Was William Bradford Secretly a Jew?

I recently came across some pretty salacious claims about William Bradford and the Pilgrims. As some who has done a fair amount of research into Bradford, in preparation for my upcoming biography, I found these quite interesting. If true, they would be pretty groundbreaking (which is always good for a new biography), and either way they involve the usage of Bradford’s memory in a way that I haven’t come across before.

After rapper Kayne West said, “JEWS  AND THE PILGRIMS GOT THE SAME HATS    THEY THE SAME PEOPLE”¹, Aiden Hunter, a self described “National Socialist”² followed up with some specific historical arguments to prove that “William Bradford, was likely a racial jew.”³ We’ll deal with his arguments one by one. 

His Hebrew Journal

He is described as “Hebrew-obsessed” and his journal contained entries written in Hebrew. … The “plausible explanation is that Bradford was of Jewish descent” and desired to read the Hebrew Torah in his ancestral tongue instead of English translations.

It is true that Of Plymouth Plantation, a historical chronicle and not a journal, does contain some Hebrew writing. But these are not in any way “journal … entries” – they are practice for a study of Hebrew undertaken in his old age. He prefaced the Hebrew words by saying, “though I am growne aged, yet I have had a longing desire, to see with my owne eyes, something of that most ancient language, and holy tongue, in which the Law and oracles of God were [written]”.[4] Paper was expensive, so he used some blank space in his Plymouth Plantation manuscript. It had no connection with the actual text of his book. This in no ways indicates he was a Jew. As Bradford tells us, he was not a native Hebrew speaker, but was learning the language in his old age because it was the language in which the Christian Old Testament was written. This was by no means uncommon for a Puritan. The Separatist pastor Henry Ainsworth, who Bradford knew as a young man, was a respected scholar of the Old Testament in Hebrew. 

Spanish Terms

He used terms like ‘barricado’ and ‘palizada,’ which is best explained by “prior encounters with Spanish forces due to [his] having Spanish Judaic ancestry.”

As any student of military science will know, the terms for military fortifications are often in foreign languages, commonly French. The term “barricade” is used in a standard English military text owned by Myles Standish.[5] Even if the usage of these terms was out of the ordinary, perhaps that would indicate that Bradford knew Spanish, or even was Spanish, but why would we automatically assume that he was a Spanish Jew?

His Hebrew Gravestone

On Bradford’s tombstone is written in Hebrew a jewish prayer. The use of appropriate Jewish prayers, the return to the Hebrew language and the calling upon Jehova, rather than Christ or Jesus, would seem strong indicators that the religion of the colony was Judaism, and not Protestant Christianity.

If you visit Burial Hill in Plymouth, you will indeed find that Bradford’s tombstone contains a Hebrew prayer. But this actually tells us nothing about Bradford himself. No markers survive from the first decades of New England burials – they were marked with wood, or not marked at all. The obelisk you can see today was erected in 1835 – The better part of two centuries after Bradford lived.[6] It also bears a Latin inscription. Was he also a secret Roman?

The evidence presented does not demonstrate that the religion of the colony was Judaism. This is a ludicrous claim to anyone who has studied the colony’s history. Much was printed at the time showing that they practiced separatist Puritan worship, not Judaism –  detailed histories by the Pilgrims themselves and works of Christian theology by John Robinson, their pastor in Leiden. And we know they weren’t just trying to keep it quiet, for we have accounts by visitors such as John Winthrop, Roger Williams, and other lesser known figures, who would have certainly mentioned if their worship was not Christian. 

The Pequot Massacre

Bradford led the massacre of about 700 Pequot Indians, mostly women and children, and wrote that it was a “sweet sacrifice”: “To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.”

These are genuine quotes from Of Plymouth Plantation, and these days, probably the most controversial thing he ever wrote. But he did not “lead the massacre.” Massachusetts Bay called on Plymouth for aid, but Plymouth drug its feet and did not send troops that arrived in time to participate in the fighting. Bradford was writing as a historian summarizing accounts he had received of the war.[7] This was also one of the few years in which he was not elected governor, but only an assistant.

His Jewish Features

In addition to exhibiting jewish behavior, Bradford had the obvious phenotypical features of a jew (see black and white painting [on the right]).  Also in a painting [above], we can actually see a jew standing in the background watching as Europeans and Amerindians begin to mix. Jews indeed hide in plain sight. They are experts at mimicry.

The major problem with this argument is that no genuine likeness of William Bradford survives (if one was ever made). This drawing of him is a fiction, drawn hundreds of years after Bradford’s life, by someone with no special knowledge of what he looked like. The other image shows not a Jewish yarmulke, but a skull cap common in 16^th century attire. 

The Pro-Semites

Interestingly enough, this antisemite referenced an article arguing the same point, but which appears to be from the opposite perspective. Several professors from The University of Virginia’s College at Wise have published several articles arguing for a greater Jewish influence than they are given in mainstream histories. Pertinent to this is their article “DNA and Genealogical Evidence Suggests the Plymouth Colonists were Sephardic Jews.”[8]

This article repeats many of the claims we have already dealt with, sometimes with even more audacious claims (such as “If Bradford were motivated by Christian curiosity, he would instead have learned Greek” rather than Hebrew, when Bradford actually knew Greek, and Christians consider both the Old and New Testament inspired).[9]

Hebrew Names

They argue that the names given to the children of the Plymouth Colony demonstrate that they were Jews, including these:

[T]he Latin Sylvanus means ‘forest’ or ‘woods’ and was a common given name among Sephardic Jews…. Similarly Theophilus is Greek meaning ‘one who loves God’ and was rarely used among English citizens of the time period. Jews, however, did use Theophilus as a given name drawing on the Theophilus who was a high priest of the Second Temple period in Israel (Wynne 2017). Similarly, the name Damaris is a Jewish Greek name dating from the Second Temple period when Greek was the principal language spoken in Israel (Wynne 2017). … The presence of these names in the set of given names by the early Plymouth colonists is strong evidence of their ancestral origins as Jews. It does not support the accepted notion that these were simply ‘biblical’ names chosen by devout Protestants.

It is well documented that the Puritans (of which the Pilgrims were a subset) favored Biblical names.[10] But these examples demonstrate no connection with 17^th century Judaism, but rather a close familiarity with the New Testament – Silvanus was an associate of the apostle Paul and helped write 1^st and 2^nd Thessalonians, Theophilus was the recipient of Luke and Acts, and Damaris was a convert of Paul in Athens.[11]

Jewish DNA

This article also appeals to modern scientific technique, with an analysis of the Pilgrim’s DNA. They took the DNA from the Y-chromosome of the descendants of Pilgrim males, and identified which group it came from. Most were in the R-m269 haplogroup, which the authors acknowledge “is the most common male haplogroup in Europe, making it difficult to determine ethnic origin.” But they compared this against databases of the DNA of known Jews, and for some found matches. (I think this would be expected picking any random non-Jewish Europeans for this set, considering that there are many Jews with European ancestry). They also compared this with public DNA databases, and looked at the location and surnames of the matches to find possible Jewish connections.

I suspect a DNA expert, which I am not, would have some strong opinions on these methods. But for Bradford himself, we do not even need to go this far, for they say that the DNA evidence “does not make a strong case for William Bradford having Jewish ancestry. … Indeed, most of the Bradford matches are to persons living in Scandinavia, especially Sweden, and the British Isles.” They then had to fall back on the weaker argument that he could have been descended from Jewish converts in Scandinavia, surely quite a hypothetical and speculative argument if ever there was one.

Conclusions

One wonders why, if the authors were truly seeking the truth, they pursued these very dubious methods, rather than analyzing the many published writings and letters of the Pilgrims to see if they said they were Jews? I think the answer is quite simple – that would not have given the answer that they were looking for. They also neglect to mention that the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and were not allowed to resettle until 1655. There were some scattered Jews who did come back before that date, some by special permit, some illegally, but not many. For a family like the Bradfords, who are documented in England for generations before William, there is no reason to assume they would have been one of those few Jews. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And matching up some surnames of distant relatives living four centuries later, identified by DNA group, is not extraordinary proof.

What we have seen here is a remarkable alliance between prosemites and antisemites, both ignoring the same evidence, and both using the same false claims and dubious science to push the narrative that the Pilgrims were Jewish, for exactly opposite reasons.[12] The simple truth is, there is zero reason to think that William Bradford, or any significant portion of the Pilgrims, were ethnic or religious Jews.

1. Kayne West on X, February 8, 2025, https://archive.is/WIz89.
2. X bio of https://x.com/AidenHunterX, ax of August 21, 2025.
3. Aiden Hunter on X, February 8, 2025, https://x.com/AidenHunterX/status/1888306013893456187.
4. As quoted in  Isidore S. Meyer, “The Hebrew Preface to Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation” in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 38, no. 4 (June, 1949), p. 291.
5. See the inventory of Myles Standish; William Barriff, Military Discipline: or, the Young Artillery Man(London: Thomas Harper, 1635)p.159.
6. William Bradford, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, edt. William T. Davis, p. 19.
7. Philbrick, Mayflower  (New York: Viking, 2006) p. 231.
8. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. et. al., “DNA and Genealogical Evidence Suggests the Plymouth Colonists were Sephardic Jews” in International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 9, no, 9 (September 2018) doi:10.30845/ijhss.v8n9p1. Although this is published as a peer reviewed journal, it seems that it considered, for what it’s worth, a pay-to-publish publication that gives researchers a place to publish without serious academic oversight. (For evidence that this is a real publication by real researchers, see here).
9. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana.
10. See David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989).
11. Acts 1:1, Luke 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 1:1, 2 Thessalonians 1:1, Acts 17:34.
12. Another article trying to link the Jews and Pilgrims can be found here. While not every claim in that article is true, it adopts the tactic of presenting two sets of true facts, and leaving it to the reader to infer a significant connection between them.