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MARTIN L. ROUSE, ESQ., B.L., ON 



Sakasenoi seem to have migrated from their own country) one 

 thing cannot remain doubtful — the Sakasenoi, both from their 

 position and their closely related name, must have formed part 

 of the Ehaghiians, or eastern Ashkenazians (the change 

 from Ashkenaz to Sakasen involving little more than an 

 easy inversion of an unaccented syllable and the dropping of 

 a short vowel prefix, which is a very common phenomenon). 

 ISTow let it be borne in mind that the Saxons are 

 not mentioned in that most detailed description which 

 Tacitus gives of the peoples of Germany in his own day 

 (about A.i), 100) — not even although he includes in his account 

 Denmark and Sweden, where, he says, dwelt the Cimbri and 

 the Suii. He mentions the Angli, but no Saxones ; and these 

 first appear in history when Caransius was appointed, about 

 A.D. 280, to guard our eastern British coasts against the 

 pirates, and was termed Comes litoris Saxonici, Count of 

 the Saxon Shore. At some time after the Christian era 

 between the first century and that date, a second wave of 

 the great family of Ashkenaz, calling themselves Sakasenoi, 

 or rather Sachsen, marched northward through the Caspian 

 gates into European Scythia, and thence onward with the 

 tide of their G-erman kinsmen, the Goths, into northern 

 Europe, where the country they occupied has, like its 

 motherland, always borne the simple title of Bachsen. In 

 company with Angles and Jutes from Holstein and Denmark, 

 some of them advanced further still over the stormy ocean, 

 and, conquering and blending with tlie Kumri, formed the great 

 English, or British, race. 



A most curious fact will end my tale. The Israelites (as 

 they call themselves) or Jews (as, in my view, we miscall them) 

 who for centuries past have dwelt in Kussia and Poland, have 

 always spoken not the Kussian or the Polish tongue among 

 themselves, but an old form of German mingled with a little 

 Hebrew which is now known as Yiddish (that is Jlidisch, its 

 German name, pronounced as most common Germans pronounce 

 it). Why is this, except that the Israelites who were living 

 in the cities of the Modes* to which Assyrian power had once 

 banished them, migrated in the wake of the Ashkenazim 

 across the plains of Pussia into their iiresent abode ? 



* II Kings xvii, 6. 



