Black Jewish Cherokees: A Separate Genealogy

There may be a reason Marian Anderson looked as though she was Black, Jewish and American Indian (Cherokee). She was just that. A kodachrome photograph of the singer taken on 14 January 1940 by Carl Van Vechten. This photo along with most of her work is public domain and belongs to Yale University Library.

In the 1970s, college campuses and halls of academe were gripped by a mass delusion and fundamental error about American Indian spirituality. This version of “a separate reality” was the creation of Peruvian immigrant Carlos Casteneda, a California con man and cult leader. It took a warning letter in 1972 to The New York Times Book Review from the famous Princeton-based novelist Joyce Carol Oates to question whether the “secret” doctrines and practices presented in Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1968) and A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (Simon & Schuster, 1971) weren’t to be regarded as Native American-themed fiction, rather than credible ethnological reports about Toltec shamanism.

Casteneda submitted his first book as a master’s thesis, and it was accepted by the University of California at Los Angeles. Later, the same institution granted him a doctorate in anthropology. By the time of his death in 1998, he had written 11 books, which sold more than eight million copies in 17 languages, without being exposed for the charlatan he was. Like hallucinations  by Claude or Copilot, the mystical old irascible Indian medicine man Don Juan never had a separate or any other type of existence beyond that of a hoax. Everything was a fevered construct of Casteneda’s own imagination and broken morality. Thus, one of the revered sources of the spiritual movement known as New Age seems to have come out of a West Coast sugar cube.[1]

Quite the reverse process seems to have overtaken a certain vein of Cherokee genealogy during the same period, thanks, in part, to the validations of genetic studies and blog posts like what you are reading. Oral traditions of combined Jewish, Black and American Indian heritage have been proved true, time and time again. As long ago as 1730, when seven young Cherokee, including their future designated “king,” traveled together to be introduced to King George II, it was noted in the press that their features were regular and they were well made, though all were “black” men. As recorded in the Daily Post of June 24, 1730, and mirrored almost word for word by all the other London papers:

[T]he Indian King and his Prince, and five of the chief of his Court, (all Blacks) were introduced to his Majesty at Windsor; the [Cherokee] King had a Scarlet Jacket on, but all the rest were naked, except an Apron about their middles, and a Horse’s Tail hung down behind; their Faces, Shoulders, etc. were painted and spotted with red, blue, and green etc… [with] painted feathers on their heads.[2]

Four or more of the Cherokees, including their “king” (called Oukah Ulla, future Uku or principal chief), appear to have been children or kinsmen of the Cherokee chief Moytoy, who was visited by the adventurer and engineer of the mission, Sir Alexander Cuming, but declined to go because his wife was seriously ill.[3] Moytoy, it has been suggested, was identical with James Beamour, a Sephardic Jew and ship’s carpenter who came to Charleston in 1682 and lived mostly on the Cherokee frontier.[4] The original form of his surname was Baomer, Beamour. This prominent Spanish grandee family was scattered by the Inquisition to Meknès (Morocco), Lisbon, Jerusalem, Paris, Sidon (Lebanon) and Gibraltar, as well as London. Other forms of the surname are Benamou, Benamor, Ben Hammo, Ben Ammou, Benamu and Ben Hamu.[5] Beamer is Donald Yates’ 10th great-grandfather.

Moytoy II appears to be the same as Oukah Ullah while Chief Oconostota, called The Raven or War Chief in the 1730 delegation, was a grandson of the first Beamer (Beamour). So were also  Skiagusta (Chief Warrior) and Skalilosken Kittegusta (Speaker He-Shot-Two, from the Apalachite capital of Melilot in the Nacoochee Valley).

Tentative genealogy of the Cherokee ruling family of Beamers, who were known as Mustees and who lived as frontier Jews among the Cherokee. Certainly, Thomas Beamer (d. 1761), was called by this term in British records. It meant a mixture of Indian and Negro blood.

Most of the Cherokee figures mentioned here are in the family tree of Donald N. Yates, founder of DNA Consultants and author of many publications discussing Cherokee history and genealogy.[6] For instance, Oconostota was his ancestor through a Cherokee wife. He is also the 9th great-grandfather of Tamra Duncan of the Wolf Clan through a Creek wife.[7]

But what is the proof of Jewish admixture? In the surviving etching of the Cherokee delegation of 1730, several of its members, including Oconostota, Tistoe (Smoke Raiser, Willenawah or Great Eagle) and Clogoitah (Gun Carrier, from Tanasi) have unusual sidelocks. These do not appear to be a hair fashion but to answer to the description of payot, ringlets that orthodox Jews wear based on the injunctions of the Torah (Leviticus 19:27) and Talmud.[8]

In a prominent Cherokee tribal genealogy, ending in George Agustus Hicks, white (evidently crypto-Jewish) admixture is traced back, generation by generation, to the Wild Potato Clan wife of Moytoy, the “Cherokee Emperor,” who resided in Tellico, the Cherokee capital on the Carolina frontier, namesake of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, of later Cherokee Nation fame:

1. Wild Potato Clan Woman (1686-1730) m. Moytoy of Tellico (1687-1741)
2. Ah-nee-wa-kee (Deerhead, b. 1710) m. Cornelius Dougherty (b. 1700, d. 1770 in Keowee Territory)
3. Jennie Dougherty (abt. 1745-after 1826) m. Crittenden (Non-Cherokee)
4. Qua-la-yu-ga Gu-u-li-si Crittenden (b. abt. 1760, d. 1849) m. George X Chisholm (bef. 1822)
5. Lydia Halfbreed (abt 1774-1849)
6. William Abraham Hicks, Principal Chief 1826-1828
7. George Agustus Hicks (b. 1793, d. aft. 1858)[9]

What’s in a Country’s Name

The names and descriptions of the provinces chronicled by Huguenot observers in French Florida in the capital they called Melilot are all indicative of radical ethnic mixing as early as the 17th century. The second comprehensive treatise on the subject of American Indians would not come until James Adair’s History of American Indians (London, 1775), which suggests strong Jewish influences. We must remember that the Cherokee leaders in pictorial records have Maltese markings! Melilot is the Greek name of Malta, ruled by the Hospitaller Knights of St. John, successors of the Templars, for several centuries. The same markings were evident in  Ostenaco, whose application his portraitist Sir Josua Reynolds said took several hours.

The knee-jerk reaction of academics has been to dismiss the observations about Southeastern Indians in Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire (Rotterdam, 1681) as a zealot’s propagandistic “fantasy,” its stone cities made up to encourage European immigration. Yet much of its anthropological, historical and linguistic detail bears close study and is quite credible.[10]

Fact or fiction? The Apalache capital Melilot in Nacoochee Valley in French Florida depicted by Edouard de Graeves in 1653. The angel carries the coat of arms of the Hospitallers along with a Maltese cross, the same aristocratic insignia painted by more than one artist on Cherokee chiefs.   

The most prominent of the provinces in the Nacoochee valley is named Bemarin, evidently Portuguese from bomaria, a commercial law term meaning Concession, literally “bottomry”: The Portuguese adventurers who first penetrated to the Indian towns of the region are quite well documented. The next is called Amana (Land of Flowers, Florida) and the third Matique.[11] The other provinces are Schama and Meraco, situated in the Apalate Mountains, and Achalaque, partly in the mountains and partly in the swamps on the boundaries of the large body of water that regularly floods two times a year. Achalaque is without doubt the same as Tsalagi, an ethnonym of the Cherokee (universally pronounced Cha-la-kee), also recorded as Eshelokee (Greek etheloikioi, “volunteer settlers”), the a- or e- prefix indicating the central homeland of a tribe.

As to Schama, it is clear the name of this region and hence many of its inhabitants were Jewish. The 1670 Latin geography Hercules Siculus by Giovanni Battista Nicolosi calls it Sehema and stipulates that such a spelling is the Italian word for Hebrew Shema. The province was therefore known as Name (of God). Shema (“speak” or “hear”) was the first word of the Jewish profession of faith Shema Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu, literally “Hear O Israel the Lord Thy God is One.” Evidently, Jews or crypto-Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition in Columbia spoke to the Amsterdam rabbi Manasseh ben Israel about the solidarity and similarity of American Indians and Israelites, inspiring this name. The same legends gave birth to Ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel first published in 1626 and were responsible, it is claimed, for Oliver Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews in England in 1656.[12]

But the clenching evidence is genetic. In a 2024 blog on this website, Donald Yates revealed that many so-called private alleles, STR values held by only one tribe or ethnicity and hardly found in the rest of the world, can pinpoint the exact origins of rare admixture. (He went on to expand this finding in The Countercurrents of Prehistory: What Rare Genes Can Say about Early Human Migration.) TPOX=7 is such a marker. A predominantly African gene like others, it is present in Cherokee at the rate of 1.5%—8.7%.[13] The evidence is hard to dismiss.

Striking African features are visible in War Chief (Koranu, Raven) Oconostota (d. after 1809).  In Isaac Basire’s engraving made in London in 1730, Oconostota is wearing the British officer’s uniform given to him by the King. The Cherokee chief treasured it during his long life. According to his descendant Narcissa Owens it was passed down in the family. Since his mother was known as Quatsie (Patsy), a mulatto, and he was Motoy’s (James Beamer’s) grandson, he more than any other Cherokee of the time fits the admittedly counter-intuitive description “Black Jewish Cherokee.”

By the year 1730, there was a significant degree of admixture among the Cherokee. The potpourri included French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Moroccan, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Armenian, Turkish, African and Jewish strains. All these nationalities crop up in the autosomal results of Cherokee descendants. This admixture appears to be concentrated in the ruling families at the former Apalache capital of Melilot in the Nacoochee Valley, which had previously received strong French Huguenot, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, English, Irish, Templar/Maltese and Croatian influences, as well as an undercurrent of African slaves and other American Indian tribes.[14]

Up to the present, academics in printed works and online authorities by a large consensus have treated all these three converging ethnicities—black, Jewish and Cherokee—as part of a sort of lunatic fringe of misguided family history researchers.

As a coda, I might mention that my distant Cherokee cousin and friend, Jonathan Rex, has assembled a lot of history and genealogy concerning the Beamor or Moytoy dynasty. He thought Amouskositte (died 1753), recorded in colonial documents under spellings such as Ammonscossitte and referred to by the British as the “Young Emperor”, continued his father’s prestigious surname, (Ben) Hammo or (Ben) Ammou. It was a corruption of Amous of Cusati (Koasati, Coushatta), which the British took as meaning Bad Water (Cherokee ama).[15] If so, he is also a “black Jewish Cherokee.” He had a Jewish name, was described by contemporary historians as Black, and was identified to the British sovereign in 1730 as the “heir apparent” of the tribe.

Cherokee tribal authorities dismiss both black and Jewish ethnic strains as adventitious to the national identity. To purge their rolls of African ancestry in 2007, Cherokee Nation enrollees voted overwhelmingly to strip 2,800 Freedmen of their membership, defining tribal citizenship as “by blood.” They make such claims as Sequoyah was a “Cherokee scholar, artist, and inventor…born in the heart of the Cherokee heartland in East Tennessee in the eighteenth century…[who] sometime in the first quarter of the nineteenth century…developed an entirely new writing system for the Cherokee language,” unaware apparently of the facts that his grandfather was the well-known Sephardic Jewish physician Dr. John de Sequeyra (1712-1795) and the “Cherokee” syllabary supposedly singlehandedly invented by this Native American hero has a long history, with examples going back to the Bronze Age.

We hope you have enjoyed this AI-free creation of real people interested in their real genealogy!

[1] See excerpts from Ru Marshall, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books, 2026). That Casteneda’s works were novelistic was always the verdict held by Native American lawyer, theologian  and scholar Vine Deloria.

[2] Quoted by Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 138.

[3] William O. Steele, The Cherokee Crown of Tannassy (John F. Blair, 1977). These events are also covered in Donald N. Yates and Teresa A. Yates, Cherokee DNA Studies: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong (Panther’s Lodge, 2021), pp. 206-213.

[4] Yates and Yates (2021), p. 214.

[5] G. Faiguenboim et al, Dict. of Sephardi Surnames (FRAIHA, 2003), pp. 177, 198. Eva H. Guggenheimer and Heinrich W. Guggenheimer, Jewish Family Names & Their Origins: An Etymological Dict., 2nd ed. (KTAV, 2017), p. 249.

[6] See “Donald Yates Interviewed on Israeli TV Show about Cherokee and Jewish Connections” (blog post, Apr. 22, 2022).

[7] Yates and Yates (2021), pp. 290-92.

[8] Yates and Yates (2021), p. 211. Cf. “Cherokee Had Orthodox Jewish Beards until about 1750,” blog post Feb. 26, 2020.

[9] This genealogy is based on the work of James R. Hicks, Cherokee Lineages, available online at: https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/h/i/c/James-R-Hicks-VA/index.html. We have found Hicks to be the most reasonable and best documented of the sources for Cherokee genealogies.

[10] Charles de Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des Iles Antilles de Amerique, 2 vols., Corpus Antilles/Sciences sur les Indiens de la Caraïbe 1-2, eds. Bernard Grunberg, Benoît Roux and Josiane Grunberg (Paris : Harmattan, 2012). Rodney M. Baine, “Another Lost Colony? Charles de Rochefort’s Account of English Refugees and the Apalachites,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 83/3 (1999), p. 564. For facts rather than theories, see Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford UP, 2019), or Raymond A. Mantzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, A Companion to the Huguenots (Brill, 2016).

[11] Another province, Regazim, sounds very much like Ragusan, “one from Dubrovnik. ” Matique: cf. Serbo-Croatian Matica, “foundation, home base, colony, cultural association, league” formed from matr’ “mother.” If this derivation is correct, it would mean that Ragusans or Slavic-speaking Croatians who “accepted Christianity” (Histoire, p. 418) colonized the natives in this region. One of their number was Tathtowe (or Tistoe), a half-breed Cherokee who went to London with the others and was depicted having payot. Tistoe was also known as Great Eagle. He married Creat, the daughter of German Jewish convert Christian Priber by a daughter of Chief Motoy II (Wolf Clan). See Yates and Yates (2021), p. 231. See also Elizabeth C. Hirschman et al, “”DNA Evidence of a Croatian and Sephardic Jewish Settlement on the North Carolina Coast Dating from the Mid to Late 1500s,” International Social Science Review 95/2 (2019).

[12] Cecil Roth, The Life of Manasseh Ben-Israel: Rabbi, Printer and Diplomat (Arno, 1961). Cf. Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald N. Yates, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America (McFarland, 2012), pp. 9, 29, 39, 47. 84.

[13] “Private Alleles Reveal Admixture in Cherokee Indians,” blog post Sep. 4, 2024.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Jonathan Rex to Donald Yates, Sep. 27, 2023. For the sparse details of James Beamour/Beamer’s life, Rex cites The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston S.C.,  Volume IX, No. 1 (January 1908), p. 76, referencing, in turn, page 123 from the Records of Court of Ordinary of the Province of South Carolina, 1692-1700 (neither seen by the author). The only research Rex published was his “Hunter’s Treasures: The Cherokee Paintings by William Hodges,” in The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He shared a copy with me before it was retracted by the editors in December 2024 following challenges to Rex’s identification of Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe. The Cherokee National Research Center concluded Rex lacked tangible historical evidence. Rex lives in Poland and has become a Polish national.

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