Not that I can see. You have only provided one link, and I can find no extraordinary claims in that link. Again I ask: What makes this preliminary claim “nonsense” in your eyes?
Was Hitler Jewish? (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
The article cites the 2010 article linked to by TriPolar in post #3, then concludes ‘Despite the claims, Adolf Hitler was not Jewish.’
Also not a scientific rebuttal(which is what the OP is asking for)…and “Hitler’s Family Tree” is strangely detailed for someone with uncertain parentage.
His paper was published in the peer reviewed Journal of European Studies. I don’t know how to find the results of that peer review, and I can’t access the full paper, but the abstract does not make the categorical claims found in the press releases and the video in your link. Here is how it concludes:
“Other evidence, deriving from earlier sources, suggests that the contemporary consensus may be incorrect. Avenues for further research which might help to clarify the question are suggested.”
So, new evidence may show that unlike previous claims, there were some Jewish men in the region where Hitler’s grandmother lived. And in conclusion nobody still knows the answer and more research might one day resolve the matter. I’m having a difficult time finding anything rebuttable there.
As far as I know, there is no specimen to examine Adolf Hitler’s DNA. He’s dead; his body was burned and lost, and he has no descendants. So all modern scientists can do is examine the DNA of people related to Hitler.
Alois and Klara Hitler had six children but only two, Adolf and Paula, survived to adulthood. Paula, like Adolf, never had any children. As far as I know, nobody collected a specimen from Paula before her death in 1960. So there are no descendants of Alois and Klara Hitler.
Alois Hitler had two adult children from a previous marriage, Alois Junior and Angela. They both had children, who were Adolf Hitler’s modern age relatives. But any DNA analysis of these children runs into the problem of determining who got what genes from where. Are the genes from Alois Hitler, which would mean they were also Adolf Hitler’s genes? Or are they from Alois’ second wife Franziska, who was unrelated to Adolf Hitler?
I can’t believe I’m the first one to point out that Cecil addressed this question. True, it’s not from this year, but the evidence doesn’t change, and besides, it’s Cecil:
And the first couple of sentences pretty much sums it up (or at least it did for 1993):
“Wish I could oblige, bubeleh. But while Hitler probably didn’t have any Jewish blood, it can’t be completely ruled out. Hitler’s father was illegitimate and to this day there is some question about who his grandfather was.”
Part of his jawbone is in a Russian archive, and they might or might not have a piece of his skull too. Whether usable DNA is present, of course, may be another matter, but it’s at least plausible.
It seems there are two separate sets of claims:
-
Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish.
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Hitler’s paternal ancestry shows Jewish DNA.
#1 is at least highly debatable; the guy’s identity remains unknown, but on the balance of probabilities he likely was not of recent Jewish descent. Haplogroup E1b1b, however, is fairly common among Jewish and North African men and pretty rare among Europeans, so it lends support to the hypothesis that Hitler’s paternal line goes back to someone from the Mediterranean basin. (E1b1b is a Y-DNA haplogroup, meaning it is only passed father to son, so if Alexander Stuart-Houston, for example, has this Y-DNA, he can only have gotten it from his father William Stuart-Houston [ne Hitler], from his father Alois Hitler Jr, from his father Alois Hitler, from his father the mysterious paternal grandfather of Adolf [assuming there are no other false paternity events in this chain].)
To say that Hitler had no Jewish nor African ancestry would be quite an extraordinary claim, and therefore would require extraordinary evidence. Absent such extraordinary evidence, then, one should assume that, like nearly everyone on the planet, he does have such ancestry.
Which is not to say that said ancestry is necessarily recent enough that it would be possible to pinpoint it on a family tree.
At the risk of threadshitting, I’m more interested in the agenda of anybody who really gives a damn about Hitler’s ancestry. Unless Hitler was aware of it and it shaped his personality in some way, it’s about as important as the number of freckles on his butthole.
A few points I don’t think have been explicitly made yet:
Jewish identity has an ethnogenetic component. But it also has a religious component and a cultural component. It’s possible, for example, that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was a convert to Judaism, which might count as “Jewish ancestry” for some purposes, but not “genetic” ancestry.
I put “genetic” in scare quotes because another issue is that there is no Jew Gene. There is no gene, or sequence of genes, the presence of which would prove Jewish ancestry for an individual, or the absence of which would disprove it. There are genetic sequences with different frequencies in different population groups, such that you can identify a particular sequence and say with some level of confidence that it is most consistent with an ancestor coming from a particular population group. But you’ll only ever be dealing with probabilities. It’s my (very) layman’s understanding that that is what’s in the paper in question.
But there are factors beyond that. Let’s say that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was 100% genetically Jewish (to the very limited extent that’s even a meaningful statement). On average, you would expect to share about 25% of your DNA with any given grandparent. But it’s mathematically possible not to share any DNA with a given grandparent. Given the way human genetics actually work, as I understand it, that’s verging on impossible for all practical purposes. But even given the “100% Jewish grandfather” hypothetical, it’s possible that the genetic material Hitler inherited from him just didn’t happen to include “Jewish” genetic material (that is, sequences which are particularly prevalent in European Jewish populations and particularly rare in other populations). And, of course, it’s possible that Hitler would happen to have “Jewish” sequences despite not having any Jewish ancestry.
Another issue is that European Jews aren’t a genetic island. It’s possible that if we had perfect knowledge, and traced Hitler’s line of descent back 2000 years, we’d find he was a direct lineal descendant of the last High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, but that inter-marriage, genetic drift, and other factors had “washed out” the distinctively “Jewish” elements of his genome, and left him with gene sequences indistinguishable from non-Jewish Austrians.
Now, I Am Not A Geneticist, so I have no idea how good the paper in question actually is, and for all I know it’s a terrible job, and there are points of rebuttal to that specific paper that would be obvious to a geneticist. But, on the more general issue of whether Hitler had any Jewish ancestry, I don’t think a “scientific rebuttal” of that is possible even in theory.
I wish the OP would return to explain which parts of what has been linked to(if any) is the nonsense he is referring to in the title.
Let’s look at this- with the haplogroup present in 20% of Jewish peoples, there is thus a 80% chance Hitler had no Jewish blood. And as Little_Nemo correctly points out the DNA that was tested comes from moderately distant relatives.
That’s pretty poor evidence, honestly.
Almost. But a male will inherit his father’s father’s (and so on) Y-chromosome. And the study linked in post #3 suggested that Hitler’s Y-chromosome was a variant common in Jewish men, but rare in non-Jewish European men.
Also, it should be noted that this variant is also common in men from North Africa and the Horn of Africa, so it is far from proof of Jewish ancestry.
I Am Not A Geneticist, but I don’t think that’s how that works. If the haplogroup is present in 20% of Jews, but (and this is absolutely a hypothetical figure pulled out of nowhere) is only present in 2% of non-Jewish Europeans, and Hitler had this haplogroup, that would be a strong indication that he did have Jewish ancestry.
Thanks for the correction.
I think my larger point stands, though, that it’s not possible to “prove” Jewish ancestry one way or the other via genetics.
You are welcome.
And I believe your larger point is correct.
Not proof, but most certainly evidence to be considered.
Yeah, or maybe there’s an old Hitler hairbrush lying around somewhere. Collect the DNA, submit it to genealogy sites and see if a bunch of people named Cohen turn up.