The Arab Question, Part 6

In Part 5 of this series, which we presented here just last week, we discussed the words Ladino and Mestizo and the fact that the terms were equated in three prominent English-language dictionaries which were published in or before the 1970’s. Doing that, we also showed the history of the term Ladino as an epithet for Sephardic Jews and their peculiar dialect of Old Spanish, which many of them continue to speak even today. Then we showed how mestizos, or mixed-race Indian and presumably Spanish or Portuguese Mexicans and South Americans were called Ladinos, and we wondered how these half-breeds, who are actually more like Heinz 57 varieties derived from many different races, would be called by a label which is exclusive to Sephardic Jews in Europe. But we should not have to speculate. It was evidently not the true Spaniards or Portuguese who had mixed with Indians sufficiently and gave them such a label, but rather, it was Sephardic Jews themselves from whom they acquired the name Ladino, because it certainly was mixed Jews, or Crypto-Jews fleeing the Inquisition, who had settled among the Indian tribes in outlying areas and who freely mingled with them. Now the Spanish and Portuguese may have also mixed heavily with the Indians since then, but originally it seems to have been the Sephardic Jews who had done the initial mixing. The 16th-century rumors that the so-called Indians had descended from the ancient Lost Tribes of Israel fueled the race-mixing of Jews and Indians, and even Manasseh Ben Israel, the rabbi most responsible for prodding Cromwell to make England safe once again for Judaism, had himself repeated those rumors in his letters to Cromwell.

This belief that the Indians were the “Lost Tribes”, which is patently ridiculous, had rapidly spread throughout Europe, and we had previously noted that Swedish army chaplain Jesper Swedberg, who was well-traveled and friendly towards Jews, had brought the rumor back to Sweden in 1685. In our June, 2016 presentation on The Jews in Europe: Judaizing England and Sweden, we cited a book titled Philo-Semitism and the Gothic Kabbalah, 1688–1710 and written by Marsha Keith Schuchard which said in part “When Jesper Swedberg returned to Sweden in August, 1685, he informed the king about Edzard’s missionary work among the Jews, and he convinced him to support similar efforts among the Indians in the New World, whom he and Edzard believed to be descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” Swedberg, confusing Messianic Judaism for Christianity, was basically a proselyte of this Edzard, a former Sabbatian and Messianic Jew.

There is documentation in many other sources, aside from the lives of Manasseh Ben Israel and Jesper Swedberg, that the Jews themselves, Jewish rabbis and Jewish so-called scholars, had both contrived and perpetuated the idea that the Indians of the New World were the ancient “lost” Israelites. This in turn fueled Medieval Millennialism, as naive Protestant Christians like Swedberg thought that the conversion of both Jews and Indians, whom they believed to all be Israelites, would bring the coming of the Messiah and the Millennial Kingdom. Some of these same errant concepts persist in the Judaized Protestant churches to this very day. So in the 17th century, if the Jews believed that the Indians were the so-called “lost tribes”, what moral prohibition would prevent them from intermingling with the Indians? I would assert that their own profession in this matter actually facilitated their having mingled with the Indians. We have already seen testimony from several witnesses that Jews did indeed mingle with the Indians, and now this evening we will present modern evidence of the same.