Meanwhile, speaking of policy, of which Trump has none, J.D.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm What a wonderful living "memory" of your family going back so far in time to a specific place. A number of years ago, my husband and I went to the village just outside Cologne in North-Rhine Westphalia from which his 2-g-grandparents emigrated to Wisconsin. He did research in the Catholic church records there, and had a surprising discovery: both of his 2-g-grandparents had a Jewish grandmother. This seems to have been totally forgotten in his very Catholic family.
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lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
My entire maternal side were Westphalians, some near Cologne (Köln long ago). And pretty much every Jew in Westphalia could point to a couple of dozen others who they were directly related to, and another hundred who were second or third cousins. Maybe we're 6th cousins, thrice removed! -
William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm You may well share roots with my husband back in time. As you know, Jewish folks migrated up the Rhine into what became Germany a very long time ago and became an important part of German culture. The interesting thing about my husband's discovery is that the knowledgte of Jewish ancestry had been totally suppressed in his devoutly Catholic German-American family. Yet his immigrant ancestor with a Jewish grandmother looks in his photos very much like a rabbi.
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @lolonurse Sad to say but at a certain point it was most likely quite dangerous to admit to any Jewish connection.
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
Hey all! Meet my pal @the_icarian aka Bob. Bob, around this point a bunch of us started chatting about books, geneology, clothing, tuberculosis, peanuts, true love, philosophy, gender issues, the west, Judaism, more. A virtual dinner party of super-interesting people and ideas. Please read our ramblings (comments in non-orderly manner), join in as you wish. Anyone else, too!
All, for hashtag what about #DinnerParty or #DinnerPartyChat?
CC: @wdlindsy @lolonurse @3dogcouch @jinglepostman
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm Welcome to the conversation, Bob. Those hashtags sound great, Karen. I like thinking of this conversation as a dinner party!
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse Yes, and the other factor, I think, is that by the time the Nazis arrived on the scene, there had been centuries of these kinds of cultural and religious crossover marriages, so that having some Jewish blood in one's "pure" German lineage really wasn't uncommon.
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lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
Hi - sorry to have been off-tracked for a couple of days. I wanted to say that being Catholic in Germany was no bed of roses either. After Martin Luther, & then the Protestant Reformation, if you weren't Lutheran, you weren't going to have an easy time.
Hitler also killed Catholics. And it's possible your hubby's family contained some crypto Jews, forced during an inquisition to convert or die. Like the big group of Mexican Americans...1/2 -
lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
2/2 in New Mexico, whose priest learned that he came from a Jewish background, then started doing parishioners' trees, & found that many of them were also crypto-Jews. Did you know there's a large number of Chinese Jews who have all the paraphernalia like menorahs, kiddish cups, Seder plates, but didn't know how to "use" them bc they'd been suppressed for so long!! -
lolonursereplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm
Not only that, but in all the Germanic and European skirmishes for centuries, soldiers would rape whoever was convenient.
(And yet, when I did my DNA testing, it said I am 99% Ashkenazi Jew, traceable to one of the 3 original Ashkenazi women.) So my grandmother was wrong when she blamed "the soldier in the woodpile" for them all being blond & blue-eyed. (But there are a lot of blond or red headed Jews. Lots of redhead Semites.) -
Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
Not uncommon, but potentially lethal. Towards the end of the insanity, even "looking Jewish" was dangerous.
BTW didn't read the thing you wtote but looking forward to doing so this afternoon!
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@lolonurse @wdlindsy I had absolutely no idea! How did Judaism even get to China in the first place, I wonder?
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@KarenStrickholm @wdlindsy
Judaism is all over the world. There's a very old Jewish population in India,
there are lots of Jews in South America and Central America, lots of Jews in Africa - especially South Africa and Ethiopia (ancient population!), just everywhere. Oh - and quite a few Middle Eastern Jews (Lebanese, Iranian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, etc.)... -
William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm An interesting optic on how diverse and global Jewish cultures are: Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food. I love how eye-opening it is in showing the tremendous diversity of foodways in various Jewish communities around the world, the vast diversity of Jewish cultures rooted in one foundational belief system.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse Of course having Jewish blood of any degree — the Nazis directly emulated the one-drop rule of Jim Crow America — became potentially lethal in the Nazi period. This was not the case when my husband's ancestors with "mixed" blood left Germany in the 1840s. This is one of the huge tragedies of what the Nazis did. German Jews had previously been well-integrated into German culture.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @lolonurse Go through little villages all over Germany and you'll see Jewish names on the monuments to the fallen of WWI in front of churches. And then within only a few decades, people were convinced to turn on their Jewish neighbors or to stand by in silence as others did so, to hound and expel and murder them. I am not saying there was not antisemitism in Germany prior to this time. What I am saying is that the situation changed radically due to Nazi propaganda.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Yes, the notion that any ethnic group or "race" is "pure" is mind-boggling to me. It ignores the vast complexity of history, and it ignores the plain fact that race is a socially constructed category and by no means a natural one. DNA testing begins to show us this in interesting ways — begins to shatter our myths. I'm as Southern "white" as you can get, with almost all my immigrant ancestors arriving in Virginia in the 1600s.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Also a proportion arriving in Maryland in the 1600s, and a few more in the middle colonies in the 1700s, then drifting South. I have only one 19th-century immigrant ancestor, my mother's Irish-born grandmother.
So a typical Southern "white" family…. But Ancestry reports to me, to my brother, to our first cousins, that 1% of our genetic make-up comes from the Bantu people of Africa. So somewhere along the line, there was racial line-crossing in one of my lineages.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm These are such fascinating stories. Yes, have read about the Chinese Jewish communities and how Jewish cultural patterns have been preserved in them, even when they're no longer understood. I'm fascinated that two leading writers about Catholic spirituality from Spain in the post-Reformation period, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, both had conversos ancestry, and may both have been hounded by the Inquisition for that reason.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to lolonurse last edited by
@lolonurse @KarenStrickholm Yes, for sure. Some of his ancestors left Germany specifically because of the Prussian takeover of their Catholic regions, with the attempt to impose Lutheran standards and repress Catholics. Several of his ancestors from Catholic parts of Germany were directly involved in rebellions against the Prussian rule and had to leave Germany for fear of reprisal after those rebellions failed.