Scotland's Jews

[Nathan]

Interesting issue. I was well aware the Jews were banished from England by Edward I (Walter Scott describing the Jewish heroine Rebecca in the previous reign in his Ivanhoe) and they were allowed back by Cromwell, at which time England was not united with Scotland.

(Indeed, I really don't know the position of Scotland during the Interregnum. There had been a union of the crowns under James VI, but the crown had been cut off. Did Cromwell have any authority in Scotland?)

However that doesn't mean Jews had not been allowed in Scotland. Any ideas?

My understanding is that Jews were never expelled from Scotland or barred from living there as in England but that there wasn't a sufficient immigration "pull factor" to attract them until the more recent history of Scotland.There are no pre 17th C grave sites or civil records or synagogues that have been discovered as yet. Cromwell occupied Scotland during the third English Civil War, when the alliance between the Covenanters and the English Parliament broke down.

Jacobus is not so much the Latin for James, as James is the English/Scots for the name which ended up in Latin (via Greek from Hebrew I imagine) as Jacobus.

It's no more odd than Jacques, Giacomo or Iago. Words and names mutate from language to language, as the relationship of Hamish and James demonstrates.

Like my post above shows, Yacov, Iacobos, Jacobus... even Jacques, Giacomo or Iago...all follow a clear pattern which corresponds to similar letters. Hebrew and Greek have no "J" sound but Latin doesn't typically start names with "Y" hence "Jacobus". Even Iago is similar to Yacov given that it's not much of a shift from "c" to "g". V and B, I and Y, I and J, I and Y are all related letters and sounds. These are often used to approximate a sound when the language doesn't have an exact match. When we get to "James" the middle letter becomes an "m" and it becomes a one syllable name. While there is a Hebrew letter "Mem" it is not used in the original name, and English/Scots has two perfectly good letters with which they could render the sound of the Hebrew letter "Kuf", namely "c" or "k". This is of course evidenced clearly by the similarity between the Old Testament Biblical figure of "Jacob", and his original Hebrew name "Yacov".

While Yacov is transliterated as Jacob in the Old Testament English, it is rendered at James in the New Testament. Similarly the Name Yeshua (alt Yoheshua) is rended at Joshua in the Old Testament but as "Jesus" in the New.

My guess would be that since the Old Testament transliterations are much closer to the original names, perhaps there was a deliberate attempt to make New Testament characters seem less Jewish by drastically changing their names. I don't have a source for this.