From the Crown of Saxony to the Sephardic Bloodline: The Ink of Heinrich Philipp Simonis
- Weston Simonis
- Oct 1
- 17 min read
Updated: Oct 17
This story begins with Heinrich Philipp Simonis. We meet him at the end of his life—in Queidersbach, in 1742—where the parish clerk records his death and, crucially, names his father: Johann Simonis. Family memory says Heinrich was Catholic, even though the line is entered by a Lutheran hand. That lone entry gives us three anchors: a place, a year, and a father’s name. Everything else we know, we’ve earned by following the paper where it still survives.
Back to the Netherlands
Family memory always said Heinrich came from the North—and the records line up with that. When we follow his father Johann back across the border, the Simonis trail rises cleanly out of Dutch parish books. In Beers (North Brabant), on 22 May 1611, a priest baptizes Gerardus, son of Adrianus Simonis and Margareta, with Hendricus Henrici and Catharina Preut as witnesses. In a Catholic village like Beers those witnesses are often godparents; their names echo forward, and Hendricus (the old form of Heinrich) is already humming over the font decades before our Heinrich is born.
A generation later the book in Tilburg speaks. In 1650, at St. Dionysius, a clerk enters Joannes (Johann) Gerardus, son of Gerardus and Lijsken (Elisabeth), scratching out a word as he goes—the kind of human blemish that tells you someone stood there holding a wet infant while a tired hand weighed each line. This is exactly the configuration Heinrich’s death record expects: Gerardus → Johann → Heinrich. The dates fit the northern path better than any alternative we’ve seen—1611 at Beers, 1650 at Tilburg, then the move east that ends with Heinrich’s children in Queidersbach.
It’s also why one recurring error doesn’t work: some secondary sources give Heinrich a father born in 1625 (often in the Palatinate). If that were true, it would force Gerardus (baptized 1611) to have fathered that man at age 14—chronologically implausible—and it would break the documented Beers → Tilburg sequence that names Gerardus as the father of Johann in 1650. In short, the northern documents and their dates hold together; the 1625 assignment does not.
For a fuller narrative background on the family’s journey and Sephardic thread, see our companion post “From Exile to Survival: A Hebrew Testimony of the Line Heard by God — The Simonis Family” (https://www.thefinaljubilee.com/post/from-exile-to-survival-a-hebrew-testimony-of-the-line-heard-by-god-the-simonis-family).
North to West-Friesland
Before the Wervershoof baptism, there’s a decisive entry: on 14 January 1657 in Wervershoof, Gerardus Simonis married Antonia Jacobi in the Catholic register (see the marriage entry, DTB Wervershoof 2).
By 1 May 1658, the same parish book records their daughter Catharina, with Maria Jacobi as sponsor (the baptism entry for Catharina). On 14 January 1672, a SIMONIS line appears again as a baptism witness, showing an adult Simonis rooted in this community at exactly the right time for a boy named Heinrich to have been born.
Taken together, these entries explain the shift we see in the Dutch records: Gerardus with Lijsken (Elisabeth) in Tilburg in 1650, then a second household with Antonia Jacobi in Wervershoof from 1657 onward. The Jacobi sponsorships make sense, the dates align with the “from the North” oral tradition, and the path Beers → Tilburg → Wervershoof remains continuous on paper—before the river bends east toward Queidersbach.
At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the possibility remains open that these are two different men named Gerardus Simonis, each establishing families in different regions of the Netherlands during the mid-1600s. Until more parish evidence emerges to close the gap, the search for clarity continues.
Turning East to the Palatinate
Then the river bends east. Around the turn of the century parish notes place Simonis in Clausen; by 1718 the register at Queidersbach is baptizing the children of Heinrich Simonis and Maria Margarete—among them Hans Jakob (Johann Jacob), a name that will stand beside Heinrich again at the end. And then comes the line that ties the bow: in 1742 the clerk writes “Heinrich Philipp Simonis, son of Johann Simonis,” and sets it in the Lutheran book that kept the village’s dead. Our Heinrich, at last, on the page.
What the Names Are Saying
The names themselves explain how we got here. Heinrich is not an invention of Queidersbach; it’s already humming in Hendricus at Beers in 1611. Johann rises in the 1650 Tilburg baptism and again in 1742, when Heinrich is called a son. Jacob surfaces when Heinrich and Maria Margarete name Johann Jacob in Queidersbach—the old patriarch’s name carried by sponsors, siblings, and second marriages from the Netherlands into the Palatinate. And Philipp—that’s the princely note, common in Saxon and Hessian houses. Families don’t need royal patents to absorb royal habits; sometimes a grandmother brings the name with her, sometimes a community admires the court and names its sons accordingly. Either way, the echo is real, and it sits right there beside Heinrich in 1742.
The Sephardic Current
Beneath the parish pages runs a deeper current—the one our DNA measures. The Simonis paternal line belongs to haplogroup I-CTS10937, a Sephardic cluster. The road that carried it to Brabant and the Palatinate passes through Iberia, where Jews lived and thrived until the expulsions of 1492 (Spain) and 1497 (Portugal). From there, some went east into Ottoman lands, but many turned north—to the Low Countries and the German states. Some families fully embraced their new churches; others lived as conversos, outwardly Catholic or Protestant
while quietly carrying Hebrew memory.
Along the way, the name that starts as Shim‘on—“he has heard”—changes clothes to match each port: Ximenes and Jiménez/Giménez in Spain, Simoni/Simone around Italy and the Greek world, Simón/Simões/Simão across Iberia, Simons/Simon/Simonisz in the Low Countries and Germany, and the Latinized Simonis, which manages to sound like all of them at once.
A Southern Mirror (deeper detail)
To understand how a Sephardic family could survive—and even court honor—inside a Christian monarchy, look south. In the early 1600s, the Ximenes de Aragão (a New Christian/Sephardic house) tried something unusual: they asked the king to erase the legal stain that barred converso descendants from offices and orders. In 1617, António Ximenes—then general paymaster of the Castilian guards and artillery—petitioned Philip III to grant his entire family the “purity of blood privilege” (limpieza de sangre) enjoyed by a few celebrated converts in Castile and Portugal. In the petition he portrayed his clan as serviceable, orthodox, and noble—“clean”—and he wanted that status confirmed for all descendants of his grandfather Duarte Ximenes de Aragão. de Paula Lopes
To make the claim persuasive, António reached for lineage and service. On lineage, he asserted a male-line descent from the Jiménez of Navarre, arguing that Duarte was the son of Fernando Jiménez, a Navarrese prisoner brought to Portugal in an earlier succession war—thus tying a converso house to an Old Christian dynastic name. On service, he listed crown labors: helping with the expulsion of the Moriscos in Valencia (1609–1614), the Larache campaign in Morocco, and the exchange of princesses (1615) between Spain and France—classic badges of loyalty meant to outweigh suspicion. de Paula Lopes
António wasn’t inventing a mechanism; he was copying precedent. He explicitly asked for the same kind of privilege earlier granted to the Coronel (Seneor) family in Castile and to Cristóvão Esteves in Portugal—cases where the crown ennobled prominent converts and declared their lines “clean” to open doors to posts and honors. By 1617, however, policy had shifted: instead of simple ennoblement, the crown’s gatekeepers were fixated on limpieza as a condition for office-holding, which is exactly what António sought. de Paula Lopes
The politics were fluid. A circle of royal advisers and arbitristas was, around 1615–1619, exploring ways to loosen the harshest purity rules for meritorious New Christians. António’s request even received a favorable opinion in the Council of State with the king’s confessor, Fray Luis de Aliaga, supportive. But the Council of Portugal pushed back, citing lingering inquisitorial stains in the wider kin network and rejecting the bid. The episode shows how New Christian families navigated between papal briefs, royal favor, and inquisitorial memory—and how easily the past could be weaponized against them. de Paula Lopes
The family’s longer arc makes the strategy legible. A generation earlier you can see Ximenes de Aragão merchants and financiers managing estates and endowments from Madrid to Goa (e.g., Jerónimo Duarte Ximenes’s 1590 will), and even a relative, Fernão Ximenes de Aragão, publishing fiercely anti-rabbinic works to underline Catholic orthodoxy—each move part of a broader project to separate themselves from stigma and enter the honors market of Habsburg Spain and Portugal. Academia+1
Why does this matter for Heinrich Philip? Because the Ximenes story explains the mechanism we see—names and papers used to bridge covenant and crown. In the south, a Sephardic family spoke the language of rank (Jiménez of Navarre, royal service, purity grants) while carrying Hebrew memory. In the north, our Simonis line bears the same logic in miniature: a Catholic life preserved in Lutheran ink, and names (Heinrich, Philip) that resonate with princely culture even as the Y-DNA remembers Sepharad. The mirror doesn’t claim kinship; it shows how families like ours survived—by aligning themselves with the structures of honor while keeping the older story alive in blood and name.
Royal Echoes and the Maternal Bridge: Saxony, Hesse, and the Simonis Family
When we set the Saxon and Hessian dynasties alongside the collateral Simonis branches of Neuwied and Pfeffelbach, a striking pattern emerges. The royal houses of Saxony and Hesse saturated the 1500s and 1600s with the names Philipp and Heinrich—names that later appear in the Simonis family of Queidersbach. Philip I “the Magnanimous,” Landgrave of Hesse (1504–1567) married Christine of Saxony, binding Hesse and Saxony together. The House of Hesse itself later splintered into branches, including Hesse-Darmstadt and Hesse-Philippsthal, carrying forward the Philipp naming cycle. On the Saxon side, John George I, Elector of Saxony (1585–1656) anchored the family during the Thirty Years’ War. His daughter Sophie Eleonore of Saxony (1609–1671) married into Hesse-Darmstadt, forging a Saxon⇄Hessian bridge. The wider ruling context rested in the House of Wettin, which shaped Saxon politics and passed on naming traditions that filtered into broader society. Placed beside the Simonis line, these dynasties show the cultural “name climate” in which Heinrich and Philipp became favored names. This does not prove descent, but it explains why those names would feel natural in families moving along the same corridors.
Into this climate steps the Simonis family itself. At Pfeffelbach, we find Johann Peter Simon (1600–1659), husband of Margaretha, who died in Paris—a detail suggesting possible displacement through war, trade, or faith. His son Sebastian Simon (1630–1666) married Maria Barbara Schön. Among their children was Martinus Joannes Simonis (1653–ca.1745), who later baptized Johann Wilhelm Simon in 1679. Martinus married Anna Catharina Homberg (1657–1718), placing the Simonis line in direct contact with a Saxon-connected household and the court-influenced naming climate that favored Heinrich and Philipp. The names Johann, Jacob, Heinrich, and Philipp repeat in this line, creating a naming cycle that resonates with what appears later in Queidersbach.
Crucially, this Pfeffelbach–Neuwied Simonis household carried Sephardic and Hebrew origins—reflected in the paternal Y-DNA line I-CTS10937 (a branch of I-M253 / I1, see the YFull I1 Tree). Modern genetic research shows that haplogroup I appears within Sephardic and crypto-Jewish communities with Near-Eastern roots and Iberian continuity:
Atzmon et al., 2010 – The Genome-wide Structure of the Jewish People (American Journal of Human Genetics) demonstrates that Jewish populations — Middle Eastern and European — share a unified Levantine genetic foundation.
Nogueiro et al., 2015 – Portuguese Crypto-Jewish Lineages (Frontiers in Genetics) documents haplogroup I-M170 among Sephardic descendants who preserved their identity in secret after the expulsions of 1492 and 1496.
Unkefer, 2016 – The Tip of the Iceberg: Y-DNA Lineages Can Tell Us Jewish History and Migration (Avotaynu Online) shows Jewish clusters within “European” haplogroups, including I, with routes through Portugal and Iberia.
Collateral alias forms (e.g., Paroli / Ailis) match known Sephardic alias practices in Dutch and Rhineland records (Sephardic Common Names Database; Converso).
The Simonis surname therefore anchors itself within the Rhineland–Palatinate corridor, and the Schön maternal thread may represent the bridge through which Saxon and Hessian naming traditions entered the household, weaving the biblical echoes of Simeon and Jacob into the living record of this family’s covenant heritage.
The elders remembered that Heinrich Philip Simonis came from the North. That simple phrase, preserved in oral tradition, reaches across the centuries and points back to the earlier Dutch Simonis records in places like Tilburg and Wervershoof, where the name Johann Simonis is well attested in the mid-1600s. If so, Heinrich’s northern roots intersect with the southern corridor of Neuwied and Pfeffelbach—two threads that together form the backdrop for his emergence in Queidersbach. The oral account does not contradict the archival record; rather, it provides a living memory that aligns with the documentary trail of exile and migration.
As I explored in From Exile to Survival: A Hebrew Testimony of the Line Heard by God — The Simonis Family, Heinrich Philip Simonis appears in Queidersbach records with the names Heinrich and Philipp at the center. This matches the royal naming patterns of Saxony and Hesse, the collateral Simonis activity in Neuwied and Pfeffelbach, and the maternal Schön connection. The evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive, but it paints a compelling picture: Heinrich Philip Simonis’s name may reflect both the dynastic fashions of Saxony and Hesse and the lived reality of a Simonis family navigating exile, migration, and hidden identities.
The family tree charts illustrate this convergence clearly. On one side stand the royal echo trees of Saxony and Hesse, saturated with Philipp and Heinrich across multiple generations. On the other stand the collateral Simonis lines of Pfeffelbach and Neuwied—Sebastian, Martinus, and their Schön maternal connections. Together they form the cultural and genealogical backdrop into which Heinrich Philip Simonis of Queidersbach may belong, a story preserved not only in written record but also in the remembered voice of his descendants.
Bridge to the War Section
And this is why, when we reach Heinrich’s final line, we aren’t surprised to find a Catholic life preserved in Lutheran ink. To read him rightly, we have to step into his century, where fire and policy decided who held the keys and who kept the book. That’s the world of Catholic in Lutheran Ink: Heinrich Philipp Simonis in a War-Torn Palatinate—and it’s where his record makes perfect sense.
Catholic in Lutheran Ink: Heinrich Philipp Simonis in a War-Torn Palatinate
Heinrich Philipp Simonis died at Queidersbach in 1742, and the clerk set his name down in the Lutheran parish book. Our oral tradition says he was Catholic—and that still fits the facts on the ground. Long before Heinrich’s birth the Palatinate had learned how fragile churches could be: in the Thirty Years’ War, Heidelberg fell and the region was gutted; when the French came again in the Nine Years’ War they burned Heidelberg in 1689 and, in 1693, blasted the castle with thirty-eight mines (see the official Heidelberg Castle history). Towns along the Rhine—Mannheim, Speyer, Worms—went up in flames; in Speyer the city and cathedral burned on 31 May 1689 and thousands fled (“Speyer brennt,” Deutsches Historisches Museum). In a land like that, identity often got written wherever a roof, a desk, and a pen survived.
Out of the ashes came a practical fix: the Simultaneum—shared churches. Beginning around 1698 in the Palatinate, rulers ordered Protestant churches opened to Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic worship; often it meant one desk, one clerk, one register serving everyone (for a scholarly overview, see Brill’s entry on Simultaneum). The Palatine Church Division (Religionsdeklaration) of 1705 tried to sort things by apportioning churches between confessions, but in many villages the sharing continued—sometimes with wooden partitions down the middle of a single nave. That is exactly how a Catholic burial could end up in a Lutheran book: the register followed the clerk who kept the keys, not always the family’s creed.
And the ground never really settled. During Heinrich’s adult life the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) turned the Rhine corridor into a marching road yet again; occupations rotated, magistrates changed, and parish routine followed whoever held power that month. The human result is visible in 1709, when more than 13,000 Palatines crowded into London camps—proof that communities and their paper trails were coming apart (see the Folger’s “Poor Palatines of 1709” and the British Library overview). Even in Heinrich’s later years, the War of the Polish Succession (1733–1738) reopened the western theater; in 1734 the imperial fortress of Philippsburg fell to the French after a long siege, a reminder that instability still reached into the parishes around him. In that churn, a Catholic life being recorded “in Lutheran ink” is the administrative reality of the time—not a conversion.
One last reason some links are missing: later destruction. World War II bombing erased streets and archives across the Rhineland; in Kaiserslautern, for example, Allied bombing destroyed most of the city. When repositories go up with the rafters, families survive in fragments—a baptism here, a witness line there, and sometimes a death entry in the “wrong” book that turns out to be the only book left.
Simonis Flags & Banners: Memory Made Visible
These banners are not heraldry but reflections of a family caught in the middle of Europe’s upheavals in the 1600s and 1700s. As detailed earlier in this article, those conflicts pressed directly on the corridor our branches traveled. Side by side—none first and none last—the Dutch field recalls Beers, Tilburg, and Wervershoof, and the way Simonis took on a Latin tail while our entries crossed Catholic and Lutheran pages. The Palatinate field is darker in tone for Queidersbach and Clausen, villages where a Catholic life could be written by a Lutheran hand and still be true. The Sephardic emblem is a quiet nod to our I-CTS10937 Y-line, the road through Iberia that carried covenant north into Dutch and German lands. And the royal echo is a motif for the names themselves: Heinrich and Philipp, a reminder that in Saxon and Hessian courts those names were worn like metal, and in our family they rang like bells. Gathered together, the banners tell the same story the parish books, the DNA trail, and the oral memory already tell—migration, confession, and memory moving in lockstep.
I explore these emblems in greater depth in From Exile to Survival: A Hebrew Testimony of the Line Heard by God. Here, they stand as reminders that the Simonis family lived at the crossroads of migration and war, confession and covenant, where memory had to be carried not only in books but in names, symbols, and the survival of descendants.
DNA: Covenant Fulfilled
What the blood remembers deepens the picture. The paternal line is Sephardic—I-CTS10937—a thread that runs from Jerusalem through Sepharad, across Iberia, into the Low Countries, and onward to the Palatinate. Around it, the autosomal weave shows Saxon and Viking, German and Dutch, Italian and Greek—the nations braided into a single story.
Scripture spoke it long before science measured it: “And the Lord shall scatter you among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other” (Deuteronomy 28:64). That scattering is not an ending, but the long arc of covenant memory. The tribe of Simeon was divided, yet the name Simonis carried the testimony, “the Lord has heard.”
The prophets saw the gathering as clearly as Moses foresaw the scattering. “Yet will I gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel” (Ezekiel 11:17). DNA now bears witness to that same promise—tribal lines that endured exile, woven back together across nations and centuries.
In the names Heinrich and Philipp echo crowns and princely scepters, recalling Jacob’s blessing, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49:10). Blood and scripture speak together: covenant running through names, covenant running through the generations, covenant remembered in exile and confirmed in the marrow of our bones..
Scripture Fulfilled
Scripture has always been our compass. The name Simeon itself is born from hearing:
“And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the Lord hath heard that I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also: and she called his name Simeon.” (Genesis 29:33, KJV)
That verse gave Simeon his name—“the Lord has heard”—and by extension gave ours, Simonis, its witness. Every baptism whispered that meaning again, even when languages shifted and clerks wrote it in Latin, Dutch, or German. The sound remained the same: a testimony that God had heard.
The prophecy over Simeon’s tribe set the pattern of their wandering:
“Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.” (Genesis 49:7, KJV)
This reads like a route map of our people. From Iberia, driven by exile, to the Netherlands where names shifted under watchful eyes, and onward to the Palatinate where Heinrich Philip Simonis emerges in the record—the journey of scattering is also the journey of preservation.
The Testament of Simeon deepens this prophecy. Simeon warns his children against jealousy and strife: “Be not jealous, my children, for jealousy leadeth to murder, and to hatred of brethren. Even now I perish through my delight in Joseph, because my heart loved him. But God shall be at peace with the sons of Levi, and shall give honour to Judah and save all the Gentiles and Israel.” (Testament of Simeon 3–6)
In those words, scattering is remembered not only as a curse, but as a test of faith. Division and exile come from wrath and envy, yet God promises peace, honor, and salvation. The Simonis path through scattering carries this same tension—broken by anger and loss, yet kept by a promise greater than the wound.
The promise of kingship falls to Judah:
“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” (Genesis 49:10, KJV)
Its echo resounds in the names Heinrich and Philipp. Those princely syllables, so common in the houses of Saxony and Hesse, found their way into our line—not as thrones and crowns, but as the names of fathers and sons. In them, the Simonis family carried a faint reflection of the royal promise, passed down not in palaces but in village churches, in baptisms, and in oral remembrance.
And when the books fall silent, the command still remains:
“Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.” (Joel 1:3, KJV)
That is why the elders remembered Heinrich Philip as Catholic even when the clerk’s record marked him Lutheran. Paper preserves what survives; families remember what is true. The memory and the scripture together form the compass that carried the Simonis name across exile and scattering, keeping alive the testimony that the Lord has heard.
Reflection
The Simonis line proves covenant survival and noble echo at once. South, in Iberia, the Ximenes de Aragão argued their place before kings; north, in the Pfalz, Heinrich Philipp Simonis signed his name in two confessions and one blood. We can prove the Sephardic Y-DNA. We can prove the records from 1611 to 1742. We can prove the names. What remains unproven—but heard in every echo—is that Heinrich carried, with the covenant, a Saxon/Hessian shadow of rank through his very naming.
That is why we call this a Final Jubilee story. What was hidden is being revealed: a family heard by God, scattered yet preserved; a Catholic life kept in Lutheran ink; a Hebrew line threaded through European names; covenant remembered, crown echoed, waiting for the day when every lost page is found and every name is gathered.
The Sephardic Migration Story
The story begins with the expulsions of 1492 in Spain and 1497 in Portugal, when Jews who refused conversion were forced to flee or live as conversos (New Christians). Many remained hidden, practicing Judaism in secret even while adopting Christian names and lives (Converso).
As persecution intensified under the Inquisition, large numbers of conversos emigrated outward. Some went to the Ottoman Empire, others to North Africa, but another major route was north into Europe—especially to more tolerant lands. In the late 1500s and early 1600s, the Dutch Republic became a major refuge for these displaced Jewish families (Sephardic Immigration PDF).
The Netherlands, striving for independence from Catholic Spain, offered relative religious openness. Sephardic Jews—often first arriving under cover as “Portuguese Jews” or former New Christians—entered the Dutch economy as merchants, printers, financiers, and brokers (Researching Sephardic Ancestry in the Netherlands). By 1639, the Sephardic Jewish immigrants in the Netherlands had achieved a legally recognized status: they established synagogues, maintained cemeteries, and founded charitable organizations for dowries and community support (The Sephardic Diaspora After 1492).
Amsterdam became a central hub—the “Jerusalem of the North” for Sephardic life. Jews established Hebrew printing presses, theological and philosophical scholarship, and robust cultural institutions (Jews in Amsterdam). The neighborhood of Vlooienburg, for instance, became a dense mix of Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Dutch Protestants, and other groups—showing how Jewish life integrated among multiple communities (Vlooienburg Study).
In this environment, alias naming practices flourished. Sephardic families often used alternative names to conceal their heritage in hostile lands or to navigate trade routes. Collections of Sephardic alias names in Amsterdam show how families adopted or modified names for survival (Sephardic Common Names Database).
Some surnames later appear in the Simonis line or among collateral branches—names like Paroli (an Italianate form) or Ailis, pointing back to Iberian or southern European roots. Such names were often written in Dutch or German records with notations like “ook wel” or “genannt”—signaling that a person was “also called” by another name.
From the Netherlands the migration continued eastward. Jewish and Sephardic families—some originally conversos—moved into the Rhineland, Palatinate, and neighboring territories, carrying with them names, memory, and faith. In these areas, the Simonis family begins to emerge in church records, civil registrations, and oral memory, intersecting with the larger Sephardic diaspora’s path.
This migration arc mirrors the path of the biblical tribe: Israel → exile → return (or re-rooting). The Simonis story sits within that arc: Iberia → Netherlands → Rhineland/Palatinate → Queidersbach. The alias names, the blending of Dutch, German, and southern European DNA, and the recurrence of names like Simonis, Simons, Paroli, and Ailis all point to that layered journey.
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