I read about Southern Ohio’s Newark Earthworks in a recent issue of Newsweek, and I was so curious about this massive network of geometric mounds built by ancient North American inhabitants known as the Hopewell People that I went a’Googling.

It seems the Hopewell People built dozens of large-scale earthen mounds from 100 BCE to 500 CE, long before that douche Christopher Columbus decided to claim these parts. Some of the mounds correspond to celestial events like the 18.6 year lunar cycle, certainly enough to establish the scientific intelligence of these ancient folks. But how do archaeologists explain this giant chanukiah, mapped near the East Fork of the Little Miami River in 1823 by the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers? I guess you could say it’s an explainable coincidence that native Americans constructed something that resembles a ritual tool used by people halfway around the world to commemorate the miracle of oil lasting eight days, but even the shape above the menorah is clearly an oil lamp. Spooky, right?

Read on, because it gets so much weirder: Two artifacts, known as the Decalogue and Keystone, were uncovered at the Newark Earthworks in 1860. The Decalogue is a stone inscribed on four sides with condensed version of the Ten Commandments written in “a peculiar form of post-Exilic square Hebrew letters” with a figure that can easily be identified as Moses. The Keystone has the phrases “Holy of Holies,” “King of the Earth,” “The Law of God,” and “The Word of God” written in a more recognizable form of Hebrew. A few years later, two more stones were found, then lost, suggesting a trove of mysterious Judaica in the mounds — or a giant hoax.

There’s an enduring “Lost Tribe of Israel” theory that there were Jewish people in American long before the first Jewish settlers were kicked out of Spain and Portugal. The Maccabee’s revolt and the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem took place in second century BCE, so it’s entirely plausible these early Ohioans were refugees of the Jewish Diaspora who knew the story of the oil and the nine-armed menorah, who laid tefillin and valued the Torah.

But such bubbeminze is generally dismissed by scholars, Jewish and not. After all, how would they have made it from Jerusalem to Ohio in 100 BCE, after all? You think international travel is a pain in the tuchus now, those Jews would’ve had it way worse than stale peanuts and a $25 charge for an extra suitcase.

But why would have some guys in the 19th-century go through the trouble of cutting stone to make elaborate forgeries, and how would they have accessed arcane information about Second Temple practices? J. Huston McCullough, a professor at Ohio State University, lays out all the evidence and comes down on the side that the Newark artifacts — including stone bowls found with the Decalogue — are more than credible – read for yourself.

Perhaps the resistance to recognizing the presence of Jews in America before Jesus was even born is too frightening, not to mention daunting — that’d be a whole HELL of a lot of history to rewrite.

No time to elaborate today, but the Seattle Times just published this article about DNA testing and how it has revealed an Albquerque reverend to be a descendandant of the Cohanim. The reverend then tested 78 relatives, 30 of whom had the same genetic marker of ancient Jewish priests. Full story.

A reader sent this link, the site of Nan Rubin, who broadcasted a series of radio shows about the secret Jewish history of New Mexico.

And then there’s Donald N. Panther-Yates of Georgia Southern University and Melungeons.com, who published this piece on crypto-Jews in Tennesee, Kentucky and North Carolina, including information on Jewish Native American chiefs (and there were many of them!) It’s a crazy long and at times convoluted read (plus some funky html issues), but there’s some amazing stuff there.

All this should keep all you crypto-philes busy for awhile!

*Photo of American pioneer and Jewish Melungian Davey Crockett c/o Melungeons.com.

Do any of you remember the Lost Colony of Roanoke from elementary school? American history— as it was taught in public school in a red state— was never my bag, but the tale of an early settlement whose population vanished without a trace save one creepy word carved into a pole has stuck with me since third grade. The accompanying illustration to the lesson was particularly spooky: a group of frightened Puritan settlers dressed like Thanksgiving pilgrims before they were presumably kidnapped by the savages of the New World and forced to breed non-white, wild children.

But what if those lost souls weren’t Mayflower WASPy-types bent on settling the New World in the name of Her Majesty, but a band of “religious castaways” who figured facing a wilderness and attacks by the natives was way better than pogroms and “ethnic cleansing” going on across the Atlantic?

Yep. The first American settlers were Jews. Continue reading →

From PRNewswire: “Of the nation’s 6 million Jews, roughly 1.2 million, or 20 percent,
consist of African-American, Asian-American, Latino, Sephardic (of Spanish and
Portuguese descent), Middle Eastern, and mixed-race Jews.”

These statistics should help dissolve the Ashkenazic-centric notion that all American Jews have Yiddish-speaking grandparents from Minsk.

The findings are excerpted from The Institute for Jewish & Community Research’s new book, In Every Tongue, and include the following “forgotten” groups:

* Latinos now reclaiming their Jewish roots after their ancestors were forced into hiding during the Spanish Inquisition. Once known as “conversos,” they have recently coined the term “reversos.”
* Long-established communities of African-American Jews in many cities,
such as Chicago and New York, with their own synagogues and adjunct communities.
* Nearly 1 million spouses, children, parents, siblings of “official Jews”, many of whom, according to the research, “practice some Jewish customs and identify with Jewish issues.

This, of course, supports our conspiracy theory that everyone will eventually be Jewish, even by association, even if they don’t know it.

Photo c/o Black and Jewish Online Store