(Jewish Daily Bulletin)
Bruce A. McKelvie, a British Columbia historian of note, has advanced the theory that a colony of Jews settled somewhere along the northern coast prior to 1600 A. D., probably coming in junks from China where they were numerous and powerful in the sixteenth century.
These Jews, apparently, did not intermarry with the Indians, so that there is now no ethnological trace of their settlement. Mr. McKelvie’s theory is based on tribal customs, religious rites, legends, and the presence of many words of Jewish origin in native dialects.
The first white men who came to British Columbia could not induce the natives to eat pork “because it was unclean meat.” To this day the Siwashes refrain from keeping pigs and seldom touch pork.
In all the forty-seven dialects spoken in the province there are dozens of words of Semitic origin and with Semitic inflections, although the total number of words in a dialect may number only a few hundred.
The mitred helmet, the necklace, and the apron of the medicine man all suggest the ceremonial costume of the high priest of the Levites, Mr. McKelvie states.
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