re: #190 Decatur Deb

Ha!! Looking for a photo of the Masonic temple (which seems to be in another of the Quad Cities), I hit an entirely New and Wondrous Thing.

Did you know about the Jewish settlement from the time of Charlemagne in Calalus, Arizona?

See Prof. Cyclone Covey’s stuff below:

[Link: www.flavinscorner.com…]

Not to be a downer, but this might be part of the things where Mormons purportedly used to salt archaeological sites with relics that suggested the Lost Tribe of Israel made it to the US. There’s multiple sites (particularly out west) where amateur archaeologists have found tablets and standing stones, but professional ones have followed up and been very skeptical of the purported age and cultural content—weird anachronistic stuff like an ancient stone that has an inscription in a much later form of Hebrew.

I mean, there’ve been Jews in the New World basically since Cortez established New Spain (I think 1523 or so), and a lot of Ladino-speaking Sephardim set up communities on the Western side of continent…iirc, stretching north from Acapulco and reaching into AZ and CA. But Charlemange would mean the mid-to-late 700s: that’s a total overthrow of all available history and archaeology of Mexico.

I’m going to read the link again and do some digging. While I personally think that ancient peoples moved around more (and had more diffusion) than we give them credit for, some of the specific things being referenced are setting off my skepticism.