Excerpt from The Belmont-Belmonte Family: A Record of Four Hundred Years; Put Together From the Original Documents in the Archives and Libraries of Spain, Portugal, Holland, England and Germany, as Well as From Private Sources It is also within the range of possibility that even more definite traditions existed in a few families, though all such traditions have to be regarded with a certain amount of reasonable suspicion. The ques tion from which of the twelve tribes a Jewish family may be descended is one that has often interested students of genealogy and colleges of heraldry. The difficulty is narrowed down to a smaller choice than one would at first suppose. The capture of the ten tribes comprising the Northern Kingdom by King Shalmaneser of Assyria was a very definite loss. These tribes were completely disrupted; their national and tribal feelings were broken forever by the captivity of a large number of their most influential members, and the forced racial mixing which was a constant part of Assyrian welt-politik. They were broken forever and lost as a conscious group, despite all the efforts of well-intentioned though misled philanthropists to find their traces among the English, the Irish or even among the American Red Indians. It follows that. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.