Haplogroup E

Where are the Moors today? Who were the Moors, what were the Moors, and where did they come from?

When regarding the Moors, the term refers to the black Muslims and Jews who occupied Eurasia and Africa.

In modern times, Moorish history is predominantly illustrated through the perspective of the Muslims, but contrary to popular belief, the first mention of the Moors was actually attributed to the Israelites during the reign of the Roman Empire, because this is when the term "Moor" was created, predating the era of the Muslims.

There is much speculation and controversy when discussing the phenotype, ethnic origin and meaning of being a Moor, but when one simply returns to the etymology and root of the word, most of those arguments can be put to rest.

Etymology

The word Moor, or Marrano, is derived from the Latin words "Mauros" and "Mauri". The Greeks called them the "Maurusii".

It refers to people from the Kingdom of Mauretania, a state that covered modern northern Morocco, western Algeria, and the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. It was inhabited by native Judeo and Islamised Berbers.

The Romans first came into contact with them during the second and third centuries BC. These Mauri people would go on to be called the Moors by English speakers.

Latin was the language of the Romans, and this is the era in which the origins of the Moorish name arose. In Latin, the word Mauros means dark-skinned, black, swarthy or African. The plural of Mauros is "Mauri".

This is not to say that all Moors were dark-skinned, but before they began receiving other admixtures through fleeing persecution, settling in foreign lands and intermixing with their host communities, they were defined and documented as black in the terms of their era. Mauros is the equivalent of the modern words Negro or black.

The term Moreno can mean "dark-skinned" in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the Philippines. Among Spanish speakers, Moro refers to all things dark, just like "Moor" and "moreno". It was also used as a nickname.

The Mauri and the Mizrahi Jews

The Mauri people are described here as descendants of the Mizrahi Jews who settled the Maghreb of North Africa after Cyrus the Great permitted the Jews to return to Israel or migrate outside the lands in which they had been held captive, following his conquest of Assyria.

They were mentioned by Tacitus for revolting against Rome around 24 BC, likely resisting Roman expansion. Their revolts were in vain, and the Kingdom of Mauretania became a vassal of Rome until about 44 AD, when the area was annexed and divided into two provinces: Mauretania Tingitana and Mauretania Caesariensis.

The Roman-Jewish wars would begin about twenty years later.

The Jewish-Roman Wars

After the Jewish-Roman wars, the Israelites initially settled in other Roman territories and in Western Europe, or formed Jewish settlements in places such as the Hejaz and the southern region of Arabia, or among the Amazigh of North Africa prior to the advent of Islam.

Arabia

Those who went into Arabia settled along the Hejaz and in Yemen.

There were three main Jewish tribes in Medina before the rise of Islam in Arabia: the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa and the Banu Qurayza. The Banu Nadir were hostile to Muhammad's new religion, while other Jewish tribes lived relatively peacefully under Muslim rule. These tribes lived in northern Arabia, at the oasis of Yathrib (Medina), until the seventh century, when the men were executed and the women and children enslaved after they allegedly betrayed the pact they had made with the Muslims, following the invasion of the Banu Qurayza by Muslim armies led by Muhammad.

Other clans recorded in the region include the Banu Alfageer, Banu Awf, Banu Harith (Bnei Chorath), Banu Jusham, Banu Quda'a and Banu Shutayba.

According to al-Masudi, the northern part of the Hejaz was a dependency of the Kingdom of Judah, and according to Butrus al-Bustani the Jews in the Hejaz established a sovereign state. The German orientalist Ferdinand Wüstenfeld believed that the Jews established a state in northern Hejaz.

There was a considerable Jewish population in the Hejaz, mostly in and around Medina (Yathrib at the time), Khaybar and Tayma.

In the Constitution of Medina, Jews were given equality with Muslims in exchange for political loyalty, and were allowed to practise their own culture and religion. Later, as Muhammad encountered opposition from the Jews, Muslims began to adopt a more negative view of them.

Early Muslim conquests resulted in the exile of the Banu Qainuqa and the Banu Nadir, two of the three main Jewish tribes of Medina, and the mass execution of the male adults of the Banu Qurayza clan. The Jewish clans of Arabia slowly diminished over the centuries through conversion, persecution and migration.

While one group occupied the Hejaz, the Jews of South Arabia settled in the Himyarite Kingdom of Yemen and even influenced the religious practice of the ruling powers. The Jews prospered greatly within Yemen and intermarried into different royal branches. Musnad texts mention five royal palaces at Zafar: Hargab, Kallanum, Kawkaban, Shawhatan and Raydan, the state palace.

North Africa before the Arab Conquest

After the fall of the First Temple, some Israelites took refuge in the Maghreb and settled into Amazigh-Berber communities. They became a great influence among the communities that hosted them, which is likely what led to the adoption of Judaism and the formation of a Judeo-Berber culture.

A second wave of Jews arrived in the Maghreb after the Jewish-Roman wars, assimilating into the pre-existing Judeo-Berber communities.

During the reign of Dihya, also known as al-Kahina, the Umayyad Caliphate continued the Muslim conquest into the Maghreb. The Umayyad Empire was the second caliphate established after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

Dihya came from the Kingdom of Numidia and was born into the Jrawa Zenata tribe in the early seventh century. For five years she ruled a free Berber state stretching from the Aurès Mountains to the oasis of Ghadames (695-700 AD).

Some historians note that her title was cited in Arabic-language sources as al-Kahina, the priestess or soothsayer, a nickname given to her by her Muslim opponents because of her alleged ability to foresee the future.

This atlas presents an alternative reading: that her name is a point of reference to her ancestry. As mentioned before, after Rome came into power many Jews went into Arabia and North Africa. The Jews had a rich and flourishing settlement at Yathrib, modern-day Medina, whose principal families were the Banu Qainuqa, the Banu Qurayza and the Banu Nadir.

The Banu Qurayza and Banu Nadir are referred to as "al-Kahinan", because they traced their descent from Aaron. This suggests that "Kahinan" is an Arabised translation of "Kohen", which would mean that the Banu Qurayza and Banu Nadir were Levite lines.

After they were exiled from Medina, it is plausible that some of these Kahinan went into the Maghreb, intermixing with the now Judeo-Berber communities. Under this reading, the title al-Kahina given to Dihya is of Hebrew origin, and she herself was likely a Judeo-Berber with partial ancestry from the Jewish Kahinan tribes exiled from Arabia, mixed with the native tribes. The meanings of the names Kahina and Kohen are fully synonymous: both are used for a Jewish priest.

Arab Invasion and the Spread of Islam

Early Muslim expansion, 647-670 CE. After conquering Egypt, the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate and the earlier Rashidun rulers pushed westward. In 647 CE Arab forces entered what is now Tunisia and defeated Byzantine armies. Raids and campaigns continued for several decades, and in 670 CE the city of Kairouan was founded as a major military and religious base for further expansion.

Resistance and the Berber wars, 680s-700s. The conquest was not easy. Two famous resistance leaders were Kusaila, a Berber chief who temporarily defeated Arab forces and killed the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi, and al-Kahina, who led a major Berber coalition and resisted Arab expansion in present-day Algeria before being defeated around 701-703 CE.

Completion of the conquest, early 700s. By about 710 CE most of the Maghreb had come under Umayyad control. Many Berber groups converted to Islam, though tensions remained because Berbers often felt they were treated unequally compared with Arab Muslims.

The Umayyad Caliphate ruled over a vast multiethnic and multicultural population. Christians and Jews were allowed to practise their own religion but had to pay the jizya, a poll tax from which Muslims were exempt. Despite racial tensions, Arabs and Berbers intermarried frequently, and these unions largely brought in foreign haplogroups.

Expansion into Spain, 711 CE

After securing much of North Africa, Muslim forces crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 was led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, whose army was composed largely of newly Islamised Berbers from the Maghreb.

As discussed earlier, the term "Moor" was originally used to describe black and melanated Israelites who had formerly been under the rule of the Romans. After the Muslims conquered the Maghreb they still coexisted with Jews and Christians under dhimmi law, which protected the "people of the book", meaning people of the Abrahamic faiths or faiths that align with them.

When the Muslims conquered the Maghreb, the native people were a hybridisation of Judeo-Berber culture, but the Muslims became the ruling class. Both the Muslim and the Jewish people of the Maghreb were of dark or Moorish complexion, but since the Muslims led the Iberian invasion, the term "Moor" became synonymous with Muslims.

Descriptions in the Sources

Imam al-Dhahabi narrated in Tarikh al-Islam, page 227, that Sayyidina Ali was a short, dark-skinned man with heavy eyes: وعن أبي جعفر الباقر قال: كان علي آدم، شديد الأدمة، ثقيل العينين، عظيمهما، وهو إلى القصر أقرب.

Ibn al-Jawzi narrates that he was Adam shadid al-udma, or black, in his book Safwat al-Safwa, page 308.

The Arabs are classified into three different groups: the Ba'ida, known as the ancient or extinct Arabs; the al-Arab al-Ariba, known as the pure Arabs, today found in southern Arabian countries such as Yemen and Oman; and the Muta'ariba, the mixed Arabs who descend from Ishmael through Adnan.

The southern Arabs are typically darker than their northern neighbours, so if Ali was described as black and he was of the Muta'ariba, this reading asks how black the Ariba of Yemen were, who participated in the Umayyad invasion of Spain.

Two Classes of Moor

The Muslim Moors functioned like an executive branch, acting as the ruling power and authority over the region.

The Moors who were Jewish descend from the Mizrahi Jews who settled in Arabia, North Africa and Western Europe during the Roman Empire. In al-Andalus they functioned like a treasury: a merchant class controlling trade, banking, economics, money lending and debt collection.

These Muslims, along with the Jewish Moors, would rule and occupy parts of Europe for 780 years, from 711 AD to 1492.

How the Idea of White Moors Arose

Due to the Maghreb's proximity to Europe and to so-called West Asia, many migrations and invasions occurred throughout history, but even then the Berbers were a copper-brown to dark-toned people.

During the Moorish occupation of Europe it was also common for European people to be enslaved and traded in the Muslim world; European women in particular were highly sought after as concubines in the harems of many Muslim rulers.

The Moors of Iberia imported Christian captives from Spain all the way to Eastern Europe, from the eighth century until the Reconquista in the late fifteenth century. The Iberian Peninsula served as a base for further exports of captives into other Muslim regions of North Africa.

So the enslavement of Iberians and Eastern Europeans, together with the common practice of adding enslaved women to the harems of Moorish rulers, resulted in a new caste of Moors born out of these unions. The Moors reigned in Europe for almost 800 years and also intermixed for 800 years, which inevitably created a new group among them.

The Portuguese Moors, however, were mostly endogamous, specifically in the Jewish communities more than the Muslim ones. So although white Moors existed, the original Moor was black: genetically, phenotypically and etymologically.

Reconquista

The power of the Moors began fading against major resistance from the eleventh century onward, and the Muslims began to lose their strongholds to Christian forces. Hostility towards and persecution of the Jewish communities grew greatly as well.

After the surrender of Granada in January 1492, the entire Iberian Peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers. On 30 July 1492, as a result of the Alhambra Decree, the Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon, some 200,000 people, were forcibly expelled. The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499-1526) which forced the conversion of Muslims in Castile, Navarre and Aragon, who were later expelled from the Iberian realms of the Spanish Crown by a series of decrees beginning in 1609.

Approximately three million Moors emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610, and many of them had their assets and wealth confiscated or forfeited, though those who escaped Iberia without detection managed to retain some of their riches.

Aftermath

After the Alhambra Decree was issued, many Jews initially fled from Spain to Portugal, but in 1496 King Manuel I of Portugal also decreed the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal.

The Moors then began to resettle in the Maghreb of North Africa, with many settling in Morocco and Algeria.

There were also many Moroccan and Maghrebi Jews who migrated into sub-Saharan Africa and settled in the Senegambia, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and along the coastline of Central Africa.

Many of them formed a merchant class in the kingdoms of Wolof, Serer, Jola, Kaabu, Mali, Songhai, Oyo, Ijebu, Borgu, Hausa, Loango, Kongo and many more.

Lancados

The Lancados were Jewish Moors who fled Iberia after the Alhambra Decree. Here we discuss their migrations, settlements and genetic connection to Haplogroup E1a, also known as E-M132.

The Lancados represent both subclades of E-M44 and E-Z958.

The Alhambra Decree was issued in the late fifteenth century, with its effects continuing into the early sixteenth century.

Many Sephardi Jews migrated from al-Andalus to the Maghreb as refugees fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. The Maghreb was a popular destination, and many settled in Morocco.

The Jews who newly settled in Morocco were referred to as the Megorashim, while the Jews already present were referred to as the Toshavim. The Toshavim had been in North Africa since ancient times and spoke the local languages, Arabic or Berber.

Many Iberian Jews settled in Fes and Marrakesh. Conversos who had been banished to Iberian colonial possessions in the Americas and the Atlantic reclaimed their Judaism and also resettled in Morocco. Some of those who returned from the Americas were likely carriers of E-M44, E-Z958 and E1b1b.

Although E1a migrations begin after the Bar Kokhba revolt, a second wave of migration led these lineages into the Maghreb, Timbuktu and other areas of sub-Saharan Africa after the Spanish Inquisition.

Lancados and Degredados

On 5 December 1496, as a result of a clause in King Manuel's marriage contract with Princess Isabel of Spain, King Manuel I signed an order forcing all Jews to choose between leaving Portugal or converting.

Those who fled the country became known as the Lancados, meaning "the thrown out ones", who were usually self-exiled or fleeing persecution.

There was also another group known as the Degredados. Most degredados were common criminals, although many were political or religious prisoners, such as "backsliding" New Christians, who had been sentenced to exile from the Kingdom of Portugal. The sentence was not always direct: many had been given long terms of imprisonment, sometimes death, but took the option of having their sentences commuted to a shorter period of exile overseas in service of the crown.

The Degredados typically still operated through the will of the Portuguese monarch and his agenda, while the Lancados worked under their own volition, independent of Portuguese authority.

The number of lancados grew quickly during the first half of the sixteenth century in response to the persecution of Jews by the Portuguese kings Manuel I and Joao III.

Some lancados supported and acted as intermediaries for an increasing number of French, English and Dutch traders along the West African coast from Cabo Verde to Elmina. In order to combat this trade, the Kingdom of Portugal established fortified trading posts called feitorias at strategic points along the Gulf of Guinea coast.

Settlement and Luso-African Society

They were known to settle in Cabo Verde, Senegambia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, but ranged as far as Nigeria and Angola. Lancados lived and traded in coastal areas, either individually or in small groups, and with the knowledge and protection of native Africans.

They often took African wives from local ruling families, thereby securing protection and trading ties that worked to the advantage of both sides. They established clandestine trading networks in weaponry, spices and slaves. This black market angered the Portuguese Crown by disrupting its ability to collect taxes.

Although never large in number, the children born to the lancados and their African wives and concubines became known as Luso-Africans and served as crucial intermediaries between Europeans and native Africans.

They were often bilingual and grew up in both cultures, sometimes working as interpreters with traders. The Lancado people wielded significant power in the early development of the port economies of Bissau, Cacheu and the surrounding areas.

The lancados were primarily active in the Senegal, Gambia, Casamance and Guinea valleys; the Cacheu and Geba River regions in present-day Guinea-Bissau; and in the Port Loko region in present-day Sierra Leone. They lived as far southwest as Elmina. Perhaps their largest settlements were at Buba and Rio Grande de Buba in present-day Guinea-Bissau.

The coastal lancados and their descendants constituted a new sociocultural group that spoke Portuguese, dressed in European clothes and lived in rectangular Portuguese-style houses with whitewashed walls and verandas.

They also adopted local African customs such as tattooing and scarification. Their religious beliefs were likewise a mix of Catholicism, Vodun from Benin and Nigeria, and ancestor reverence. Some individual lancados lived so long among African people that they integrated fully into local cultures, abandoning their previous Portuguese identities.

They settled into the kingdoms and chiefdoms of Kaabu, Kassa, Wolof, Serer and Susu; the Nigerian and Beninese kingdoms of Oyo, Dahomey and Ketu; and other under-documented regions such as Kongo, where they settled Loango.

Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau

One group settled in the Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau within the kingdoms of Kassa and Kaabu, among the Mandinka, Djola, Balanta, Manjak, Wolof and Fula. They are carriers of E-Z5991 and E-Z5985.

This was the second influx of Jews among these populations. The first wave came 800 years earlier, from the Radhanite Wangara branch of the Zaghawa confederation in the eighth century, who settled in the Casamance region of Senegal and formed the Bani Israel community.

The Lancado Jews who came during the second wave must already have been aware of the pre-existing Jewish communities, because it can hardly be coincidental that they settled in the same exact regions as the first wave.

In the fifteenth century, Lancado and Degredado traders and navigators established a trading station in the area. They also formed trade relations with the Mansa of Kasa, giving the river the name Casamance. During this period the Kasa capital of Brikama held a monopoly on all European trade on the river, and the kingdom became wealthy through gold and slave trading.

The Lancados were not accepted in all communities. The Jola, Balanta and Bijago were initially hostile towards them. The region's other groups harboured communities of lancados who were subject to taxation and to the laws and customs of their hosts, including the local courts.

Disputes became increasingly frequent and serious during the late 1500s as foreign traders tried to influence the host societies to their own benefit. Under pressure from hostile locals, the Lancados abandoned the settlement of Buguendo near Cacheu in 1580 and Guinala in 1583, where they retreated to a fort. In 1590 they built a fort at Cacheu, which the local Manjaks unsuccessfully stormed shortly after its construction.

The poorly manned and provisioned forts were unable to free the lancados from their responsibilities to the native monarchs, their hosts, who in turn could not expel the traders because their goods were in great demand by the upper class.

After the lancados established themselves, they were likely seeking a way to become independent of their hosts and of the obligations demanded of them. This would have upset the local rulers and caused disputes between both parties.

Sierra Leone

The lancados in Sierra Leone established the town of Port Loko and directed trade in the region, but the Temne would later dominate the area. The Temne are partially descended from the Mane invasion that conquered the country in the sixteenth century.

In the seventeenth century, Lancado Iberian explorers and traders came to Sherbro Island. They traded with the Sherbro and with other peoples up the rivers into the interior. Sherbro Island lies within the Bonthe district of Sierra Leone, a region predominantly occupied by Sherbro and Mende people.

The change in power structure and warfare during the Mane invasion could also have caused a migration of some kind to occur.

Bight of Benin and the Emo Yo Quaim

The Lancados were primarily centralised around the Upper Guinea coast, but were not limited to these regions. They also settled in the Bight of Benin and assimilated into its existing kingdoms.

Evidence of this lies in the fact that when the Lancados began adopting the customs of native Africans and syncretising their Judaic beliefs with African spirituality, Vodun and Ifa were among the practices they adopted. Vodun and Ifa are not found among the Mande people, but among the Fon, Ewe and Yoruba of the Bight of Benin.

According to page 267 of The Earth and Its Inhabitants by Elisee Reclus, describing Dahomey: "East of Great Popo begins the Dahomey territory, guarded by the important town of Glehweh, known to Europeans by the various names of Fida, Heredah, Whydah, Wida. The old writers called it Juda, and its inhabitants were said to be Jews, while the neighbouring river Allala, whose real name is Efra, became the Euphrates. During the flourishing days of the slave trade, from sixteen to eighteen thousand were annually transported from Ajuda, as the Portuguese called this place, which at that time had a population of thirty-five thousand. The tutelar deity of Whydah is the snake, and its famous fetish temple is served by priestesses, called mothers or sisters."

The snake culture is reflective of the Lancado Jews who adopted Vodun.

According to oral traditions, and to scholars such as Allen Godbey, a scholar of history, archaeology and Semitics, a professor at Duke University and the author of The Lost Tribes a Myth, as well as sources from Ulysses Santa Maria and Cambridge, the indigenous people of Yorubaland are able to recall a period when Israelite tribes came and settled their lands.

In southern Nigeria the natives call the Black Jews the strange people, or the Emo Yo Quaim. They are also called the B'nai Ephraim, the sons of Ephraim.

They claim that their ancestors came from Morocco, and this is supported by Godbey, who noted that their language is a mixture of Maghrebi Arabic, ancient Hebrew and local pidgin. They were also said to possess a copy of the Torah.

The assertion of these Yoruba Jews is that their ancestors were driven from locality to locality by Muslim persecution; they did not find rest even when they arrived at Timbuktu.

Timbuktu at the time was ruled by the Songhai king Askia Muhammad, who had declared his own inquisition upon the Jews, stating that they must convert to Islam or leave. Those who stayed became Muslims, others fled into the Bandiagara cliffs among the Dogon, and others left the country altogether.

Those who went to Nigeria became known as the Emo Yo Quaim, or Yoruba Jews. These Yoruba Jews lived in the Ondo district when Godbey wrote in 1930, a district nine hundred miles southeast of Timbuktu. At that time they numbered about two thousand people in twenty small hamlets.

Although these Jews may have predominantly settled Ondo State, based on the habits and migration patterns of the Jews in Africa, once they grew comfortable in the region they would have begun to spread deeper into the interior while also staying close to states along the coastline in order to conduct trade.

This means that beyond Ondo they would also have settled Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Cross River, across Yorubaland and the Niger Delta.

The ethnic composition of Ondo State consists largely of Yoruba subgroups: the Idanre, Akoko, Akure, Ikale, Ilaje, Ondo, Ese Odo and Owo peoples. Ijaw people, such as the Apoi and Arogbo populations, inhabit the southeastern swamps close to the Edo State border. A small population speaks a variant of Yoruba similar to the Ife dialect in Oke-Igbo, a town close to the Osun State border.

The B'nai Ephraim assimilated into different communities among these tribes and groups, such as the Ijaw and Ilaje, and inhabited not only Ondo but spread throughout the entire Niger Delta.

Assimilations

As we move through the different communities occupied by different peoples from Ondo, we can see possible historical footprints left behind by the B'nai Ephraim.

In Ondo State, the headquarters of Akure North is Iju, inhabited by the Ekiti. In Ondo South there is a town called Okitipupa, or Ode-Idepe, inhabited by the Ikale people. There are three areas within this land called Iju-Oke, Iju-Odo and Iju-Osun.

The name Iju can also be tied to the Ijaw people, who are known as the Ijo. They were among the first people in Nigeria to come into contact with Europeans, the earliest explorers arriving in the early fifteenth century. In the 1500s they came into contact with Portuguese Jewish merchants who were likely Degredados and Lancados, and their communities began trading in enslaved people as middlemen while also trading in palm oil.

The Arogbo and Apoi subgroups of the Ijaw occupy Ondo. The Arogbo ancestors migrated northwards up the old course of the Forcados river and settled near the site of Patani.

Living nearby in the upland region were proto-Edo or Efa people called the Erowha. The Arogbo and Erowha intermarried, and this alliance gave birth to the clans of Uvwei and Effurun, or Ephron.

The Forcados region of southern Nigeria carries a Portuguese name and had been inhabited by Portuguese Moors as early as 1472. Its neighbour is the Burutu community. Burutu is derived from Hebrew, and the Efik people also referred to themselves as the Eburutu.

The Ephron clan of the Arogbo Ijaw is derived from Ephraim. The B'nai Ephraim who settled among the Arogbo Ijaw intermixed with the Erowha to produce this hybrid clan. The Efik rulers, called Eburutu, used the name Efiom, which is also derived from Ephraim, and used Hebrew names such as Atai.

Settlements

Ultimately, once the B'nai Ephraim arrived in Ondo State, they settled into the Akure kingdom among the Ekiti people, where they formed Iju-Itaogbolu.

The Moorish Jews of the Maghreb are famously known as carriers of Haplogroup E1b1b, and carriers can be found among the Ekiti people at 4.2 per cent, though the predominant lineage is E1b1a, which is most common among the Yoruba. This suggests that the carriers of E1b1b represent the Ephraimite lineages among them, arriving as a minority and settling among the local E1b1a population.

Ephraimites also settled the Ikale kingdom among the Ikale and formed Iju-Oke, Iju-Odo and Iju-Osun. Another group of Ephraim settled among the Ijaw-Arogbo kingdoms, where they formed the Ephron clan.

The Arogbo Ephron clan of the Ijaw are also related to the Urhobo. The haplogroup E-CTS10935, a subclade of E-Z958, can be found among some Urhobo people.

The Ephraimites also settled the Ilaje kingdoms, where they formed the towns of Zion Ikerigho (Ugbo), Zion Iluabo (Ugbo), Zion Gbabijo (Mahin), Zion Igbokoda (Mahin), Zion Mahintedo (Mahin), Zion Ogogoro (Mahin), Zion Pepe (Ahere) and Zion (Igbotu). Zion is a Hebrew name marking a holy place, or a reference to Jerusalem.

The Ikale and Ilaje also spread into Ogun State, and some may have settled among the Egba and Owu people, because within the state there is a town called Iju-Oloko. In Lagos, a prominent place of trade for the Lancados, there is a place called Iju-Ishaga.

Ijebu

The Lancado Jews may also have settled in Ijebu-Igbo. The Ijebu are mainly in Ogun State, but Ijebu-Igbo lies within the Ondo region as well.

Some characteristics among the traders of the Ijebu are highly indicative of a Lancado presence, and many Lancados settled within the kingdom as powerful merchants under the Awujale, the king.

The greater Ijebu people may be descendants of the Jebusites, the original inhabitants of Jerusalem before it was conquered by King David.

The lancados assimilated into these communities after the expulsion from Iberia. The Ijebu were among the first of the Yoruba people to have contact with Europeans, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They were coastal traders and middlemen for European goods, as acknowledged by historians such as Ajayi and Espie in 1965.

The source of the trade that the Ijebu facilitated as middlemen between West Africa and Europe specifically comes from the Lancados, as well as from Jews who broke away from the Timbuktu community and settled in Nigeria, who would have acted as intermediaries.

Ijebu was a prime brass-importing kingdom, which highlights the early importance of metalworking in Ijebuland. The state rose in power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly due to its important position on the trade routes between Lagos and Ibadan. The kingdom imposed sharp limits on trade, insisting that all trade through the region be conducted by Ijebu merchants. The monopoly brought great wealth to the kingdom, but also annoyed the Europeans.

Loango and Kongo

In 1496 King Manuel I of Portugal exiled two thousand Jewish children to Cabo Verde, Sao Tome and Principe. Those in Cabo Verde formed their own communities or settled into the Senegambian kingdoms. Those sent to Sao Tome and Principe assimilated into the Vili community as merchants in the kingdoms of Loango and Kongo.

From around the seventeenth century a black Jewish community was to be found on the Loango coast. It was first mentioned in 1777, and a more thorough description of the community was provided by the scientific works produced by the German Loango Expedition of 1873-76.

Early Dutch commercial records indicate that Loango exported considerable copper to the European market during this period. Loango was a major producer and exporter of cloth, both to the interior and to the Portuguese in Luanda, where thousands of metres of Loango cloth were imported in the early seventeenth century.

In the seventeenth century, Vili merchants were travelling some distance from their homeland in search of commercial opportunities. Among the earliest noted were voyages to the copper mines at Mindouli.

By the time of the first recorded contact with Europeans, the Kingdom of Kongo sat at the centre of an extensive trading network. Apart from natural resources and ivory, the country manufactured and traded copperware, ferrous metal goods, raffia cloth and pottery.

Edith Bruder, The Black Jews of Africa, pages 145-148.

Jamaican Maroons

The word Maroon comes from the Spanish word cimarron, meaning wild or untamed. The word usually referred to runaway slaves, castaways from ships, or those who had been shipwrecked.

It may in fact refer to the black Marranos of Iberia, Moors who pretended to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition but still secretly practised Judaism.

After the Alhambra Decree declared that all Jews must be exiled or convert to Christianity, many who converted became Marranos, and were also compelled to help navigate white Iberian explorers to the Americas as their auxiliaries and guides.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to see Jamaica, claiming the island for Spain after landing there in 1494 on his second voyage. The Moors, or Marranos, were the first black, mulatto and white people in Jamaica.

Cimarron carries the element "marron", which can be a shortened form of Marranos, directly identifying the origin of the people.

The Maroons have an interesting history and ancestry, because they are the direct descendants of the first Africans brought over to the New World before the transatlantic slave trade officially started.

Slavery in Jamaica began in the 1500s under Spanish rule. From 1509 onward the permanent settlement of the Spanish began, and the indigenous population were forced into slavery alongside the Maroons.

The Maroons of Jamaica were Iberian and North African Moors, together with West Africans, who were enslaved but escaped Spanish and British plantations, which is how cimarron took on the meaning of wild or untamed, because of their runaway status.

They then formed settlements and militias in the mountainous interior, after taking refuge with the remnant Taino and Carib population who were native to the island prior to Spanish settlement and genocide.

West African Arrivals and the British Conquest

In the early years of the sixteenth century the practice of importing slaves from West Africa to work in Jamaica began. A majority initially came from the Akan people of Ghana, a warrior people, so later imports began to come from the Igbo and Yoruba of Nigeria, who gave their enslavers no less trouble.

In 1655 British naval forces captured Jamaica from the Spanish. The British took advantage of Jamaica's strategic location in the centre of the Caribbean to challenge Spanish dominance of the region and to disrupt their lucrative trade in gold and silver.

During the upheaval caused by the transition from Spanish to English rule, many of the West African slaves formerly owned by the Spanish escaped into Jamaica's hilly interior and pioneered the resistance to slavery that would continue in Jamaica for most of the ensuing two hundred years. These escaped slaves assimilated into Maroon culture, which was now an amalgamation of Moorish, West African and native roots.

British forces were unable to establish control over the whole island, so a large portion remained in the hands of the Maroons, particularly in the rugged interior. For seventy-six years there were periodic skirmishes between the British and the Maroons, alongside occasional revolts by enslaved people.

In 1673 a revolt of two hundred enslaved Africans in St Ann Parish created a separate group, the Leeward Maroons. These Maroons united with a group of Malagasy people who had survived a shipwreck and formed their own Maroon community in the parish of St George in northeastern Jamaica. Several more rebellions strengthened the numbers of this Leeward group, notably in 1690 a revolt of four hundred enslaved Africans at Sutton's plantation in Clarendon Parish.

The First Maroon War

The First Maroon War took place periodically between 1728 and 1740. The Maroon leadership during this conflict featured Nanny of the Maroons and Quao leading the Windward Maroons, and Cudjoe and Accompong leading the Leeward Maroons.

One story holds that Nanny and her brothers split up in order to continue the resistance to the plantation slave economy across Jamaica. Cudjoe went to Clarendon, where he was soon joined by about a hundred Maroons from Cottawood, while Accompong went to St Elizabeth, where a Maroon community was later named for him. Nanny and Quao made their way to Portland and the Blue Mountains.

Nanny was almost a Jamaican Harriet Tubman.

In addition to what they raised and produced, the Maroons sent traders to the coastal towns to exchange food for weapons and cloth. During the First Maroon War, the Maroons of Nanny Town raided plantations for weapons and food, burnt plantations, and led liberated slaves to join them at Nanny Town.

Nanny Town was an excellent location for a stronghold, as it overlooked Stony River from a nine-hundred-foot ridge, making a surprise attack by the British very difficult. The Maroons organised look-outs for such attacks, and warriors could be summoned by the sound of a horn called an abeng.

Nanny Town was organised similarly to a typical Ashanti town in Africa. After the First Maroon War, a deed from the colonial government granted Nanny more than five hundred acres of land where the Maroons could live, raise animals and grow crops.

Granny Nanny is said to have freed more than eight hundred slaves over the span of fifty years. She also had a vast knowledge of herbs due to her role as a spiritual leader.

During the First Maroon War, and especially between 1728 and 1734, the British attacked Nanny Town time and time again, but each time the colonial militias captured and occupied it, the Windward Maroons regained it shortly afterwards. This was accomplished through the Maroons' high level of skill in fighting in an area of heavy rainfall, as well as their ability to disguise themselves as bushes and trees. The Maroons also used decoys to draw the British into ambushes, sending uncamouflaged fighters out into view and then running towards their concealed comrades.

When Governor Edward Trelawny realised that the British colonial forces would not be able to win the First Maroon War, he offered a treaty first to Cudjoe of the Leeward Maroons in 1739, and then to Quao in 1740. Cudjoe was able to secure a more advantageous treaty than Quao, probably because the western Maroon leader was negotiating from a stronger position. The 1739 treaty gave Cudjoe permission to keep all Maroons who had joined his town before he signed the document, but the Windward Maroons were required to return all runaways who had joined them in the three years prior to Quao signing the 1740 treaty.

Quao watched while the British military commanders quarrelled over who should sign the treaty with the Windward Maroons, an argument eventually won by Robert Bennett. Quao and Bennett cut their fingers and mixed their blood in a calabash bowl, after which they signed the peace treaty.

In exchange for full sovereignty and autonomy, the Maroons were asked to agree not to harbour newly self-liberated Africans, but rather to help catch them. This last clause caused a split between the Maroons and the rest of the black population. Another provision was that the Maroons would serve to protect the island from invaders. Discontent with the treaty and land encroachment from planters later led to the Second Maroon War.

Many local and diaspora Jamaicans today have expressed discontent towards the Maroons. While some view them as heroes, others view them as traitors who sold out their people.

In reality, what the Maroons wholeheartedly stood for was freedom, justice and black liberation, which is why Nanny successfully freed almost a thousand slaves. In every beautiful garden there are bad apples, but that does not create the absence of good. Where there is good there is bad; where there is bad there is good; where there is life there is death; where there is death there is life.

Yes, the Maroons signed the agreement to return runaway slaves, but that does not mean it was fully honoured, which is partially the foundation of what brought about the Second Maroon War. After the first war the Maroon groups were likely classified according to levels of loyalty. Each faction violated the treaty to some degree, but none was more rebellious and non-compliant than the Trelawny Maroons.

After the 1740 treaty, it appears that Quao and Nanny parted ways. Nanny took her supporters east to what would later become Moore Town on the eastern fringes of the Blue Mountains, while Quao took his people west to central Jamaica and formed a community in a town that later came to be known as Crawford's Town, on the western edge of the Blue Mountains. However, in about 1746 the white superintendents appointed by the British governors took control of Crawford's Town and replaced Quao as the Maroon leader of that community. The new leader was another Maroon officer, Edward Crawford, after whom the town was eventually named.

In 1754 Quao and his supporters rose up in revolt, killed Ned Crawford, and captured the three white men who acted as superintendents in Crawford's Town. Governor Charles Knowles sent a militia detachment under the command of Lieutenant Ross to negotiate with Quao, but the Maroon leader spurned his offers and reasserted Maroon control of the town. Ross then secured the allegiance of Crawford's supporters, as well as other Windward Maroons, and they defeated the minority of Maroons who supported Quao, capturing him and killing a number of his officers.

It is not clear what happened to Quao, because he disappears from the records after Crawford's Town was destroyed. His supporters relocated to the neighbouring Maroon town of Scott's Hall, while the supporters of Crawford took up residence in the new Maroon community of Charles Town. The white superintendents took control of both Charles Town and Scott's Hall in the aftermath of the Crawford's Town uprising. Maroon officers, such as Davy the Maroon, reported to the superintendents in Scott's Hall.

The Second Maroon War

The Second Maroon War of 1795-96 was an eight-month conflict between the Maroons of Cudjoe's Town, later renamed Trelawny Town after Governor Edward Trelawny at the end of the First Maroon War, and the British colonials who controlled the island. The settlement lay near Trelawny Parish in St James Parish, Jamaica.

The Maroons of Trelawny Town felt that they were being mistreated under the terms of Cudjoe's Treaty of 1739, which had ended the First Maroon War. The spark of the war came when two Maroons, one named Peter Campbell, were found guilty of stealing two pigs by a court in Montego Bay. The court then ordered a black slave to flog the two Maroons, and the humiliation provoked outrage in Trelawny Town.

When six Maroon leaders, led by Montague James and including Major Jarrett, came to the British to present their grievances, the British took them prisoner. They were acting under orders from the new governor, Alexander Lindsay, 6th Earl of Balcarres, who wrongly believed that the French had infected the Maroons with their revolutionary spirit. Balcarres completely mishandled the dispute, which could have been resolved without conflict; he ignored the advice of local planters and ordered his forces to put down the Maroons of Trelawny Town. Fighting began in mid-August.

The success of the Maroons in fighting the British to a standstill was felt far and wide. Half a century later, the creator of independent Haiti, Toussaint L'Ouverture, remarked that in Jamaica there were in the mountains blacks who had forced the English to make treaties with them, and that he too was black like them and knew how to make war.

The war lasted eight months and ended in a bloody stalemate. The British fielded five thousand troops and militia, outnumbering the Maroons ten to one, but the mountainous and forested topography of Jamaica proved ideal for guerrilla warfare.

In the first two weeks of the conflict, the Maroons of Trelawny Town killed sixty-five British soldiers without any Maroon death reported. Throughout the entire conflict, one general complained that the colonial forces had killed fewer than thirty-two Maroons and their allies. Recent research shows that the colonial militias were only able to kill about twenty-one Trelawnys. The Maroon warriors also laid waste to a number of sugar estates in western Jamaica.

The casualties suffered by the colonial militias were higher than those suffered by the Maroons. There were a number of engagements for the remaining months of 1795, during which the British suffered between eight and twelve killed or wounded in each skirmish. No final figure was given for total British losses, but the casualties were believed to be in the hundreds.

When General George Walpole employed a scorched-earth strategy against Trelawny Town, the Maroons found they had difficulty getting access to food, water and ammunition as the dry season began at the end of the year. When Governor Balcarres imported some one hundred bloodhounds and their handlers from Cuba, Montague James and his lieutenants saw this as the last straw and accepted Walpole's overtures for peace. The Maroons had had the better of the skirmishes, so they only laid down their arms and surrendered in December 1795 on condition that they would not be exiled. Walpole gave the Maroons his word that they would not be transported off the island.

The treaty signed in December between Walpole and the Maroon leaders established that the Maroons would beg on their knees for the King's forgiveness, return all runaway slaves, and be relocated elsewhere in Jamaica. The governor of Jamaica ratified the treaty but gave the Maroons only three days to present themselves to beg forgiveness, on 1 January 1796. Suspicious of British intentions, and wanting to retain their dignity, the Maroons who surrendered did not do so until mid-March, by which time the conflict had proved very costly to the island and had resulted in the ruin of many plantations and estates.

Balcarres used the contrived breach of treaty as a pretext to exile most of the Trelawny Town Maroons to Nova Scotia. Walpole was disgusted with the governor's actions, pointing out that he had given the Maroons his word that they would not be transported off the island. Walpole resigned his commission and went back to England, where he became an MP and protested in vain in the House of Commons at how Balcarres had behaved in a duplicitous and dishonest way with the Maroons. However, the Secretary of War, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, supported the governor's decision to exile the Maroons.

Exile to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

In 1796 about 581 Trelawny Maroons were transported to Nova Scotia, but fifty-eight managed to evade exile and stayed behind in Jamaica. They either forged careers as free persons of colour or joined Accompong Town. During the voyage seventeen Maroons died. During the first winter of 1796-97, which was a bitter one, another nineteen died. During that winter another five Maroons were born, and in 1797 the surgeon John Oxley counted 550 Maroons in Nova Scotia.

After a few years the Maroons were upset with the poor accommodation in Canada. Led by Montague James, they asked to be transported to the new British settlement of Sierra Leone in West Africa. The British government eventually agreed, and the Maroons travelled to Freetown at the start of the nineteenth century.

The final leg of their journey was aboard HMS Asia. She arrived at Halifax on 31 May 1800, presumably still under her captain from 1796, Robert Murray, to pick up the Maroons, sailed again with them on 8 August, and arrived in Sierra Leone on 30 September that year.

At Trelawny Town, and throughout their exile to first Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone, Montague James continued to command the Trelawny Maroons. In 1809 the Sierra Leone governor Thomas Perronet Thompson officially nominated Montague James as head of the Maroons in Sierra Leone. Montague James died three years later.

Once they became settled and began to flourish, their numbers grew to the mid-six hundreds by 1826. They gained good jobs in the civil service and the military.

However, the situation soured for the Maroons in the 1830s, when they objected to the use of corporal punishment in the military, and a new governor dismissed many Maroons from civil service jobs and gave them to Nova Scotians and Liberated Africans. Many Maroons were traders, but they could not compete with the Liberated Africans who came to the colony in large numbers and took over the internal trade.

The Return to Jamaica

With the passing years, more Maroons requested a return to Jamaica. After the Second Maroon War the Jamaican Assembly had passed a law making it a felony punishable by death for any Trelawny Maroon to return to Jamaica. Two petitions sent by the Maroons in Sierra Leone to the British Crown requesting the right to return were rejected.

However, in 1831 another petition was presented by 224 Sierra Leone Maroons to the British government, and this time the Jamaican authorities relented. They responded that they would place no obstacle in the way of Maroons returning to Jamaica, but would not pay for any passage or the purchase of lands on the island.

The true agenda behind the British decision to allow the Maroons back was that abolitionists had been campaigning for decades in Parliament and finally succeeded in 1833, two years after the British permitted the Maroons to return to Jamaica from Sierra Leone. Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, but there was still a compromise: the apprenticeship system of 1834-38. Planters wanted formerly enslaved people to continue working under supervision, while abolitionists pushed for immediate freedom. After continued criticism and protests, apprenticeship was ended early, in 1838.

So the British forestalled the foreseen problem of having no labourers on their now abandoned plantations by bringing in an influx of Maroons who were already skilled in the areas of British demand and already desired to return to Jamaica. Many freedmen in Jamaica wanted to cultivate their own plots rather than work on plantations, leaving a vacuum for workers, so the Jamaican planters turned to Sierra Leone.

In 1839 the first Maroons made their way from Sierra Leone to Jamaica. Mary Brown and her family, which included her daughter Sarah McGale and a Spanish son-in-law, sold off their property in Sierra Leone, bought a schooner and set sail for Jamaica. They were joined by two other Sierra Leone Maroons, Mary Ricketts and her daughter Jane Bryan.

In 1841 the first ship to arrive in Sierra Leone looking for African workers was the Hector, and several Maroons were so desperate to leave Sierra Leone that they did not wait for the ship to dock, but rowed out to meet it in their canoes. In all, sixty-four Maroons left Sierra Leone for Jamaica on the Hector alone. Most Sierra Leone Maroons lived in Freetown, and between 1837 and 1844 Freetown's Maroon population shrank from 650 to 454, suggesting that about two hundred made their way back to Jamaica.

The Jamaican Maroons who remained in Sierra Leone gradually merged with the developing Sierra Leone Creole people. This community was made up of immigrants and the descendants of various groups of freed slaves and rebels who arrived in Freetown between 1786 and about 1871. After abolishing the Atlantic slave trade, the British Navy posted ships off Africa to intercept slavers and would deposit liberated slaves at Freetown. Some modern Creoles, or Krio, still proudly claim descent from the Maroons.

The Creole congregation of Freetown's St John's Maroon Church, built by the Maroons in 1822 on what is now the city's main street, have especially emphasised their descent from the Jamaican exiles. The Maroons brought their ceremonial music and dances to Sierra Leone. That ceremonial music gradually became a popular Creole genre known as Gumbe music and dance, named after the drum. It has survived into the twenty-first century and influences popular music, and has become identified with the broader Creole population.

There was initial tension between the Maroons, the Nova Scotians and the Liberated Africans, largely due to the manipulation and divide-and-conquer strategy the British used to maintain control over the colony. There was violence, disagreement and misunderstanding, but once they found a way to come together it gave birth to a beautiful culture.

The Krio language of Sierra Leone is heavily influenced by Jamaican Patois and Gullah Geechee as its foundation, with local African dialects intertwined depending on the region. It was born in Sierra Leone, and the diaspora of Krios spread it to the Gambia, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. The passenger lists of the 1841 and 1861 Maroons who migrated back to Jamaica from Sierra Leone are broad as well.

Ultimately the Maroon identity was born from Moorish, Taino, Carib and African culture.