How was this report phrased? I thought reports estimated ancestry, which isn’t the same as estimating the possibilities thereof.
Yes, I’d be more suspicious of a result from mainland Europe stock that showed no Jewish ancestry whatsoever.
But some of y’all need to learn what Godwin’s Law *actually *says. Just mentioning Hitler isn’t it.
Been too long. I’m not even sure where I filed it. But yeah, it’s showing <2% Native American.
The Law of Return allows application for Israeli citizenship. You don’t need a job offer or a work permit.
I had a thread a while back asking about similar things. It turns out that I have a Jewish great-grandmother. I would have to demonstrate that she was actively Jewish, and (I think) also demonstrate that no-one in the chain of descendants leading to me had actively converted to another religion before having kids, to establish eligibility for Right of Return. But even though this great-grandmother was my mother’s father’s mother, my grandfather was technically Jewish, and it’s quite possible that I would have enough Jewish ancestry to qualify.
As the person who first mentioned Godwin’s Law by name, I would have thought it was obvious that I was making a little joke.
This is an interesting question for me, too.
My father’s father was unknown. I mean, obviously he was known to my grandmother, who got knocked up by him as a young woman back in the olden days. But my dad was raised by his grandparents, as his mother’s sibling. That sort of thing happened a lot back then. Big family scandal, terrible secret, etc etc. I only met my grandmother a couple of times, I was 12 when I last saw her. My father predeceased her by a year or two, when I was a teenager. Anyone with any actual knowledge of my grandfather’s identity is long dead.
Anyhoo, I always assumed that my unknown grandfather was of the same Irish &/or Scottish stock as the rest of my ancestors. Till I did a DNA test and turned out to be 1/4 Ashkenazi Jew, specifically from Lithuania or somewhere nearby. Interesting and cool.
I am happy to embrace my Jewish ancestry. I now tell people I’m 1/4 Ashkenazi.
But… I am not religious. I am an Atheist. And I’ve never lived as a Jew because nobody knew I am one, more or less. So… am I Jewish?
If the Nazis had known about DNA, they’d have loved it. And I am quite sure that my 25% Litvak DNA would have got me a one-way ticket to the death camps. And I have zero doubt that modern Jew haters would be happy to murder me based on that DNA too.
So, I’m Jewish enough that some people would murder me because of it. But does that make me a Jew? Could I claim Israeli citizenship? I don’t want to, but it is an interesting question to consider.
No death camp or concentration camp for you, unless you were also a Jehova’s witness, resistance, gay, mentally ill, deformed, communist, trade union, “unwilling to work” etc.
You would be classified as Mischling (mongrel) grade 2. As long as you didn’t classify as Jewish, you wouldn’t be treated the same as “full” Jews.
They would frown on you marrying another mischling, especially of the first grade, as your kids would be suspect. But marrying an aryan sufficiently “diluted your Jewishness” for your kids to be aryan. While Mischlinge of the 2nd grade did suffer restrictions in employment, those of the first degree also in education, and both were treated as not full or equal citizens. But no death camps
Not by any formal definition. The traditional definition would require your mother to be Jewish. The Law of Return is broader in accepting one Jewish grandparent, but I assume they require a named individual. Genetics is not part of the definition (because such tests didn’t exist when the laws were written).
Did you read my posts above? According to the Nuremberg Laws, someone who was 1/4 Jewish was a Mischling (Mixed Race) of the second degree and eligible for German citizenship barring other factors like being a practicing Jew or married to one. You had to be 3/4 Jewish to be automatically considered a Jew.
It’s possible that the Nazis used a somewhat stringent definition because they wanted to include only those who were most clearly different to avoid backlash. Now if the Nazis had known about DNA they might have used that as part of the definition. But as has been said if they included anyone with a trace of Jewish ancestry they would condemn most of the population of Europe.
My brother’s DNA showed we are 28% Native American. And it was a shock to us. While we knew our mother probably had Native American in her long line of well documented New England heritage, we have been unable to trace who our father really was, as opposed to what he said about himself. We figure he must have had a good percentage of Native genes.
The ironic thing about the rabbinical definition of Jewish in terms of the mother is that the MtDNA of most Ashkenazim is European. This means that if you trace our ancestry far enough back you will find a non-Jew in the female line, meaning that, strictly speaking, none of us qualify. On the other side, for Jewish males, the Y chromosome traces back to the middle east. The case mentioned above about an Italian with middle east MtDNA is readily explained since most Italian Jews were Sephardim, who left Spain during the inquisition.
As Poe’s Law shows, you need a smiley with that.
I’ve had a similar experience, except it is my maternal grandfather who is unknown. My DNA results show around 25% Italian - but my brother’s and sister’s test show considerably less. However, we all show up with relative matches in the 2nd-4th cousin range to people with Italian surnames, including one 2nd cousin match. I have made contact with a 3rd cousin match whose grandparents are from the area in Italy that Ancestry.com gives as a probably ancestor site. I know the “ethnicity estimates” have very large margins of error, and I suspect the algorithm can get lost pretty easily. However, my understanding is that genetic matching to individuals is pretty accurate, and in my case seems to confirm an Italian grandfather to a high probability.
Well unless you also took this same DNA test, technically what this shocked you with was the fact that your brother is 28% Native American. Just sayin’.
Not necessarily.
There was a joke back then:the true aryan type: blond like Hitler, slim like Göring, tall like Goebbels.
Pointing out that most of the Nazi leaders didn’t seem to be of the ‘aryan’ true-German appearance they touted. So some political opponent could have demanded their DNA results; which might have been embarrassing.
Remember the cases of racist white-supremacists whose DNA testing showed them to have a significant percentage of African ancestry? Kind of killed off their prominence in the racist movement.
I’m well aware of the Nazis “mischling” categories. If you read about it, though, they weren’t strict about their definitions. If you were a partial Jew and had skills they approved of, you were probably fine. If not, you were in the “we’ll get to you later” category, not the “you’re A-OK” category. Plenty of people with the same amount of Jewish ancestry as me did end up in forced labour camps because of it, and plenty of those people died. Some did get sent directly to the death camps.
But not because of that one-quarter Jewish ancestry. Those people had other factors that sent them to the camp. Perhaps they were actually religiously or culturally Jewish. Or were part of any of the many other groups the Nazis wished to destroy (communist etc).
The whole point of 1/4 Jewish ancestry was that offspring with an aryan partner would not create a Jewish person, but an aryan. Therefore there was no need to kill a Mischling 2nd grade. If you will, they were preserving the aryan 3/4 of that person. Now, as I stated above, had things gone differently in history and the Reich had lasted longer, they might well have made a convenient next group of victims. But in actual history, 1/4 Jewish, on its own, did not mean deportation.
(It did mean marriage and career restrictions, and all the trimmings I’d being a 2nd class citizen in a country that made that a profound negative.
So you’re agreeing now that the actual situation wasn’t as automatically fatal as you initially claimed, which was my point. And I wasn’t saying that you would be A-OK if you had partial Jewish ancestry, just that it would normally take additional factors to be sent to the camps.
Interestingly, My DNA is 98.6% Ashkenazi Jew and 1.4% from somewhere in or near India. So together with the OP, we’re one Jew and one goy. 
Really? Why?
True - DNA doesn’t get handed down evenly.