Straight geneology. My great-great grandmother and most her family going back had decidedly Ashkenazic surnames. Somewhere along the line somebody converted - or just stopped practicing Judaism.
My great-grandfather came to the US in the 1880s (from Czechoslovakia, I think) and he was Jewish - but in the US, he married a Catholic woman (and he’d presumably converted), so your hypothesis is definitely possible.
Absolutely right! My father changed his name about when I was born from an obviously Jewish name to a neutral one. It was 1937 (second depression), I was newly born, he had just lost his gas/service station, and he was desperate for a job. It didn’t help; when he finally got a job it was with my mother’s uncle. After that, he made no attempt to hide his Jewishness.
I forget the story of Madeline Albright, but I believe she was born Jewish and her parents subsequently converted. I don’t know the precise Jewish law on the subject but I think that if she didn’t convert, she was techincally Jewish and didn’t discover this until late in life since her parents never told her.
Yes. There’s no equivalent of baptism in Judaism. There’s no ritual that someone born to a Jewish mother has to go through to be Jewish- they just are.
That applies even if your mother converts to Judaism while she is pregnant with you. If your mother is Jewish when you are born, so are you, even if you never do anything Jewish like get circumcised. If a child is born to a Jewish mother but is raised in another religion, then wants to be Jewish as an adult, the child doesn’t have to go through the process of converting to Judaism.
No, anyone who wants to and can convince a rabbi that they sincerely want to can convert to Judaism. Most people who do convert to Judaism do so because they are marrying a Jewish person, but that isn’t a requirement. There’s no requirement of ancestry, and nobody asks you questions about your ancestry during the conversion process (at least for Conservative Jews).
I think this is the stat I’d vaguely heard about that set me wondering. From, where else, Wikipedia:
Two million is a lot, and it’s the right time.
This is the greatest news I have ever heard.
I wish that my obsession with chickens was better documented here, so you could know how excited I am, but I assure you, my friends will take the opportunity to roll their eyes anew when I tell them-- dare I say, “crow” about it?
Looks like I have a better case for proving that I’m a chicken and don’t know it than that I’m a Jew. I can live with that.
In Czarist Russia, genes inherit Jew!
Not only is marrying a Jewish person not a requirement, but it can be a negative factor, because some rabbis may see it as an ulterior motive, suggesting an insufficient level of sincerity and dedication to the religion.
You could probably be a lot of things and not know it. Come on now, somewhere a long the line someone in your family got the story wrong and passed on horrible information. I bet that happens a lot! So for those of you who are 50% this, 20% that, and 30% other… you probably have it all wrong.
I found exactly that when I started doing genealogy. “She was French” was really “her grandmother was a French-speaker whose parents came from Switzerland, and the surnames are mostly ultimately German, while ¾ of her ancestors were something else”; “he was Irish” meant “he had red hair and his mother had an Irish maiden name, but he was mostly something else.”
Like a chicken! Ha!
Oh Lord! First time I’ve groaned at a pun in many a year. Well played, you magnificent bastard.
This is either a typo or an error.
This reminds me of one of the best Family Guy scenes.
Jillian: Wait wait! I have another question. How do I know if I’m Jewish?
Brian: Are you Jewish?
Jillian: No
Brian: There you go sport.
Jillian: Thanks Brian.
I really hope we see more of Jillian.
IIRC, the classical definition of Jewish heritage was that you were born to a Jewish mother. Therefore, even assuming a handful of Jews spread throughout the world early enough (and 4000 years would certainly be), nearly every woman in the world could possibly be directely descended from a Jewish woman. Ergo, by that definition, nearly everyone would be Jewish. Exceptions would include highly isolated populations, particularly the New World, and maybe where historical population movements are unclear, like Sub-Saharan Africa.
It was a comment that the answer is “it depend” - obviously, having one Jewish ancestor a century ago doesn’t magically make somebody “all Jewish”. The one-drop rule is pretty silly all the way around.
“Born to a Jewish mother” is not the same thing as “directely descended from a Jewish woman”. All mothers, grandmothers etc. along the way have to be Jewish.
For example, if a Jewish man marries a non-Jewish woman, their children (both male and female) are not Jewish under the rule you cited, although their paternal grandmother is Jewish.
And besides, it’s not just descent from any old Jewish woman. It has to be the direct maternal line. It doesn’t matter if you had a Jewish great-grandmother unless it was your maternal grandmother’s mother.
ETA: What the poster above said. Curse this slow brain.
Actually, it is quite likely that none of us Ashkenazi Jews really are. Here’s why. The rule is that you have to be born to a Jewish mother to be Jewish. So how do I know I am? Well, my mother said so. How did she know? Her mother said so. And so on. But genetic analysis has shown that while most Jewish men (most who believe they are Jewish, that is) have Y chromosomes that trace back to the middle east, a large majority of Ashkenazi Jews have mitochondrial DNA that is north European.
To understand this, you have to know that Y chromosomes are passed father to son (women don’t have a Y chromosome, except for rare genetic anomolies) while mitochondrial is almost always inherited strictly from the mother. This means that it very likely that were I able to trace my ancestry back far enough, I would find that some distant ancestor had married a Russian or Polish or even German woman (not that those countries existed in those days) who raised her daughters as Jews. Probably the men were peddlers or the like and took their women where they could. Were the women converted? By a rabbi? It somehow seems unlikely to me, although I have no evidence. I just don’t think people thought about things like that then. You called yourself a Jew, you were a Jew. Certainly the Israelis never made an issue of it. They do make an issue of marriage, but they make no attempt to go back generations. Or do genetic analysis.