” ADAIR family claimed to have its origins in a foreign land, an ancestor beheading a pirate in Scotland and then claiming the prize of a baronetcy from the Scottish king. The name Adair is Hebrew and stands for the month of early spring in the Jewish calendar. Dark looks atypical of the Irish or Scots are evident in this portrait of Kentucky’s early governor, Gen. John Adair (1757-1840). He was a nephew of the famous Indian trader James Adair (abt. 1709-1783). Courtesy Kentucky Historical Society.

Histories of American Jewry, including Jacob Rader Marcus’ classic and comprehensive survey, tend to emphasize the Ashkenazim (Eastern and Central European Jews). For the colonial period, scholars focus on prominent individuals and primarily East Coast congregations. The story of American Jews is “New York-centric.” Little work has been done to tell the story of the Sephardic diaspora in an American context, though everyone acknowledges the dominant role Sephardim played in Jewish American life until about 1840. Jews in the South, the Ohio valley and along the Mississippi receive short shrift, while estimates of the total number of Jews in early America are far too conservative. They seem to go back to Marcus’ statement in the 1930s that at the time of the American Revolution there were no more than 2,000 Jews concentrated in about 10 coastal cities. Lancaster, Pennsylvania was the only inland community included. It is hard to reconcile this low number with the more than 50,000 Jewish soldiers who are known to have fought in the War Between the States 75 years later. We know about them because they refused to eat pork in their rations, requested the Sabbath off for religious purposes and were buried in Hebrew graves. (For further reading, see The Jewish Confederates by Robert N. Rosen, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000). Marcus was also responsible both for the trend of disregarding Jewish sounding names in records and refusing to consider Jewish converts as Jews. Crypto-Jews did not even enter the picture with Marcus. But by the standards of most historians today, half a century after Marcus, if a family bears the name Cohen, Cone, Jacob and the like it was at least at one time Jewish, while Jewish converts to Christianity are usually counted as “lapsed” Jews, but Jews nonetheless. 

Certain states like North Carolina and Maryland are grossly ignored in standard Jewish histories. If anyone doubts that early American Jewish demographics may be in need of revision, consider the case of Sampson Co., N.C. and surrounding counties. The 1790 Federal census had a 4th column between the number of females and slaves in the household that enumerated "Other Free Persons." It was up to the census taker how to interpret this. In Sampson Co., just upland from Wilmington, he seems to have used this category for Jews and Indians. C.D. Brewington, "a distinguished native of Sampson Co.," wrote The Five Civilized Indian Tribes of Eastern North Carolina with "historical facts about these Indians whose descendants are still here" and "evidence of their intermarriage and life with the Whites from Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony." Many identified as Coharie Indians and later as Lumbee. Apparently his ancestors are listed as "Other" in the household of Ann Brewington where there are 3 "other" and nobody else--a whole "other" household. We can also suspect names that are only first names like Hannah without a surname stood for Indians ("Old Natt"). Here are some more "other" households from Sampson County 

Minor (many spellings) becomes a common "Melungeon" name, as does Williams, Green, Perry, Davis, Bell, Chavis, Cumbo and West. John Flowers may have begun life as Johann Blum, or John Bloom. Waldon is probably the same as Wallen, oneNairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River

of the early explorer families of Tennessee and the namesake for Waldens Ridge. Wiggins is probably related to Eleazar Wiggans, a prominent Jewish trader among the Yuchi and other southeastern Indians. Neighboring counties Duplin, Bladen, Brunswick, Johnson, Onslow and New Hanover have some, but not as many:

John, Fleet, Core, William and Daniel Cooper were in Sampson at the time (one of my lines, known to be crypto-Jewish, like Boone). Also, there is a former town on the South River named Lisbon! Some of these, if not the majority, were Portuguese Jews. Before the time of the Revolution, there was a rabbi, synagogue, school and Hebrew library in a little town called Warrenton in Bute County on the North Carolina Piedmont. The governors of the synagogue used a Freemason's Lodge as their "sponsor," or cover. My 6^th-great-grandfather William Cooper, who accompanied Daniel Boone to Kentucky and planted the first corn crop there, was a member. Original data found at http://www.mindspring.com/~marydrake/

The earliest depositions of Lumbee Indians (which were not taken until the late nineteenth century) make it clear that one important strain of founding families came to the swamplands of Robeson County from northeast North Carolina, just inland from the “Lost Colony.” Lumbee is an invented name, a back formation based on the place-names Lumberton and the Lumber River, the later not popularized until the rise of the lumber industry.

The oldest name is Lumberton, and I believe it was originally Lombard-town, though I have no way of proving this. The Jewish (and banking) district in metropolises like London and Philadelphia was invariably named Lombard Street because that is where “Lombard law” or mercantile law prevailed. “Lombard” and “Jewish merchant” were often synonymous. In medieval Oxford, Lombard-Hall was named after its Jewish proprietor (Anglia Judaica, by D’Blossiers Tovey, p. 8). The oldestBritish Jews were Lombards, going back to Roman times; they were joined by French-speaking Jews brought over by William the Conqueror. Thus we find a lot of overlap between Lumbee and Melungeon names. The common denominator is Jewish. The original appeal of these swamps to Jews lay in their rich, secret pig iron and coal beds. We find in the will of Israel Roberson preserved in the Wrightsboro Quaker records in 1773 an exact description of one of them (“…One hundred acres of land Lying on the head of the Beaver Dam in South Carolina where it is thought there is a Iron Mine”). Glass-making, a Jewish monopoly through the ages, was also practiced there, and the Gibsons of South Carolina became that state’s first millionaires. The county was later named for a Robertson family member—the same clan that founded Watauga and Nashville. But the mutual attraction of crypto-Jews to a safe haven where central authority dared not exert itself explains how several “Indian” cultural groups—Tuscarora, Coharie, Catawba, Saponi, Croatan, Ocaneechi, Cheraw (called the Juda Indians by the Spanish), Tudelo (a Langobardic/Visigothic hero’s name) and so forth--came together to form the “Lumbees.” No Indian languages were ever spoken by tribal members, and the Lumbee today have a difficult case to make to the U.S. Federal Government to become recognized. An example of a common Lumbee name that can be derived from a medieval Jewish Lombard family is Braveboy. A 1292 census of Paris lists numerous wealthy Jews from Brabant, a Flemish city with ties to the cloth, weaving and woolen industry of Lombardy (de Brabant, Brebois). Bradby, a family that supplied multiple chiefs to the Pamunkey Indians of Virginia, is probably a corruption (shown above is William Bradby, 1899).

“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. 

 

Thus, the category Jewish actually subsumes the label Melungeon. Some Jews were Melungeon, but all Melungeons apparently were Jews (or Moors, also persecuted and often thrown together with Jews). This says nothing about their religion but is purely an ethnic and social-historical description. Presumably, however, just as a lapsed Jew is still regarded by other Jews as a Jew, the descendants of a lapsed Jew are also Jews. The timeframe really does not matter. Marranos fleeing the new vehemence of the Spanish Inquisition that began in 1580 with the union of the Spanish and Portuguese thrones returned to Judaism in places like Bayonne and Hamburg after as much as six to eight generations of life as New Christians. Some of the founding families of Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1701 had concealed their Jewish traditions for up to 10 generations, back to the first forced baptisms of the 1390s. For the Savannah Jews the lapse was at least from 1497 to 1733—in other words, 236 years, or about 10 generations.

 

It remains to be seen how many individual crypto-Jewish practices survived in different Appalachian families, and for how long. The following list is taken from the book Secrecy and Deceit. The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, by David M. Gitlitz (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press). I can testify to many from my own family lines, which include hierarchical families of the Cherokee (Wolf and Paint Clans primarily) and Choctaw/Chickasaw (Colbert and Moshulatubbee), plus the surnames Cooper, Blevins, Sizemore, Green, Jackson, Hart, Jordan, Muse, Sanford, Yates, Denney, Bundren, Goble, Shankle, Lackey and Houston.

·        The Crypto-Jewish Belief System and Attitudes toward Christian Beliefs

o       Linkage to the wellsprings of Jewish tradition such as preservation of Davidic and Levite ancestry

o       Refusal to mention or swear by the name of Christ

o       Veneration of Jerusalem as the promised land

o       Belief that the Messiah is yet to come

o       Non-existence of Hell

o       Averroism and this-worldly orientation

o       Trust in God’s blessing to those who keep his commandments (mizvot):“Jewish history was a product of God’s response to their collective behavior”

o       Observance of the law of Moses

o       Jewish saints like Moses, Joshua, Aaron, Abraham, Elijah, Joseph and others

o       Denigration of Christianity as an inferior, superstitious religion, including ridicule of Jesus, Mary’s virginity, the doctrine of transubstantiation, miracles, etc.

o       Rejection of the last rites

·        Superstitions (Fortune telling, Love and Cures)

·        Birth, Marriage, Death and Funeral customs

o       Male and female children named eight days after birth

o       Two “first” names

o       “Smith-Jonesing”

o       Circumcision by a mohel

o       Birth vigils and propitiation of the fairies (hadas)

o       Jewish wet nurses

o       Ritual baths

o       Fundamental commandment as found in Deut. 11:19, blessing of children, the mezuzah

o       Education of spouses

o       Introduction of children to Judaism at about age 13 or 14, with injunction never to reveal the family’s secrets

o       Godfathers and godmothers in the Jewish way

o       Endogamy and strictures against courting or marrying an outsider

o       Children of mixed marriages called mulattos

o       Divorce common

o       Levirate marriage (Deut. 25:5)

o       Wedding contracts similar to the ketubbah

o       Giving of multiple wedding rings

o       Serving wine and presentation of expensive gifts at wedding feasts

o       No sexual relations during menstruation, often a week’s separation

o       Premarital sex not necessarily a sin

o       Frequent liaisons with unmarried women or servants or slaves, even bigamous relationships

o       Prohibition against women cutting their hair

o       Turning dying person’s face to the wall (2 Kings 20:2)

o       Not leaving body unattended from moment of death to burial

o       Burial in virgin soil, in very deep graves, symbolic sprinkling of sand from Israel

o       Burying deceased male in fringed or tasseled prayer shawl (tallit)

o       Placing money or misshapen pearls in coffin

o       Throwing silver coin into baby boy’s first bath water

o       Saying Kaddish at grave site and for relatives buried elsewhere

o       Burial within one day

o       Eating eggs, fish and lentils (or chickpeas) after funeral

o       Upsetting the furniture in the dead person’s home

o       Observing shivah (Gen. 50:10)

o       Turning all mirrors in the house toward the wall after a death

o       Pouring out all drawn water in the neighborhood of a corpse

o       Feeding widows and the poor as act of charity after a death

o       Avoidance of June weddings in Hebrew month of Av

·        Sabbath and Holiday Customs

o       Sweeping the house, making a stew, washing and dressing in best clothes for Sabbath

o       Sweeping the house from outside in to avoid sweeping dirt past mezuzah

o       Sweeping the entire front yard

o       Lighting Shabbat candles on Friday night once three medium-sized stars can be seen

o       Blessing one’s children at the Shabbat breaking of bread

o       Lighting at least two lamps or candles, always with new wicks or new candles

o       Making sure the lights are kindled by a woman (female name Manorah is sometimes found)

o       Use of the word Adonai for God

o       Abstaining from work, household chores, traveling, opening one’s business or handling money on Saturday

o       Eating precooked casseroles (often fish and eggplant), stews and cold cuts on Shabbat

o       Fasting for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, on Mondays and Thursdays and other appointed times, often in women’s groups

o       Popularity of the name Rosanna, Roxanne, Roseanne (=Rosh Hashanah)

o       Sukkot, or the Festival of the Booths (often combined with the Indians’ Green Corn Festival)

o       Hanukkah (popularity of the name Hanna)

o       Purim and popularity of the names Mordechai and Esther

o       Passover, eating in reclining position, use of matza (unleavened bread), special wine, etc.

o       Fasting and wearing old clothes in July to commemorate the destruction of the Temple

·        Other

o       Having just an Old Testament and no New Testament in the house

o       Reading Josephus as a Bible substitute (also a popular name)

o       Reading the Book of Tobit

o       Using a handwritten prayerbook consisting of the Psalms

o       Observing the daily cycle of prayer of a Jew

o       Knowledge of the words and melody of the Shema (Jewish credo)

o       Washing your hands before praying, saying the blessing after eating

o       Hand kissing

o       Blessings over wine, bread, fruit, upon seeing lightning, etc.

o       “Are you a traveling man?” a code greeting for Jews (and Masons) who meet on the road

o       Minyan (quorum of 10 males for worship)

o       Having a dedicated room in the house for worship services or meeting outdoors or in caves, etc.

o       Worship spaces devoid of any decoration

o       Men and women worshiping separately

o       Having a cantor to sing portions of the service

o       Praying facing east (toward Jerusalem), with door or window open

o       Bobbing of heads during certain parts of prayer meeting

o       Home weddings

o       Kipah

o       Teffilin

o       Calligraphic banner inside home with Bible verse

o       Keeping kosher

o       Throwing out eggs with blood spot

o       Not eating meat with any defect

o       Abstaining from all pork (exceptions sometimes made for sausage and bacon!)

o       Cooking with olive oil

o       Waiting between meat and dairy (Ex. 23:19, 34:26 and Deut. 14:21)

o       Keeping a special knife for kosher slaughtering

o       Avoiding eating meet that is undercooked and bloody

o       Kosher processing of meet to eliminate excess fat, boiling, removing sciatic nerve, porging

o       Casting pinch of bread into fire

o       Eating only recipes cooked by maternal grandmother 

 

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.'"