How wonderfully fortuitous to find this “Mountain Jew” t-shirt from ShalomShirts.com just as we’re off to retrieve Yenta boy from camp in North Carolina. A month in the mountains is a long time—I wonder if he’ll come back with a beard?

Speaking of Mountain Jews, I recently received a link to an Examiner.com article that claims there is evidence that Sephardic Jews were the first people to settle in the Southern Highlands of what is now western North Carolina. There’s good background on the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal in the late 1400s and throughout the 1500s, and the author, Richard Thornton, makes an interesting case for some historical re-examination.

Thornton has published two more articles describing stone inscriptions that he says prove an ancient Jewish presence in North Georgia and Western Carolina: First, near Brasstown Bald Mountain, the name “Liube” with the date 1715 is carved on one of the Track Rock Gap petroglyph boulders. While the soapstone petroglyphs are believed to have been created by Native Americans, Thornton claims that the name Liube is specifically a Jewish girl’s name, and was perhaps added by a young lady looking to add her own tag to the ancient graffiti already there. (I haven’t been able to confirm the name “Liube” as Jewish, though—anyone?)

A couple of hours north in the Smoky Mountains off the Cherohala Parkway, another rock inscription holds mystery for Thornton: He writes that the phrase “PREDARMSCASADA SEP 15, 1615” means “Prayer we will give, married” with the date in Ladino, the Spanish-Hebrew dialect used by Sephardic Jews, and was carved in commemoration of the wedding of a nice Jewish couple. (No evidence of a broken glass or weepy mother-in-law, however.)

While Thornton’s articles are fascinating, they haven’t been corroborated by archeological sources—no effort has ever been made to examine the remains of a Spanish village near Dukes Creek. I’ve long been captivated by the theory that Portuguese and Iberian Jews running from the Spanish Inquisition ended up in the Appalachians and beyond as early as the 1600s, subsisting off the land and avoiding contact with Cherokee and other settlers. There’s speculation that the mixed-race group of mountain people known as “Melungeons” are descendants from such Sephardim; legends abound that Melungeons spoke a form of Spanish that could have been Ladino and lit candles on Friday evenings. Even if it all turns out to be a wackadoodle bubbemintza, it would be amazing to see more research before these sites are destroyed by weather and tourism.

I may try to convince El Yenta Man to take a detour while we’re tooling around the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Absurdivan so I can do a lil’ amateur yenta sleuthing.