Not since Wilder passed (may his memory be for a blessing). We’re electing a new Gene at the secret Jew Conspiracy meeting. I’ll be attending mostly for the wonderful bagels and whitefish and to find out who blabbed about the Space Lasers.
I cannot imagine why this is a manner of any interest at all…
The virulence of his anti-Semitism wouldn’t be entirely surprising if he had grown up on the receiving end of local gossip and teasing/bullying about the possibility. But that would be just as speculative as much else about the question.
If he was Kohanim specifically, that would have a much higher probability of already being clear, as there are better genetic markers for that sort of thing vs general Jewish ancestry.
Which was precisely the method used in 2014 by the British TV series, Dead Famous DNA, to claim that Eva Braun had Jewish ancestry. Mind you, this was also the programme that paid money to David Irving for what turned out to be a fake clipping of Hitler’s hair, so its credibility is, let’s just say, somewhat problematic.
I suppose if true it could be of some general interest as a little extra bit of Ammo against Naziism, “See even your greatest leader doesn’t live up to the racial purity metric he espouses”. And if it was false but widely claimed, I could see being interested in correcting the record purely on the basis of myth busting, the same way that one might want to debunk the notion that ring around the roses was about the black death. But I agree it seems weird to be passionately invested in the answer one way or the other.
What prompted me to ask the question in the first place was the sheer frequency with which I heard people assert Hitler’s Jewish ancestry as fact, when it isn’t conclusive at all. By focusing on his supposed genetic Sephardic roots, isn’t there a danger of stating that Hitler wasn’t an Austrian/German but a mix of all races and thus just a flawed human being?; that the 6 million Jewish victims weren’t Jewish at all but a mix of all races, so in effect treating the deaths of those 6 million, not as genocide but as a mass killing and then stating " Well, Stalin was much worse". Facts do matter. Not caring about facts has real consequences. I’m quite willing to accept independent peer-reviewed studies that confirm the supposed Jewish ancestry but so far the study or studies are inconclusive.
- The “sheer frequency” you bring up is not supported by much evidence, and
- It is kind of hard to do any rebuttal when information about Hitler’s ancestry is full of holes, dubious links to “Hitler’s Family Tree” notwithstanding.
It’s obvious you haven’t looked. Keep looking !
I may be wrong, but from what you’ve written in this thread, it seems like you may be laboring under a couple of misconceptions.
First off, “race” is a social construct, not a biological one. Saying Hitler has “genetic Sephardic roots” is pretty close to a meaningless statement. He might, or might not, have shared a haplogroup or a Y-chromosome variant that is more common among Sephardic Jews than among the general European population, but there’s no such thing as being “genetically Sephardic.” To the extent that there’s a scientific rebuttal to that nonsense, that’s it.
It’s not that Hitler shares no genetic commonalities with Jewish populations, because of course he does, because that’s how human genetics work. And just as there’s no “Jew gene”, there’s no “Aryan gene”, either, or a “German/Austrian” gene. You simply can’t “prove” Hitler had or did not have any Jewish ancestry through genetics. Hitler wasn’t an Austrian/German in a genetic sense because that’s not a thing. He was “just a flawed human being”; we all are. His flaws, of course, were monstrous on a scale that has few parallels in recorded history, but that has nothing to do with his “race”.*
The other major issue I see is that you seem to be falling prey to the Nirvana fallacy. Either there’s 100% proof that Hitler had Jewish ancestry or he didn’t. That’s just not how this works. We don’t know who his paternal grandfather was. We almost certainly never will. And we will never have perfect knowledge of his line of descent. There’s no way to rule out any Jewish heritage. There is no “2021 scientific rebuttal to…Hitler’s supposed Jewish heritage”, and there can’t be.
The best we can say is that the best historical evidence we have is that Hitler probably didn’t have any recent Jewish ancestry. And there’s some genetic evidence that he may have had a haplogroup and a Y-chromosome variant that are more common among Jewish populations than among the general European population. They are also apparently more common among some African populations, but the historical evidence makes it more likely they were contributed by a Jewish ancestor than a Berber ancestor, but there’s nothing definitive. There’s just never going to be anything definitive, either way.
Finally, instead of telling the rest of us to “keep looking” for the claims you want rebutted, it might help if you actually cited those claims. It’s quite possible there is a “2021 scientific rebuttal” to a particular piece of “nonsense peddled about Hitler’s supposed Jewish ancestry”. But without knowing what the specific claim you want rebutted is, there’s not much any of us can do to help you.
*It of course was very much about what he thought about race.
Thanks gdave for your methodical and constructive reply. I completely agree with your point that it is meaningless to talk about his “Sephardic Jewish” roots. There is no ‘Jewish’ gene. That’s my view as well. There are many articles on the topic of Hitler’s supposed Jewish ancestry. They mention the chromosome Haplogroup E1b1b1.It’s easy to find these articles. I didn’t think it necessary to link to them all. The majority of them do no lay out the genetic details very well. Most of them seem to be based on one study done by Dr. Leonard Sax. My interest was simply to discover more independent studies to compare with that of Dr. Sax. I haven’t found them. Let’s leave it a that.
The basic problem is that AH’s paternal grandfather - his source for the Y chromosome and 1/4 of his genetic makeup - is unknown. We can infer that it was either the man his mother eventually married (or his brother) which would make the answer fairly bland, but without a definite answer, it’s all speculation.
AFAIK there’s no definite genetic reference to fall back on. So again, … all speculation. The specific OP question’s answer is - “no way to tell”.
Whether there’s even any Jewish candidates for grandpa - still just speculation, but unlikely.
As for the remainder of the family tree - unlike North Americans, not a lot of mix and match and wandering happening in pre-WWI Europe, especially in the backwaters. Barring a little extracurricular fun, most families knew where they came from and who their medium-close relatives were. That was kind of necessary to avoid too-close matches. (Did Austria generally forbid first-cousin marriages?)
Also, there was a decent amount of genetic mixing. Remember that the guy in Sound of Music was an Austrian admiral, which sounds hilarious until we remember that before WWI Austria-Hungary did own the seaport of Trieste and the Yugoslav coast. So the addition of genetic groups from the Mediterranean area would not be unusual, although it would take a while to filter into the Austrian backwoods.
The Jewish Virtual Library article also had this to say:
“In 1933, the London Daily Mirror published a picture of a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest inscribed with some Hebrew characters and the name Adolf Hitler, but this Bucharest Hitler could not have been the Nazi leader’s grandfather. At the time, though, this picture sufficiently worried Hitler that he had the Nazi law defining Jewishness written to exclude Jesus Christ and himself.”
So even in the extreme unlikelihood that Hitler had a Jewish ancestor, he would’ve been exempt from the horrid taint, and his modern admirers would no doubt accept that.
Now we can move on to the important stuff, like whether Bernie Sanders is really Aryan.
Clarification, please: Is the OP looking for all available information on the subject, or just information that supports the OP’s viewpoint?
I think the problem was that rather than asking, “did Hitler have Jewish ancestry?” Your OP was worded in such a way as to presuppose that he did not. Then when others pointed to evidence that he may have actually had some, you rejected it out of hand. That suggested that rather than a desire to learn the truth you had a vested interest in the answer being no.
The phrase “nonsense peddled” in the title sort of hinted at what the OP was looking for.
In modern Jewish canon, IIUC, Jewishness is matrilineal, so if he had a Jewish grandfather, he would not himself be officially Jewish at all.
This was decided a long time ago. Gene Simmons was the backup Jew Gene and received an automatic promotion when Wilder died.