Lack of religion = missing Jew?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
My family is the sort that imported Jewish heiresses from the States to bolster their tottering aristocratic finances in their European country - a la Downton Abbey. In return, said heiress had a title and lived in a castle, and her kids had a guaranteed lineage.

So yes, I know I've got Jewish ancestry. But everyone was required to be Catholic with a capital C.

wow what a story!

Without fail Annoying French Lady shows up to talk about her family.

You want to police who can post?
You somehow feel insecure?
You can’t just enjoy the variety of experiences and origins?

It’s a you problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How fascinating! I’m on a very similar search. There’s always been a suspicion in my dad’s family that we have some Jewish ancestry too. We also have a “mystery” German relative who came to the US around 1848. I can’t find anything about his life before the US, and his son (my 3x grandfather) seems to have erased this man too, even going so far as to tell everyone he was adopted.

It turns out that we do have some Jewish dna that can’t otherwise be explained, but I’d love to know more about this ancestor. As a kid, I always wished we were Jewish instead of Catholic, so this search is mostly wish-fulfillment for me. Knowing if this guy was Jewish won’t actually change anything, of course, but I’m still curious.

A few ideas for leads—were they naturalized? If so, can you order the Declaration of Intent and other paperwork from the National Archives? And was there a German language paper in the town that they settled in? By sheer good luck, I found an obituary for a half-sibling of my ancestor that gave some clues about where they likely were from. Nothing definitive but I at least have some guesses now.

There were a number of failed revolutions in 1848. Those associated would have to flee Europe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
My family is the sort that imported Jewish heiresses from the States to bolster their tottering aristocratic finances in their European country - a la Downton Abbey. In return, said heiress had a title and lived in a castle, and her kids had a guaranteed lineage.

So yes, I know I've got Jewish ancestry. But everyone was required to be Catholic with a capital C.

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.

My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring, we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds – pretty standard, really. At the age of twelve, I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. At the age of 18, I went off to evil medical school. At the age of 25, I took up tap dancing. I wanted to be a quadruple threat — an actor, dancer…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What would you be looking for from a reconnection? Have you done 23 & me or the like?

I don't know what I would be looking for. Maybe more understanding of who my family was before they "lost" their identity.

I have done 23 and me. Said what I expected, German, Danish, UK.

If you had Ashkenazi DNA that should have showed up in the results - I'm not sure if/how they test for Sephardim.

You could use Ancestry.com to see what you can track down. But also, if you are feeling a pull toward Judaism, I'd say explore it. Spend some time going to a reform synagogue - or talking to a rabbi. I think, especially now, you will be welcomed.

From what I understand there is no way to test for Sephardim. My dad did 23 and me and even though he is 1/8th Spanish Jew (or so we've been told) it just shows up as Iberian.

Oh interesting - I'm 99% Ashkenazi (per personal history and 23 and me) so I wouldn't even know know what to look for to find out if someone is Sephardic. I guess OP would have said if her results showed some Spanish or Portuguese heritage, or Moroccan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
My family is the sort that imported Jewish heiresses from the States to bolster their tottering aristocratic finances in their European country - a la Downton Abbey. In return, said heiress had a title and lived in a castle, and her kids had a guaranteed lineage.

So yes, I know I've got Jewish ancestry. But everyone was required to be Catholic with a capital C.

wow what a story!

Without fail Annoying French Lady shows up to talk about her family.

You want to police who can post?
You somehow feel insecure?
You can’t just enjoy the variety of experiences and origins?

It’s a you problem.

Lol. Sacre bleu!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

Protestants were stricter on tithing than Catholics so that might have been the story they told everyone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jews came to the US to celebrate being Jewish and to practice their faith openly. There were booming Jewish communities across the United States from the 19th century onward, sending letters back to the home country encouraging people to come to the US. The antisemitism they encountered was, by the standards of the old world, quite mild. You may have been excluded from clubs but people didn't burn down your houses or lead pogroms in your neighborhoods. The college antisemitism was mainly at the Ivies, not across the board and not the land grant universities. And the US did reward Jews with tremendous prosperity through their hard work and Jews soon established a political presence as well, with Louis Brandeis appointed to SCOTUS in 1916. Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States, outside of perhaps a handful of social climbing people but even that would be pretty limited.

The idea people would emigrate to the US to specifically hide their Jewish ancestry flies against documented history. It doesn't rule out an individual who didn't care about their Jewish heritage and was an atheist leaving behind their Jewish heritage as part of starting a new life. They may very well have been leaving behind previous marriages and unhappy family lives. People had many stories and reasons for emigrating to start a new life. But I'd think hiding a Jewish heritage would be one of the weakest ones.

I don’t know. My grandmother was flat-out fired from a job when they found out she was Jewish, in the 1930s. She didn’t speak about it much, but I know that they depended on the money and it must’ve been devastating emotionally. At that time Jews explicitly could not live in my current neighborhood, nor could they attend the school that my son attends.

Yes, there were no pogroms, but the burden was still there (balanced off to some extent by a vibrant community). You wrote “Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States” - that’s true with regard to personal pride, but there were plenty of practical reasons to conceal Judaism.

I see people more desperate to make a theory fit despite prevailing evidence otherwise. Your story is anecdotal, subject to misinterpretation, and it was also a time when women were fired from many jobs as soon as they got married because the husband was expected to take care of her, just to use as an example of the complexities of the time. Did antisemitism exist? Of course! But there is a difference between not boasting about a faith and heritage in public versus simply pretending it never existed. The latter would be unusual. The enormous success of American Jews makes it a weak theory. It's possible an individual would, for various reasons, walk away from a Jewish heritage but we can't rely on it as a likely answer to OP's story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jews came to the US to celebrate being Jewish and to practice their faith openly. There were booming Jewish communities across the United States from the 19th century onward, sending letters back to the home country encouraging people to come to the US. The antisemitism they encountered was, by the standards of the old world, quite mild. You may have been excluded from clubs but people didn't burn down your houses or lead pogroms in your neighborhoods. The college antisemitism was mainly at the Ivies, not across the board and not the land grant universities. And the US did reward Jews with tremendous prosperity through their hard work and Jews soon established a political presence as well, with Louis Brandeis appointed to SCOTUS in 1916. Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States, outside of perhaps a handful of social climbing people but even that would be pretty limited.

The idea people would emigrate to the US to specifically hide their Jewish ancestry flies against documented history. It doesn't rule out an individual who didn't care about their Jewish heritage and was an atheist leaving behind their Jewish heritage as part of starting a new life. They may very well have been leaving behind previous marriages and unhappy family lives. People had many stories and reasons for emigrating to start a new life. But I'd think hiding a Jewish heritage would be one of the weakest ones.

I don’t know. My grandmother was flat-out fired from a job when they found out she was Jewish, in the 1930s. She didn’t speak about it much, but I know that they depended on the money and it must’ve been devastating emotionally. At that time Jews explicitly could not live in my current neighborhood, nor could they attend the school that my son attends.

Yes, there were no pogroms, but the burden was still there (balanced off to some extent by a vibrant community). You wrote “Jews have never had a reason not to be proud of being Jewish in the United States” - that’s true with regard to personal pride, but there were plenty of practical reasons to conceal Judaism.

I see people more desperate to make a theory fit despite prevailing evidence otherwise. Your story is anecdotal, subject to misinterpretation, and it was also a time when women were fired from many jobs as soon as they got married because the husband was expected to take care of her, just to use as an example of the complexities of the time. Did antisemitism exist? Of course! But there is a difference between not boasting about a faith and heritage in public versus simply pretending it never existed. The latter would be unusual. The enormous success of American Jews makes it a weak theory. It's possible an individual would, for various reasons, walk away from a Jewish heritage but we can't rely on it as a likely answer to OP's story.

This is an overly defensive take. Jews came to the US for a variety of push-pull factors, and just like some Black people opted to “pass,” so did some Jews in the face of antisemitism. And considering that many Jews don’t consider mixed marriages to result in Jewish kids, that in an of itself would probably result in a fair number of people with no Jewish self-identity (along with a presumably normal rate of out of wedlock birth and adoption).

And sometimes religion really does just disappear over a few generations — especially in the past when we did not preserve copious artifacts, and parents/grandparents died much younger. I have two Jewish friends who are basically completely un-identified with Judaism and I didn’t even know they were Jewish at all until well into our friendships. Their own kids have no Jewish identity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One more thought—you may want to consider that they changed their names for more prosaic reasons too. Immigration officials and us census takers were notoriously bad at spelling foreign names so some of my ancestors changed theirs to be easier to spell and pronounce in the US.

This is a untrue. Immigration officials were required to check names of immigrants with the names on manifests. If a name change was going to happen, it would have been done in the port of departure. Since there wouldn't have been any identity documents, passengers could give any name they wanted. Also, at Ellis Island all immigration officials spoke at least 3 languages including the language of the passengers coming in.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-did-ellis-island-officials-really-change-names-immigrants-180961544/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

Protestants were stricter on tithing than Catholics so that might have been the story they told everyone.

DP. I'm not familiar with the PP's tithing story but I was sitting at my FIL kitchen table when he got a letter from his Catholic Church reminding him to tithe. It was 3 days after MIL's funeral.

My ILs were hard core Catholics. My DH had gone to Catholic schools K-12. FIL spent years as a sacrostan. A priest had been coming to their house weekly for the last 6 months of MIL since she was too infirm to go to church. The callousness of the letter crushed FIL and he stopped going to church.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

Protestants were stricter on tithing than Catholics so that might have been the story they told everyone.

Don't know what to tell you. I'm the PP and both me and my husband's families were Catholics in Ohio and New Jersey when the church came asking for money in very dire situations. Both families switched to protestant (Methodist and Lutheran). My great Grandmother was so angry for decades that she told her grandsons don't marry Catholic girls.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What would you be looking for from a reconnection? Have you done 23 & me or the like?

I don't know what I would be looking for. Maybe more understanding of who my family was before they "lost" their identity.

I have done 23 and me. Said what I expected, German, Danish, UK.

If you had Ashkenazi DNA that should have showed up in the results - I'm not sure if/how they test for Sephardim.

You could use Ancestry.com to see what you can track down. But also, if you are feeling a pull toward Judaism, I'd say explore it. Spend some time going to a reform synagogue - or talking to a rabbi. I think, especially now, you will be welcomed.

From what I understand there is no way to test for Sephardim. My dad did 23 and me and even though he is 1/8th Spanish Jew (or so we've been told) it just shows up as Iberian.

We have Jewish friends who know their families are from E. Europe and their results come back as Ashkenazi Jewish. My DH's family is from the Andean area of South America. Their results come back as Spain, Indigenous Andean and "Jewish". We're assuming it's Sephardic given the history of Sephardic Jews.

Let me tell you, my very Catholic IL's were SHOCKED they had Jewish ancestors. It was both funny and sad. They were also shocked at how much Indigenous Andean DNA they had (50%+). They firmly believed they were 100% Spanish.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What would you be looking for from a reconnection? Have you done 23 & me or the like?

I don't know what I would be looking for. Maybe more understanding of who my family was before they "lost" their identity.

I have done 23 and me. Said what I expected, German, Danish, UK.

If you had Ashkenazi DNA that should have showed up in the results - I'm not sure if/how they test for Sephardim.

You could use Ancestry.com to see what you can track down. But also, if you are feeling a pull toward Judaism, I'd say explore it. Spend some time going to a reform synagogue - or talking to a rabbi. I think, especially now, you will be welcomed.

They test for the two besides Ashkenazi. I think Ashkenazi the most common type in the US.
I couldn’t believe how many of my husband’s family members are 100% Ashkenazi. Where we live it’s not uncommon to marry outside your religion or background.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What would you be looking for from a reconnection? Have you done 23 & me or the like?

I don't know what I would be looking for. Maybe more understanding of who my family was before they "lost" their identity.

I have done 23 and me. Said what I expected, German, Danish, UK.

If you had Ashkenazi DNA that should have showed up in the results - I'm not sure if/how they test for Sephardim.

You could use Ancestry.com to see what you can track down. But also, if you are feeling a pull toward Judaism, I'd say explore it. Spend some time going to a reform synagogue - or talking to a rabbi. I think, especially now, you will be welcomed.

From what I understand there is no way to test for Sephardim. My dad did 23 and me and even though he is 1/8th Spanish Jew (or so we've been told) it just shows up as Iberian.

Are you sure? My mother’s shows up Iberian and now I can’t remember why.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is going to sound like an odd question. My Mother's family was non-religious for at least 3 generations back into the 1910s. My Mom strongly suspects my Grandfather's mother was Jewish (last name Kramer) and the non-religious decision was basically to eliminate our Jewish identity.

I have absolutely 0 corroboration of this story. But when a major religious event happened in my other family history you heard the story (e.g. husband died Catholic church asked for more tithing so they became protestant).

Thoughts? BS? Weird?

If this were the case, how would you reconnect with the identity?

That means everyone else was Catholic or Protestant. I doubt truly religious people would give up their church because 1 member of the family was a different faith.

Do you have religion now? I feel guilty about how ignorant my daughter is about religion because my husband and I are not religious and weren’t really taught ourselves.