Introduction.
We do not really know how many non-Jewish citizens of the USA descend
from Jews.
I have heard all kinds of estimations sometimes mentioning fantastically large
numbers.
A large number of Jews migrated to America. Many assimilated. Their descendants
in many cases may now be found amongst the Gentile population.
It is not easy to be Jewish. The Jewish Religion is demanding. One can only eat
certain foods, work on certain days, and have sex with one's wife on only part
of the month.
For those who keep the Jewish Religion the difficulties are worth it. The
Almighty gives HIS own reward.
After leaving the religion it can be difficult to remain Jewish. Jews suffer
from discrimination. Other people do not like always like them. If one lives
with other Jews then the dislike of non-Jews may conceivably be lived with.
Otherwise the tendency would naturally be to hide one's origins. Not only Jews
do this. Numerous Germans in the USA reportedly claimed to be Dutch or Irish.
It is difficult to estimate how many Gentile Americans are of Jewish descent.
All kinds of unknown factors are involved.
Did they have large families or did they tend to have few or none children?
Families and whole peoples do tend to die out and disappear. On the other hand,
other once insignificant groups may suddenly increase and multiply and leap to
the foreground.
Jews are bound by the Covenant.
Once the Covenant is left does the Almighty punish them with demographic
obliteration?
Or maybe not?
Anyway this is a question that arises.
We in Brit-Am/Hebrew Nations are involved with tracing the Lost Ten Tribes. We
believe that descendants of the Ten Tribes are now to be found amongst Western
Nations.
We consider the USA to be dominated by Manasseh but to include very very many
from Ephraim as well as from all the other Tribes. Hosea 2:14 and Ezekiel 20:35
speak of Israel being brought into the Wilderness in the End Times or in the
Period leading up to them. The Wilderness is the place where the Almighty will
renew HIS COVENANT with the Israelites.
North America may be this Wilderness.
See:
Further Reflection: Israelites and the Wilderness.
The USA today encompasses approximately almost 42.5% of the Jews in the world,
and about half of the non-Jewish Israelites.
Throughout the centuries the Jews of Europe were persecuted. They suffered from
persecution, discrimination, forced conversion to Christian, kidnapping of women
and children,
and so on. It stands to reason that many Jews were lost amongst the Gentiles.
Did many of these Gentiles of Jewish descent eventually find their way to the
USA?
This is not an empty question.
The migrants from Europe to North America were often different from those who
stayed behind. Studies have been done this. Even physical differences have been
noticed.
Certain family names have almost disappeared from Europe but are now common in
America.
We understand that concerning the immigration from Germany to the USA in the
1700s and 1800s that these were descendants of Israelites.
Those who remained in Germany, on the whole, were not Israelites.
For more details,
See our work,
Joseph - The Israelite Destiny of
America.
What applies to German and other Immigration to the USA concerning Israelites
may also apply to Jews.
Hispanic Jews (Anusim) in the USA?
OTHERS (i.e. not our august selves) for some time have been making similar
claims concerning early Hispanic settlement in the southern USA.
In Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Malta, and southern Italy (once ruled by Spain) Jews
were given the choice of converting or leaving. Many converted. Many were also
forced to convert.
In Portugal all the children were abducted, baptized, and brought up as
Christian.
These people were referred to as Marranoes (pigs) by the Spanish and as Anusim
(forced converts) by the Jews.
After their conversion some of the Anusim kept Jewish customs and tried to
practise the Jewish Religion in secret. They were persecuted by the Inquisition.
Even those who were genuine Christians were suspected and harassed and often
falsely accused. It is believed that groups of Anusim tended to congregate in
certain areas. The early Spanish settlements in what is now California, New
Mexico, Texas etc may have been one of these regions.
Recently numerous studies have been made long these lines.
Every now and again one of them makes headlines.
Our friend Cecil Davis sent us the following note accompanied by an article:
Hi Yair,
This article is also in the Jerusalem Post (English version) dated 11-May-12;
article "Jews of the Lost Valley" page 30 of the magazine with the title
"One-sided narrative". Don searched and found where the article came from; it is
printed below. In addition, the Jerusalem Post article is worth reading. Your
friend, Cecil
Deep in Colorado, a lost valley of Jews
By Melissa Jacobs, February 23, 2012
Extracts:
A remote valley in southern Colorado may
not be the first place one would go in search of a lost Jewish community. But a
recent study published in the US Journal of Human Genetics suggests that San
Luis is harbouring exactly such a secret.
"We found evidence that DNA segments are shared by Sephardic Jews and Spanish
Americans from Colorado and New Mexico, suggesting shared ancestry," said Dr
Harry Ostrer, Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York
and the director of the study.
Dr Ostrer's team analysed two communities whose ancestry can be traced back to
Spanish colonial times, one in the San Luis Valley, which stretches between
southern Colorado and New Mexico, and one in the Loja Province of southern
Ecuador.
It is the first time that researchers have studied the entire genome for large
chunks of DNA that indicate shared ancestry, rather than just looking at
particular disease mutations or other individual genes. They calculated Jewish
ancestry among the Lojanos at 5-10 per cent, and among the Spanish Americans, or
Hispanics, at 1-5 per cent.
Rumours of a secret Jewish past had been
flying around the San Luis Valley for decades. Five hundred years ago, a number
of Conversos - Jews who were forced to convert by the Spanish Inquisition - made
their way across the Atlantic. Over the past few decades, scholars claim to have
found remnants of crypto-Jewish practices in communities in south-west USA, as
well as in Latin America. As the theory goes, when the Inquisition hit the
shores of the New World, the crypto-Jews moved to the far flung corners of the
Spanish Empire in a bid to escape the church.
Some Hispanics are even said to keep up forms of Jewish life without knowing
their origin. Demetrio Valdez, a Catholic cattle farmer in the San Luis Valley,
for example, grew up practising kosher slaughter without realising that the
technique was Jewish.
Orlando Mondragon, one of the New Mexicans who took part in the study, wasn't at
all surprised to hear news of his likely Jewish heritage. "He always thought
so," said his wife, Viola.
What applies to these few isolated Hispanic communities may also be pertinent to
other immigrant groups to the USA.
A Look at Comparative Statistics.
How many Descendants of Jews Should
there be?
Having pointed out the difficulties involved we may still make tentative
comparisons and perhaps guess the possible numbers of Jewish Descendants in the
USA.
We compared Jewish Immigration with that of the Irish and Germans and Italians
and this is what we came up with.
Jewish Americans
Jewish Americans
Jewish Encylopedia (1906) United
States.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14589-united-states
During the twenty-five years 1881-1905 very nearly 1,000,000 Jewish immigrants
reached the United States.
By 1904, the Jewish population can not have been much below 1,700,000.
Jewish Migration to the United States
Altogether about 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe came to the USA.
From Ancestry.com Wiki
This article originally appeared in "Jewish American Research" by Gary Mokotoff
in The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy
Jewish migration to the United States is divisible into periods. For each there
are sources of information for doing genealogical research.
DatesPeriodNumber of Immigrants
1654-1838 Colonial/federal Fewer than
15,000
1838-80 German emigration 250,000
1881-1924 Eastern European emigration 2,000,000
1924-44 Pre-Holocaust 100,000
1945-60 Holocaust survivors 250,000
Present Russian Jews and others Up to 50,000 per year.
Altogether ca. 3 million.
2012 5,275,000
Altogether an increase of less than 1. 8 times.
Irish Americans
Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry
to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans?estimated at 11.9% of the total
population?reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey
conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.[2] Roughly another 3.5 million (or about
another 1.2% of Americans) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish
ancestry. The Irish diaspora population in the United States is roughly 6 times
the modern population of Ireland.
Immigration The Journey to America/ The
Irish
Altogether, almost 3.5 million Irishmen entered the U.S. between 1820 and 1880.
In years after 1860, Irish Immigration
persisted. More than 2.6 million Irish came in the decades after 1860.
About 6.5-7 million immigrants.
2014 36 million.
An increase of 5 to 6 times.
German Americans
German American
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
German Americans are citizens of the United States of German ancestry and
comprise about 50 million people, or 17% of the U.S. population, the country's
largest self-reported ancestral group.[2]
between 1820 and World War I, during which time nearly six million Germans
emigrated to the United States.
Why Germans Left Home
Table 3. German Immigration since 1820
Totals
Total Immigration 49,753,412
German Immigration 7,028,258
German % of Total: 14.1
[Source: U. S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Washington,
D. C., 1975, 15; U. S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United
States: 1990, Washington, D. C., 10]
Increase 7 times.
Italian Americans
Immigration
The Italians
During the mass emigration from Italy during the century between 1876 to 1976,
the U.S. was the largest single recipient of Italian immigrants in the world.
However, their impact was not as great as countries like Argentina and Brazil.
Italian American
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
About 5.5 million Italians immigrated to the U.S. from 1820 to 2004.[2] The
greatest surge of immigration, which occurred in the period between 1880 and
1920, alone brought more than 4 million Italians to America. About 80% of the
Italian immigrants came from Southern Italy, especially from Sicily, Campania,
Abruzzo and Calabria.
Today, over 17.8 million Americans claim Italian ancestry.
An increase of 3.
Conclusion
The Irish since coming to the USA have increased by about 5, the Germans by ca.
7, and the Italians by around 3.
These figures may be mistaken. Each case is different.
Irish and Italians are mostly Catholics and in the past tended to have large
families.
The German immigration was earlier and therefore has increased more.
Jews who identify as Jewish have only increased by less than 1.8. Nowadays more
than 40% of the Jews intermarry with non-Jews.
Usually the result of intermarriage from a Jewish perspective is disappearance.
Based on Statistics alone we could say that for every two Jews who identify as
being Jewish in the USA there is at least one Gentile whose parents were Jewish
only one generation back.
The situation was more or less the same almost from the beginning. In some
places it was worse.
A rough guess that 15 to 20 million USA Gentiles are by ancestry more Jewish
than anything else may well be acceptable.
Most of these would be white though the Afro-American and Hispanic communities
may also include those of Jewish descent.
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