Residue of persecution
A few years ago the Jerusalem Post had an article about Tony Fossas the Major League pitcher. Fossas born in Cuba, and in the later years of his career, had come to Israel to help start a baseball clinic. While in Israel, Fossas went to the Diaspora Museum and did a search. It turned out the his mother’s family name was the name of a prominent Jewish family in Spain at the time of the inquisition. He questioned some relatives and discovered that his grandmother would secretly light candles on Friday night. At the time of the article Fossas said that he was going to investigate his apparent Jewish heritage. He had apparently been in contact with a Rabbi at that point. How much more he investigated, I have no idea. But the Judaism of his family was hidden for 500 years due to persecution. Now once again we’re hearing of someone in the public eye discovering that he’s Jewish. Last week it was Senator George Allen of Virginia. The revelation about Allen made The Volokh Conspiracy.David Bernstein wonder
This makes me wonder about how many Americans there are who have at least one Jewish grandparent, but who aren’t Jewish, and about how many of these Jewish parents or grandparents hid their origins from their families, as did Albright’s parents, John Kerry’s grandparents, and perhaps Allen’s mom.
In the case of Allen’s mother it appears that it was a combination of fear of persecution and fear of acceptance. Albright’s father apparently hid his origins due to fear of persecution. (Of all the people who’ve turned out to have Jewish roots, I’ve the least sympathetic of Albright. When I first read of her father’s escape from Czechoslovakia, I thought that he was Jewish. I find it beyond belief that the possibility never seemed to cross her mind.) And in the case of Kerry’s grandfather, it appears that he hid his Jewish roots in order to get ahead. Allen’s revelation has led to Charles Krauthammer’s observation, or law. (also here.)
Krauthammer’s Law: Everyone is Jewish until proven otherwise. I’ve had a fairly good run with this one. First, it turns out that John Kerry — windsurfing, French-speaking, Beacon Hill aristocrat — had two Jewish grandparents. Then Hillary Clinton — methodical Methodist — unearths a Jewish stepgrandfather in time for her run as New York senator. A less jaunty case was that of Madeleine Albright, three of whose Czech grandparents had perished in the Holocaust and who most improbably contended that she had no idea they were Jewish. To which we can add the leading French presidential contender (Nicolas Sarkozy), a former supreme allied commander of NATO (Wesley Clark) and Russia’s leading anti-Semite (Vladimir Zhirinovsky). One must have a sense of humor about these things. Even Fidel Castro claims he is from a family of Marranos.
In fishing for an explanation of this phenomenon, Krauthammer finds a good and a not so good reason …
There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world’s population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other “everyones” — the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics. But it is not just Jewish excellence at work here. There is a dark side to these past centuries of Jewish emancipation and achievement — an unrelenting history of persecution. The result is the other more somber and poignant reason for the Jewishness of public figures being discovered late and with surprise: concealment.
Though I prefer to be positive, I tend toward the latter, darker explanation. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon.
In the wake of the revelations about Madeleine Albright’s origins Barbara Kessel wrote a book, Suddenly Jewish about a number of prominent people who discovered mid-life that they were Jewish or had Jewish roots.
I guess that when You’re in Love the whole world’s Jewish. That show featured entertainment’s most famous non-Jewish Jew, Valerie Harper. (She has never been Jewish, except in the characters she played.)
Technorati tags: Judaism, Suddenly Jewish.
Crossposted at Israpundit and Soccer Dad.
