An Alleged Polish Crypto-Jew; Who Wants Peasant Ancestors? Guest Blog Post by Kasia

Peasants in a Russian Village. Who wants boring ancestors like this? Source.

Adrien Brody in "The Pianist." As Kasia observes,
"Both are narratives of victimhood and suffering,
but while one is degrading, the other is ennobling."

Are your ancestors boring? Were they just a bunch of lumpy grey peasants, sunup to sundown, rooting in the earth, slopping manure, snoring? Never learning to read, relieving themselves outside?

Wouldn't you like more glamorous and exotic ancestors than that? If not Cleopatra or Napoleon, at least a poet or two?

Who hasn't known this frustration?

Luckily, when I was a kid, my mother took me to Czechoslovakia, and I met my peasant ancestors. They were really cool people. I write about one of them, my Aunt Bora, in this essay. I am proud and happy to descend from peasants like my Aunt Bora.

But Eastern European peasants are negatively stereotyped, as described in the book "Bieganski." It's understandable that some would like to trade their Eastern European ancestry for a more glamorous one.

***

Recently Bieganski the Blog featured a post titled A Biological Take on Identity Politics. This blog post addressed some people, who have no evidence of Jewish ancestry, insisting that they are crypto-, or hidden, Jews. One New York Times essayist even went so far as to claim that her hidden Jewish ancestry was lurking in her DNA. Her genes contained memories of persecution and survival. She had been raised Catholic, but her genes' memories told her she was really Jewish.

A blog reader, Kasia, read that blog entry and responded with the fascinating story of a woman she came across on the web. This woman appears to be of strictly Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, and Hungarian ancestry, but is insisting, without any evidence, that she is a crypto-Jew.

Here's Kasia's description of the woman:

I have come across this person on the internet who is absolutely convinced that she is Jewish. She seems to have researched her roots pretty well, to the extent that she knows most of the birthplaces and names of her relatives and ancestors within the last 100 years or so.

There is a problem though. All the names and places point to a Gentile Polish/Lithuanian and Slovak/Hungarian background. There is no evidence that any of her ancestors converted to Christianity, to the contrary, they all seem to have been dyed in the wool Roman Catholics.

Surprisingly, this absolute lack of evidence of any Jewish roots is to this person proof absolute that all her relatives had, in fact, been Jewish, then converted, and then lived in denial for the rest of their lives. Not some of them, which would have been realistic, but all of them.

The fact that some of them had their names misspelt / transcribed into English on Ellis Island and in subsequent census records is further evidence of their duplicity and eagerness to hide their true identity.

This would have remained, to me, a bizarre and mildly entertaining story found on the internet; but then I read Danusha's blog post on Crypto Jews, as well as the very interesting comments on this post, and I realised that the earnest, blind yearning for Jewish roots I described above might be dictated by something else, or something more, than mere confusion or wishful thinking.

To someone of her background, swapping the "narrative" (haven't liked the word since Literary Theory class at university, but there you are) of poor, uneducated peasant immigrants from Eastern Europe for a story shared by the Jewish diaspora worldwide is probably tempting. Both are narratives of victimhood and suffering, but while one is degrading, the other is ennobling. One condemns you to isolation and rejection, the other gives your individual existence meaning within a greater whole. I would probably never have understood this if I hadn't read Danusha's blog from end to end beforehand.

Just so it's clear - I wish my internet acquaintance all the luck in finding her Jewish relatives. She probably has a few, like many other Eastern Europeans. I just don't think finding them automatically makes her Jewish. The past is a muddle of ethnicities which it would be impossible to untangle today.

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Regular readers of this blog know what I'm going to say. It is up to us to tell our own story. I cover this ground in the three part blog post on the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision. 

You can start by buying, reading, reviewing, and recommending a book by and about Polish peasants and their working class descendants, and getting that book on the syllabi in schools.