ENGLISH  
 ORIGINS 

A Brief Proposal Concerning The Origin of The English People

  Ideas & Points of view

Editorial Note: The following article by Eric M. Flaxenburg was first published in 1995 in the Brit-Am Magazine "Tribesman" which later became known as "Brit-Am Truth" and is still available. The article contains opinions and information that are original, interesting and worthy of consideration.

Introducing Eric M. Flaxenburg of "French Creek Sheep & Wool Company", Elverson, Pennsylvania, USA. Article submitted to "Brit-Am" 4/13/95 Prior to the author having read "The Tribes":

~Of late I have been living inside a crossword puzzle. I have been, as it were, a guest in an English country house haunted by some restless spirit rattling indistinct words like ancient chains, in the small hours before dawn. I have seen his shadowy face materializing beside my bed, trying, always trying, to tell me something. But the rattled words were muffled distorted by the passage of time.

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~Some years ago, returning from a business trip in the Outer Hebrides, my wife and I were driving on one of those single lone byways in the Scottish Highlands. We waited for a Border Collie to herd a flock of Blackface Sheep across the road when I spotted their shepherd close by. I jumped from the car and hailed him.
"Do you know where I can buy one of these?"
I showed him a plastic shepherd's whistle I had been unable to locate anywhere.
"Hoot mon", he said. "If I knew ye could buy it, I wouldna' ha' made it."
He dug into his weathered tweed jacket and produced a handcarved wooden whistle. I admired his whistle and then his collie and told him I had a collie at home. We talked about the wonderful attributes of Border Collies for a bit when he looked at me and said;
"Y'ken how we come by collies, do ye?"
I didn't know and shook my head.
"We got them from the Jews".
He proceeded to narrate a tale of some ancient invasion populated with sheep and dogs and bloody battle.
"Aye, in the end we drove the Jews back to their boats but not before we captured their dogs. Clever dogs they were, too."
"Jews?" I asked. "You must mean Jutes." As in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes?
"I mean what I said and I said Jews!"
He must have noticed the incredulous look on my face .
"That is how we come by the name of Collie. It's from the Hebrew word for dog, Caleb# ."
Actually the word is Kelev, but anglicised Caleb is close enough.
I shook his hand solemnly and with my other hand I tried to wipe the smile off my face.
As I returned to the car he called out, a big grizzled grin on his leathered face.
"What tribe are ye?"
Tribe? My God, had he guessed? I felt like Abraham sojourning with Sarah in Egypt. If I told him the truth he might want to steal my wife. (The Hebrew word for bride, "Kallah", is perilously close to Collie.)
I hesitated, unwilling to lie.
"Are ye nae here for the Gathering of the Clans?" he asked.
"What's y'r tribe?"
"MacFlaxenburrrgh."
I shouted back, relieved and in my best burrh.
My wife, unaware she had just escaped Sarah's Egyptian adventure gave me a confused look as I got back in the car.
"Just another one of us Jutes," I mumbled.

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~A few years ago I was reading an article on Wool in the National Geographic. There was a description of Orthodox Jews examining woolen suits for any trace of an inferior yarn that would render the garment tref or unkosher. Such a garment was called shatnez from a Biblical word of uncertain origin possibly from the root SH/'/T meaning pounded or stamped. (Linen, the "inferior" yarn, is pounded to make it ready for spinning.)
SHATNEZ, SHA'AT!# 2 I bounded out of my chair for the big edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up...
SHODDY...of obscure origin.
1a. Woolen yarn obtained by tearing to shreds refuse woollen rags which, with the addition of some new wool, is made into a kind of cloth.
b. Yorkshire dial...etc. etc.
Yes, the English and the Jews were, or had been, sheepbreeders, but the combination of a very similar word describing the same peculiar crime, appearing where it should not, separated by thousands of miles and almost as many of years, had to be more than a mere coincidence!
Jews, Jutes, Caleb, Collie,; Shatnez, Shoddy. (The last, a derivative of Yorkshire, hard by the Border country, whence originated the Border Caleb...whoops, Collie.)
What was a Jute? I kept picturing, in my mind's eye, the armbands Jews had to wear in Nazi occupied Europe...Jude! Is that who the Jutes were? Juden...Judaeans? Had they, when they invaded Britain in the 5th century AD, with their Angle and Saxon allies settled in the north country?
Unfortunately, there is no recorded history of the Jutes on the Continent, and although it is assumed that they came from Jutland, the Danish peninsula named after them, we have no archaeolgical evidence. The Venerable Bede (672/735) in his Ecclesiastical History of the English tells us that the Jutes settled, not in Yorkshire, but in Kent and the Isle of Wight*.

[*Editor's comment: I have seen a source inferring that the very first "Anglo-Saxon" invaders of the north may in fact have been Jutes or been led by them.]

So much, I thought, for the Border Caleb.
Nevertheless, "shoddy" would not leave me. I looked over maps of England, especially Kent, for geographical tracenames or toponyms, as they are called. Nothing...at least to my untrained eye. But then Kent had been the crossroads of innumerable forays from, Celt to Roman to Anglo-Saxon to Dane, and finally, to Norman.
I sent to the British Tourist Office for the biggest map of the Isle of Wight I could buy. Small islands are a different matter are they not...isolated, conservative and immune to feckless change.
I discovered a very curious anomaly. Of the three rivers on the Isle of Wight, two have the same name!
Whoever settled this island had either no imagination or a limited vocabulary. The two rivers are neither common tributaries nor do they even approach each other. In fact they are on opposite ends of the island and are separated by a larger river. It would be as if we had called the Colorado and Ohio rivers by the same name.
The name of the two rivers is the Yar.
The name of the middle river is the Medina.
Medina is the Hebrew word for capitol or state and, although the river does flow through Newport, the capitol, the name could have other references, such as place of judgement or deliberation, or, perhaps, middle.
It is the same name given by Jews escaping from the Roman destruction of Judaea in the second century to an oasis in Arabia that was to become the springboard for a new religion. It bears that name today. (The word is also Arabic but it is generally conceded that Medina, in contemporary Saudi Arabia, was first named by the Jewish tribes who had settled there.)
I understood of course, to quote J.P. Mallory in Search of the Indo-Europeans, that ..."There is a wide acceptance among both linguists and archaeologists that the study of river names can provide an important source of prehistoric information."
The word Yar must mean or refer to river in some tongue.
If Medina is Hebrew then Yar should be also.
Yar is, in fact, an ancient Hebrew word for river (Gen. 41;1, 41;18).
The three perennial rivers of ancient and contemporary Israel are the Yarmuk, the Yarkon, and the Yarden. Although they are supposedly derived from three different roots (Y/R/M; Y/R/K; and Y/R/D) one must remember that the Jutes, if they were, indeed, originally Judaeans were at least four hundred years removed from their native land and language at that time (more if you are referring to Hebrew rather than Aramaic). The Yarden or Jordan is often translated as the River of Dan [Yar-Dan]. In any event, "Yar" has a very ancient pedigree as a word for river.
There is at least one other River Yar (spelled Yare) in England and that flows into Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk Broads.
Other than these three tantalising bits of linguistic archaeology, little if anything remains of the Jutes.
Nor was my luck with the Angles any better. Although Tacitus mentions them in the 1st century AD, only the Saxons seem to have had any kind of recorded history on the Continent and much of that is of a later date and mostly because Charlemagne was terribly preoccupied with them.
Saxons, Angles, and Jutes appear to have come from the North Sea coasts stretching from Jutland to the present day Netherlands and the Friesian Isles. But they did not originate there and the secret of the Jutes, (and the Angles) must, of need, lie with the Saxons. In any event, if we find out who the Saxons are we may find out also, who the Jutes and the Angles are.

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~In the Bible, Ashkenaz is the grandson of Japheth. Japheth is one of the three sons of Noah, and according to Biblical tradition, the father of the European peoples. Shem and Ham, of course, are the other two sons of Noah.
Ashkenazi is also the Biblical name associated with the Scythians, i.e. the Scythoi of the Greeks, the Ashkazi of the Assyrians, and the Saka of the Medes. (We do not know what the Scythians called themselves.) All these names, incidentally, mean in their various tongues, "sharp knife" or "to cut" or "to skin". That will prove to be important.
The Scyths were a fierce horsebreeding culture that controlled the Black Sea steppes from the Caspian shores to the Balkans. Herodotus speaks of them with great respect, indeed awe, and their highly sophisticated goldwork is still being uncovered.
Ashkenaz, the same ancient Hebrew word, was used by medieval rabbis to describe Germans or their lands.
The most common contemporary use of the word, Ashkenazi, is reserved for Yiddish speaking Jews of European origin and their descendants. This branch of Jewry and their Germanic tongue can be traced back to, at least, the eighth century. They are, by language, rite, and appearance, different from that other large group of Jewry, the Sephardim as well as the many lesser groups who fled the Roman destruction, such as the green-eyed Tat of the Caucasus, the Bene Israel of India, the Kai Fung of China, etc.
Is there some deep truth buried in the various uses of this ancient word... some common point where they all merge?
What would such a truth reveal?

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~The core of the Scythian Empire was the Royal Scyths around whom gathered confederates and allied tribes as well as fugitives and runaways..................
The Scyths ruled a vast expanse from the Eighth to the Second Century B.C. when they were pushed westward by a kinred nation of horsemen, the Sarmatians. Nevertheless, there was ample opportunity and motive for contact between ancient Jews and their Scythian neighbors.
The first such opportunity occurred in B.C. 722 when Sargon II of Assyria carried off the ten northern tribes of Israel. How many he carried off (27,290 by his own count) is a moot point*:

[* Editor's Observation: The said inscription is referring to the city Samaria which was but one city (out of many) in the northern kingdom and this at the end of a three-year siege. Other Assyrian inscriptions say that all the men of the Northern Kingdom were taken away. This is confirmed by the Bible, by Midrashim, and by archaeolgical remains. Even the inscription regarding the city of Samaria may apparently be MOST CORRECTLY interpreted as saying that Sargon took 27,290 or what not out of the city's captives for HIS OWN USAGE and all the rest he exiled to Assyria, i.e. 27,000 plus from the captives of the city of Samaria were put aside by Sargon for his own personal service and all the rest of the city's captives were sent into exile. For more details concerning the correct interpretation of this inscription see our other writings on this subject such as "The Completeness of The Exile". To claim (as some do) that only 27,290 were taken into exile is a gross misrepresentation of the facts which on the contrary in fact indicate that all the northern Israelite population was exiled.]

Although judging by the number of nations who claim to be descended from the Lost Tribes, it should have been a very great many, indeed! England has always been preeminent in this claim.
It is reasonable to assume that Sargon II chose to carry off the artisans and intellectuals of the Ten Tribes...and that, these skilled captives were instrumental in building Dar Sharrukin, the fortress of the north commenced by Sargon II (Sharrukin in Assyrian) in B.C. 717. The concept behind this new city was not only to protect the northern frontiers of the Assyrian Empire but, even more, to open the way north for further expansion. Contact here between Hebrew captive and allied Scythian tribesmen must have certainly been facilitated.
In B.C. 705 Sargon II was killed in battle with the Cimmerians who were subsequently destroyed and driven west by the Scythians.
Did the Ten Tribes, both, as individuals and tribal groups, escape and join themselves to the Scythian/Ashkazi/Ashkenazi tribes? Was it their fate to disappear into the maw of the barbarian north?
Had they done so, it is unlikely that they would have been known by any name resembling the Jutes or Judaeans. These ten tribes were of the Northern Kingdom and would have identified themselves by their individual tribal names, or as Israel or Jacob...or...Angle.

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The Yiddish or Ashkenaz word for Jacob is Yankel.
It is a nazalization of the Biblical root Y/K/B meaning heel or ankle. (Jacob, you will recall, came forth from his mother's womb grasping Esau's heel or ankle). It is a rare Ashkenaz family that does not have an Uncle Yankel...and yes, Yank for short. However this may smack of the authority of Border Collie, it cannot be summarily dismissed. There are simply too many coincidences cropping up.
The usual explanation that the Angles are named for Angeln, the Schlesvig coastline that turns abruptly westward (on the map anyway) is even less probable. It is more likely that the coast country is named after the Angles who were once its principle inhabitants. In any event, I sailed those waters once as a young merchant mariner and believe me, one cannot see any angles at sea-level.
The two southern tribes were, of course, also Jacob or Israel but they called themselves Judah after the larger of the two tribes.
Indeed, the term Judah or Jew, supplanting Jacob or Israel as the common patronymic came into usage at the time of the Babylonian Captivity in B.C. 587. This was the second time there would have been ample opportunity and motive for Biblical Jewry to seek refuge among the Scythian/Ashkenazi who still ruled the North. Especially so, if there had been any knowledge of compatriots who had done it previously. These and subsequent fugitives would have retained a name similar to Judah/Jew/Jute.
The third and most likely time for Jews to seek refuge in the North among their Ashkenazi brethren would have been during the Roman destruction of Judaea in the second century A.D. when the alternatives to flight were slavery and death.
By this time, however, seven hundred years of Scythian domination of the steppelands had ended. Defeated and pushed westward by the Sarmatians, the Royal Scythians were in the process of being lost to history somewhere north of the Danube. Nevertheless, Jews escaping the long arm of Roman revenge had found refuge in such remote regions as India and China. Finding their brethren among the Scythian/Ashkenazi in Europe would not be all that difficult and they could do it in sufficient numbers to retain, at least a vestigial, if fading identity. They had done it elsewhere, and indeed, must have had sufficient presence in the Volga basin as late as the Eighth Century A.D. when they converted the Khazar nobility.

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~European dates before the Roman conquest of Gaul and Britain are conjectural at best, and in the dark forests of Germany where the light of Rome never penetrated, they are not reliable before the ascendancy and literacy of the Church. Nevertheless, somewhere less than a thousand years after their defeat by the Sarmatians the Scythian/Ashkenaz turn up, not surprisingly, in northern Europe.
The sixth century Gothic historian, Jordanes, in describing Scandinavia as a "mother of nations" in his history of the Goths (Getica) uses the antique term, "Scanza", instead of the later version, Scandinavia. He was referring, of course, to the Germanic tribes.
Flip the final "a" to the penultimate position (a very common mutation) and the word becomes Skanaz. It takes neither linguist nor rocket scientist to recognise the same root as Askenaz. In addition both words contain the root SKN meaning knife.
The rest become easy. SKN = SK(s)N = Saxon. (Remember the Saka of the Persians?)
Saxon also means "knife".
Scandinavia very likely means the Sailing Skanaz or Saxons. We do know the Saxons first appear in our history as North Sea pirates and seaborne marauders. These were either the forerunners of the Vikings, or more probably, the very same people.
The Scythian/Ashkenaz, pressed by the Sarmatians to the Baltic and North Sea shores traded their war horses in for their beautiful longboats. Born in the Black Sea Steppes a thousand years before, it was in Skanza,that they themselves gave birth to the multitude of Germanic tribes that were to scourge Europe from Scandinavia to Spain and eventually found the modern nation-state.

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~Very recently, in Warsaw, I spied a theatrical advertisement which read Sarmatia
"Shazam!" I asked my Polish hosts what the term meant. They dutifully explained that it was the name of a play now being shown.
"Tak, tak." I knew that, but what did the word Sarmatia mean in that context. My heart was pumping. They must have thought I was having a seizure. I explained my excitement as lucidly and briefly as possible. Sarmatia, I was told, is a word used to describe the oldest and truest born of the Szlachta, the Polish aristocracy and warrior class, and to their rather excessive and extreme lifestyle. Beyond that, nobody could illuminate further.
I have since learned that, according to one historian (Adam Zamoyski in "The Polish Way"), the word referred to a self-serving theory that "the Polish Szlachta [upper class] were not the same Slav stock as the peasantry, but descendants of the Sarmatians, a warrior people from the Black Sea Steppe..."
Self-serving or not, if the Scythian/Ashkenaz/Saxon ended up along the Baltic and North Sea shores, Poland is exactly where the descendants of the Sarmatians should be. Strange too, is it not, that the very nature of Sarmatian invention and invincibility...the metal stirrup and spur enabling an armoured rider to carry a heavy tipped lance ... was the historical essence of the Polish Szlachta cavalry, and eventually, of all European chivalry.
And so, thanks to the Sarmatians, we have the Ashkenaz/Saxon poised along the North Sea shores, ready with their Angle and Jutish allies to invade and settle Britain, not unlike a later time when Moorish armies and Jewish confederates invaded Spain.

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~Words, mysterious words, bubbling up from the bottom of a cauldron cooking for millennia. Is that all that is left? For fifteen hundred years the Church had fought a war of attrition against the Jews... a war that had its most horrible aspects in its secular phases.
Heresies from Arianism to the Reformation, were labeled by the Church as "Judaizing" ... as well they might have been. For Western Civilisation is suffused with a Jewish presence, a Jewish presence that the Church did its best to obliterate by conversion, death, and deportation. It is a presence, evident not only in the visible manifestations of Jewish ideas and their authors from Jesus to Einstein, but in the myriad contributions of hidden Jews, of forgotten Jews and of the untold minions of the descendants of such Jews.
In a very real sense, Western Civilization is, at the very least, as much a Biblical product as it is a Classical one; it is the offspring of Jews as much as it is of Greeks and Romans...not only intellectually, but in a very palpable physical sense as well.
Jewishness is in the very DNA of Western Civilization.

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~To that restless ghost wandering through my dreams...
"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit."
Your tale is told and it cannot be untold.

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"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of the LORD.
"Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.
"Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compacted together:
"Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the LORD" (Psalm 122;1-4).