DNA testing is an unparalleled genealogical resource, yet 15 years after the inception of genetic genealogy many genealogists and family historians remain unclear about its use. As a result, DNA testing is underutilized and potential knowledge goes unrealized.
To remedy this situation, the Avotaynu Foundation has taken the lead in forming the Avotaynu DNA Project, a collaboration of experienced Jewish DNA project administrators, historians and geneticists worldwide whose mission is to develop an online knowledge base that will enable historians, scientists and genealogists to further illuminate the history of the Jewish People.
[Editor’s Note: Already persuaded? Go to the bottom of this article at any time and find the ways you can participate in the Avotaynu DNA Project!]
By now, most people know that each human being carries in the genetic material of every one of his cells, information about his ancestors— all of them. Scientists are continually learning more about DNA and what information may be gleaned from it. The use of DNA testing for genealogists is described everywhere—at conferences, on television, on the Web and in books. Perhaps the enormous variety of sources is a prime reason why current and prospective users of DNA testing have so many questions. Lost in all the articles, books and lectures are answers to simple questions such as:
Why is it important that I take a DNA test?
What am I trying to demonstrate?
Who in my family should take the test?
What specific test should they take?
What may I reasonably expect the results to show?
How do I interpret the results?
What haplogroup or regional projects offer assistance?
How do I usefully communicate with genetic matches?
Should I do further testing?
That so many genealogists still ask these basic questions after 15 years of articles, lectures and books, comes in part from the fact that the field is evolving so rapidly, but also because the Jewish genealogical community does not yet have a focal point for answering questions and keeping members abreast of important advances in the use of DNA testing for genealogical research.
Avotaynu aims to meet these needs and its recent expansion into online publishing at www.avotaynuonline. com will help greatly. New tests, new projects and new resources all can be reported online more rapidly and more broadly than ever before. Partnerships with Jewish genealogical organizations, Jewish DNA project sites, genetic experts and social networking outlets will enable Avotaynu to create an online address where reliable current information on users’ most urgent questions—such as those above—may be addressed clearly, accurately and quickly. The goal is not to create a new layer of bureaucracy, but rather to bring together and maximize the talent and energy of existing DNA projects and their managers.
Genetic Census of the Jewish People
An impetus for the Avotaynu Project was the recent Avotaynu Online article written by Bennett Greenspan (“A Call for the Genetic Census of the Jewish People,” Spring 2015) in which he implored the Jewish community to undertake a massive autosomal genetic census of the Jewish people before the size and clarity of our genetic inheritance is lost.
What is clear, however, is that interested members of the genealogical community alone cannot provide the critical mass needed to provide a meaningful sample of the Jewish population. To accomplish this task, genetic testing must become “social-networking-friendly,” easily comprehensible and fun for ordinary (i.e., non-genealogist) Jews to understand and use. Genetic testing must become as simple and rewarding as ordering a book on Amazon.
Increased testing and reporting of DNA results will help individual genealogists by revealing connections that could not be discovered by conventional means. Avotaynu has larger goals as well.
Three Larger Goals
Avotaynu Online, utilizing all of its component resources, has three major goals for DNA testing:
The first goal is to provide sufficient DNA sampling to enable Jews all over the world to discover their genealogical connection to one another. In a theoretical sense, Y chromosome and mitochondria testing has already proven this for specific lineages, but if sufficient numbers of Jews participate in these as well as autosomal DNA testing, the evolution of technology in the years ahead will give evidence of actual connections to one another.
The second goal is to foster projects that will illuminate major questions of Jewish history, such as the current interest among claimed descendants of the b’nei anusim, the remnants of crypto-Jewish families who converted under duress in Spain and Portugal. While the size of this apparent Diaspora is not yet known, the 21st century may yet witness the restoration of a sense of Jewish ancestral identity among these descendants, perhaps an important moment in Jewish history.
The third goal is to enhance the quality of DNA research undertaken both by individual genealogists and by organized DNA projects and to help them present their results in a scientifically credible and publishable form.
To achieve these goals, the Avotaynu DNA Project will help organize existing resources to undertake the following initiatives:
The project will use its website at http://www.avotaynuonline.com/avotaynu-foundation-dna-project/ to serve as a clearinghouse for providing the best available recommendations and links to DNA resources of all kinds—Facebook groups, websites, Family Tree DNA projects pertaining to a specific surname, Y chromosome haplogroups or ancestral location.
In collaboration with expert DNA project administrators, the Project will provide online guidance to genealogists on how to identify genealogically suitable individuals to test within one’s own family, to determine the appropriate tests to take, and to help understand the results.
For people looking to run high-quality DNA projects, the Project will work with geneticists to develop and publish in our pages descriptions of the sophisticated tools and best practices for taking the essential steps in any scientific endeavor, including hypotheses, scientific design, recruitment of test subjects, funding, implementation, tools for data analysis, publication of conclusions.
The Project will endeavor to work with Jewish genealogy conference organizers to foster special programming such as a “DNA Day” to encourage more concentrated conversation on DNA topics among participants who may not be able to devote an entire week to the topic.
The Avotaynu Foundation, a non-profit public foundation, will serve as a U.S. tax-exempt vehicle for individuals that wish to sponsor testing within the community.
To simulate genetic testing, the Project will continue to publish in Avotaynu Online genealogical success stories that have relied on DNA testing. The project will support genetic studies of public interest, such the presently ongoing the “Boy on the Train” project, a collaborative effort to find the family of a three-year-old boy left on a train near Warsaw in 1943, who was adopted by a Catholic family during the war and grew up to become an Israeli army colonel.
To stimulate Sephardic genetic research and illuminate both the Sephardi component of the contemporary Ashkenazi population and any remnants of the crypto-Jewish population, Avotaynu will partner with the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and with Sephardi institutions.
Goals likely will evolve over time, and will not be achievable immediately. The vision laid out here is intended to stimulate a conversation with readers and thereby begin a collaborative process that will serve the disparate needs of the Jewish genealogical community. Take the opportunity to engage now by sending your thoughts to AvotaynuOnline.DNA@gmail.com.
HOW MIGHT YOU PARTICIPATE?
Heare are the Paths to Joining the Avotaynu DNA Project!
If previously been tested by Family Tree DNA, visit http://tinyurl.com/pd8zjk2 and choose Option A. Once you have joined, we will help direct you to haplogroup and geographical DNA projects where experts can help you interpret your results and perhaps recommend further testing that will enable you to learn more. We will give you advice on adding information to your DNA website profile that will increase your chances of being noticed by a genealogical match. If you have close matches, we will offer advice on how to “break the ice” when communicating with them;
If not yet tested, but would like to plow right in and purchase a kit, visit http://tinyurl.com/pd8zjk2 and choose Option B;
If you would like to learn more about Jewish genetic genealogy in general, visit our Project web page at Avotaynu Online DNA Project Home Page. Based on what you are trying to learn about your ancestry, we recommend tests to start with, and give you pointers on how to identify whom in your family should be tested; and lastly,
To receive the latest news on developments in Jewish genetic genealogy no matter what your level of expertise, sign up for a free digital subscription to Avotaynu Online at http://tinyurl.com/oygl3dr. Additional features on DNA subjects also regularly appear in our quarterly print edition, which can be subscribed to by mail or at http://www.Avotaynu.com/journal.htm
IF IN DOUBT, feel free to contact us at AvotaynuOnline.DNA@gmail.com or reply directly to this post.
Sitting on the passenger side of the coach, Reiza Flier swept her beady gray eyes over the family’s small home. At approximately 40 years old, this mother showed expressions of defiance and anticipation, even if she also felt sadness for leaving her ancestors and home behind, fear and anxiety about the journey ahead, and deep longing to reunite with her husband and oldest son. The coach driver flecked the horses, jostling Reiza, her two youngest sons, and himself as the wheels creaked to a brisk roll.
[This article is dedicated to my Grandpa Harold, who I wish could have lived long enough for me to share this with, and to my husband and children, who encouraged my family writing in the first place. Special thanks to the four Flayer female descendants who helped me to reunite all of Max and Rose’s children.]
Even in late September 1910, it was already cold as they departed Shklov, a town in Russia’s Pale of Settlement (also called White Russia, but today within the borders of Belarus). Reiza likely wore a covering over her black hair, many skirts, and several tops capped by a shawl to keep warm and save space in the family’s bags. At less than 5 feet tall, she probably looked like a short, stocky barrel under the thick layers of clothes.
Her sons Galisohey and Mane sat in the back of the coach, similarly bundled up and holding onto the family’s bags. Aged 15 and 13 years, respectively, they were probably excited for the trip, a transatlantic adventure that they hoped would change their lives and the family’s future generations. Galisohey was already taller than his mother, at 5 feet 3 inches, but matched her light complexion, black hair, and dark eyes. Eventually, light brown-haired Mane would grow to be tallest of all his siblings. These three were the last of the family to undertake the arduous trip to America, di goldene medine or “Land of Gold” in Yiddish.[1]
In the past few weeks, these Fliers had sold most of their belongings and said their goodbyes to the family and friends who remained. Elje Flier, Reiza’s father-in-law, was her closest living relation, and he would stay behind. It must have been very difficult for Reiza to watch the buildings and dwellings of Shklov shrink in the distance as each minute passed. With approximately 5,000 Jews still living in town, Shklov had a marketplace and at least one synagogue and school for children.[2] Reiza’s heart must have ached as she realized that this would probably be the last time that she would lay eyes on her hometown — the only place she had ever known — and hoped the future would be brighter in a new place.
Reiza was born between 1870 and 1873 in Shklov, just a few years after her older sister Eska Mira.[3] The girls might have grown up hearing stories about the town’s glorious history from their parents Noach Razin and Lillian.[4]
The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was created by a union between the two kingdoms in 1569.[5] Jews began settling in this Eastern European area (the Pale of Settlement) after they were expelled from Western Europe and Russia and faced economic competition with Christian guilds in western Poland. Polish aristocrats invited Jews to become part of the feudal economy on their estates. Jews managed industries that they leased from these aristocrats and established shtetl towns, while their Polish landlords promised protection and restricted markets on Jewish religious days. This leasing system, upon which the Polish nobles and Jewish agents depended, sustained all participants. Jews exported grain west and played a large role in the production of alcohol. The Jewish communities were largely autonomous and self-governed by an elite group called the kahal, which collected taxes, provided judgment according to Jewish law, and monitored Jewish activities. When revolutions sprung up worldwide toward the end of the 1700s, the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom weakened as absolutist rule strengthened its neighbors. Austria, Prussia, and Russia began swallowing up Polish-Lithuanian lands in 1772 in a partitioning process that lasted 23 years. This change in rule did not immediately alter the Jewish communities but would eventually have a profound and lasting effect on Jewish life in the shtetls.
Situated on the Dnieper River, Shklov was founded in 1668 on the northeastern corner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. [6] The town was owned by Polish magnate families Sieniawski, and later, Czartoryski. The Jewish population in town grew, and many of the most prosperous businesses and families were Jewish.
When Russia annexed Shklov in 1772, the town entered its brief golden era. Empress Catherine the Great gave Shklov’s estates to her romantic “favorite” Major-General Count Semen Gavriilovich Zorich in September 1777. He went on to establish a luxurious court that richly influenced the culture and education of local Jews. On the western border of the first partition, Shklov was situated in an ideal location for the exchange of ideas and products between western kingdoms and Russia’s eastern cities. The urban, aristocratic lifestyles and Western ideas of the court and trade spread first to the Jewish merchants, then to the religious intellectuals. Shklov served as one setting for Jewish cultural debates between Hasidism, Mitnagdic rabbinism, and Haskalah (Enlightenment) and became the first and largest center for Hebrew printing in Eastern Europe.
But this golden era began to decline with Poland’s second and third partitions in 1793 and 1795 and Count Zorich’s death in 1799. Shklov was no longer a border town ripe for exchanging ideas — rather, it became just another interior town among many that Russia overtook. Without any heirs and strapped with high debt, Count Zorich’s court was liquidated by the Imperial treasury and his assets dispersed to government agencies in St. Petersburg. Many of the rabbinic elite immigrated to Israel, influenced by Zionism. Jews from White Russia moved to southwestern parts of partitioned Poland where modern industry was beginning to develop. Most Hebrew printing moved to Vilna and Grodna after 1799. Napoleon invaded and pillaged the town in 1812 as Shklov’s prominence in Yiddish culture and Jewish thought dwindled.
By the generations of Reiza’s grandparents, the traditional Jewish way life for the masses living in shtetls was crumbling. Most Jews were restricted to living in the Pale of Settlement in 1835.[7] Several government statutes — such as implementing military conscription in 1827 (25-year service that was harshest for Jewish males, who could be enlisted at 12 years of age, but even kidnapped and sent to military schools as young as 6 years old), eliminating the kahal’s Jewish autonomous rule, and establishing state schools for Jewish children in 1844 — failed at assimilating Jews into mainstream Russian society or strengthening the economy. The Russian government’s abolishment of serfdom and anti-Semitic attitude (vacillating between policies of assimilation and segregation) made life difficult, and ultimately unsustainable, for the Jews inherited by Russia from the partitions.
Under Czar Alexander II’s reign beginning in 1855, Russia’s economy shifted from a primarily agricultural feudal system to a capitalistic, industrial one.[8] Uprooted from the estate economy, many Jews and peasants were forced into new sources of income and moved from the country into more populated towns and cities, hoping for greater opportunities. Non-Jewish Polish townspeople and peasants, who had long competed with Jews economically and disliked their past loyalty to the Polish nobility, maintained their prejudices against Jews. Economic competition bred poverty and anti-Semitism. When a Jewish revolutionary woman was found to be involved with Czar Alexander II’s assassination in March 1881, many anti-Jewish pogroms broke out in southern Russia. The “May Laws” issued in 1882 forced Jews to live in towns (and even sometimes restricted their moving between shtetls or houses in the same town), limited mortgages and rental contracts to Jews, and prohibited Jews from doing business on Sundays and major Christian holidays.[9]
As this social and political turmoil was unfolding, the Razin girls were growing up, likely in a lower-class household. The sisters would have learned the practical skills of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and child-rearing to prepare them for their future lives as traditional Jewish wives and mothers. Most formal schooling was reserved for boys, but the Razin girls might have attended a heder or similar type of informal education in a local home, with other male or female children for probably four years at most. They communicated in Yiddish, but their ability to read, write, and solve mathematical problems was likely basic. They might have read tekines (women’s prayers) or the Tsena Urena (Yiddish text that retells aggadic material) at home, and they could have learned basic Russian. The girls probably did not understand, read, or write Hebrew, the language of more scholarly, religious Jewish boys who studied Hebrew, Talmud, and other religious texts at the heder, bet midrash, or more intense yeshiva schools.[10] The girls likely learned ways to support their future families through sewing, washing, or gardening as an economic imperative; in the elite Jewish classes, wives were often expected to support their scholar-husbands through small businesses.
Fateful Decision
As Reiza and her two young sons made their way on the road through dense forests, their surroundings were probably mostly unfamiliar to them. Traveling outside of Shklov was most certainly not a habit of theirs and something they would not have undertaken without a lot of planning and trepidation. With the crisp fall weather, the trees’ leaves would have transformed to red, yellow, orange, and brown and started falling, and the small transport might have wondered about roving, hungry wolves in the surrounding forests.[11] Occasional glimpses of the familiar Dnieper River and the memory of their other family members having observed the same surroundings as they began their journeys to America, could have relieved some of their concerns.
They had secured a train-ship-train package, just as their departing family had done before them. The closest train station to Shklov was in Orsha, a city 27 miles northeast that took approximately 9 hours to reach by carriage.
Once in Orsha, they disembarked at the train station, stretched their legs, walked around, and anxiously waited to board the train that would take them to their departure port. Just five years earlier, a violent pogrom had broken out in this same town, killing 32 Jews, injuring hundreds of others, and destroying businesses and houses. It was in this same train station that eight Shklov residents (seven of whom were Jewish) had disembarked for business and were chased and attacked by an angry mob of peasants and railway workers; five of the Jewish travelers were killed.[12] Thus, Reiza probably wanted to stay inconspicuous and hurry her boys onto the train so they could leave as quickly as possible.
Ironically, the railroad tracks that had bypassed Shklov — contributing to its economic demise — were that same ones built at an opportune time for enabling the family’s escape from the tragic fate that awaited them there. Constructed by 1880, the railroad ran from Romny (near Poltava, Ukraine) to Libau (modern-day Liepāja, Latvia), a city then part of Russia. One wonders if Shklov’s residents, who would have heard about the train station in nearby Orsha, realized that this innovation would eventually be the emigration path of thousands of Russian Jews, their lifeline out of the Pale.
Both Razin girls probably married by age 20, following the Jewish tradition of young age at marriage. Eska wedded Leibe Minkin, who practiced Orthodox Judaism.[13] Reiza married Max Flier, who was probably not as religiously inclined. These might have been shiddikhet (arranged marriages), but such a practice was more common among upper-class households whose daughters’ dowries or parents could help support the young couple, especially if the groom was a Torah scholar.
Max Flier was born in Shklov in approximately 1867 or 1868 to Elje Flier.[14] Other Fliers lived in Shklov, but it is unknown if and how they were related. The origin of the surname Flier is vague, but in the Mogilev region where Shklov is situated, it appears to derive from flies, the Yiddish word for “to flee” or “to fly.” It could have also been related to the last name Shinder, which means “a flayer or skinner of animal meat.”[15]
When Max was young, the Russian Ministry of the Interior issued new statutes that made most Russian males liable for military service and further restricted Jewish men.[16] Draftees outside Siberia would serve six years in the army followed by nine years in the reserves, but the draft age for Jews was extended by three years from (age range of 18 to 25 years to 18 to 28 years). Because authorities suspected Jews of draft-dodging more than non-Jews, they enacted more complex measures to keep track of Jewish men, including a special census of all Jewish males and Jewish draftees serving military duty in the same place as where they were registered (instead of closest to their residences). “The [Commission on Jewish Draft Evasion] revoked the Jews’ right to replace conscripts with their brothers, removed the exemption for guardianship of disabled parents, and effectively eliminated the physical requirements for Jewish recruits,” according to author Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.[17] There are many stories of parents paying bribes, mutilating male children, or kidnapping other boys to fulfill Russia’s military quota.[18]
Max also probably came from a lower-class household, and whether he served in the Russian military or not is unknown. Instead of the luxury of becoming a Torah scholar, he learned a trade to support his family and possibly evade the draft, which exempted artisan and guild merchants at certain times. [19] He grew up learning bookbinding, a fitting but probably unprosperous profession given that Shklov’s prominence in Hebrew printing had ended 50 years prior.[20] Max’s trade of bookbinding (and smelling of book glue, according to his grandson Harold Flayer) would last for the rest of his life.[21]
After marriage, young Reiza soon gave birth to three boys — Itzik on May 6, 1891, Galisohey on February 7, 1895, and Mane on April 9, 1898.[22] Similarly, Eska had at least four children of her own during this period, two boys and two girls.[23]
Their families grew in the crowded shtetl, where life worsened as poverty rose and anti-Jewish policies and pogroms continued. Especially in this northwestern area of Russia, the migration of rural Jews into towns and cities increased competition for jobs. Jewish men, many of whom were limited to craftsmen occupations, had difficulty providing for their families when so many other Jewish men in the same town were doing the same jobs.[24] Between 1900 and 1908, the average Jewish family’s income was approximately 500-600 rubles annually ($250 to $300 per year; $5,898-$7,077 in 2015 dollars).[25] Lack of economic opportunities, military conscription, the geographical magnitude of pogroms, plus the government’s indifference disillusioned many Jews and pushed them toward emigration.
The Flier and Minkin families discussed the possibility of moving to America and ultimately decided to support each other in this huge endeavor. Although Max’s bookbinding profession would probably not be a lucrative one anywhere, the Flier family chose to take the chance of immigrating to America, where they could have a greater opportunity for a comfortable life.
Max left first, between 1899 and 1902,[26] a trip that cost about 165 rubles or $1,946 in 2015 dollars (nearly a third of the family’s annual income).[27] Little is known about Max’s actual travel. Apparently many of Shklov’s Jews made a similar decision to emigrate to other places during this same period, because the town’s Jewish population dropped by nearly 50 percent from 9,677 in 1847, to 5,122 in 1897.[28]
Both Itzik and Galisohey, at ages 11 and 7, respectively, had learned enough of their father’s bookbinding trade to carry it on in his absence, possibly with Reiza’s assistance, and bring financial support into the household. However, Mane probably had little memory of his father, having been only approximately 3 to 5 years old when Max left.
With her husband gone and three boys to raise, Reiza likely grew very close emotionally, financially, and physically — and possibly even lived with — the Minkin family. Leibe, Reiza’s brother-in-law, would have carried on with his work, and the boys in both families probably worked to bring in money and possibly attended heder. All three Flier boys likely spent a lot of time with their Minkin cousins. Meanwhile, Eska gave birth to another daughter around 1902.
Leibe emigrated in 1903, the same year as the rest of the Minkin family (two oldest daughters Etta and Lillian and youngest son Jacob) and decided to settle in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[29] Later in 1903, Eska, along with their oldest son Schlomo and baby daughter Rosa, departed from Antwerp aboard S.S. Vaderland, arriving in New York on January 8, 1904.[30] Leibe was working as a peddler and resided at 306 S. Second Street.
Eska and her husband must have had a joyous reunion, because just 10 months later, she gave birth to a baby boy. However, perhaps due to Eska’s advancing age, the baby was stillborn and buried in New Bedford’s Hebrew cemetery on October 23, 1904.[31] The Minkin family continued living in New Bedford, where Leibe began going by the name Luess or Lewis, and Eska changed her name to Mary.[32] In 1910, they resided at 528 S. Water, living close to several other Russian Jewish families, possibly some of the couple’s relatives.[33] The Minkin children and grandchildren went on to become prominent lawyers and professors on the East Coast. Mane Flier always spoke of his Minkin cousins, although he probably didn’t see them much after they left for America. Mary died in 1936 in New Bedford, followed by Luess in 1942.[34]
The Journey Begins
After the Minkin family’s departure from Shklov, Reiza worked and cared for her three Flier sons alone for the next seven years. She stood by, waited, and watched, as her husband and brother-in-law, then her sister and family each departed for America, leaving her and her youngest boys to leave last. Reiza was likely very lonely and became fiercely independent, having to raise her boys essentially on her own.
She probably relied heavily on her father-in-law, Elje, and also her older sons for financial support, along with any money Max could send from America. Her sons’ greater educational opportunities might have meant that Reiza depended on them to read and write letters that passed between her and Max — their only contact for the decade that they spent apart — and for any official documentation that the family would have needed to legally leave the country.
After violent and destructive pogroms broke out in Kishinev, Russia (modern-day Moldova) in 1903 and 1905, the Jewish Colonization Association greatly expanded its work and set up local information bureaus all over Russia to aid Jewish emigrants.[35] The Flier family probably obtained a lot of assistance with procuring tickets and official documentation, as well as information about the journey, safety, America, and the English language, from a nearby JCA office. Emigration was highest in the western part of the Pale, with most information bureaus in the Minsk province. Since many bureaus were located near railways and rivers, there was likely some JCA organization in Shklov or at least Orsha.
Perhaps the Orsha and Kishinev pogroms or Itzik’s maturation — and eligibility for the draft — prompted the family to send Itzik out of Russia as soon as possible. To legally leave Russia, each emigrant needed a passport, a ship ticket, and reasonably good health.
Procuring a passport required a prospective emigrant “to present an identity card; a ‘certificate of probity’ from the police stating that there was no hindrance to the person’s going abroad; and, if the applicant was male and between the ages of 18 and 21, a document certifying that he had reported to the recruitment office.”[36] An identity card had to be obtained from where a person was registered or resided; without one, birth certificates and witnesses had to prove identity. Police would issue a certificate of probity after viewing the identity card and ensuring no complaints had been filed against the person. A passport could then be issued for all the family members whose identities had been proven.
However, if a father left without leaving a passport for his wife or a notarized document of their marriage, she had more obstacles to overcome. To obtain a passport, the wife had three choices. Her husband could declare before a notary in the new country that he wanted his wife and children to join him, then the affidavit had to be signed at the Russian consulate in his place of residence and sent to his wife. The wife claim could declare at a police station that her husband had abandoned her and obtain confirmation statement after an investigation. Or the wife could emigrate illegally.
Obviously, obtaining passports and other documentation was a difficult and long process, prompting approximately 90 percent of Jewish emigrants to leave illegally, usually through bribery or smuggling. “The separate communal registration of the Jewish population, internal migration that took people far from where they were originally registered, wives without power of attorney from their husbands, and the difficulty of coping with the Russian bureaucracy of the early twentieth century led many emigrants to look for an illegal way to get out of the country,” according to author Gur Aloey.[37] Additionally, the near-equal cost for emigration, at 12 to 15 rubles for a passport or smuggler, made the legal status irrelevant.[38]
With assistance from Max, the JCA, or the Hebrew Aid Society in Chicago, the Fliers purchased prepaid packages through shipping companies or their agents for Itzik and later the remaining family’s trips. Usually paid in installments, advance payments were sent to the shipping company, which registered the passengers, and the final payment was made at the port.[39] The company then had to send the emigrants on the first ship sailing for the chosen destination.
Itzik’s total emigration probably cost approximately $1,946 in 2015 dollars, which included $177 for train fare; $825 for ship passage; $141 for a passport or border smuggler; and $118 for lodging in Libau, food, and medical exam; plus $25 to show U.S. authorities. Three years later, the price of emigration would have been closer to $2,536 each for Reiza, Galisohey, and Mane. After 1908, each immigrant was required to show $50 at Ellis Island, but married women traveling to reunite with their husbands could be excluded from this.
The family chose Libau as their departure port. This was not surprising — when the port opened in 1905, it was called “The Libauian Danger” because it diverted emigrants away from Western Europe, especially German ports.[40] Railways directly linked this Baltic Sea port to populated cities in the Pale as well as more rural agrarian regions such as Orsha. It also had the advantage of being in the same country (Russia), using the same language, and boasting the second largest Jewish community in a Baltic port, according to the 1897 census. Medical inspections were also easier to pass there than in Germany. Although passports were more necessary for those departing from Libau,[41] port guards or gendarmes were always open to bribery. In fact, a plurality of Jewish emigrants between 1905 and 1914 departed from Libau (29%).
Alone at 16 years old, Itzik left his mother and brothers behind at the Orsha train station and arrived in Libau. Described as 5 feet 2 inches tall, with dark skin and brown hair and eyes, Itzik departed from Libau on October 21, 1907 aboard the S.S. United States.[42] The ship stopped in Copenhagen, Denmark before arriving on November 12, 1907 in New York. Itzik’s final destination was to Uncle L. Minkin in New Bedford. Since Luess had paid for Itzik’s ship passage, he might have been obligated to work near him to pay off the debt. With his bookbinding skills, a few belongings, and $2 in his pocket ($51 in 2015 dollars), Itzik set off reunite with his Minkin family and set up shop in Massachusetts.
Itzik quickly changed his name to Jack. In 1909 and 1910, he was already working as a bookbinder at 69 Purchase Street while living with the Minkins at 528 S. Water Street.[43] Soon, Jack joined Max’s business as a bookbinder in Chicago, and they lived as boarders at 1219 S. Jefferson Street in May 1910.[44] They were living in home shared with Max Atkin, his wife and 3 children, between the railroad tracks and infamous Maxwell Street. Most of their neighbors were Jews from Russia as well. Both Flier men spoke Yiddish, not English. By this point, Max had evidently decided that his Hebrew bookbinding business would flourish in a city that had such a large Jewish population, and so he began setting down roots.
Completing the Journey
Now, the train brought Reiza, Galisohey and Mane through Minsk, Vilna, Kovno, all bustling metropolises where the little family marveled at the huge buildings and crowds of people they had never witnessed before.[45] Around September 23, they disembarked from the train in Libau, where Jews had become emigration agents, money exchangers, and hotel/boardinghouse managers as the emigration business became more financially lucrative in the 1890s.[46]
By this time, U.S. laws mandated detailed manifest lists and departure port inspections of passengers or the shipping companies would face fines. Companies usually placed this burden on their shipping agents, who could lose their right to represent the shipping line if too many immigrants were sent back to their home countries at the companies’ expense.[47] In 1906, the Russian American Line began direct steamship service between Libau and New York. Steerage emigrants were supposed to undergo medical inspections at the Libau port, and an American doctor “carefully examined” the Fliers.[48] The family stayed in a boardinghouse, hotel room, or room provided by the shipping company for five days until their departure date. Their bodies, clothes, and belongings might have also been cleaned and deloused at this time, and they could have been vaccinated.
However, the U.S. Immigration Commission complained about the inadequacy of procedures. Indeed, a Commission report created just a year after the Flier’s journey explained that a dock clerk for the American consular agent could not speak English and “mechanically placed the consular seal on every inspection card presented to him without even looking at the person to whom the card had been issued.”[49] The inspecting committee also learned that the consular agent could not speak English and never attended embarkation, simply signing the ship’s bill of health when it was sent to him.
Once at the dock, the Fliers showed their passports (or done some bribing if they did not have any), received a stamp on their inspection cards certifying their health, and did not worry about entanglements with authorities because the boys were not draft age. They answered many questions for the ship manifest, declaring that their final destination was to Max Flier in Chicago, Illinois.[50] They carried tickets, paid for by Max and Reiza, as well as $25 ($625 in 2015 dollars). Reiza was described as 4 feet 10 inches tall and unable to read or write. Galisohey was taller, able to read and write, and already working as a tailor. Mane could read and write, but no other details were given for him, probably because of his young age. Many of their fellow passengers were also Russian, Polish, and Jewish.
On September 28, 1910, they boarded S.S. Estonia and made their way into the bowels of the ship along with approximately 780 other steerage passengers, setting sail soon after.[51] Built in 1889, it was an older ship acquired by the Russian American Line just three years earlier.[52] “Steerage was the least desirable space on the ship: an extremely crowded area with inadequate sanitation, no ventilation, noxious smells, noise from the engine and people, and increased sensation of the rocking of the ship, plus little to do to occupy time,” explained one author.[53] The Fliers probably stayed together in the family compartment, sleeping on two-layer bunk beds beside other families.[54] Mattresses were likely burlap-covered bags of straw or seaweed. Each steerage passenger probably received a pillowcase, a life jacket (which also served as a pillow), blanket, and mess kit. There were just one to two washrooms for third class passengers, with a few wash basins each. The Fliers probably felt seasickness, given that they had spent little to no time on the water during their entire lives in Shklov. If they felt well enough to eat, passengers would wait in long lines for stewards to serve food into their mess kits from 25 gallon tanks or kettles on deck or in steerage.
The Fliers spent more than two weeks sleeping in the stuffy, stinky, and filthy lower decks of the ship, where seasickness and cramped quarters likely made the air putrid and disease rampant. Despite these squalid conditions, passengers could enjoy music played by others or if the weather was nice, breathe in fresh air on deck. The Fliers might have enjoyed watching the waves of the Baltic and North Seas and city sights during the ship’s stop in Rotterdam, Netherlands.[55] On the last long leg of their voyage, they would have stared at the vastness of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Once they finally reached the New York coast, the ship passed through the waterway between Brooklyn and Staten Island. When passengers on deck spotted their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, their excited shouts would have elicited a rush of passengers up to the decks, cheering and crying in relief. The Statue symbolized the end of their ship passage but more importantly, their arrival in America, the place where they hoped to find freedom, prosperity, and happiness.
Upon arrival, an American doctor boarded the ship to check for obvious signs of illness or any contagious diseases.[56] Recent cases of cholera among newly arrived immigrants had frightened Ellis Island officials and prompted them to begin a letter-writing campaign to immigrants at their final destinations.[57] A health officer found no traces of cholera aboard S.S. Estonia, but he still delayed the ship’s arrival until a sick child could be removed from a cabin and observed for signs of cholera. The ship docked at a wharf on October 13 or 14, where first- and second-class passengers disembarked, but third-class passengers had to wait several hours or even days to board ferry barges that would take them to Ellis Island.[58]
While waiting on deck, the Fliers likely had a lot of time to marvel at New York City, the largest, most crowded city they had ever seen. Reiza probably especially worried about whether the three of them would pass their final examinations and if they did, how they would find their way to the train station in such a bustling, confusing city. Eventually, Reiza, Galisohey, and Mane Flier picked up their bags and stepped off the ferry onto Ellis Island. They likely felt a mixture of relief, worry, and excitement as they felt solid ground beneath their feet for the first time in weeks. They were guided into a large brick building to begin their final inspection process, a nerve-racking experience that would last probably five hours.
Once inside, tags with each immigrant’s page and line number from the ship manifest were pinned or hung around them, and their baggage was inspected and stored. The Fliers would have been led up a stairway, unaware that they were undergoing the “6-second exam” during which inspectors looked for obvious physical problems and used chalk to mark the front of each person’s coat with an initial letter, indicating their defect. Once in the huge Registry Hall, a surgeon reviewed their health inspection cards from aboard the ship, and more formal medical inspections and intelligence exams occurred. Inspectors and physicians were probably especially diligent about signs of cholera, given the recent news. At another station, the dreaded “eye man” used button hooks, hairpin, or fingers to lift each Flier member’s eyelids, checking for trachoma, a highly contagious and feared eye disease that causes blindness.
Finally, immigrants who passed these inspections sat or stood in divided pens awaiting their legal inspection. Registry clerks, along with immigration inspectors (who were often fluent in foreign languages or assisted by interpreters), called out the immigrants and re-questioned them, using the manifests to confirm their answers. The interrogation lasted just a few minutes, and most passed it just fine.
There is no indication that any of the Flier family were detained or deported. So once they successfully passed all tests at Ellis Island, they were brought to the money exchange office and then escorted to the ferries that would bring them across the waters of New York Harbor to lower Manhattan in New York City. On the mainland, they would have taken a horse-drawn cab or a trolley (the East Side Line from Lower Manhattan near City Hall to a few blocks east and then walked) to Penn Station. Once there, they likely had tickets for one of the Erie Railroad’s Main Lines that brought passengers from New York to Chicago.[59]
As the three Fliers settled into their train seats for a 2:40 p.m., 6:30 p.m., or 12 a.m. departure, they must have felt both exhilarated and exhausted. After years of waiting and such a lengthy journey, they had arrived and been admitted into America. Their train ride would take them through Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, giving them cursory views of New York and Ohio’s cities and countrysides. Nearly 30 hours later, they were finally reunited with husband and father, Max, and son and brother, Itzik, in Chicago’s Grand Central Station.
Settling in Chicago
After nearly a decade apart, Reiza and Max’s long-awaited reunion must have been joyous. The happy family became reaccustomed to living together again at a house at 646 W. 12th Street (renamed Roosevelt Road in 1919). They likely rented part of the building, sharing it with other families. This location was just around the corner from Max and Itzik’s residence in May,[60] and was right in the heart of Chicago’s Russian Jewish neighborhood.
Between 1880 and 1920, approximately 55,000 East European immigrants settled around the intersection of Halsted and Maxwell streets, and 90 percent of this population was Jewish.[61] This poorest part of the city had the advantages of being close to the railroad tracks where immigrants disembarked and offering plenty of cheap (but shoddy) housing. Crowded with stalls, shops, and homes, the area became the bustling shtetl marketplaces that newcomers, like Reiza’s family, knew so well back home. Although she might have been accustomed to minimal indoor plumbing, the density of people and buildings packed into a few blocks still might have stunned and frightened her. She likely missed the space, natural light, and outside beauty afforded by their own private home back in Shklov. This “ghetto” area’s buildings often had several apartments that many families rented, and stables and outhouses cluttered the alleys behind homes, where trash and waste piled in smelly, vermin-infested heaps. Not surprisingly, these crowded and unsanitary conditions led to frequent infections.
Sweatshops, with their harsh and sometimes fatal working conditions, sprang up, and children often quit school early to work and help support their families. Reiza and her sons were probably impressed to hear about the huge garment workers’ strike that had begun earlier in October 1910 at the nearby Hart, Schaffner, and Marx factory. [62] After hundreds of arrests and a few deaths, the four-month-long strike was deemed largely successful, as the owners were forced to recognize needle-trade unions, improve sanitary conditions, increase uniform and overtime wages, and reduce the workweek. Earning a living was still exhausting for immigrants, and many traditional Jews found it challenging to adjust to the city’s rushed nature and German Jews’ secularism. Anti-Semitic attacks against Jews, sometimes fatal ones, still occurred, but there was no obligatory military service and no more pogroms for the Fliers to worry about.
Overall, life within the Maxwell Street community was generally safe and familiar. “The security of the temporary, transitional culture within the Maxwell Street community, with its myriad familiar Jewish institutions and traditions, served to ease the pain of accommodation into the New World, even though the ghettolike settlement was itself a small and limited world,” wrote Irving Cutler, a Jewish Chicago author.[63] Max and Rose never learned English or became naturalized, speaking only Yiddish in their home.[64] This is not surprising, because they never had to leave their Yiddish-speaking neighborhood and could still reap America’s benefits without becoming citizens. A few blocks southwest, they would have done their shopping, bargaining, socializing, and possible selling among the crowded stalls and shops of the Twelfth-Halsted-Jefferson-Maxwell Street commercial districts. There were numerous synagogues, Hebrew schools, bathhouses, and Yiddish newspapers and theaters. Within a few blocks northwest of their home, the Fliers could have visited Jane Addams’ Hull House, the Jewish Training School, or the Chicago Hebrew Institute for English, Jewish, or technical classes and for social events. Even though they never learned English, all of the family members Anglicized their names: Max was most certainly not his original name, Reiza changed her name to Rose, Galisohey altered his to Edward, Mane began going by Emanuel or “Manny,” and the family’s last name became Flayer.
Less than one year after arriving, Rose gave birth to Elsie on September 13, 1911.[65] Rose was approximately 42 years old at this time and probably not expecting to be a mother again. Elsie endured an isolated, sad childhood, since she was much younger than her brothers (13 years younger than Manny) and the only female offspring.[66] She remembered her mother being sickly and likely tired while growing up.
Rose, standing; Elsie, center; others unknown
By approximately 1917, Rose and all her children posed for photographs in Chicago. Dark and stern Rose sat beside young Elsie (aged 5 to 7 years), whose shy white face was framed by long ringlets. Both females were probably wearing their best clothes, and standing beside them were an unknown woman and girl, possibly Rose’s sister Mary Minkin and one of her daughters, but more likely local friends or their landlord’s wife and daughter. All three Flayer sons also posed for photographs before the brothers went their separate ways. Somehow, all of the family members were able to avoid working in the harsh sweatshops that prevailed in the area. The rest of their lives were marked by many moves, new relationships, and job changes, as Max and Rose’s children established their own lives in America.
Elsie’s three brothers: Edward, Manny and Jack Flayer
The first major event in the young men’s lives would have been America’s entry into World War I. Just after they had escaped Russia’s military conscription, they were eligible for military service in the United States. All three became registered, but there is no evidence that any of them were drafted.
By June 1917, Jack was working as a driver for a wet washing business in New York City. Some unknown injury had caused him to lose at least three fingers from his right hand, but this might have saved him from serving both in Russia and America.[67] The same day, Edward was living on his own on Wood Street in Chicago, around the corner from his family. He was working as a printer for druggist/pharmacist E.C. Dewitt closer to downtown Chicago.[68]
When Manny registered for the draft a year later, he was living with his family at 1823 Taylor Street and working at Loirette Corset Company.[69] By this time, the Flayer family had moved further west, away from the crowded Maxwell Street area like many other Jewish families were doing.[70] They shared the building with another small Jewish family.
Max, Rose, and Elsie Flayer continued residing on Taylor Street for the January 1920 census, but where Manny was living at the time is unknown.[71] Elsie was already attending primary school, where she first began learning English.[72] This same year, American women won the right to vote, and Prohibition outlawed alcohol, but these events probably did not largely affect the Flayers.
By the time of the 1923 directory, the family had moved to 1458 Washburne Avenue, right beside the Addams/Medill Park.[73] Manny was living with his family and working as a milliner. This home was more east than their previous one, closer to Maxwell Street, so the family might have moved there to enable Elsie to be closer to Joseph Medill High School. Probably around this time, Max, Rose, and Elsie posed in pictures outside their home. Max appeared sturdy, happy, and proud, while Rose showed a defiant yet exhausted expression as she wore ill-fitting, faded dresses. Bright Elsie smiled broadly and sported a brown, stylish bob.
L-R: Elsie as a teenager, unknown woman, RoseMax and Rose
Elsie completed the business curriculum in two years, taking bookkeeping courses because she felt the need to work as soon as possible.[74] The school building (still in existence as the Urban Prep Academy at 1326 W. 14th Place) was located just a few blocks from her home, near the intersection of 14th Place and Throop. The Medillite yearbook from June 1927 printed the slogan “Wisdom, dignity and modesty — may these, thy assets, prove of rare power to thee” under Elsie’s name. [75] Her motto was listed as “Right living brings happiness,” and her favorite saying was, “I’ll forgive you this time, but don’t let it happen again.” She enjoyed using a bookkeeping machine and must have been well-liked at school, because she was the central character in the “Prophecy for the June Class” poem published in the yearbook:
…I beheld near by a lady coming on with footsteps slow
And thought I would inquire of her that which I wished to know.
As she came a little nearer, I thought I knew her face
Yet I couldn’t put it in exactly its right place.
But at last she stood before me and all wonder vanished quite —
‘Twas our old chum, Elsie Flayer, and I hugged her with delight.
It was strange that I should know her for the change in her was great;
She was very tall and slender and she moved with queenly gait.
She, quite surprised to see me, said I had been long away
And gave me an invitation to remain with her that day.
Her kind offer I accepted, and she hailed an aero car …
Within a few months of Elsie’s graduation, Manny moved out of the house upon his marriage. By 1928-1929, Max, Rose, and Elsie had moved west again and were renting at 1218 Millard Avenue, in the predominantly Jewish area called Lawndale. Many Jews in Chicago can trace their families to Lawndale, “for during much of the first half of the twentieth century, as many as 40 percent of the Jews of Chicago lived there.”[76] This area was quiet and had relatively new residences, spacious streets, and parks surrounded by railroads. “Most of the brick and stone houses lining the streets had light and airy rooms, baths front and back porches, and backyards bordered by alleys,” Cutler described. Although there were many single-family homes on this street, their building was likely divided into apartments. At least three families lived in their building, and the Flayers paid $25 per month in rent ($358 in 2015 dollars).[77] Even in his 60s, Max worked as a bookbinder; Elsie had started work as a mail order clerk.
Elsie, around 18 years old, in 1927.
1929 was a rough year for Americans, but it was an especially tragic time for the Flayers. This year served as the beginning of the end of Rose’s triumphant life. She had survived through so much — living in poverty and danger under discriminatory Russian rule, largely raising three sons on her own, traversing the Atlantic Ocean as a wife with two sons, seeing three sons avoid military duty in two countries, raising a daughter later in life, and acclimating to a new life in America. It was her strong body, rather than an external factor, that eventually turned against her. Rose had likely experienced abdominal pain and bowel difficulty for some time and underwent surgery after being diagnosed with rectal cancer, a form of colon cancer.[78] When the stock market crashed in October, the family was probably rejoicing over the birth of Manny’s first daughter. But then they plunged into mourning, as the infant died unexpectedly in early November.[79]
With these medical and emotional struggles, the Depression’s start probably strained the family’s financial situation. Rose must have continued to be sickly and sad over the next two years, despite her surgery. The cancer spread to her pelvic organs, lungs, and lymph nodes by the time she was hospitalized at Michael Reese Hospital. She succumbed to the cancer on July 14, 1931 at the age of 58 years.[80] Her funeral was held the next day, and she was buried in the Mazir gate section of Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park.[81] Rose’s death hit Elsie hard — she was not even 20 years old yet, she was the only child still living at home, and she was Rose’s sole daughter. As a young woman, Elsie was likely devastated at the loss of her best friend.
After Rose’s death, Max married an older woman named Lena, who Elsie disliked as a stepmother.[82] Elsie went to live with friends and then stayed with Jack’s family in New York City or Fall River, Massachusetts for about a year. She became close with his oldest daughter, Sylvia, and returned to Chicago around 1933, when her niece was about 12 years old.
Max finally retired from bookbinding in July 1934, and he and Lena moved to a house at 1441 S. Spaulding.[83] After working and experiencing hypertension for so many years, Max had a short retirement period. He passed away on January 31, 1936 from heart failure, aged 68, at Mount Sinai Hospital. His funeral was held on February 3 at Weinstein Brothers’ Chapel, and he was buried alongside Rose at Waldheim Cemetery.[84] He had worked hard to support his family, lived alone for years, and led his family halfway across the world to enrich their livelihoods. Lena did not last much longer, moving to Sawyer Avenue and then passing away in May of the same year.
Like many other immigrants, Max and Rose showed foresight, struggled and sacrificed, and established a new life for their family, ensuring that their descendants would ultimately thrive in America. It is their triumphs that will keep Flayer family memories alive for future generations.
Notes
[1] Henry Abramson, “Two Jews, Three Opinions: Politics in the Shtetl at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” The Shtetl: New Evaluations, Steven T. Katz, editor. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 85-101, particularly 87.
[2] For more information about Shklov’s history, see David E. Fishman, “Shklov,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shklov: accessed July 5, 2015). Also, see David E. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
[3] No birth records for the Razin sisters are available to this author. These estimates are based on other documents available for the women, such as census, immigration, and death records.
[4] Waldheim Cemetery (Forest Park, Cook County, Illinois), Rose Flayer marker, Gate 121, Section Mazir, Lot 39, Section B, Row 19, Grave 4; personally read and photographed, 2005; translated by Soloman Lachman, 2014. Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records, death certificate 6020923 (July 14, 1931; amended September 11, 1931), Rose Flayer; Cook County Clerk, Chicago.
[5] Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
[6] Fishman, “Shklov,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov.
[7] Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Bartal, Jews of Eastern Europe.
[10] Shaul Stamfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 7, Antony Polonsky, editor (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 187-211.
[11] See Zalman Shneour, Song of the Dnieper, Joseph Leftwich, translator (New York: Roy Publishers, 1945), a fictional Shklov novel that describes scenes of wolves attacking coaches.
[13] Marsha Jackson, to Shayna Muckerheide, email, 7 July 2013, “Re: Family History Email from Shayna Muckerheide,” Muckerheide Research Files; privately held by Shayna Muckerheide, Sandusky, Ohio.
[14] Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records, death certificate 6003290 (2 February 1936), Max Flayer; Cook County Clerk, Chicago.
[15] Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, NJ: Avotaynu, 1993), Avotaynu.com (http://www.avotaynu.com: 28 December 2015). Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Dictionary of Jewish Names and their History (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 151.
[16] Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 132-138.
[17] Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 138.
[18] Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army.
[19] Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 133.
[20] Fishman, “Shklov,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
[21] Illinois death certificate no. 6003290 (2 February 1936), Max Flayer.
[22] No birth records for the Flyer sons are available to this author. These estimates are based on other documents available for the men, such as census, immigration, naturalization, and death records.
[23] 1910 U.S. census, Bristol County, Massachusetts, population schedule, New Bedford, p. 16B, ED 203, dwelling 528 Water Street, family 721, Louis Minkin; digital image, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com: accessed June 19, 2013); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 579.
[24] Gur Alroey, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters From Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 158-159.
[25] Gur Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl. In the footsteps of Eastern European Jewish emigrants to America, 1900-1914,” Leidschrift vol. 22, no. 11 (April 2007): 91-122, particularly 99.
[26] 1910 U.S. census, Cook County., Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, p. 15A, ED 512, dwelling 1219 Jefferson Street, family 219, Max Flier; digital image, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com: accessed March 19, 2013); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 250. 1920 U.S. census, Cook County, Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, p. 16B, ED 639, dwelling 1823 Taylor St., family 339, Max Flayer; digital image, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com: accessed March 19, 2013); citing NARA microfilm publication T625, roll 319.
[28] Fishman, “Shklov,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
[29] 1910 U.S. census, Bristol Co., Massachusetts, pop. sch., p. 16B, dwell. 528 Water Street, fam. 721, Louis Minkin.
[30] Manifest, S.S. Vaderland, December 19/29, 1903, list A, p. 67, line 15, for Mirel Minkin (age 36); digital images, Ellis Island (http://www.ellisisland.org: accessed June 19, 2013); citing NARA microfilm publication T715, roll 425.
[31] New Bedford, Massachusetts, death certificate no. 1236 (October 24, 1904), infant Minkin; digital image, FamilySearch.org (https://familysearch.org: accessed 30 December 2015); citing Massachusetts Archives, “Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915,” v 71, cn 227, FHL microfilm 2057436.
[32]New Bedford Directory (Boston, Massachusetts: W.A. Greenough & Co., 1906), 307, for Louis Minkin; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed June 19, 2013); citing U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995database.
[33] 1910 U.S. census, Bristol Co., Massachusetts, pop. sch., p. 16B, dwell. 528 Water Street, fam. 721, Louis Minkin.
[34] Plainville Jewish Cemetery (New Bedford, Bristol County, Massachusetts), Eshka Mira and Luess Minkin markers; read and photographed by Marsha Jackson, 2013.
[35] Alroey, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear, 14-17 and 24-31.
[40] Nicholas Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880-1914,” Jews and Port Cities, 1590-1990: Commerce, Community, and Cosmopolitanism, David Cesarnin and Gemma Romain, editors (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006): 197-214, particularly 201-209. Alroey, “Out of the Shtetl,” 113.
[41] Harry Boonin, “Coming to America from Hamburg — Through Hamburg and Liverpool,” Avotaynu:The International Review of Jewish Genealogy XXII, No. 4 (Winter 2006): 15-22. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 28.
[42] Manifest, S.S.United States, November 12, 1907, list 10, p. 166, line 3, Itzik Flier (age 16); digital images, The Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Foundation Inc. (http://www.ellisisland.org: accessed July 5, 2015); citing NARA microfilm publication T715.
[43]New Bedford Directory (Boston, Massachusetts: W.A. Greenough & Co., 1909), 232, for Jacob Flayer; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed June 19, 2013); citing U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995database.
[44] 1910 U.S. census, Cook Co., Illinois, pop. sch., p. 15A, dwell. 1219 Jefferson Street, fam. 219, Max Flier.
[45] George F. Cram, “Russia,” Cram’s Standard American Atlas of the World, 3rd ed. (Chicago: 1889), 329; digital image, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (http://www.davidrumsey.com: accessed 29 December 2015).
[46] Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880-1914,” 205.
[47] Ronald H. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 17-18.
[48] Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880-1914,” 205-209. “Won’t Let Cholera Spread,” The Sun (New York: October 14, 1910), page 1, column 4; digital image, Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov: accessed 29 December 2015).
[49] Evans, “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880-1914,” 208.
[50] Manifest, S.S. Estonia, October 13-14, 1910, list 5, p. 18, line 16, Reiza Flier (age 41); digital images, The Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Foundation Inc. (http://www.ellisisland.org: accessed 5 September 2014); citing NARA microfilm publication T715, roll 1577.
[51] “Won’t Let Cholera Spread,” The Sun. p. 1, col. 4.
[54] For more information about experiences on immigrant ships, see also Ronald H. Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Ivan Chermayeff, Fred Wasserman, and Mary J. Shapiro, Ellis Island: An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1991); Mandy Patinkin, Ellis Island, DVD (The History Channel, 2001); Pamela Reeves, Ellis Island: Gateway to the American Dream (Avenel, New Jersey: Random House, 1993); Virginia Yans-McCalughlin and Marjorie Lightman, with The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Ellis Island and the Peopling of America: The Official Guide (New York: The New York Press, 1997).
[57] “Won’t Let Cholera Spread,” The Sun. p. 1, col. 4.
[58] Manifest, S.S. Estonia, October 13-14, 1910, for Reisa Flier, The Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Foundation Inc. (http://www.ellisisland.org).
[59] Matthew J. Boylan, New York City, to Shayna Muckerheide, email, 22 September 2014, “Library Question — Answer [Question #9841163],” Muckerheide Research Files; privately held by Shayna Muckerheide, Sandusky, Ohio.
[60] Manifest, S.S. Estonia, October 13-14, 1910, for Reisa Flier, The Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Foundation Inc. (http://www.ellisisland.org). Donnelly, Reuben H. Donnelly, The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago (Chicago: The Chicago Directory Company, 1911), 460, Max Flayer; microfilm number 88 image, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.
[61] For more information about the Jewish Chicago experience in the early 20th century, see Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Ira Berkow, Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1977); Irving Cutler, Jewish Chicago: A Pictorial History (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2000).
[64] Rhona Greenstein, Los Angeles, to Shayna Muckerheide, email, 27 September 2014, “Re:,” Muckerheide Research Files; privately held by Shayna Muckerheide, Sandusky, Ohio. 1930 U.S. census, Cook County, Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, p. 6A, ED 16-867, dwelling 1218 Millard Ave., family 108, Max Flayer; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 29 December 2015); citing NARA microfilm publication T626, roll 454.
[65] “Illinois, Cook County Birth Registers, 1871—1915,” Elsie Flayer, index, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 December 2015); citing Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records, Springfield.
[66] Anita Juswick and Rhona Greenstein, phone interview by Shayna Muckerheide, December 2013; personal notes privately held by interviewer, Sandusky, Ohio, 2013.
[67] World War I draft registration card, New York County, New York, serial number 334, draft board 96, roll 1765678; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 December 2015); citing NARA microfilm publication M1509.
[68] World War I draft registration card, Cook County, Illinois, serial number 32, draft board 23, roll 1493572; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 December 2015); citing NARA microfilm publication M1509.
[69] World War I draft registration card, Cook County, Illinois, serial number 171, draft board 25, roll 1493574; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 December 2015); citing NARA microfilm publication M1509.
[71] 1920 U.S. census, Cook Co., Illinois, pop. sch., p. 16B, dwell. 1823 Taylor St., fam. 339, Max Flayer.
[72] Greenstein to Muckerheide, email, 22 September 2014.
[73] R.L. Polk, Polk’s City Directory (Chicago: R.L. Polk & Co., 1923), 1336, Max Flayer; digital image, Newberry Library (http://www.chicagoancestors.org: accessed 29 December 2015).
[74] Rhona Greenstein, Los Angeles, to Shayna Muckerheide, email, 28 December 2015, “Re: Belated Reply,” Muckerheide Research Files; privately held by Shayna Muckerheide, Sandusky, Ohio.
[75] The Students of Joseph Medill High School, The Medillite 25 (Chicago, Illinois: June 1927), 81 and 88; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com: 30 December 2015), citing U.S., School Yearbooks, 1880-2012 database.
Alroey, Gur. “‘And I Remained Alone in a Vast Land’: Women in the Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 12, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2006): 39—72.
—. “Out of the Shtetl. In the footsteps of Eastern European Jewish emigrants to America, 1900-1914.” Leidschrift vol. 22, no. 11 (April 2007): 91-122.
The American Association of General Passenger and Ticket Agents. The Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba, 42nd Year. W.F. Allen and E.S. Allen, eds. New York: The National Railway Publication Co., January 1910. Hathi Trust. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp. 39015076287310
Boonin, Harry D. “Coming to America from Hamburg — Through Hamburg and Liverpool.” Avotaynu:The International Review of Jewish Genealogy XXII, No. 4 (Winter 2006): 15-22.
Chermayeff, Ivan, Fred Wasserman, and Mary J. Shapiro. Ellis Island: An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1991.
Chicago Alphabetical Telephone Directory. Chicago: Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Summer 1930. Microfilm image. Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois.
Cram, George F. “Russia Map.” Cram’s Standard American Atlas of the World, 3rd ed. Chicago: 1889. Digital image. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. http://www.davidrumsey.com.
Donnelly, Reuben H. The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago. Chicago, Illinois: The Chicago Directory Company, 1911. Microfilm image. Newberry Library. Chicago, Illinois.
Illinois. Cook County. 1910, 1920, 1930 U.S. census, population schedule. Digital images. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestry.com.
Illinois. Cook County. World War I draft registration cards. Digital images. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestry.com.
Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records. “Illinois, Cook County Birth Registers, 1871—1915.” Index. Springfield, Illinois. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestry.com.
Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records. Death certificates. Cook County Clerk, Chicago. http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com
Juswick, Anita, and Rhona Greenstein. Phone interview by Shayna Muckerheide, December 2013. Personal notes. Privately held by interviewer, Sandusky, Ohio. 2015.
As the child of Holocaust survivors, I have been keenly aware of this Jewish and human tragedy since I was of school-age. Now at the age of 52, I see the youngest of the survivors reach old age and die. My own mother recently passed away at age 86 and thankfully she shared her story with me over the years.
There is an urgency to document and record the stories not only of suffering and brutality, but also strength, courage and survival. Such projects are an ongoing focus of many Holocaust related museums and institutions around the world.
As one who has a personal and professional interest in genealogy, I have had on my ‘to-do’ list a project to record my parents’ and grandparents’ experiences during the Shoah and afterward.
another project that I am pursuing in my spare-time is the identification and recording of known Holocaust related monuments, memorials, gardens, museums and libraries in North America. As a former archivist, I understood the need to find, organize and make this information accessible.
The geographic scope of the project includes the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Thus far, I have identified more than 300 sites. The database includes the group or agency responsible for each site, artist when applicable, date of creation, and other details. I include photographs wherever possible.
Many of sites identified so far are large-scale, well-known and in public spaces. Others are smaller in scale and found in Jewish cemeteries, on the grounds of synagogues and Jewish community centers. I was pleased to find sites in Central America and the Caribbean.
There have been similar attempts to create such a database, and I am hoping to collaborate with the groups or people sponsoring them to develop as comprehensive a database as possible. I invite readers to check my list and contact me with locations not yet recorded. While the list is fairly comprehensive already, I’m sure there are many, many sites that I am missing. Access the list here: http://jpreisler.com/HolocaustMemorialsNorthAmerica.pdf
Please send additions, photos and any corrections to me at: jhp1963@yahoo.com!
Photograph above: Holocaust Memorial Garden designed by Tobi Kahn for the JCC on the Palisades, Tenafly, New Jersey (1997)
Holocaust Memorials, Statues & Museums in North and Central
Compiled by Julian H. Preisler
This is a growing list which will be added to as time permits United States of America
AK – at present there is no Holocaust memorial in the state. A Jewish Museum in Anchorage opening in 2013 will have a Holocaust Resource Center
AL, Birmingham – Holocaust Education Center AL, Birmingham – Temple Emanu-El – Holocaust Memorial Sculpture, sculptor Cordray Parker, 1982, donated by Dorothy Steiner
AL, Birmingham – Kelly Ingram Park – Roots of Courage, Branches of Hope – Horse Chestnut Tree and Plaque, donated by Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Public Library, 16th Street Baptist Church, Jewish Federation & BHEC, 2010
AL, Demopolis – Holocaust Memorial located at the Jewish Cemetery, donated by Mary Louis and Bert Rosenbush
AL, Dothan – Holocaust Memorial Sculpture at Temple Emanu-El
AR – at present there is no Holocaust memorial in the state. There is an Arkansas Holocaust Education Committee as part of state government. A sapling from the tree in front of the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam was donated and will be planed at the Clinton Library with a memorial included
AZ, Chandler – The Holocaust & Tolerance Museum
AZ, Green Valley – Green Valley Cemetery – Jewish Section – Holocaust Monument, 2012
AZ, Phoenix – Beth El Cemetery 2300 W. Van Buren, Holocaust Memorial, Photo credit: DM & TV from Waymarking.com P
AZ, Phoenix – Congregation Beth El – Holocaust Memorial @ synagogue courtyard, 1981, Gale DuBrow sculptor, rededicated 2009, Photo credit: DM & TV from Waymarking.com P
AZ, Phoenix – Beth Israel Memorial Park, Holocaust Memorial, Photo credit: DM & TV from Waymarking.com P
AZ, Sun City – Holocaust Memorial @ Sunland Memorial Park Cemetery, Photo credit: DM & TV from Waymarking.com P
AZ, Tucson – Jewish Community Center – Holocaust Memorial by Ami Shamir
AZ, Tucson – U of Arizona Meyer Agron Student Center – Driftwood Sculpture Holocaust Memorial, Edmund Beir, 1986, meant to symbolize how the Jews have been tossed around like driftwood throughout history.
CA, Fullerton – Temple Beth Tikvah 2011, Holocaust Memorial and Garden
CA, Hollywood – Beth Olam Cemetery. 2000, six channel fountain in the ground with symbolic tree stump, bronze plaque
CA, Irvine – Merage JCC of Orange County – Holocaust Memorial Garden
CA, Los Angeles – Mount Sinai Memorial Park – “Memorial to the Six Million” 1966 Bernard Zackheim, Gravel garden with two dozen concrete markers denoting the names of concentration camps, ghettos and killing centers, six large wooden sculptures and an eternal flame.
CA, Los Angeles – Sondra Smalley Family Sculpture Garden – Holocaust Sculpture by George Rickey 1985
CA, Los Angeles – Cedars-Sinai Hospital – Feintech Family Holocaust Memorial Water Sculpture “North of Yesterday”, 1988
CA, Lo Jolla – Lawrence Family JCC, Holocaust Memorial sculpture & Garden 1999 CA, Los Gatos – Holocaust Memorial
CA, Oakland – Beth Jacob Congregation – Holocaust Memorial inside
CA, Oakland – Temple Sinai – Holocaust Memorial Sculpture, Peter Boiger, 1991
CA, Ontario – Temple Sholom – Holocaust Memorial, 2003, by Jeffrey Schrier
CA, Palm Desert – Civic Center Park CA, Rohnert Park – Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Grove @ Sonoma State Univ.
CA, Sacramento – Home of Peace Cemetery P CA, San Diego – former East County JCC, a Holocaust sculpture in a fenced garden once existed here CA, San Diego – JCC Holocaust Memorial & Garden
CA, San Diego Beth Shalom – Holocaust Sculpture, 2004 Laurie Gross CA, San Francisco – Palace of Legion of Honor – Lincoln Park
CA, San Francisco – Eternal Home Cemetery – Holocaust Memorial (Colma) P
CA, San Francisco – Salem Memorial Park – Holocaust Memorial (Colma), Photo Credit: James Carlson P
CT, Stors – U of Connecticut – Thomas J. Dodd Research Center – Holocaust Sculpture, 1997 by sculptor Dana Baldwin Naumann, “Holocaust: Never Again…Never Forget”
CT, West Haven – Shara Torah Cemetery Holocaust Memorial P
CT, West Hartford – JCC – Holocaust Memorial 1981 sculptor Elbert Weinberg
CT, West Hartford – Chabad House Holocaust Memorial DC, Washington – Garden of the Righteous 1992 – Adas Israel Congregation
DE, Wilmington – Congregation Beth Emeth – Schenker Holocaust Memorial Garden & Blumenfeld Path of the Righteous Gentile, sculpture by David Klass, dedicated 2008 P
DE, Wilmington – Beth Emeth Memorial Park – Holocaust Memorial
DE, Wilmington – JCC – Children’s Holocaust Memorial by Aharon Bezalel also a separate Garden of the Righteous Gentiles which was the first in the USA.
DE, Wilmington – Holocaust Memorial @ Freedom Plaza aka Spencer Plaza (French St bet. 8Th & 9th Sts), 1979 by Elbert Weinberg
FL, Miami Beach – Temple Beth Raphael – former synagogue now used as a private residence once was considered the only building dedicated to memorialize & remember the Holocaust. Most of the facade was decorated and worded in such a way to be a memorial.
FL, North Lauderdale – Star of David Cemetery Holocaust Memorial
FL, North Miami Beach – Temple Sinai of North Dade – Holocaust Memorial to the Children P
FL, North Miami Beach – Riverside Gordon Memorial Cemetery (formerly Shalom Memorial Gardens) – There is a Ben Gurion Section for Holocaust Survivors 15700 NE 18th Avenue
FL, Orlando – Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida – Maitland
FL, Orlando – Southwest Orlando Jewish Congregation – Holocaust memorial – a mobile tile memorial in process of being contructed. Boy Scout project.
FL, Port Richey – Jewish Community Center of West Pasco – B’nai Tefillah P
FL, Sarasota – Temple Beth Shalom Cemetery – Holocaust Memorial Garden, 1993 Men’s Club
MA, Springfield – Hatikvah Holocaust Memorial in the JCC lobby – local Holocaust survivors & victims. A wall memorial tribute of photos, 2011. Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center 1997
MA, Waltham – Brandeis University Holocaust Memorial by Nathan Rapoport, 1997
MA, West Roxbury – Koretz Cemetery @ Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries
MA, West Roxbury – Zviller Cemetery @ Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries
MA, West Roxbury – Pollonoe Cemetery @ Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries P
ME – Maine Holocuast Education Network ME, Portland – Temple Beth El Slivka Holocaust Memorial, 2003 by sculptor Robert Katz. First public Holocaust memorial in Maine
ME, Augusta – The Michael Klahr Holocaust Education Resource Center @ University of Maine aka The Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine, 2008
MO, Independence – Kehilath Israel Blue Ridge Cemetery – Holocaust Memorial – 1901 Blue Ridge Blvd. Greater Kansas City metro area. “The Memorial to the Six Million”, dedicated 1963 and the dedication speech was given by President Truman. Commissioned and funded by the New Americans Club a group of Holocaust Survivors in KC. Designed by Washington, DC artist Maurice Newman
NJ, Hackensack – Holocaust Memorial, on the grounds of the Bergen County Courthouse
NJ, Jersey City – Liberation Holocaust Memorial @ Liberty State Park. Sculpture by Nathan Rapoport, 1985 showing a US soldier carrying a Holocaust Survivor
NJ, Pennsauken – Camden County Holocaust Memorial – Cooper River Park 1981, B’nai B’rith Cherry Hill Lodges and the Jewish Community – Designed by sculptor Harold Kimmelman P
NJ, Mahwah – Ramapo College Holocaust Sculpture by Paul Perces, 1989
NJ, Monroe – Etz Chaim Monroe Twp. Jewish Center – Holocaust Memorial Garden, 2008
NJ, Teaneck – Holocaust Memorial & Education Center, proposed for Andreas Park 2013
NY, Buffalo – Temple Beth Tzedeck Holocaust Memorial Sculpture and Garden. Originally installed at Temple Beth El of Greater Buffalo in 1986. After the synagogue merger the sculpture was reinstalled at the new location of the merged congregation in 2006. Designed by Maurice Ascalon and sculpted by his sons David and Adir Ascalon.
NY, East Meadow – Eisenhower Park. Holocaust Memorial Trees & Monument for 25th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Martyrdom, 1968 P
NY, East Meadow – Eisenhower Park. Children’s Holocaust Memorial Anniversary of Kristallnacht. 1979 P
NY, Flushing – Mount Hebron Cemetery – Wishnewitz Holocaust Memorial
NY, Flushing – Mount Hebron Cemetery – Litin Holocaust Memorial – Litiner Podolier Aid Society, 1947
NY, Flushing – Mount Hebron Cemetery – Bukaczowce Holocaust Memorial
NY, Spring Valley – Temple Beth El Holocaust Sculpture by Yehiel Shemi 1970’s
NY, Syosset – North Shore Synagogue Holocaust Sculpture, 1993 by Janet Indick
NY, Wantagh – The Suburban Temple – Holocaust Memorial Wall & Garden, 1990
NY, White Plains – Holocaust Memorial Garden 148 Martine Ave. 1992
NY, Whitesboro – Temple Beth El Cemetery Holocaust Memorial NY, Woodmere – Bais Tefilah Congregation – Holocaust memorial wall sculpture inside synagogue, designed by David Klass
NY, Woodmere – Young Israel Congregation – Holocaust memorial wall sculpture inside synagogue, designed by David Klass
NC, Charlotte – JCC – Holocaust Memorial sculpture & garden
NC, Charlotte – Marshall Park – Holocaust Memorial – originally located at Holocaust Square near Dilworth Road and Morhead Street dedicated in 1979. Moved in 1998 to Marshall Park and there are plans to move it to a more visible location
ND – none known at present
OH, Akron – Holocaust Memorial sculpture
OH, Beachwood – Shaarey Tikvah Holocaust Memorial Garden
PA, Pittsburgh (Versailles Boro) – Jewish Cemetery, Holocaust Memorial located at the cemetery shared by Gemilas Chesed Congregation and Temple B’nai Israel
PA, Pittsburgh – Jewish Community Day School – Holocaust Sculpture, 2012
PA, Pittsburgh – Holocaust Memorial Garden – Temple Emanuel of South Hills 2004
PA, Pittsburgh – Holocaust Memorial Garden – Temple Ohav Shalom
PA, Scranton – JCC Holocaust Memorial
PA, Sharon – Beth Israel Synagogue – Holocaust Memorial 1999, idea by Ben Tishman for his Boy Scout Eagle project
PA, Uniontown – Jewish Community Holocaust Sculpture, Main Street, by Zeljko Kujundzic 1982
PA, York – Holocaust Memorial Wall Sculpture, JCC
PA, Williamsport – memorial @ Ohav Sholom Congregation Cemetery
PA, Wynnewood – Temple Beth Hillel Beth El – Holocaust Memorial Chapel, 2002 RI, Providence – started in 2012, Barney Zeit
WV, Morgantown – J.D. Rechter Holocaust Memorial Library @ The Morgantown Public Library Aull Center, 2010
WY
Canada
Alberta, Calgary – JCC Holocaust Memorial, 1607 90th Avenue, dedicated in 1986 – Photo Credit: Kevin Evans P
Alberta, Edmonton – Holocaust Memorial on the grounds of the Provincial Legislature, 2003 – Photo Credit: Kevin Evans P
British Columbia, Vancouver – Holocaust Centre Society for Education & Remembrance, JCC
British Columbia, Vancouver – Vancouver Holocaust Memorial @ Schara Tzedeck Cemetery in New Westminster, 1986 – Architect: Jack Lutsky; Designer: Naomi Spiers
British Columbia, Victoria – Congregation Emanu-El Cemetery Holocaust Memorial
Ontario, Toronto – Beth Beth Bais Yehuda – Samuel Edelstein Children’s Garden
Ontario, Hamilton – Beth Jacob Cemetery – Memorial to the Six Million, Warsaw Ghetto fighters, Resistance fighter and all who fought Nazism. Grand Order of Israel Lodge, Hamilton
Ontario, Hamilton – Ohev Zedeck Cemetery – Holocaust Memorial
Ontario, Ottawa – Jewish Community Cemtery – Holocaust Memorial, 1978 erected by the community
Ontario, Ottawa – National Holocaust Museum – announced in 2013 to be built in the nation’s capital. Ontario, Toronto – The Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre
Ontario, Toronoto – Bathurst Lawn Memorial Park – Adath Sholom Synagogue – Minsker Farband Section, Holocaust Memorial
Ontario, Toronto – Holocaust Memorial & Wall of Names @ Earl Bales Park, 2001 Canadian Society for Yad Vashem
Ontario, Toronto – Mount Sinai Memorial Park – Independent Arbeiter’s Ring Section Holocaust Memorial
Ontario, Vaughan – Reena Holocaust Garden @ the Reena community Residence Lebovic Campus, 2012
According to Arthur Kurzweil: “For the Jewish people, our royal families have been those of the illustrious rabbis.”[1] If that is true, then the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage is foremost among these noble families. For centuries, Jewish men and women have sought to connect themselves and their descendants to this renowned family, either through marriage, or by paper trail. Now, thanks to recent advances in genetic genealogy, this may be possible to do for many more individuals of Jewish descent than ever before.
The Katzenellenbogen rabbinic lineage, which descends from Rabbi Meir ben (son of) Rabbi Isaac Katzenellenbogen, better known as the Maharam of Padua (c. 1482–1565), is a venerable family with many tens of thousands of descendants widely dispersed throughout Eastern and Central Europe, as well as Israel and the United States.[2] The family derived its name from the locality of Katzenelnbogen in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, now Germany.[3][4]
The Katzenellenbogen lineage produced a long line of distinguished rabbis and notable personalities over the centuries and is tightly interwoven with many of the most renowned Ashkenazi rabbinic families of Europe. The family was widely dispersed, but its unity was maintained through meticulously kept family records. Thanks to the genealogical research efforts of our co-author, Dr. Neil Rosenstein, in locating, translating, and compiling the abundant source material in his book, The Unbroken Chain, the genealogical information on the Katzenellenbogen lineage is extensive and highly accessible.[5]
The Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage is a particularly noteworthy lineage from a genealogical research perspective, due to its many marriage connections to other iconic rabbinical lineages and dynasties throughout Europe and the Russian Empire, its large number of descendants, and its well-documented paper trail.[6][7] Members of the family intermarried with other prominent Jewish families and produced many notable rabbis. Such was the fame of the Katzenellenbogen family that men who married Katzenellenbogen women typically adopted their wives’ family surname[8] (see the Appendix for additional information regarding the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage).
Thanks to the numerous published genealogies of the Katzenellenbogen family in rabbinical sources, family trees, and yichus letters, genealogists have reached a consensus regarding the authenticity and validity of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.[9][10]
The ancestral links and connections from Rashi to Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen are summarized in Figure 1.[11] Figures 2 and 3 take a closer look at Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s paternal descendants, from 1482 to the present. The ancestral links and connections summarized in Figures 1, 2, and 3 below will assist descendants of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage in tracing their ancestry.
FIGURE 1: DESCENT OF THE KATZENELLENBOGEN RABBINICAL LINEAGE FROM RASHI
FIGURE 2: THE KATZENELLENBOGEN RABBINICAL LINEAGE, DESCENDING FROM RABBI MEIR KATZENELLENBOGEN
FIGURE 3: THE KATZENELLENBOGEN RABBINICAL LINEAGE, DESCENDING FROM RABBI MOSES KATZENELLENBOGEN
Identifying Pedigreed Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage
Genetic tests, including Y-DNA tests, are not an easy substitute for traditional genealogical research, and a substantial knowledge of the genealogical background is required before Y-DNA tests can make a significant contribution.[12]
The Katzenellenbogen lineage extends over five centuries, but lines with living paternal descendants, descending solely from father-to-son, are rare, and locating and testing them presents unique genealogical challenges. Extensive genealogical research of the Katzenellenbogen family conducted by Dr. Neil Rosenstein, culminating in the publication of The Unbroken Chain,[13] laid the necessary groundwork for identification of living descendants for this Y-DNA study.
From the hundreds of lineages documented in his book, Dr. Rosenstein selected seven candidate paternal lines for which he had preliminary information linking them to living descendants: Ellenbogen, Green, Katzenellenbogen, Leiner, Mintz, Riesser, and Selwyn. An eighth candidate line, for Kellen, was discovered through additional genealogical research conducted by study authors Paull and Briskman.
Unfortunately, living descendants could not be located for the Green, Leiner, or Riesser paternal lines, and the sole living descendant of the only paternal line that still bears the Katzenellenbogen surname, declined to take a Y-DNA test. This left the research team with four viable candidate lineages for Y-DNA testing, represented by the Ellenbogen, Kellen, Mintz, and Selwyn lines.
Dr. Richard Ellenbogen (b. 1943) represents the Ellenbogen paternal line, which descends from Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen (c. 1541 – 1617) through his son, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (c. 1565 – 1630). Rabbi Meir’s grandson was Rabbi Saul Katzenellenbogen (1617 – 1691), and Rabbi Saul’s son was Moses Katzenellenbogen (1670 – 1733). Richard Ellenbogen is descended from Moses Katzenellenbogen through Moses’ son Rabbi Naftali Hirsch Katzenellenbogen (d. 1800) and his son Meir Katzenellenbogen (b. circa 1725).
Brian Keith Selwyn (b. 1960) represents the Selwyn paternal line, which descends from Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen (c. 1541 – 1617) through the same lineage as Richard Ellenbogen, but through a different son of Rabbi Naftali Hirsch Katzenellenbogen, Moses Aryeh Mannheimer (b. 1750).
David Kellen (b. 1953) represents the Kellen paternal line, which descends from Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen (c. 1541 – 1617) through the same lineage as Richard Ellenbogen, but through a different grandson of R. Meir Katzenellenbogen (1565 – 1630), R. Meir Katzenellenbogen (born after 1630), and named after his grandfather.[14] The paternal lines of descent for these three verified Katzenellenbogen descendants are presented in Figures 2 and 3, and are summarized in Table 1.[15]
A descendant representing the Mintz paternal line that descends from Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen through his grandson, Rabbi Nachum Katzenellenbogen, ABD of Slutsk, was also located.[16] However, several sources mention Rabbi Nachum of Slutsk as either the son or the son-in-law of Saul Wahl’s son Meir,[17][18] and based on genealogical research conducted since his original publication of The Unbroken Chain, in 1990, Dr. Rosenstein believes him to be a maternal descendant.[19] Due to this uncertainty, the Mintz descendant was not included in Table 1.
TABLE 1: Paternal Line of Descent for Pedigreed Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage
In addition to the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants, the authors located two additional descendants having an oral history of descent from the Katzenellenbogen lineage: Graham De Vahl Davis (b. 1931), and Viktor Katsenelenbogen (b. 1936).
Graham De Vahl Davis’s paternal ancestor Woolf Davis (1828 – 1902) was born as Zeev Katzenellenbogen, in Poland. In addition to having the Katzenellenbogen surname, the family has an oral history of descent from the Katzenellenbogen lineage.[20]
Viktor Katsenelenbogen’s grandfather was Abel Katsenelenbogen (c. 1870 – 1941). Abel’s father was the main rabbi of a synagogue in Bucharest, Romania. According to family oral history, the family originated in Spain, from where they immigrated to Germany.[21] The family had an oral history of descent from a “famous rabbinical line.”
Methods
The Y-DNA tests were conducted by Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) of Houston, Texas. The standard DNA Y-chromosome segment (DYS) markers, also referred to in genetic testing as short-tandem repeat or STR markers, for the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants, three partially documented descendants, and nine newly-identified genetic matches of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, are presented in Tables 2, 3, and 4.
The value of testing Y-DNA STR markers comes from creating a Y-DNA signature (haplotype) with them and comparing that Y-DNA signature to others in a database. They are useful for genetic genealogy because a unique Y-DNA signature distinguishes one paternal lineage from another. They can then be used in conjunction with Family Tree DNA’s Y-DNA comparative database to discover genealogical connections or historic ancestry.[22]
Y-DNA mutates very slowly, and passes down from father-to-son without recombination, except for the rare mutations that occur along the hereditary line, which is why the Y-DNA genetic signature of a male descendant represents that of his entire paternal lineage.[23] For the purpose of Y-DNA testing, it is essential that all descendants of the studied lineage are son-after-son. If there is even one maternal ancestor interposed in the lineage, the Y-DNA results of the descendants will not reflect the Y-DNA genetic signature of their common paternal ancestor.
In order to establish the Y-DNA genetic signature of a particular common paternal ancestor, the Y-DNA of descendants of that paternal ancestor must genetically match one another. Ideally, these descendants should be from at least two different sons of that common ancestor, with each descendant representing a different cousinly paternal line. Matching Y-DNA results from three or more different paternal lines provides additional confirmation and validation of the Y-DNA genetic signature.
Y-DNA tests of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants were reported at the 67 STR marker level. Y-DNA tests of partially documented paternal descendants were initially reported at the 37 STR marker level. If their allele values were found to match those of pedigreed descendants, their Y-DNA tests were upgraded to 67 STR markers.
Four Jewish genetic matches and five Iberian genetic matches to the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants were identified from their genetic match lists, and they accepted invitations to join our FTDNA Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA project. All were listed as close genetic matches to the pedigreed descendants; each had a minimum of Y-DNA 67 STR markers tested, and most also had additional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping to further refine their initial haplogroup classification.[24]
Y-DNA Test Results
Table 2 presents the Y-DNA test results for both pedigreed and partially documented Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants. The three Katzenellenbogen descendants for whom there are complete paper trails which clearly and explicitly document paternal pedigree are: Richard Ellenbogen, David Kellen, and Brian Selwyn. All three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants agreed to take a Y-DNA test.
Table 2 also presents the Y-DNA test results for the three Katzenellenbogen descendants for which the evidence of paternal pedigree is equivocal, due to either incomplete paper trails, ambiguities in their paternal pedigree, or the absence of archival records. These three descendants include Viktor Katsenelenbogen, Graham de Vahl Davis, and the Mintz descendant.
The Y-DNA results showed a very close genetic match between all three of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, Richard Ellenbogen, David Kellen, and Brian Selwyn. They matched one another on 66/67 STR markers. Each of them had one non-matching allele value, representing a possible mutation out of the 67 STR marker locations tested. The 64 of 67 STR markers at which the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants’ allele values identically match represent ancestral values.
With only three pedigreed descendants, it is not possible to determine whether the single non-matching allele value represents a mutation or an ancestral value; hence, these idiosyncratic allele values are considered as “possible ancestral allele values” (indicated by the green shaded cells in Table 2).
A Y-DNA SNP test identified all three pedigreed descendants as belonging to the J-M267 haplogroup, of which the terminal J-L823 SNP is a subclade (see Discussion of the J-M267 / J-L823 Haplogroup). This haplogroup designation, together with the Y-DNA 67 STR marker allele values (haplotype), comprises the genetic signature for the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.[25]
The Y-DNA test results also showed a genetic match between Viktor Katsenelenbogen and the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. He was a 60/67 marker match to Richard Ellenbogen, David Kellen, and Brian Selwyn. His seven non-matching allele values represent probable allele mutations (indicated by the blue shaded cells in Table 2). Viktor also belongs to the same J-L823 subclade of the J-M267 haplogroup as do all three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants.
These results, coupled with his surname, and his family’s oral history of rabbinical descent,[26] indicate that Viktor Katsenelenbogen is most likely a descendant of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, although it is also possible that his common ancestor predates the progenitor of the rabbinical line (see Time-to-Most Recent Common Ancestor Predictions).
TABLE 2: Y-DNA Test Results for Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage
In contrast to these matching Y-DNA results, Graham de Vahl Davis matched the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants on only 10 of 37 STR marker locations, and he belongs to a completely different (R-M269) haplogroup. The descendant from the Mintz line also matched the other three pedigreed descendants on only 10 of 37 STR marker locations, and he, too, belongs to a completely different (E-M2) haplogroup.
These widely disparate Y-DNA results effectively rule out paternal descent from the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage for these two individuals. In the case of the Mintz line, these results were anticipated, since, as previously discussed, their descent from the Katzenellenbogen lineage was suspected of passing through a maternal Katzenellenbogen ancestor, Rabbi Nachum of Slutsk. In the case of the de Vahl Davis line, it is difficult to know where the disruption in the paternal lineage occurred, as the lineage is only partially documented. It is quite possible that the de Vahl Davis line, like the Mintz line, passes through a maternal Katzenellenbogen ancestor.
Nine newly-discovered Y-DNA genetic matches were identified from the genetic match lists of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants. They fell into two different groups consisting of four Jewish, and five Iberian genetic matches.
Table 3 presents the Y-DNA STR marker results for the four newly-identified Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches (KGMs) to the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants. The closeness of their Y-DNA genetic match varied from 63 of 67 allele values for Richard Dahl and Samuel Gelfand, and 64 of 67 allele values for Bennett Greenspan, to 65 of 67 allele values for Marvin Zaveloff. They also belong to the same J-L823 subclade of the J-M267 haplogroup.
An interesting aspect of the Y-DNA results for the newly-identified Jewish KGMs, is that all four of them displayed the same differences from the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants’ ancestral allele values at the same two STR marker locations (DYS388 and DYS576), signifying that probable mutations had occurred in their line at these two marker locations (denoted by the blue shaded cells in Table 2).
At three other marker locations (DYS570, DYS557, and DYS534), the Jewish KGMs shared matching allele values with either one or two of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. These allele values (denoted by the green shaded cells in Table 2) may represent mutations, but they may also represent ancestral allele values; additional research will be need to distinguish between these two possibilities. Two of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs also displayed a probable mutation at marker location DYS446.
TABLE 3: Comparison of Y-DNA67 Results between Pedigreed Katzenellenbogen Paternal Descendants and Newly-Identified Jewish Genetic Matches
Table 4 presents the Y-DNA STR marker results for five Iberian Katzenellenbogen genetic matches (KGMs) to the verified Katzenellenbogen paternal descendants.[27] They were identified based upon their appearance on the genetic match list of all three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. All five belong to the J-M267 haplogroup; two have had additional SNP testing, and belong to the J-L823 subclade of the J-M267 haplogroup.
The closeness of the Iberian KGMs genetic match to the haplotype[28] of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants varied from 61 of 67 allele values for Gilbert Marquez, 62 of 67 allele values for Xico Garcia and Manuel Tenorio, and 63 of 67 allele values for Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez and Eddy Romero.
An interesting aspect of the Y-DNA results for the newly-identified Iberian KGMs is that several of their mutations were identical to those of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs. In particular, all five Iberian KGMs displayed the same mutation at STR marker location DYS388 and four of them displayed the same mutation at DYS576. In addition, all five Iberian KGMs displayed a mutation at STR marker location DYS444.
All five newly-identified Iberian KGMs were initially classified as belonging to the J-M267 haplogroup, as were the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. They have since been reclassified as belonging to either the J-YSC0000076 or the J-L823 subclade of the J-M267 haplogroup based upon the results of additional SNP testing.[29]
The fact that these five Iberian KGMs’ haplotype so closely matches the haplotype of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, taken together with the fact that a significant number of other individuals of Iberian descent are also present on the Katzenellenbogen pedigreed descendants’ genetic match lists, raises the distinct possibility that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage has a Sephardic ethnic origin.[30] This possibility is also consistent with known Sephardic migration patterns[31] (see DNA Evidence of Sephardic Descent).
TABLE 4: Comparison of Y-DNA67 Results between Pedigreed Katzenellenbogen Paternal Descendants and Newly-Identified Iberian Genetic Matches
Time-to-Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA) Predictions
FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model was used to predict the time-to-most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) probabilities for the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, Richard Ellenbogen, David Kellen, and Brian Selwyn, as well as for nine of their genetic matches, including Viktor Katsenelenbogen, the four newly-identified Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches, and four of five newly-identified Iberian Katzenellenbogen genetic matches.[32]
Pedigreed Katzenellenbogen Descendants
In comparing Y-DNA67 marker results, for the purpose of estimating the probability of the TMRCA, each pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendant was compared to the other two pedigreed descendants. These probability predictions are presented numerically in Table 5 and graphically in Figure 4.
Table 5: Time-to-Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA) Predictions for Pedigreed Paternal Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinic Lineage
Richard Ellenbogen’s and David Kellen’s most recent common ancestor (MRCA), Rabbi Moses Katzenellenbogen (1589 – 1643), preceded them in the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage by eleven generations (see Table 1). The actual probability of the MRCA living within eleven generations is therefore 100 percent. FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model predicts a 95.8 percent chance of their MRCA living within eleven generations (see Table 5). With a margin of error of only 4.2 percent (100% – 95.8% = 4.2%), this TMRCA prediction is highly accurate.
David Kellen’s and Brian Selwyn’s MRCA, also Rabbi Moses Katzenellenbogen, preceded David in the lineage by eleven generations, and Brian by ten generations. FTDNA’s time predictor model predicts a 93.0 percent chance of their most recent common ancestor living within ten generations, and a 95.3 percent chance of their MRCA living within eleven generations. With a margin of error of between 4.7 – 7.0 percent, this TMRCA prediction is also highly accurate.
Richard Ellenbogen’s and Brian Selwyn’s MRCA, Rabbi Naftali Hirsch (d. 1800), preceded Richard in the lineage by eight generations, and Brian by seven generations. FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model predicts a 78.5 percent chance of their most recent common ancestor living within seven generations, and an 85.0 percent chance of their MRCA living within eight generations. The time predictor model overestimates the actual TMRCA by 15 – 21.5 percent, which is still reasonably accurate, especially for a lineage of this age. Overestimation of the TMRCA in the range of between 5 – 50 percent has been typically reported in previous Y-DNA studies of rabbinical lineages.[33][34][35]
Figure 4: Mean Probability of the Common Ancestor Living within a Specified Number of Generations for Pedigreed Paternal Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinic Lineage
Katzenellenbogen Descendant of Unknown Pedigree
Viktor Katsenelenbogen represents an intriguing case. Although he does not have a documented pedigree, his paternal lineage possesses the Katzenellenbogen surname, and he genetically matches all three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. His Y-DNA allele values match those of Richard Ellenbogen and Brian Selwyn at 59 of 67 STR marker locations, and match those of David Kellen at 60 of 67 STR marker locations (see Table 2). Viktor also belongs to the same J-L823 haplogroup.
Although he shares the Katzenellenbogen surname with the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, and he undoubtedly shares a common paternal ancestor with them, his relatively high number of allele mutations raises a question as to whether his most recent common ancestor precedes or succeeds the founder of the rabbinic line, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (b. 1482).
FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP) model predicts a 35 – 60 percent chance (mean = 43.4%) of Viktor Katsenelenbogen’s MRCA with the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants living within the past twelve generations; a 49 – 82 percent chance (mean = 65.2%) of him living within the past sixteen generations, and a 60 – 93 percent chance (mean = 79.5%) of him living within the past twenty generations (see Figure 5).
Based on the fact that the TiP model has been found to overestimate the TMRCA by 4.2 – 22.5 percent in this study, and by as much as 50 percent in other Y-DNA studies of rabbinical lineages,[36] and the fact that Viktor Katsenelenbogen and his known ancestors bear the Katzenellenbogen surname, there is a reasonable chance (49% – 82%) that the common ancestor who unites Viktor Katsenelenbogen with the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage lived within the past sixteen generations, sometime after the founding of the lineage in 1482.
However, it is also quite possible (18% – 51% chance) that the common ancestor who unites Viktor Katsenelenbogen with the Katzenellenbogen lineage lived more than sixteen generations ago, prior to the founding of the rabbinical line, and long before the era of mandated Jewish surnames. If so, what would explain his family having the Katsenelenbogen surname?
There are several possibilities for how this may have occurred. One possibility is that a common male ancestor who lived prior to the founding of the rabbinical lineage had several sons. Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (b. 1482), who founded the rabbinical line, descended from one of these sons (Rabbi Isaac), and a non-rabbinical Jewish line descended from a different one of these sons.[37] At some point, one of the descendants of the non-rabbinical line married his cousin – a woman from the rabbinical line – and adopted her Katzenellenbogen surname.
The authors have previously encountered a similar example of this dual paternal and maternal descent in their study of the Twersky Chassidic dynasty.[38] Another possibility is that the Katzenellenbogen surname predates Meir Katzenellenbogen by several generations and was passed down through the patrilineal line. In this scenario, Viktor Katsenelenbogen would not descend from Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen directly, but rather from a cousinly Katzenellenbogen line.[39] [40]
Figure 5: Mean Probability of the Common Ancestor Living within a Specified Number of Generations for Viktor Katsenelenbogen and Pedigreed Descendants of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinic Lineage
Newly-Identified Katzenellenbogen Genetic Matches of Jewish Descent
One of the most satisfying and potentially useful applications of the identification of the Y-DNA genetic signature of a rabbinical lineage, is the identification of previously unknown individuals who share a common paternal ancestor with that lineage, and who, based upon when that common ancestor lived, may even be descendants of that lineage.
In regard to the four newly-discovered Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches KGMs), the closeness of the genetic match to the haplotype of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants varied from 63 of 67 allele values for Richard Dahl and Samuel Gelfand, and 64 of 67 allele values for Bennett Greenspan, to 65 of 67 allele values for Marvin Zaveloff (see Table 3). Although none of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs have the Katzenellenbogen surname, or an oral history of descent from the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, all four match the haplotype of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants more closely than does Viktor Katsenelenbogen.
FTDNA’s time predictor model predicts between an 81.0 – 96.8 percent chance (mean = 87.5%) of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs’ MRCA with the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants living within the past twelve generations, and between a 94.5 – 99.4% chance (mean = 96.6%) of the MRCA living within the past sixteen generations (Figure 6).[41] These probabilities are only slightly less than those calculated for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants themselves (see Table 5).
Based upon the closeness of their genetic matches, as evidenced by the >95% mean probability of their MRCA living within the past sixteen generations, and the accuracy of the FTDNA time predictor model for predicting the TMRCA for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, it is reasonably likely that their MRCA lived within the past sixteen generations, and that all four of these newly-identified Jewish KGMs descend from the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage sometime after the founding of the lineage in 1482.
Figure 6: Mean Probability of the Common Ancestor Living within a Specified Number of Generations for Pedigreed Katzenellenbogen Descendants and their Newly-Identified Jewish Genetic Matches
Newly-Identified Katzenellenbogen Genetic Matches of Iberian Descent
One of the most intriguing findings of this study was the identification of a significant percentage of previously unknown Katzenellenbogen genetic matches (KGMs) of Iberian ethnicity. As many as nineteen genetic matches with Iberian surnames representing five distinct families – Carrasco, Echeverria, Marquez, Romero, and Tenorio – appeared on the genetic match lists of pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants.
Members of these same five families, in addition to three others with Iberian surnames (Chavez, Garcia, and Lopez) appeared on the genetic match lists of Viktor Katsenelenbogen, and the newly-identified KGMs of Jewish descent. Members of five of these eight families (Echeverria, Garcia, Marquez, Romero, and Tenorio) accepted our invitation to join our Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA project. Of these five family surnames, three of them (Garcia, Marquez, and Romero) are known converso surnames.[42]
Information collected regarding their oral histories, family trees, and DNA tests showed all five of these individuals to possess both Iberian ancestry, and one or more markers of Sephardic descent, including an oral history of having converso ancestry, and/or DNA evidence of Jewish ancestry.[43] This information is summarized as follows:
Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez Sr.
Nearly all of his Y-DNA genetic matches who identify their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry.[44] This was observed at all STR marker levels (12, 25, 37, 67, 111) and genetic distances.[45] The reported ancestral origin of his closest Y-DNA 67-marker matches at genetic distances £ 2 are Spain, Lithuania, and Poland. At a genetic distance of 2, one of his 67-marker matches reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim (Hebrew for converted Jews) as their ethnic ancestry.[46] At a genetic distance of 1, one of his 25-marker matches reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
He shares identical allele values with Eddy L. Romero at 64 of 67 Y-DNA STR marker locations, with Manuel Tenorio at 63 of 67 marker locations, and with Xico Garcia and Gilbert Marquez at 61 of 67 marker locations, indicating that he shares a common paternal ancestor with other newly-identified genetic matches of Iberian descent, and of likely converso ancestry.
The vast majority of his FTDNA Family Finder matches have Iberian surnames, the most common being Echeverria, Ordines, and Torres. However, some of his more distant Family Finder matches have Jewish ancestral surnames (e.g.; Cohanim, Eichenberg, Fischer, Leidel, Rosenbaum, Schneider, Schreiber). According to his FTDNA “My Origins” autosomal DNA test, his ethnic makeup is 59% European, 24% New World, 6% East Asian, 3% Central/South Asian, 6% Middle Eastern, and 2% African, of which the latter two components are consistent with being of Sephardic ethnic ancestry.
Xico Garcia
Nearly all of his Y-DNA genetic matches who identify their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry. This was observed at all STR marker levels (12, 25, 37, 67, 111) and genetic distances. The reported ancestral origin of his closest Y-DNA 67-marker matches at genetic distances £ 3 is Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain. At a genetic distance of 4, one of his 37-marker matches reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim as their ethnic ancestry. At a genetic distance of 2, one of his 25-marker matches reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
He shares identical allele values with Eddy L. Romero on 62 of 67 STR marker locations, and with Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez Sr. and Manuel Tenorio at 61 of 67 marker locations, indicating that he shares a common paternal ancestor with other newly-identified genetic matches of Iberian descent, and of likely converso ancestry.
The vast majority of his FTDNA Family Finder matches have Iberian surnames, the most common being Gonzales, Martinez, and Garcia. According to his “My Origins” autosomal DNA test, his ethnic makeup is 67% European, 19% New World, 7% East Asian, 6% Middle Eastern, and 1% African, of which the latter two components may be indicative of Sephardic ethnic ancestry.
Gilbert Marquez
Nearly all of his Y-DNA genetic matches who identify their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry. This was observed at all STR marker levels (12, 25, 37, 67, 111) and genetic distances. The reported ancestral origin of his closest Y-DNA 67-marker matches (genetic distances £ 6) are Spain and Poland. At a genetic distance of 4, one of his 67-marker matches reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim as their ethnic ancestry. At a genetic distance of 2, one of his 25-marker matches reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
Gilbert shares identical allele values with Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez at 61 of 67 STR marker locations, and with Eddy L. Romero at 60 of 67 marker locations, indicating that he shares a common paternal ancestor with other newly-identified genetic matches of Iberian descent, and of likely converso ancestry. He did not take a Family Finder test, so his “My Origins” autosomal DNA ethnic makeup was not reported.
Eddy L. Romero
Nearly all of his Y-DNA genetic matches who identify their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry. This was observed at all STR marker levels (12, 25, 37, 67) and genetic distances. The reported ancestral origin of his closest Y-DNA 67-marker matches (genetic distances £ 2) is Spain. The reported ancestral origin of his Y-DNA 67-marker matches at genetic distances ³ 2 is Spain, Poland, Belarus, Latvia, Germany, Lithuania, Austria, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. At a genetic distance of 5, one of his 67-marker matches reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim as their ethnic ancestry. At a genetic distance of 7, one of his 67-marker matches reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
He shares identical allele values with Manuel Tenorio at 66 of 67 STR marker locations, with Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez Sr. at 64 of 67 marker locations, with Xico Garcia at 62 of 67 marker locations, and with Gilbert Marquez at 60 of 67 marker locations, indicating that he shares a common paternal ancestor with other newly-identified genetic matches of Iberian descent, and of likely converso ancestry.
The vast majority of his FTDNA Family Finder matches have Iberian surnames, the most common being Martinez, Garcia, and Trujillo. However, many of his more distant Family Finder matches have Jewish ancestral surnames (e.g.; Blumenthal, Cohen, Feldman, Frankel, Goldberg, Rosenberg, Rubenstein, Shapero). According to his “My Origins” autosomal DNA test, his ethnic makeup is 62% European, 22% New World, 8% East Asian, 1% Central/South Asian, 2% Middle Eastern, and 3% African, of which the latter two components may be indicative of Sephardic ethnic ancestry.
Manuel Tenorio
Nearly all of his Y-DNA genetic matches who identify their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry. This was observed at all STR marker levels (12, 25, 37, 67) and genetic distances. The reported ancestral origin of his closest Y-DNA 67-marker matches (genetic distances £ 1) is Spain. The reported ancestral origin of his Y-DNA 67-marker matches at genetic distances ³ 1 is Spain, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Latvia, Bulgaria, Germany, Austria, and Ukraine.
At a genetic distance of 4, one of his 67-marker matches reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim as their ethnic ancestry. At a genetic distance of 6, one of his 67-marker matches reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
Manuel shares identical allele values with Eddy L. Romero at 66 of 67 STR marker locations, and with Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez Sr. at 63 of 67 marker locations, indicating that he shares a common paternal ancestor with other newly-identified genetic matches of Iberian descent, and of likely converso ancestry. He did not take a Family Finder test, so his “My Origins” autosomal DNA ethnic makeup was not reported, but he does have an oral history of converso ancestry in his family.[47]
Relationship between Katzenellenbogen Genetic Matches of Jewish and Iberian Ancestry
The distribution of Iberian KGMs on the match lists of Jewish KGMs at different Y-DNA STR marker levels are shown in Table 6. Overall, Iberian KGMs comprised between 8.3 – 29.0 percent of the Jewish KGMs’ match list, with a mean value of 20.3 percent.
Three data outliers were observed at the 12 STR marker level for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, where only one genetic match and twelve total matches were reported. This appears to be due to an anomaly in the FTDNA Y-DNA genetic match reporting system. After eliminating the three outliers, the range of Iberian KGM matches was 15.0 – 29.0 percent, with a mean value of 21.6 percent. Brian Selwyn had no genetic matches reported at the 25 marker level. This also appears to be due to an anomaly of the FTDNA Y-DNA genetic match reporting system.
An interesting observation was that the newly-identified Iberian KGMs matched the newly-identified Jewish KGMs more closely (i.e., at higher levels of Y-DNA markers tested, and on more STR markers) than they did the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, indicating that they shared a more recent common ancestor with them. As previously discussed, several of the Iberian KGMs’ allele values were identical to those of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs. In particular, they displayed the same two idiosyncratic allele values at STR marker location DYS388 and DYS576 (see Tables 3 and 4).
FTDNA’s time predictor model predicts between a 41.4 – 81.2 percent chance (mean = 59.2%) of the four Iberian KGMs’ MRCA with pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants living within the past twelve generations, and between a 69.6 – 94.6 percent chance (mean = 82.4%) of the MRCA living within the past 16 generations (Figure 7). [48][49]
These TMRCA probabilities are approximately 14-to-26 percent less than those calculated for the newly-identified Jewish KGMs (see Figure 6). Based upon the closeness of their genetic matches, as evidenced by the >80 percent mean probability of their MRCA living within the past 16 generations, and the accuracy of the FTDNA time predictor model for predicting the TMRCA for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, it is reasonably likely that the newly-identified Iberian KGMs’ most recent common ancestor in the Katzenellenbogen lineage, like that of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs, also lived sometime after the founding of the lineage in 1482 (see Summary and Conclusions).
Table 6: Jewish-Iberian Genetic Match Rates among Katzenellenbogen Descendants
Figure 7: Mean Probability of the Common Ancestor Living within a Specified Number of Generations for Pedigreed Katzenellenbogen Descendants and their Newly-Identified Iberian Genetic Matches
Lines of Evidence of Sephardic Descent of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage
Due, at least in part, to the German-derived surname of its founder, and to the fact that he was appointed rabbi of an Ashkenazi synagogue, the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage has always been considered as an iconic Ashkenazi rabbinical lineage. In fact, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Katzenellenbogen surname is sometimes used in conjunction with the Ashkenazi epithet.[50] The results of this study, however, challenge this long-held belief, and provide compelling evidence that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage is of Sephardic origin.
There are five main lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage has a Sephardic origin. These lines of evidence include: (1) An oral history of converso ancestry among newly-identified Iberian KGMs; (2) DNA evidence of converso ancestry among newly-identified Iberian KGMs; (3) An oral history of Sephardic ancestry among both pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants and newly-identified Jewish KGMs; (4) DNA evidence of Sephardic ancestry among newly-identified Jewish KGMs, and (5) Y-DNA haplogroup evidence for both newly-identified Jewish and Iberian KGMs. Each of these lines of evidence is presented and briefly discussed below.
Oral History of Converso Ancestry among Iberian Katzenellenbogen Genetic Matches
One of the five newly-identified Iberian Katzenellenbogen descendants, Manuel Tenorio, has a history of converso ancestry in his family, reporting that his grandparents and great-grandparents practiced their Jewish religion in secret.[51] Mr. Tenorio is a close genetic match to both Eddy L. Romero and Rodolfo Echeverria Dominguez, indicating that they most likely share a common converso paternal ancestor. Genealogical evidence from research of the paper trail suggests that the Tenorio and Romero lines may be connected, and that they may share a common paternal ancestor who lived during the early 1700s.[52]
DNA Evidence of Converso Ancestry among Iberian Katzenellenbogen Genetic Matches
When descendants of a paternal lineage of Iberian or Jewish ethnicity take a Y-DNA test, the overwhelming majority of their genetic matches are generally other individuals of similar ethnicity. If a significant number of genetic matches of Jewish ancestry appear on the Y-DNA match lists of the descendants of a particular Iberian paternal lineage, this provides an indication that one or more of the ancestors in the lineage were conversos, and that the lineage may be of Sephardic origin. The more distant the Jewish genetic matches are, the further back in time the Iberian common ancestor is likely to be.
In this Y-DNA study, the five newly-identified Iberian KGMs were all found to have a significant proportion of Jewish genetic matches on their Y-DNA match lists. As previously discussed, nearly all of their genetic matches who identified their ancestral origins reported Ashkenazi as their ethnic ancestry. This was observed at all STR marker levels and genetic distances. One of the genetic matches common to all five descendants reported Spain as their ancestral origin, and Anusim (Hebrew for converted Jews) as their ethnic ancestry. Another genetic match common to all five descendants reported “Sephardic” as their ethnic ancestry.
Three of the five Iberian descendants also took FTDNA’s Family Finder autosomal DNA test. Their ethnic admixture “My Origins” test showed significant Middle Eastern and African components, which may be indicative of Sephardic ethnic ancestry.[53] In addition, many of their more distant Family Finder matches had Jewish ancestral surnames. Autosomal DNA research studies have demonstrated the persistence of autosomal DNA segments in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, due to its endogamy, resulting in the detection of many more distant matches than for non-Jewish populations.[54][55][56]
Taken together, the Y-DNA and autosomal DNA data provides compelling supportive evidence of a converso ancestry and Sephardic ancestral origin of the newly-identified Iberian Katzenellenbogen genetic matches.
Oral History of Sephardic Ancestry among Jewish Katzenellenbogen Descendants
One of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, Brian Selwyn, reported an oral history of his family having Spanish or Sephardic ancestry.[57] Brian is a close genetic match to the two other pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, Richard Ellenbogen and David Kellen, and he shares known common paternal ancestors with them, indicating that they most likely share a common Sephardic ancestry. In addition, Viktor Katsenelenbogen’s family also has an oral history of his paternal line having originated in Spain,[58] as does newly-identified Jewish Katzenellenbogen descendant, Richard Dahl’s.[59]
DNA Evidence of Sephardic Ancestry among Jewish Katzenellenbogen Descendants
When descendants of a paternal lineage of Jewish or Iberian ethnicity take a Y-DNA test, the overwhelming majority of their genetic matches are generally other individuals of similar ethnicity. If a significant number of genetic matches of Iberian or converso ancestry appear on the Y-DNA match lists of the descendants of a particular Jewish paternal lineage, this provides an indication that the lineage may be of Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi origin. The more distant the Iberian genetic matches are, the further back in time the Sephardic common ancestor is likely to be.
In this Y-DNA study, the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, as well as the Katzenellenbogen descendant of uncertain pedigree, and the four newly-discovered Jewish Katzenellenbogen descendants, were all found to have a significant proportion (mean of 20.3%) of converso genetic matches of Iberian ancestry on their Y-DNA match lists (see Table 6).
Despite the three-generation difference between their respective common ancestors, the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants have a similar percentage of converso genetic matches of Iberian ancestry on their Y-DNA match lists. Viktor Katsenelenbogen, despite an uncertain pedigree, is likely to be a Katzenellenbogen paternal descendant on the basis of his surname, oral history, and Y-DNA genetic signature. He has a similar percentage of converso genetic matches of Iberian descent on his Y-DNA match list, as do the four newly-discovered Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches.
These significant percentages of converso genetic matches of Iberian ancestry on the Y-DNA match lists of all pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants and their Jewish KGMs remained relatively constant, irrespective of geographic location, pedigree, and generation of the common ancestor. This points to a Sephardic ancestral origin of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.
Y-DNA Evidence of Sephardic Descent: The J-M267 / J-L823 Haplogroup
Essential to determining the unique Y-DNA genetic signature of a particular rabbinical lineage is the terminal single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), which defines the haplogroup to which descendants of the lineage belong.[60]
In addition to having a high percentage of standard Y-DNA markers or short-tandem repeat (STR) allele values in common, another Y-DNA characteristic that all pedigreed descendants of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage and their newly-discovered genetic matches share is that they were all initially classified as belonging to the J-M267 haplogroup. Men from this lineage share a common paternal ancestor, which is defined by the presence of the SNP mutation referred to as M267.
Y DNA haplogroup J-M267, also commonly known as haplogroup J1, is a subclade (branch) of Y-DNA haplogroup J-P209, along with its sibling clade Y-DNA haplogroup J-M172, commonly known as haplogroup J2. Y-DNA haplogroup J1 is estimated to be approximately 20 thousand years old and is thought to have originated somewhere between Anatolia and Mesopotamia.[61] J-M267 has several recognized subclades, most notably J-P58 and J-L823.
Haplogroup J-M267 is found at its highest frequencies in the southern Middle East, west of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, to the Mediterranean Sea, and encompassing the entire Arabian Peninsula. The J-M267 marker has been carried by Middle Eastern traders into Europe, central Asia, India, and Pakistan.
As with other populations with Mediterranean ancestry, this lineage is found at substantial frequencies within Jewish populations. The Cohen modal haplotype lineage, as well as the presumed lineage of the Prophet Mohammed, are found in Haplogroup J-M267.[62][63][64][65]
To further delineate the haplogroup of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, we tested the Y-DNA of the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, and the likely Katzenellenbogen descendant (Viktor Katsenelenbogen) for the J-L823 terminal SNP, to investigate whether they belong to the J-L823 subclade. We selected this particular SNP for testing because several of our newly-identified Jewish and Iberian KGMs had previously tested positive for it, and because it has been previously identified in other Y-DNA studies of Sephardic Jews and conversos.[66][67] This SNP was also suggested for testing by Bennett Greenspan.[68]
All three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants tested positive for the J-L823 terminal SNP, as did Viktor Katsenelenbogen. All four of the newly-identified Jewish KGMs, who had previously tested for this terminal SNP belonged to the J-L823 subclade, as did two of the five newly-identified Iberian KGMs; the other three Iberian KGMs had not been tested for it.
Although a specific “Sephardic SNP” has not yet been identified, the J-L823 SNP does provide at least supporting evidence of possible Iberian/Sephardic ethnic ancestry. Wim Penninx has concluded that the J-L823 subclade split into separate Ashkenazi and Sephardic branches:[69]
“Many Jewish Y-DNA branches have interesting characteristics. J-L823 is special with its half palindrome, and shows a special history … In total, seven J-L823 branches are known at the moment: three Iberian, three Ashkenazi, and one German. One of the three Ashkenazi lines almost certainly passed Iberia before arriving in the Ashkenazi countries. It is most likely that this ancestor left Spain long before the time of the Edict of Expulsion. The statistics on the other two branches is insufficient to make a claim on their historic path. When members of all six branches are measured with Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) tests, and the data is well-compared, we will be able to determine the moments the branches split.”
It is interesting that the J-L823 subclade has been determined to have both Ashkenazi and Iberian branches, and we agree that future NGS tests will help to shed light on the historic branching of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic lines.
Taken together, the three lines of DNA evidence discussed above, in combination with the two lines of evidence obtained through the oral histories, and the historic information regarding Sephardic migration patterns, leads us to conclude that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage most likely had a Sephardic origin.
Recommendations for Future Study
As is the case for the majority of pioneering genetic genealogy studies, the Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA study raises many new research questions, and opens many new promising research avenues to exploration.
Based upon the matching Y-DNA results of three pedigreed paternal descendants of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, we have succeeded in identifying the haplotype and haplogroup that characterizes the Y-DNA signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, back to their most recent common ancestor (MRCA).
This Y-DNA genetic signature is based on the testing of 67 STR markers, and one additional downstream single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Due to different allele values at three specific STR marker locations among the three pedigreed descendants, there is some uncertainty regarding which allele values represent ancestral values, and which represent mutations. Undoubtedly, as other descendants of the Katzenellenbogen lineage are identified, and additional STR markers and SNPs are tested, these uncertainties will be reduced, and the Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA genetic signature will be further extended and refined.
In this study, we identified four Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches (KGMs) and five Iberian KGMs on the basis of their matching Y-DNA genetic profiles, rather than by traditional genealogical research methods. Analysis of the time-to-most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) using the FTDNA time predictor model, led us to the hypothesis that their MRCA most likely lived sometime after the founding of the lineage in 1482. The use of phylogenetic-based methods to estimate the TMRCA may lead to different hypotheses regarding when the MRCA lived.[70]
We recommend that genealogical studies be conducted which research the paper trail of both the Jewish and Iberian KGMs identified in this study, in an attempt to identify the common ancestor which links them to the Katzenellenbogen lineage. Identifying the MRCA would help determine which of the current models yields more accurate TMRCA predictions.
It would also be useful to conduct Y-DNA research studies which compare TMRCA model predictions for pedigreed descendants of other rabbinical lineages where the TMRCAs are known. Such studies would provide useful validation data for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of current STR mutation rate-based models and emerging phylogenetic-based methods which employ next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques.
Another potential new avenue of research involves the surprising finding that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical dynasty most likely had a Sephardic origin. This raises the possibility that many other Jewish and rabbinical lineages, once thought to be of Ashkenazi origin, are actually of Sephardic origin as well.
In this regard, we recommend that Y-DNA research studies which focus specifically on Sephardic Jewish populations be conducted, together with studies of Iberian individuals of known converso ancestry. Such Y-DNA research studies are needed to broaden the Sephardic Y-DNA database, and would yield much useful information regarding Sephardic allele patterns, SNPs and haplogroups.
Autosomal DNA research studies which explore differences in chromosome segments and ethnic admixtures between Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and converso populations represent yet another promising avenue of research. The essential first step in conducting these types of population-based autosomal DNA research studies lies in identifying appropriate reference populations. This is true of population-based Y-DNA studies as well.
We tested for the J-L823 terminal SNP in this study, which yielded fresh insights into the possible ethnic origins of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage. In theory, age estimates of clusters based upon SNPs have the potential to be more accurate than those based upon STRs, but the science is still evolving, and more fundamental genealogical research is needed. As NGS tests become more widely available and used, and the full genome database grows, emerging phylogenetic methods may play a larger role in identifying new descendants of rabbinical lines and in defining the Y-DNA genetic signature.
The accurate identification of novel SNPs through testing of sufficiently large populations of both Jewish and Iberian descent, could shed new light on deep ancestral links, and the possible Sephardic origin of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, and other Jewish lineages. In particular, identifying the time of the Ashkenazi-Sephardic split remains a challenge for further genealogical study.
Summary and Conclusions
The Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage dates back over 500 years. Extensive genealogical research of the Katzenellenbogen family laid the necessary groundwork for identification of three living son-after-son descendants of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage for this Y-DNA study.
In our preliminary Y-DNA study of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, we identified the haplotype and haplogroup of a single pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendant (Richard Ellenbogen), and a possible descendant having the Katzenellenbogen surname, together with an oral history of descent (Viktor Katsenelenbogen).[71] Based upon their matching Y-DNA results, we hypothesized that we had preliminarily identified the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage. With the identification and testing of two additional pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, we have now confirmed the Y-DNA genetic signature that we identified in our preliminary study.
The near-identical genetic match among the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, Richard Ellenbogen, David Kellen, and Brian Selwyn, together with their well-documented paper trail, provides a high degree of confidence that their distinct allele pattern at 67 STR marker locations, which defines their haplotype, in addition to the J-L823 SNP, which defines their haplogroup, accurately represents the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.
This Y-DNA genetic signature dates back to their most recent common ancestor, Rabbi Moses Katzenellenbogen (1589 – 1643), the great-great-grandson of the founder of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (c. 1482 – 1565).
As previously discussed, thanks to the numerous published genealogies of the Katzenellenbogen family in rabbinical sources, family trees, and yichus letters, the authenticity and validity of the lineage has been well-established, and there is a broad consensus among genealogists regarding Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s descendants’ identities, and their position in the lineage, particularly for the early generations.
Based upon a solid foundation of traditional genealogical evidence supporting the well-documented paternal lineage between Rabbi Moses Katzenellenbogen (1589 – 1643) and Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (c. 1482 – 1565), there is reason to believe that the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage identified in this study can be extended back four generations to represent that of the founder of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen.
This hypothesis, however sound, remains to be proven by future genealogical research. Adoptions, non-paternal events, and lineage mistakes, however rare, do occur, even in well-documented rabbinical lineages, and cannot be ruled out without direct Y-DNA evidence.
The extreme closeness of the genetic match between the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants was unexpected for a lineage that extends over 400 years and eleven generations back to their common ancestor. Another surprising finding was the high degree of accuracy of the FTDNA time predictor model for estimating the time-to-most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants.
One of the most intriguing research questions raised by this study is in regard to when the most common recent ancestor of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants and their Iberian genetic matches lived. There are at least three possibilities regarding the origin of the Iberian Katzenellenbogen cluster, and when it may have arisen:[72]
The first possibility is that the Iberian cluster descends from a cousinly line of Meir Katzenellenbogen. Their common ancestor could have predated Meir Katzenellenbogen by just one or two generations (mid-1400s).[73]
The second possibility is that the Iberian cluster directly descends from Meir Katzenellenbogen. In this case, one of Meir’s non-rabbinical descendants (of which he had many), could have immigrated to any of several Spanish/Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World (g., Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Peru), converted to Catholicism, and acquired their Hispanic surname there, sometime after the 15th century.[74]
The third possibility is that the Iberian cluster descends from a more distant Iberian ancestor of Meir Katzenellenbogen.[75]
Based upon the closeness of their genetic matches, and the accuracy of the FTDNA time predictor model for predicting the TMRCA for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants, we believe it is reasonably likely that the TMRCA for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants and their newly-identified Iberian genetic matches was sometime after the birth of the founder of the rabbinical lineage in 1482.
Lending support to this possibility is the finding from multiple studies of Jewish lineages that the time predictor model tends to overestimate the actual TMRCA in the vast majority of cases.[76] We must, therefore, allow for the possibility that the Iberian cluster may have acquired their surnames from a common ancestor who converted to Catholicism sometime after 1492.
We emphasize, however, that this possibility is no more than a hypothesis that remains to be proven or disproven by future research studies. Currently, neither STR mutation-rate based models, such as the time predictor model, or phylogenetic-based methods, can predict the TMRCA with the necessary precision to allow us to distinguish among these various possibilities, with a high degree of scientific certainty.
One of the more fascinating findings to come out of this study is that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage has a probable Sephardic origin. Perhaps because the founder of the lineage, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, was born in the town of Katzenelnbogen, in present-day Germany, from where the family took its name, the lineage which he founded has long been regarded as an iconic Ashkenazi lineage.[77][78] The results of our Y-DNA study challenge that view, and provide compelling genetic evidence that the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage was most likely Sephardic in origin.[79]
This finding, although remarkable, is not without historical precedent. Sephardic Jewry, having been expelled from Spain, found different homes throughout Europe, and Italy, due to the similarity of its climate, and religious tolerance, was a prime landing place. From the middle of the 1500s onward, the Italian-Jewish community was really a Spanish community.[80][81]
It is also well-known that a number of major rabbinical families have a long-standing tradition that they descend from pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.[82] Two prominent Ashkenazi rabbinical families, Epstein and Horowitz, for instance, claim descent from two brothers who lived in Spain during the 13th century.[83][84][85][86]
The Katzenellenbogen lineage is over 500 years old, with many thousands of descendants widely dispersed throughout the world. Undoubtedly, many of its members were patrilineal descendants of non-rabbinical branches of the family.[87] The fact that the four newly-identified Jewish Katzenellenbogen descendants have unique surnames, but likely descend from the same patrilineal lineage, illustrates the difficulty that confronts many Ashkenazi Jews – their common ancestor often predates the era in which Jewish surnames came into use.
As surname use became mandatory for Jews in most of Europe during the late 1700s – early 1800s, the descendants of those common ancestors adopted a variety of surnames based upon the places they were from, their occupations, nicknames, spouses’ surnames, parents’ given names, the decisions of the kahal (Jewish community council) or the whims of the local authorities.[88] This makes tracing Jewish lineage even more difficult using traditional genealogical methods, and emphasizes the importance of Y-DNA and other genetic tests as an essential component of Jewish genealogy.
One of the more gratifying aspects of this study involved identifying the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, and then using that genetic signature to either confirm paternal descent from the lineage, or to bring to light possible mistakes in the paper trail.
Although the identity of his common ancestor remains uncertain, for Viktor Katsenelenbogen, the validation of his paternal descent from the Katzenellenbogen lineage through his Y-DNA genetic match to the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants is a very significant finding, because other than the Katsenelenbogen surname, and a tenuous family legend of rabbinical descent, he had no archival documentation or family tree proving descent from the Katzenellenbogen lineage.[89]
For Bennett Greenspan, the founder and president of Family Tree DNA (FTDNA), the discovery of his paternal descent from the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage is an especially gratifying finding. Bennett’s founding of FTDNA was an outgrowth of his profound desire to identify and trace his paternal lineage. The fact that he shares a common ancestor with the illustrious Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, and that there is a possibility that he may be a descendant of this renowned lineage, came as an astonishing revelation to him, as he had no idea that his paternal lineage had any rabbis of note.[90][91]
For the five newly-identified Iberian genetic matches, their Y-DNA genetic match to the three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants is also a very significant finding, as it indicates that their paternal ancestors were most likely Jewish conversos, and that they share a common paternal ancestor with an historic and renowned rabbinical lineage.
The finding that the Mintz descendant did not match the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage supports what some genealogists had already suspected – that there is a maternal descendant interposed in the Mintz line of descent from Meir Katzenellenbogen. That maternal descendant is likely to be Rabbi Nachum of Slutsk, about whom there is some uncertainty as to whether he was a son or a son-in-law of Meir Wahl Katzenellenbogen.[92] Although this finding awaits confirmation through additional Y-DNA testing, it does illustrate that lineage mistakes can occur, even in lineages that are as deeply-rooted and well-documented as the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.
As growing numbers of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews turn to genetic testing as a way of discovering their roots, it is becoming increasingly clear that characterizing the unique Y-DNA genetic signature of the historically significant rabbinical lineages with well-documented pedigrees, will play a critical role in the ultimate success of these endeavors. As Y-DNA genetic signatures are identified for a growing number of rabbinical lineages, and the number of families represented in the DNA databases increases, the likelihood of finding a match to a well-documented pedigree increases.[93]
Y-DNA research studies such as WIRTH,[94] Polonsky,[95] Bacharach,[96] and Wertheim-Giterman (Savran-Bendery Chassidic dynasty)[97][98] have demonstrated the intrinsic value of characterizing rabbinic Y-DNA in an effort to bridge the major gaps in the paper trail for both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
With the successful identification and characterization of the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, we hope to enable many current and future generations of previously unknown Jewish and Iberian descendants to connect themselves and their families to this illustrious rabbinical lineage, and to discover their remarkable lost heritage.
Appendix: The Illustrious Ancestry of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage
The Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, which descends from Rabbi Meir ben (son of) Rabbi Isaac Katzenellenbogen, better known as the Maharam of Padua (c. 1482–1565), is a venerable and historically significant family with many thousands of descendants widely dispersed throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States.[99] The family derived its name from the locality of Katzenelnbogen in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, now Germany.[100][101]
Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s son, Rabbi Samuel Judah (1521–1597), inherited his father’s position as the head of the Padua yeshiva.[102] Rabbi Samuel Judah’s son was Saul Wahl (c. 1541–1617), the Polish Court Jew and legendary “King of Poland for a day.”[103] Saul had five sons and six daughters, who married into the leading families of East European Jewry.[104]
Members of the family intermarried with other prominent Jewish families (e.g., Ashkenazi, Helperin, Horowitz, Luria, Mintz, Rappaport, Shapiro, and Teomim, among others), and produced many notable rabbis. Such was the fame of the Katzenellenbogen family that men who married Katzenellenbogen women typically adopted their wives’ family surname.[105]
The list of notable descendants of the Katzenellenbogen lineage includes Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Lord Immanuel Jakobovitz (Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), Martin Buber, Karl Marx, Moses and Felix Mendelssohn, Baron Guy de Rothschild, and Helena Rubenstein, among many others.
The founder of the lineage, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, was a great-grandson of Rabbi Aharon Luria, and thus a descendant of the venerable Luria lineage. According to Neil Rosenstein, “among families which claim descent from biblical King David, probably the one with the most authenticity is that of the Lurie family.”[106] The Lurie family was foremost in the earliest adoption of surnames, a claim which was recorded in the 1999 U.S. edition of the Guinness Book of Records, under “Longest lineage.”[107]
By virtue of Rabbi Aharon Luria’s marriage to Miriam Spira, the daughter of Rabbi Solomon Spira, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen also descends from the ancient and esteemed Shapiro rabbinical lineage, which traces its roots through the Treves rabbinical lineage, which claims descent from the famed biblical commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Yitzhak Tzarfati, better known as Rashi (1040 – 1105).
Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen married Hannah Mintz (1485 – 1564), the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Mintz (d. 1530), son of Rabbi Judah Mintz, head of the yeshiva of Padua, Italy. Judah ben Eliezer ha-Levi Mintz (c. 1405 – 1508), also known as Mahari Mintz, was the most prominent Italian rabbi of his time.[108] He officiated as rabbi of Padua for forty-seven years, during which time he had a great number of pupils, among whom was Meir Katzenellenbogen.
Tombstones of Rabbi Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen in the old Jewish cemetery in Padua, Italy (the tall tombstone against the back wall), and his father, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (partially obscured, to the immediate right of Samuel Judah’s tombstone)[109]
Katzenellenbogen family crest showing detail of a crouching cat on top of Rabbi Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen’s tombstone.[110]
In the Siege of Padua soon after Rabbi Judah Mintz’s death, almost all of his writings were destroyed. His grandson, Rabbi Joseph Mintz, discovered sixteen of his responsa,[111] and these were published in 1553, by Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, who printed his own responsa in the same volume. In this document, Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s name appears as “Meir ben (son of) Yitzhak Katzenellenbogen mi (of) Padua,” along with his father-in-law Rabbi Abraham Mintz, and his grandfather-in-law, Rabbi Judah Mintz.[112]
Many Katzenellenbogen rabbis and descendants wrote yichus (pedigree) letters and books regarding their illustrious lineage. Many of these rabbinical sources are compiled in Dr. Neil Rosenstein’s books on Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen[113] and the Lurie lineage.[114] Several of the more well-known of these sources are presented here.
Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen Responsa, 1553 [See fn. 115]
In 1758, Rabbi Pinchas Katzenellenbogen (1691 – 1765), son of Rabbi Moses Katzenellenbogen (1670 – 1733), son of Rabbi Saul Katzenellenbogen (1617 – 1691), wrote a manuscript entitled: The Book of Inheritance about his genealogy back to Saul Wahl. The manuscript included the story about Saul Wahl serving as the King of Poland for one night.[116]
In 1797, Rabbi Naftali Hirsch Katzenellenbogen (1745 – 1828), son of Rabbi Eliezer (Lazarus) Katzenellenbogen (b. 1700), and 4th-great-grandson of Saul Wahl, wrote a book, Sha’ar Naftali, about his genealogy, in which he traces his descent from Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen through nine generations.[117][118]
In 1854, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Edelman (1805 – 1858) wrote a book about the genealogy of the Katzenellenbogen family entitled: The Greatness of Saul Wahl. In his book, he presents Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s descent from Rashi through the Luria, Shapiro, and Treves lineages, and Rashi’s descent from King David.[119]
In 1936, Rabbi Meir Ellenbogen (born Katzenellenbogen) (1865 – 1947) wrote a book entitled: The Silver Thread, about the Katzenellenbogen genealogy, which presented the entire lineage from Rashi to Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, and his descendants, ending with himself.[120]
Thanks to the numerous published genealogies of the Katzenellenbogen family in rabbinical sources, family trees, and yichus letters, genealogists have reached a consensus regarding the authenticity and validity of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.[121]
Authors, Jeffrey Mark Paull & Neil Rosenstein, IAJGS Conference, Jerusalem, Israel, July, 2015
Two of the Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA research study authors descend from the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.
Lead author, Dr. Jeffrey Mark Paull, descends from the Katzenellenbogen lineage through the marriage of his 4th-great-grandfather, Rabbi Eliyahu Pinchas Polonsky, to Sima Wertheim, the daughter of Rabbi Aryeh Leib Wertheim. Sima’s mother, Leah Wertheim, was the granddaughter of Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl. Rabbi Twersky was a direct descendant of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, through his great-grandmother, Dinah Wahl Katzenellenbogen.
Dr. Neil Rosenstein descends from the Katzenellenbogen lineage through his grandmother, Sonya (Sarah) Katzenellenbogen, who married Boris (Baruch) Rosenstein. Sonya was a direct descendant of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen’s granddaughter, the wife of Rabbi Joel Ashkenazi, who acquired his wife’s Katzenellenbogen surname.
Notes
[1] Arthur Kurzweil: “From Generation to Generation – How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History.” Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint (2004), p. 196.
[5] Neil Rosenstein: “The Unbroken Chain: Biographical Sketches and Genealogy of Illustrious Jewish Families from the 15th–20th Century.” Revised Edition. The Computer Center for Jewish Genealogy, CIS Publishers, New York, NY, 1990. Dr. Rosenstein is planning to publish a new edition of The Unbroken Chain in 2016.
[6] Chaim Freedman: “The Rashi Descent.” http://www.jewishgen.org/rabbinic/infofiles/rashi.htm. The author mentions the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage as one of “a core of medieval rabbinical families who were descended from Rashi,” and which “comprise the root from which most other rabbinical families stemmed.”
[7] Rabbi Reuven Ross: “Maharam Padua.” Op cit. In regard to the Katzenellenbogen family, the author states: “The family could trace its roots back to Rashi and further still to Dovid HaMelech and it is estimated that at least fifty per cent of Ashkenazi Jewry today are descendants of this royal lineage.”
[8] Jewish Virtual Library: “Katzenellenbogen.” Op cit.
[9] Neil Rosenstein: “Katzenellenbogen Lineage Question.” Email communication with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 22, 2015. In regard to the accuracy and authenticity of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage, particularly for the first six generations from Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (1482 – 1565) to Rabbi Saul Katzenellenbogen (1617 – 1691), Neil Rosenstein stated: “The paper trail of that period is solid. All sources, books, manuscripts, epitaphs, etc. leave no doubts.”
[11] There are ongoing debates among scholars regarding inconsistencies in the lineage between Rashi (1040 –1105) and Rabbi Joseph Treves (c. 1305 – 1370). For example, Neil Rosenstein, in his book, “The Lurie Legacy,” cites a gap of “7 to 8 generations between Rashi and Joseph Treves.” While acknowledging that there are uncertainties in the early generations descending from Rashi that may never be adequately resolved, we believe that it is important to present the currently available published genealogical information, even though it may not be from primary sources. The lineage that we present in Figure 1, and its sources are documented in our Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage family tree, and posted on Ancestry.com: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/88431732/family.
[12] Edward Gelles: “The Jewish Journey: A Passage Through European History.” I.B. Tauris & Company Ltd., London, 2016, p. 16.
[13] Neil Rosenstein: “The Unbroken Chain.” Op cit.
[14] Neil Rosenstein: Email communication with Jeffrey Briskman, February 23, 2015. David Kellen’s lineage was based on information from Neil Rosenstein’s newly revised edition of The Unbroken Chain (pre-publication draft). According to this information David’s line descends from Meir Katzenellenbogen (born after 1630), who was the brother of Rabbi Saul Katzenellenbogen (1617 – 1691). There is some uncertainty regarding the unnamed paternal ancestor between Jacob Katzenellenbogen (c. 1720 – 1761) and Meir Katzenellenbogen (born c. 1770).
[15] The primary source for the lineage information presented in Table 1 is The Unbroken Chain, pp. 92-95, and 112-119. Additional genealogical sources, including immigration, census, and obituary records, as well as internet search resources and personal communications were utilized to locate living descendants of these lineages.
[16] The abbreviation ABD stands for Av Beit Din, the Hebrew term for head of the rabbinical court.
[17] Meir Ellenbogen: “The Silver Thread,” Op cit.
[18] Aaron Walden: “Shem ha-Gedolim he-Ḥadash.” Warsaw, Poland, 1864, p. 59. The author mentions Nachum of Slutsk as the son-in-law of Saul Wahl Katzenellenbogen’s grandson.
[19] Neil Rosenstein: “Katzenellenbogen Lineage.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 19, 2015.
[20] Graham de Vahl Davis: “My Grandfather Was a Ghost.” Email correspondence from Neil Rosenstein to Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 21, 2015.
[21] Tatyana Tsenter (Viktor Katsenelenbogen’s daughter): Russian website Odnoklassniki (Classmates), www.ok.ru. Instant text communication with Jeffrey Briskman, October 1, 2014.
[24] Wikipedia: “Haplogroup.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup. A haplogroup is comprised of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor having the same single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation in all haplotypes. In human genetics, the haplogroups most commonly studied are Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) haplogroups and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups, both of which can be used to define genetic populations. The special feature that both Y chromosomes and mtDNA display is that mutations can accrue along a certain chromosome segment and these mutations remain fixed in place on the DNA. Furthermore, the historical sequence of these mutations can also be inferred.
[25] ISOGG defines the term “genetic signature” as: “Another name for a haplotype,” a Y-DNA haplotype being the numbered results of a genealogical Y-DNA STR test. http://isogg.org/wiki/Genetics_Glossary. FTDNA defines it similarly. https://www.familytreedna.com/learn/y-dna-testing/. In our view, the haplogroup, defined by the terminal single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) that is shared by members of the haplogroup, is also an essential part of the Y-DNA genetic signature of a particular paternal lineage; STR and SNP results are complementary, and most powerful when used in tandem.
[26] Tatyana Tsenter: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Briskman, May 1, 2015.
[27] Xico Garcia initially appeared on the genetic match lists of all three pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants. He later dropped off their match lists, although he remained on the match list of Viktor Katsenelenbogen. His Y-DNA results are included in Table 4 because his allele values match the haplotype of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants as closely as those of the other Iberian descendants. His recent omission from their genetic match lists may simply be an artifact of FTDNA’s match list reporting system.
[28] The haplotype is represented by the matching ancestral allele values and the possible ancestral allele values (indicated by the green shaded cells) in Tables 2, 3, and 4.
[29] The J-YSC0000076 haplogroup is a subclade of the J-M267 haplogroup, and J-L823 is a subclade of J-YSC0000076. Identification of the J-L823 subclade requires a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) test.
[30] Wikipedia: “Sephardi Jews.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews. Sephardi Jews, also known as Sephardic Jews or Sephardim (Hebrew for “The Jews of Spain”), are a Jewish ethnic division whose ethnogenesis and emergence as a distinct community of Jews coalesced in the Iberian Peninsula around the 10th century. They established communities throughout Spain and Portugal, evolving what would become their distinctive characteristics and diasporic identity. Their residence as an organized Jewish community in Iberia was brought to an end starting with the Alhambra Decree by Spain’s Catholic Monarchs in the late 15th century, which resulted in a combination of migrations, expulsions, mass conversions, and executions.
[32] A TMRCA prediction could not be calculated for the fifth Iberian descendant, Xico Garcia, using FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model, because he does not currently appear on the genetic match lists of the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants (see note #27 above).
[33] Rachel Unkefer: “Interpreting Y-DNA Markers: A Primer.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Spring 2014. Using McGee Utilities to calculate TMRCAs, the author reported: “In situations with known family trees, the number of generations back to the known MRCA tends to be smaller (more recent) than the 95 percent probability prediction in the vast majority of cases we have studied. The actual documented TMRCA usually falls between the 50 percent probability predictions and the 95 percent probability predictions.”
[34] Jeffrey Mark Paull: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: A Case Study of the Polonsky Rabbinical Lineage.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Fall, 2013. Using FTDNA’s time predictor model, the author found that the actual TMRCA fell between the 58.6 percent and 89.5 percent probability predictions.
[35] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: The Savran-Bendery Chassidic Dynasty.” Using FTDNA’s time predictor model, the authors found that the actual TMRCA fell between the 53.8 percent and 93.3 percent probability predictions.
[36] Rachel Unkefer, “Interpreting Y-DNA Markers: A Primer.” Op cit., 2014.
[37] Meir Katzenellenbogen was known to have had a brother, Moses, who lived in Prague (see notes #39 and #40 below).
[38] Dr. Abraham Joshua Twerski (b. 1930) is a known maternal descendant of Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky (1730 – 1797). Abraham’s paternal ancestor, Rabbi Mordechai Dov, was the son of Menachem Nachum’s great-granddaughter, Sterna Rachel Auerbach (nee Twerski), and acquired her Twerski maiden surname. Surprisingly, however, Abraham’s Y-DNA results matched those of the Twersky rabbinical dynasty, thereby implying that the Auerbach and Twersky rabbinical lineages share a common paternal ancestor.
[39] Neil Rosenstein: “Saul Wahl: Polish King for a Night or Lithuanian Knight for a Lifetime.” The Computer Center for Jewish Genealogy, Elizabeth, NJ, 2006, p. 3. Rosenstein refers to a book called “Die Familien Prags” (1892) by Simon Hock, which mentions Moses (d. 1540), son of Isaac Katzenellenbogen, whom Rosenstein considers as “most likely a brother of Meir [Katzenellenbogen] of Padua [Italy].” Hock also records other Katzenellenbogen family deaths in Prague in 1634. This implies that after Meir Katzenellenbogen moved to Padua, some other Katzenellenbogen families stayed in Prague. Viktor Katsenelenbogen could be a descendant of one of those Katzenellenbogen families.
[40] Meir Wunder: “Elef Margaliot.”ha-Makhon le-hantsaḥat Yahadut Galitsyah, Publisher, Jerusalem, Israel, 1993, p. 188. According to this second source, Rabbi Isaac Katzenellenbogen left Germany and moved to Prague with his family. His son Moses, brother of Meir Katzenellenbogen, died there and was buried in the Prague Jewish cemetery. This source corroborates that there was another non-rabbinical branch of the Katzenellenbogen family who remained in Prague, and who descended from the same common ancestor as Meir Katzenellenbogen.
[41] The FTDNA time predictor (TiP®) model calculations for Figure 6 are based on a comparison of newly-identified Jewish descendants with pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendant David Kellen, at 67 STR markers.
[42] SephardicGen Resources: Consolidated Index of Sephardic Surnames. http://www.sephardicgen.com/ databases/indexSrchFrm.html. Garcia, Marquez, and Romero are very common Iberian surnames, and their listing in this index of Sephardic surnames is not meant to imply that all individuals with these surnames are of converso ancestry.
[43] Wikipedia: “Converso.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converso. A converso (from Latin conversvs, for “converted, turned around”) and its feminine form conversa, was a Sephardic Jew who converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries, or one of their descendants. The remaining Jews who had not converted were finally expelled from Spain in 1492, and a significant portion of them who chose to convert to Catholicism were subject to discriminatory laws and harassment by the Inquisition. New Christians of Jewish origin were referred to as marranos. The term marrano may also refer to Crypto-Jews or those who secretly continued to practice Judaism.
[44] The vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews do not know their ancestry going back more than a few generations. Hence, they report their ancestry as being Ashkenazi by default, because they are unaware that they may have a Sephardic ethnic origin.
[45] FTDNA: “Y-DNA Genetic Distance.” https://www.familytreedna.com/learn/y-dna-testing/y-str/genetic-distance/. “When talking about two or more Y-chromosome STR (short tandem repeat) haplotypes, genetic distance is the total number of differences or mutations between two sets of results. In general, it is found by summing the differences between each STR marker.”
[46] Wikipedia: “Anusim.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anusim. Anusim, meaning coerced or converted Jews, is a legal category of Jews in halakha (Jewish law) who were forced to abandon Judaism against their will, typically while forcibly converted to another religion.
[47] Manuel Tenorio: Email correspondence with Judy Simon, June 3, 2015. Mr. Tenorio wrote: “The answer to your question is yes. My grandparents and great-grand parents practiced their Jewish religion in secret. They were devout Catholics and pillars of the Church; however, secretly, they practiced their Jewish Faith in secret in a small window-less room that they lit with candles.”
[48] Because all newly-identified Iberian Katzenellenbogen genetic matches (KGMs) appear only on David Kellen’s Y-DNA genetic match list at the 67 STR marker level, he was selected to represent the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants for the purpose of utilizing the FTDNA time predictor model.
[49] Wim Penninx: “Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA Study.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 21, 2016. Wim has expressed reservations regarding the accuracy of FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP) model, especially in the 15 – 20 generation range. On the basis of his analysis of the genealogical data, including the J-L823 SNP, he is of the opinion that the MRCA for the pedigreed Katzenellenbogen descendants and their Iberian genetic matches predates the founding of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineage. While we certainly acknowledge this possibility, and present it as one of several possible scenarios in our article, we do not believe that either STR mutation-rate based models, such as the TiP model, or phylogenetic-based methods are currently accurate enough to make this determination with a high degree of scientific certainty.
[52] Miguel Torrez: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, January 28, 2016. According to Mr. Torrez: “So, it appears that these two families have a connection prior to the re-conquest of NM in 1692. Is the connection in Mexico or in Spain; I am not sure and think a lot more will need be done to analyze the possibilities. There is still a chance that a Tenorio fathered the Romero line in the early 1700s since YDNA confirms the legitimacy of the Romero line back to 1730s without a doubt via Daniel Romero and Eddy Romero YDNA match and genealogies.”
[53] Although Middle Eastern and Northern African ethnic components are consistent with Sephardic ethnic ancestry, differences in ethnic admixture between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have not been well-defined, and even less is known regarding ethnic admixture for converso populations. This is a promising new area for future research.
[54] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Janet Billstein Akaha: “Using Autosomal DNA Analysis to Connect Rabbinical Lineages: A Case Study of the Wertheimer and Wertheim Dynasties.” AVOTAYNU Volume XXVIII, Number 4, Winter 2012.
[55] Jeffrey Mark Paull, Gaye Sherman Tannenbaum, and Jeffrey Briskman: “Differences in Autosomal DNA Characteristics between Jewish and Non-Jewish Populations.” Surname DNA Journal, published July 31, 2014.
[56] Jeffrey Mark Paull, Gaye Sherman Tannenbaum, and Jeffrey Briskman: “Why Autosomal DNA Test Results Are Significantly Different for Ashkenazi Jews.” AVOTAYNU Volume XXX, Number 1, Spring 2014.
[57] Brian Selwyn: Verbal communication with Jeffrey Mark Paull, October 8, 2014.
[58] Tatyana Katsenelenbogen: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Briskman, October 1, 2014.
[59] Richard Dahl: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, May 30, 2015. According to Richard: “There is no oral tradition of rabbinical descent, but there is an oral tradition of Spanish origin. The family has been Dahl since the French occupation of Germany.”
[60] Wikipedia: “Haplogroup.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup. A haplogroup is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor having the same single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation in all haplotypes.
[64] Michael F. Hammer, Doron M. Behar, et al.: “Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood.” Human Genetics 126 (5): 707–717 (2009).
[65] The authors are currently researching the ancient Rappaport-Cohen rabbinical lineage, which they have identified as belonging to the J-M267 haplogroup.
[66] Victar Mas: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, September 20, 2015. FTDNA J1 project administrator, Victar Mas, responded to our question regarding the J-L823 SNP as follows: “If you look at the J1 project, you’ll see we have Spanish kits in Cluster E. The surnames include Echeverria, Tenorio, Santafe, and Garcia, to name those that are in the project. We know J-L823 is Jewish, so either they were Conversos or Crypto-Jews that lost their Jewish identity through time.”
[67] Judy Simon: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, June 5, 2015. FTDNA Iberian Ashkenaz project co-administrator, Judy Simon concluded: “The DNA has established the fact that there are Sephardim/conversos on the L823 paternal line.”
[68] Bennett Greenspan: “Which SNPs to Test for the Katzenellenbogen Lineage.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, May 28, 2015. Bennett responded to our question regarding which SNPs would be most useful to test the Katzenellenbogen descendants for as follows: “YCS000076 is shared by lots of Jews and Arabs. Ideally we would look for a more downstream SNP. The SNP should be referred to as: J-L823. I would use that specific gene.”
[69] Wim Penninx: “J-L823 Haplogroup.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 9, 2016.
[70] Wikipedia: “Phylogenetics.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among individuals, species, or populations. These relationships are discovered through phylogenetic inference methods that evaluate observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences (e.g., SNPs) or morphology under a model of evolution of these traits. The result of these analyses is a phylogeny (also known as a phylogenetic tree) – a hypothesis about the history of evolutionary relationships. Phylogenetic analyses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution, ecology, and genomes.
[71] Jeffrey Mark Paull, Neil Rosenstein, and Jeffrey Briskman: “The Y-DNA Signature of the Katzenellenbogen Rabbinical Lineage – Research Update and Preliminary Findings” (2014). https://independent.academia.edu/JeffreyMarkPaull.
[72] Wim Penninx: “Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA Study.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 15, 2016. In this email message, Wim Penninx stated: “I agree with the three scenarios.”
[73] The newly-identified Iberian and Jewish Katzenellenbogen genetic matches could descend from a cousinly line of Meir Katzenellenbogen. There is historical evidence for the existence of such a cousinly Katzenellenbogen line who lived in Prague contemporaneously with Meir’s branch (see notes #39 and #40 above).
[74] Joshua Teplitsky: “The Sephardic Diaspora After 1492.” Op cit.
[75] This is the explanation that is favored by Wim Penninx (see note #49 above).
[76] Rachel Unkefer: “Interpreting Y-DNA Markers: A Primer.” Op cit., 2014.
[77] Rabbi Reuven Ross: “Maharam Padua.” Op cit. The author presented the following genealogical information regarding Meir Katzenellenbogen: “Born in the town of Katzenellenbogen Germany in 1482, from where the family took its name, his father Rav Yitzhak was a Torah scholar of great repute and is quoted in various Halachic works under the title Mahari. The family could trace its roots back to Rashi and further still to Dovid HaMelech, and it is estimated that at least fifty percent of Ashkenazi Jewry today are descendants of this royal lineage.”
[79] In this regard, it is important to note that although Meir Katzenellenbogen was born in Germany, it is not known where his father, Rav Yitzchak (Isaac) was born.
[81] Ibid. According to this source: “The most famous Jew to flee Spain was Don Isaac Abarbanel (also spelled Abravanel). His presence in Italy gave standing to the Spanish Jews, who rose rapidly to positions of wealth and influence … Around the same time the Abarbanel arrived, a great rabbi from Poland settled in the town of Padua, Rabbi Meir ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen.”
[82] Neil Rosenstein: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, June 5, 2015. According to Dr. Rosenstein: “It has been well-known that a number of major rabbinical families have a long-standing tradition that they descend from pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. This is also borne out by scholars such as Rabbi Beryl Wein and Sir Martin Gilbert.”
[83] Meir Wunder: “Elef Margaliot.”Op cit, p. 47-48. This source presents the family tree of Rabbi Aharon ben Yosef ha-Levi, the progenitor of the Epstein family, and his brother, Rabbi Pinchas ben Yosef ha-Levi, the progenitor of the Horowitz family. These brothers are the direct male descendants of Rabbi Zerahyah ben Yitzhak ha-Levi Gerondi (1125-1186).
[84] Tzvi ha-Levi Ish Horowitz: “Legacy of Horowitz Family: First Generations.” M. Lenkowicza, Krakow, Poland, 1929. The author provides the family tree of brothers Pinchas and Aharon from Barcelona, sons of Yosef ha-Levi who was the paternal descendant of Yitzhak ha-Levi Gerondi. The author also tells the story of how the descendants of Pinchas came to Bohemia and acquired their Horowitz surname.
[85] Baruch ha-Levi Epstein: “Makor Baruch.” Ram Publishing, Vilna, Lithuania, 1928, pp. 3; 54-55. The author states that he is a descendant of the Sephardic family known as Benveneshti, and that he is also a descendant of the author of “Ha-Maor” (Zerahyah ben Yitzhak ha-Levi Gerondi). He also mentions the change of the family’s surname from Benveneshti to Epstein, when they emigrated from Spain to Germany.
[86] Wim Penninx: “Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA Study.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 21, 2016. In a dissenting view, Wim Penninx sees no strong argument for the Iberian ethnic origin of the Epstein-Horowitz line. He points out that Horowitz is probably part of the R1a haplogroup, which has no indication of Iberian lines as of yet. He also points out that the Epstein surname is present in many Y-DNA branches, and that it is clear that the name was given without reference to a single paternal line.
[87] JewishHistory.org: “The Marranos.” Op cit. According to this source: “Rabbi Meir ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen had three sons: a rabbi, a banker and a merchant. They befriended Italian noblemen scattered among the fractured states of the Italian peninsula and created a base for Jewish life for the future. Rabbi Katzenellenbogen and his sons fathered a great number of descendants.”
[88] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “The History, Adoption, and Regulation of Jewish Surnames in the Russian Empire – A Review.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Fall, 2014.
[89] Tatyana Tsenter: Email communication with Jeffrey Briskman, May 1, 2015. Viktor Katsenelenbogen’s daughter said of her father: “He was told that his ancestors were famous rabbis. But that’s all that he knew. No papers left, no records of any of it. Exactly one year ago, I was thinking of a birthday present for my father, and decided to order a Y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA to find more information about the last name that my father was so loyal and dedicated to. My father is the last one who carries this last name in our family. I am his only daughter, but my two sons know where they came from and are very proud of it now.”
[90] Bennett Greenspan: “Genetic Genealogy: History and Current Issues.” AVOTAYNU, Volume XXX, No. 2, Summer 2014.
[91] Bennett Greenspan: Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, September 17, 2014. Quoting Bennett: “I’d be blown away if I came from a famous rabbinic family.”
[92] Neil Rosenstein: “The Unbroken Chain.” Op cit., p. 12. In regard to Nachum of Slutsk, Dr. Rosenstein states: “Various sources seem to be uncertain of the fact whether or not he was the son or the son-in-law of Meir.”
[93] Rachel Unkefer: “From Kansas to the Rhine: A DNA Journey through Europe’s Rabbinic Capitals.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, Winter 2013.
[94] Herbert Huebscher and Elise Friedman: “DNA and Jewish Genealogy Join Forces.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Summer 2007.
[95] Jeffrey Mark Paull: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: A Case Study of the Polonsky Rabbinical Lineage.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Fall, 2013.
[96] Rachel Unkefer: “From Kansas to the Rhine: A DNA Journey through Europe’s Rabbinic Capitals.” Op cit., 2013.
[97] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Y-DNA Genetic Signature of the Savran-Bendery Chassidic Dynasty.” Surname DNA Journal, May 31, 2015.
[98] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Connecting to the Wertheim-Giterman Rabbinical Lineage through Y-DNA.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Volume XXX, Number 3, Fall 2014.
[102] Wikipedia: “Yeshiva.” http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshiva. A yeshiva is a Jewish institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts, primarily Talmud and Torah study.
[103] Neil Rosenstein: Saul Wahl: “Polish King for a Night or Lithuanian Knight for a Lifetime.” Op cit.
[104] Neil Rosenstein: “The Children and Grandchildren of Saul Wahl.” Email correspondence with Jeffrey Mark Paull, February 11, 2015.
[105] Jewish Virtual Library: “Katzenellenbogen.” Op cit.
[106] Neil Rosenstein: “The Lurie Legacy: The House of Davidic Royal Descent.” Avotaynu Inc., Bergenfield, NJ, 2004, p. xxi. (The Lurie surname includes spelling variants Loria and Luria).
[109] Photograph of Padua cemetery and Katzenellenbogen tombstones provided courtesy of Neil Rosenstein, who photographed the cemetery in January, 1968.
[111] Wikipedia: “Responsa.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsa. Responsa (Latin: plural of responsum, “answers”) comprise a body of written decisions and rulings given by legal scholars in response to questions addressed to them. In the modern era, the term is used to describe decisions and rulings made by scholars in historic religious law.
[112] Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen and Rabbi Judah Mintz: “Sheelot u-Tshuvut (Questions and Answers).” Aluise Bragadini Publisher, Venice, 1553.
[113] Neil Rosenstein: Saul Wahl: “Polish King for a Night or Lithuanian Knight for a Lifetime.” Op cit.
[114] Neil Rosenstein: “The Lurie Legacy.” Op cit.
[115] Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen and Rabbi Judah Mintz: “Sheelot u-Tshuvut (Questions and Answers).” Op Cit. The photo of the cover page the book, which was published in 1553, is in the public domain.
[116] Rabbi Pinchas Katzenellenbogen: “Sefer Yesh Mankhilin” (Book of Inheritance). Unpublished manuscript from 1758, published by Makhon Hatam Sofer, Jerusalem, 1986.
[119] Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Edelman: “Gedulat Shaul (The Greatness of Saul Wahl).” Shaw Publishing Co., London, 1854.
[120] Meir Ellenbogen: “The Silver Thread: Record of the Katzenelenbogen (sic) Family, including Mintz, Lurie, Teumim (sic), Samuel, and Greenberg.” Moinester Publishing Co., Brooklyn, NY, 1937.
[121] Neil Rosenstein: “Katzenellenbogen Lineage Question.” Op cit.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the members of our Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA project for their participation in our research study, and for their permission to publish their names and DNA results in our article. We would also like to express our gratitude to our distinguished panel of peer reviewers, with special mention to Rachel Unkefer, Wim Penninx, and Gaye Tannenbaum, for their insightful review comments and suggestions. We also wish to gratefully acknowledge Bennett Greenspan, founder and president of Family Tree DNA, for his generous contributions and support of our Katzenellenbogen Y-DNA project.
Many published family trees of the historical Horowitz family of Prague and Horovice, Bohemia trace the origins of the family back to Catalonia in Spain and to Lunil, Provence in France, in particular to the esteemed Benvenisti Halevi Family, which included renowned early rabbinic authorities Rabbi Aaron Halevi of Barcelona and Rabbi Zerachiah Halevi of Girona, author of Baal Hamaor (the Book of Light). The purpose of this article is to review the descriptions of the Horowitz genealogy to ascertain where and when this tradition might have developed.
Early Sources
Ethical will of Rabbi Sheftel (Shabtai) Halevi Horowitz (1590-1660)
Circa 1650. The great scholar Rabbi Yeshaya ha-Levi Horowitz (c.1565–1630) was the author of the encyclopedic ethical work Shnei luḥot ha-berit, published 1648 in Amsterdam by the publisher Immanuel Benvenisti (1608-1665) (both book and author areknown by the acronym Shelah). There is no indication in the book that there is any family connection between the author and publisher. The earliest known mention of the origins of the Horowitz family is found in the ethical will of Rabbi Sheftel (Shabtai) Halevi Horowitz (1590-1660), which was appended to Yesh Nochlin (1615) written by his grandfather Rabbi Abraham (son of Shabtai) Horowitz (1540-1615) and published in 1701. Rabbi Sheftel writes very strongly about the importance of knowing one’s family history:
As is well known the third destruction (after the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem) in the year 1648 caused massive loss of life and also caused confusion about family identity. The sages of that time tried to salvage the family lineages but there was a limit to how much they could do, and there is reason to fear that in later times people will claim to be part of a distinguished family or to place a blemish in a holy seed. Therefor it is important for anyone who lives in such a time to write a clear pedigree and leave it for his children so that they may know precisely from whom they are descended. I therefore wish to tell you my beloved young and wise son Isaiah (SG”L) that you are my son, and I am the son of the Gaon and pious Rabbi Yeshaye SG”L author of Shnei Luchos HaBris, grandson of Rabbi Avrohom son of Rabbi Sheftel, author of Emek Brachah, and Rav Sheftel was the son of Rabbi Yeshaye SG”L and he (Rabbi Yeshaye) was the son-in-law of the prince Akiva of Oben (Obuda, now part of Budapest) who is buried in the holy community of Prague near the grave of my mother. My mother Chaya was said in her time to have performed all the good deeds of the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. She was the daughter of a Torah scholar, who was also a great philanthropist, and [your] mother, too, was from a great family the daughter of Rabbi Moshe Charif (the sharp mind) son of Rabbi Israel of Lublin, and all of them were of pure family lineage. I have written this not that I wish to boast of it just that you and my daughter should know who you are and who are your ancestors, and you should instruct your children, and they to their children for all time, for the Holy One blessed be He only rests His presence on those of pedigree.
Yesh Nochlin, published 1701
Circa 1740. A further Horowitz genealogy does not appear for another century, in the work of Rabbi Pinchas Katzenellenbogen (1691–1767,), a great-grandson of the famed Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz of Cracow (through his daughter Hinda). Rabbi Katzenellenbogen wrote a masterful historical memoir named Yesh Manchilin containing many genealogical details and family trees. This invaluable source remained only in manuscript form in the Oppenheim collection in the Bodleian library, until transcribed and published by Rabbi Isaac Feld in 1986 (Machon Chasam Sofer, Jerusalem).[1] There are several chapters devoted to Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz and the Horowitz family. In Chapter 135 Rabbi Katzenellenbogen writes:
I will copy that which I saw in a manuscript volume of Rabbi Aryeh Leib, the rabbi of Boskovitz, the son of Rabbi Menachem Mendel, rabbi of Raustitz and head of the rabbinical court of Nikolsburg, son of the elder sage Rabbi David, rabbi and av beth din in Trebitsch.My ancestor wrote the order of genealogy of the family Horowitz in Prague: This is what I have been told by R. Zalman Fischhof of Vienna. R. Yisrael S.G.L.: his son R. Pinchas built the synagogue in Prague; his son Yeshaye (son of Pinchas); Zalman (son of Yeshaye); three daughters of R. Yeshaye were (1) Raizel, (2) Nechama, and (3) Nissel. R. Lipman (in the manuscript it says in parenthesis—“this may be Rabbi Uri Lippmann [the famed preacher in Vienna and Prague-ed.] who was the father of the well-known printer in Sulzbach who lived to a great age, R. Aron”) was the son of the aforementioned Raizel, the wife of R. Uri Kelma [Kuma, Kamen]; R. Shimon son of Raizel; R Zalman Fischhof son of Shimon.[2] [As for] the above-mentioned R Lipman: (in the manuscript it says “If this is the R Lipman who was the father of R Aron the printer, then R. Aron would be the brother of Hendel who is the maternal grandmother of the above-named Rabbi David, and that seems illogical to assume that R. Aron could be a sibling of Rabbi David’s grandmother, and that is a sufficient discussion.”).
Circa 1800. Some genealogists have claimed that the encyclopedic work Shem Hagedolim of Rabbi Chaim David Azulai (1724-1806) is evidence of the Spanish Benveniste origins of the Horowitz family. However, the Horowitz family is mentioned only briefly as a prestigious family of scholars, and no specific mention is made of any Spanish and Provencal antecedents
19th and 20th Century Sources
Rabbi Joseph Lewenstein of Serock
It is well known that there was a sudden outpouring of rabbinical biography and genealogy published at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including several dedicated to our subject matter.[3]
1883. The first printed documentation of the Spanish connection that I have found is an article by Yitzchak Meir Lewenstein, the son of Rabbi Yosef Lewenstein of Serock, in the newspaper Hamelitz February 26 1883, with further installments March 9 and 22. This is a long Horowitz genealogy which claims to be a handwritten family yichus brief in the possession of his father, which was then being published because of the many requests for transcripts. What Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Lewenstein actually wrote (incidentally two of his grandchildren died just last year at age 95 and 98!) was:
Hamelitz March 9, 1883
….. Rabbi Akiva Kohen’s daughter married Yeshaye from Horovitz in Bohemia. He was an offshoot of the tree of our Rabbi Isaac the Levite (who is quoted in the talmudic novellae of R. Solomon b. Aderet on megilah 26 and Gittin 41b) who was the son of Rabbi Pinchas the Levite (who is quoted by R. Yomtov b. Ashevili in many places) the brother of Rabbi Aaron the prince of the Levites of Barcelona, author of the book of education (Hachinuch) and Bedek Habayit, who was called the Re’ah and was a disciple of Nachmanides and R Solomon b. Aderet; son of R. Yosef.
1899.Moshe Yaakov Schwerdscharf published Daat Lenvonim in Munkach, and he followed this with another genealogical work Geza Tarschishim published in Lemberg (Lwow) in 1905. This is just one of the many genealogical works written in rabbinic Hebrew which are now available online without charge from http://www.hebrewbooks.org/ In both these works, Schwerdscharf cites the Spanish ancestry as a matter of fact, without mentioning its source:
Yeshaye Halevi from the city of Horovice in Bohemia, according to what is told he owned the village of Horovice and was therefore known as “Ish Horowitz.” And he was a descendant of Rabbi Yitzchak Halevi, son of Rabbi Pinchas Halevi who was the brother of Rabbi Aron Halevi of Barcelona, prince of the Levites, who was known as Re’ah and author of Bedek Habayit and the Sefer Hachinuch. They were sons [descendants] of Rabbi Zerachiah Halevi, son of Yitzchak Halevi, son of Rabbi Zerachiah Halevi, author of Baal Hamaor, which he completed in Lunil in 4910 (1150) where he died in 1186.
1900.Rabbi Chaim Aryeh Horowitz of Cracow published a volume of his talmudic novellae titled Chaye Aryeh and added a preface with his family history. He writes of the first known Horowitz, Yeshaya Horowitz of Prague, “it was said of him that he was an emigrant from Spain, a descendant of R. Yitzchak Halevi, son of R. Pinchas Halevi the brother of Rabbi Aron Halevi.”
1902. Pinchas Pessas of Dubna published another Horowitz genealogy which he called Ateret Haleviim(Crown of the Levites). Here too, the author cites the tale of Spanish origin, but as something that is told. He does not give a specific source although the book is otherwise thoroughly footnoted and sourced.
1903.Rabbi Shmuel Zanvil Kahana published Anaf Etz Avot (branches of the tree of ancestors). It is a highly organized work with tables of ancestors and descendants, with each generation numbered and indexed. There is a part of the book devoted to the Horowitz family and he lists this Halevi ancestry, and gives as sources the book Ohr Hachaim (Ch. 293) and the letter from famed genealogist Rabbi Joseph Lewenstein of Serotsk. Ohr Hachaim is the bibliographic and historical work of Heimann Joseph Michael of Hamburg (1792-1846) published in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1891. However, while the chapter cited gives the genealogy of the Halevi family of Barcelona and Lunil, it never mentions a link to the well-known Horowitz family.
1909. In Piotrków, Abraham Joseph Fisher, from the town of Aleksandrów near Lodz, published a book of Talmudic commentary by Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz of Prague and Krakow, whom I mentioned above. The title page accurately describes R. Pinchas as having come from Prague to Krakow and as a brother-in-law of Rabbi Moshe Isserles (the renowned Rema), a relative of the Tosfos Yom Tov (who married a great-niece of R. Pinchas) and a relative of Rabbi Yeshaye Horowitz the author of Shelah. The introduction includes a great deal of genealogical material, although much of it duplicates that which was published elsewhere in the few years prior. But the most important factor is that the manuscript of Beth Pinchas was in the possession of Rabbi Lewenstein of Serock who gave it to Fisher to transcribe and publish.[5]
1928.Rabbi Zvi Halevi Horowitz of Dresden, a scholar and historian, produced a family history of the Horowitz clan. This was first published in the Zeitschrift fur die geschichte der juden in die Czechoslovakei II 89–109, 222–229, and III 127–137, 221–22; also as an appendix to a talmudic work published by his brother Rabbi Moshe Horowitz, Tov Ayin, and as a separate book Toldot Mishapachat Horowitz (Cracow 1928). In the German version he cites more sources, but the only ones he presents for this earlier ancestry are his father’s introduction to Chaye Aryeh and the Megilas Yuchson of Rabbi Meir Perels in the Warsaw edition of 1889. The Megilas Yuchsin however seems to say no more and no less than is found in the will of Rabbi Sheftel Horowitz that has been previously mentioned. The Megilas Yuchsin does not mention the Spanish antecedents, rather it is in a footnote in the Warsaw edition that it was added by the publisher, thus not giving us any earlier source for the tale.
2004. Another discussion of the early ancestry of the Horowitz dynasty is found in a thorough article by Rabbi David Nachman Rotner of Jerusalem, published in the journal of the Stoliner chassidim in Kovetz Bais Aron VeYisrael (No. 113, page 155–161) in 2004. He quotes the Prague museum and archives wherein there are several mentions of R. Asher Zalman (Zelikman) Horowitz, father of R. Yeshaye Horowitz whom the earlier genealogists consider the first known generation of Horowitzes. Rabbi Rotner appears to have made a very intense study of the original records, even finding an earlier generation in the original Prague records. So I was hopeful he might shed some more light on the Spanish connection.
There are certainly more examples of references to the Spanish origins of the Horowitz family in private genealogies of the past 100 years. Judy Goldberg writes: “I have a hand written document that is titled “Seder Ha’Dorot” סדר הדורות in our family that starts in Barcelona with Aharon and Pinchas Ha’Levi and ends with my great-grandfather the last rabbi of Dubova, Ukraine Moshe Aharon (Bernstein) Berdichevsky (1845-1919). We do not know who wrote it but we think it was either written by his oldest son Yechiel Micha Yoseph Berdichevsky (1865-1921) or by his wife and his right hand Rachel (née Ramberg) Berdichevsky (1879-1955).”
One wonders whether — given the fact that a devoted genealogist of the family living in the 1740’s had not heard of a connection to the illustrious ancestor Rabbi Zerachya Halevi and the Benveniste Family — this family legend documented 140 years later should be considered reliable? Was it merely inferred from the fact that the Shnei Luchot Habrit was published by Immanuel Benveniste? If Rav Sheftel Horowitz, the son of Rabbi Yeshaye Horowitz, writing between 1650 and 1660, and recalling his family lineage with pride, did not include the prior generations before Rabbi Yeshaye Horowitz (the 1st), and the careful genealogies of the family only allude to the Benveniste connection as כפי המסופר (“as has been told”) or מספרים במשפחתנו (“they tell in our family”) and only those who wrote much later incorporated it as documented fact, shouldn’t we consider it more of a tradition and legend than established with certainty?[6]
Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein is the rabbi of Congregation Minchas Chinuch of the West Side in New York City. Born in England and educated there and in the USA, he has long enjoyed finding more ancestors and relatives of his wide-ranging family. He also works as a hospital chaplain, and director of a kosher certification agency.
Notes
[1] In the appendix to this chapter, Rabbi Feld notes that the chapter was especially hard to read and notes that newer technology may be able to restore greater legibility. Perhaps a volunteer would peruse the Bodleian manuscript with better lighting and photo-corrective scans which would add some information to this chapter.
[2] We have not been able to reconcile this account of the ancestors of R. Zalman Fischhof. Compare http://www.geni.com/people/Meshulam-Zalman-Auerbach/6000000004957016884 with http://www.geni.com/people/Zalman-Fischhof/6000000040838745842.
[3] The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) includes an article on Pedigree by Joseph Jacobs with a list of families with pedigrees in the Encyclopedia.
[4] Incidentally, Rabbi Shmelke Horowitz taught his disciples that he felt a special connection to the prophet Samuel, as recorded in the book Nazir Hashem, but he did not mention to them that he was a descendant of the venerated prophet though he too was from this prestigious line.
[5] This in itself gives more strength to the Levensteins as guardians of the Horowitz heritage. I remember that when I first went to study in the yeshiva in Gateshead, the tractate studied at the time was Yevamos, and it was this volume of commentary that was most popular for insights into Tosfos comments. I must have handled it a hundred times without giving a glance at the introduction.
[6] Coincidentally, the latest issue of Vayisyaldu, a Hebrew language e-zine dedicated to rabbinical genealogy, authored by a Rabbi Wettstein, is devoted to the Charlap family and its illustrious history. There too he finds that the first mention of ancestry traced back to King David is in a journal article in 1890 issue of Knesset Hagedolah (Warsaw). He also notes with surprise that (just as we questioned the phenomenon that the elders of the Horowitz family wrote about their lineage but did not mention the Spanish connection) the elders of the Charlap /Don Yichya/ Ibn Yichya family did not mention their Davidic descent. Only their descendants knew of their illustrious ancestry. Rabbi Gedalya Ibn Yechya 1526-1588 wrote a family history and says nothing about it.
It happened again. I couldn’t believe it but I have two witnesses. Just as I was about to leave my weekly writing class at the library of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), I stopped by the entry desk to log in my couple of volunteer hours. In front of that desk is a low wall, and next to that a three-tiered book rack on wheels filled with books in various sizes and content available for anyone to purchase. These are used books donated to the SWC but in the case the SWC already has these they offer them for sale at very minimal costs.
So right there on the top shelf was a small stack of five smallish books, with brown mottled covers, with some Hebrew lettering in gold on the top front cover. I picked up the top one and maybe because of my genealogical curiosity or experience I flipped to the inside back cover. It was after all a Hebrew book and not an English one, and what I saw there made me gasp in amazement.
Below a couple of penciled lines with Hebrew letters, were several clearly written and printed lines that constituted a family history of sorts. How could this precious piece of family documentation have ended up here? I knew I had to find the family who had donated it unaware of its contents and return it to their loving hands.
Susan, the library administrative assistant who sits at the desk behind that low wall, knows me as well as my daughter and father-in-law who both used to volunteer at the library. When she observed with her keen blue eyes what had transpired, she looked at me and said,
“Go ahead – take them!”
So I did. Excitedly, I returned home with my 5-pack and then I had a chance to really read what was written there. Here’s the content and a photo of that transcription.
Figure 1 Handwritten inscriptionFigure 2 Transcription of Handwriting
Wow! I thought, whoever that was crammed a whole lot of information into one small compact page. But I didn’t even have a name to go by. Sure there was an address, but if that book had been given away, the writer was no longer alive! But the year 2000 was not so long ago. How much effort would it be to try and figure out who this was and then how to return it?
First, from the lettering in Hebrew, I realized it was not Hebrew but Yiddish. While my Yiddish is not great, I could readily figure out that it translated as:
Keyla was born the 20th day of Kislev, at 10 PM, in Brussels.
The 20th day of Kislev? Incredible! Because while I found these late in the day on December 1, 2015, the corresponding Hebrew date was no less than the 20th of Kislev 5776 – 85 years later!
So Keyla, most probably had changed her name to something more American, and she had provided her secular date of birth of December 9, 1930. She had provided the names of her parents and their dates of birth. All this was information I could work with.
With her family name and place and exact date of birth I started with Ancestry.com. With these criteria, I found her Social Security Death Index (SSDI) Record that yielded her first name as “Caroline” and that she had died 1 February 2001. That was less than 6 months from the time she had written that mini-family history! Maybe she never had a chance to tell anyone that she had even done that.
After that, I found the 1940 Census record that had William, Fannie and Caroline FRIEDMAN living on Howard Ave. in Brooklyn. Father William’s occupation was listed as “Furrier, Floor Boy.” I have no idea what “Floor Boy” was supposed to be, but I was intrigued that he had been in the fur business, as had my late father. The 1940 census is the latest census available to the public, since 72 years has to elapse before a census becomes available. So the 1950 census won’t be available until 2022.
Figure 3 Extracted from 1940 Census, FRIEDMAN Family
Her SSDI record had also provided her name as of when she died. Her name of Caroline devolved to the less formal, Carrie, and she had married someone with the family name of HODES. Could I find an obituary for her? That would help me find a next of kin. Except, I could not find an obituary for her. So what about the man she married? What was his first name?
Figure 4 California Marriage Record, Sam HODES to Caroline FRIEDMAN
I found a marriage record for a Samuel HODES who had married Caroline FRIEDMAN on 12-24-1950, almost exactly the date of her parents’ marriage, less one day. Was he still alive? I doubted that because these books were at the SWC, as if descendants had been clearing house. Could I find an obituary for Sam? I lucked out.
Hodes, Sam May 29, 1929 – January 26, 2013 Sam was born in South Bend, Indiana and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He is predeceased by his parents, Jack and Dora (Lieberman): wife, Carrie (Friedman); in-laws, William and Fanny Friedman, sister, Ruth (Silver). He is survived by daughters, Sheri (Michael) Marion and Cathy (Robert) Greenly, grandchildren, Josh Greenly, Darren Greenly, Melissa (Jason) Mitchell and Freddy Krems, great grandchild, Harley Mitchell, siblings Jerry (Silvia) Hodes, Morrie (Sherry) Hodes, Renee (Mel) Ozur and many nieces and nephews. Sam fought a courageous battle with multiple myeloma and lung cancer. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Tower Cancer Research Foundation … or the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America … Published in the Los Angeles Times from Jan. 29 to Feb. 3, 2013
Since we are long-term subscribers to the Los Angeles Times and I’m an avid reader of obituaries, I might actually have seen this. But I didn’t know him so nothing registered for me. But this obituary confirmed who his wife and in-laws were. Better than that, it gave me the names of two daughters, Sheri and Cathy.
I figured I’d focus on the first one first. It was a logical progression. So that sent me looking for Sheri, married to a Michael MARION. By Googling I found a wonderful love story about the two people who had once known each other in their teen years, but eventually married others, only to find each other so many years later. Anyone can read their “Love Story” as entitled in the Arizona Republic newspaper, in this link: http://archive.azcentral.com/families/articles/0214fam_lovestory.html.
So now I knew they were living in Scottsdale, Arizona. Not so far away from where she grew up, but I needed a phone number or e-mail to contact her. That turned out to be the most difficult part in all of this process.
I do not subscribe to any of the various on-line services that provide all vital information such as telephone numbers and e-mails, police records, and so forth. Why should I? I’m not a private investigator and otherwise rarely would have a need to spend money to find out these things. So I rely on Google and my own sleuthing abilities. It’s more challenging that way and that’s why trying to find a phone number on my own was more difficult. Because daughter Sheri had been married before, I thought I might have luck locating husband Michael MARION, since a man, whether divorced or not, generally retained his family name. So I did find him on a LinkedIn website, as having a business called Marion Consulting, which had an office in Orange County. That seemed a little strange if he was living in Arizona. But from there I had an OC phone number and gave that a call. A pleasant voice of (presumably) a young man named Josh, answered the phone. I briefly told him I was trying locate a Michael Marion, because I had found something that belonged to his late mother-in-law and wanted to return it. Josh said,
“It can’t be him. His mother-in-law is still alive.”
Hmm, I thought, can there be two Michael Marions?
So I had to try something different. That “Love Story” said that Sheri was a “magazine lady.” So I tried Googling with that information. Sure enough, there she was on LinkedIn also!
Figure 5 Extracted from LinkedIn site for Sheri Marion
I loved the description she had provided of her business and as President of her company, called “The Magazine Company, Inc.” Here’s what it said:
“Customer service is so important to me. I like when I get to talk to a REAL person on the phone and not a tape telling you to push this and that! If you call you will ALWAYS talk with me or I will call you back within 24 hrs (or call my cell)
I love speaking with my clients!! I like to find out what exactly what types of magazines they are looking for for thier (sic) clients.
I LOVE being THE MAGAZINE LADY!!!”
You can tell she loved exclamation marks also. So she had a business, but on LinkedIn there was no phone number, so I tried searching for her business. At the time of my search I came up with a website on Connect 6 that strangely had no telephone number. What kind of business has no telephone number listed? Yet, she says she loves to speak with her clients.
I was not ready to give up. Maybe my searches were not the best. Googling can yield different results at different times and with slight variations in what you put in the search field. However, somehow I wound up with a very strange connection to her cell phone number. There are websites where you can check if a telephone number is bogus, a scam, or from a robocall — a so-called computerized auto-dialer. Sometimes you just put in a number and see what others have to report about a particular number or unwanted calls. Try it yourself.
Anyway, possibly as a result of misdial a few years ago, an annoyed person on the other end, identified as AJ, reported a phone number as being from a telemarketer,
“Did you get a call from 480-332-1613? Read the posts below to find out details about this number. Also report unwanted calls to help identify who is using this phone number.
From AJ, 30 Jun 2012,
A call from a female who says “my name is Sherry Marion(?) I need some information; call me back at 480-332-1613.” Caller ID for 480-659-1722 (this is the number the phone call came in on) says “Magazine Lady”. Caller ID for 480-332-1613 is Tmobile cell phone. Both numbers are listed as Phoenix, Arizona. A business calling a business on a Saturday afternoon in the summer?
Yikes, lady, get a life.
Caller: Magazine Lady
Call Type: Telemarketer”
Well, this was certainly an unusual way to find a phone number, but I decided to use it, and bulls-eye! I had found my target.
I reached Sheri and related to her that I had found this set of books with the precious content and how I wanted to ensure it was returned to a family member. I think she was just totally surprised by this finding. She said her sister, Cathy, lived in the vicinity of the SWC. Sheri herself was also going to be traveling the next day to visit her daughter and grandchildren in the LA area and she wanted to meet with me and of course, retrieve the books. She was also going to talk to her sister.
As it turned out, the sisters could not come the next day (Wednesday) but we did arrange to meet Thursday morning. I decided to photograph the books and also look through each one, just in case I might find some other things of interest to share with them.
Figure 6 Photos from Inside the Books
In the first book of the set, Breishit, or Genesis in English, the meaning being, “In the Beginning,” might have been the right place to inscribe births, the beginning of a new life. But what should we make of an apparent colorful rubber stamp of a ship? It appeared to have three smokestacks and what looked like Union Jack flags of England. It was a curious thing to investigate. It was certainly strange to find such an item in a book of the Torah. It was definitely not Noah’s ark.
In the third book, on the inside flyleaf, I found the Hebrew signature of Wolf FRIEDMAN, Brussels. Why the third book? That was the book of Vayikra, or Leviticus in English. I hypothesized, that since the word Vayikra translates as “and he called,” maybe he took this as the place for his name, somewhat paraphrasing to “he was called.” It was just a thought and may have been a totally random choice. After all, the covers of the books already had his name and place imprinted in gold. Finally, I wanted to look at the oval rubber stamp at the top left of the page.
3 December 2015
Not quite two complete days after my find, on a bright sunny Thursday morning, the two sisters, Sheri and Cathy Greenly (a successful real estate broker) arrived. I had prepared and printed out for them my paper trail of how I managed to track them down. Sheri wondered why I hadn’t looked for Cathy, but I explained Sheri was listed first. I suppose if I hadn’t succeeded in locating her, eventually I would have looked for Cathy.
Sheri didn’t know how I had found her cell-phone number and I kept her in the dark until she came in person. I hadn’t wanted her to feel bad that someone had reported her phone number as a telemarketer. So having kept Sheri intrigued about that find, I was able to show her the print-out.
She was about to tell me about that love story of her and Michael, and how they reunited, but I stopped her. “I know all about that already. It helped me find you!” As for Michael Marion’s business, she said that that OC company was his after all! I guess Josh wasn’t up to date as to his boss’s personal details. I could have cut my research a lot shorter…
I explained how I had found the books on a date corresponding to what would have been exactly their mother’s 85th birthday – I had sort of “resurrected” her for them, by returning these.
Cathy explained that “BREUGMAN” was the name of the hospital their mother was born in.
In addition to that special fact-filled page, I asked them “Do you know anything about that ship image?” They had no clue.
Sheri and Cathy were delighted to have this treasure back and then worried about what other items they might have inadvertently donated, unaware of any intrinsic value. I asked Cathy, who seemed to have kept more of the family memorabilia, if she could send me a photo of the “players” in this story and she promised to follow-up.
Figure 7 Sheri’s Bracelet, “Everything Happens for a Reason.”
Figure 8 L to R; Sheri, Madeleine, Cathy, December 3, 2015
I told them how I wanted to write this story up and with their permission to possibly publish it on-line and I promised to send them my write-up so they could approve or correct anything that I might have misrepresented. It was only fair.
I asked my husband to take a photo of us to conclude the handover process. And just before they left, Sheri showed me her silver bracelet with a single charm that dangled from her wrist, that reads, “EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.” I couldn’t have thought of a better ending to this episode myself!
Post Scripts
Figure 9 Sam HODES, Carrie, Sheri, William, Cathy, and Fannie, ca. 1960Figure 10 Fannie, Caroline “Carrie”, and William FRIEDMAN, ca. 1948
1. Figures 9 and 10 are photos sent to me by Cathy Greenly.
2. Googling after the fact, it is now much easier to locate Sheri Marion, the Magazine Lady, complete with three phone numbers, including a toll-free number, at http://www.mag-lady.com/ Sheri cautions to make sure you use the toll-free 888 rather than 800 or you’ll wind up with a porn number!
3. Sheri is NOT a telemarketer. Her clients are places like medical or dental offices that strive to have a variety of magazines to entertain waiting patients until they are seen.
4. That ship intrigued me, so I researched some more and learned that the family were fortunate to have left Brussels in early 1939, boarding the ship, the SS Normandie, in Le Havre, France, and arriving in New York, February 2, 1939. On Wikipedia, I found out more about the ship. Like that image in the book, it did have three smoke-stacks, but it was a French-built ship and not British. So why that image is there is a mystery, unless it was just something close or reminiscent of the ship they had traveled on. How it got there, we’ll never know.
5. As for the oval rubber stamp on the opposite corner, it appears to be that of the bookseller. What I could make out, translated, looks like:
I thought that the last line implied that it was located on the street of the Benzdin Shul. But where was that? In Belgium? Or, more probably in Poland. I was curious to find out.
6. The set of chumashim was printed in Warsaw, 1928. Since the FRIEDMANs married at the end of 1925, the story of Wolf’s father, Mendel, giving it to him prior to marriage doesn’t make sense. The covers of the books have the name WOLF FRIEDMAN BRUSSEL (in Hebrew) imprinted in gold. Several possibilities came to my mind:
a. Wolf’s father Mendel, ordered the books and sent them to his son, between 1928-1930. Maybe sometime in early 1930 when a grandchild was soon to be born, because Wolf entered the birth of his daughter in the back of Breishit, and she was born 9 Dec. 1930.
b. Wolf ordered the set from Bendin, himself.
c. Wolf bought them in Brussels, although I didn’t think they had a street name like that in Brussels.
7. I actually found more on the bookseller, Moshe Mordechai SINGER. Using JewishGen’s Jewish On-line World Burial Registry (JOWBR) I located his tombstone in Bendin/Bedzin, Poland, in the Czeladz-Bedzin Cemetery, although the family name was transliterated as ZINGER. The Hebrew letter for the beginning of his name is a Zayin, so sometimes in different countries in Europe it could be pronounced as a Z or an S. Same name really. The stone, entirely in Hebrew has the embellishment at the top of the engravings of two books. Nice touch symbolizing his profession. He died January 1933. I copied and included the tombstone photo here.
Figure 12 Tombstone of Moshe Mordechai SINGER
8. Had I gone straight to finding the FRIEDMAN’s passenger record of arrival in 1939, I would have found that Faijgla/Fannie had actually been born In Bendin also. She might have known this bookseller from there and advised father-in-law or husband from whom to buy the set. Pure speculation.
In Conclusion
Researching people or trying to locate individuals is generally not a straight-forward progression. It has to be approached from many angles, and often from different starting points. We will never know the whole story about people or families, but we can pick up the trail of Hansel-and-Gretel crumbs that were unintentionally left behind.
Books have always been one of the best resources for family history: they are often very organized and well-researched, and many of them were written by contemporaries of our ancestors. But for those of us who have spent countless hours in libraries hunting for that one golden nugget of new genealogical information, the inefficiency of searching books is all too apparent. In the past few years, there have been remarkable initiatives, including by Google, to scan and digitize millions of books and make their content searchable online. However, even in a new digital format, searching books remained inefficient, and extracting the value from books has for long been beyond the reach of many genealogists.
This challenge was the impetus behind MyHeritage’s latest technology: Book Matching. This innovation automatically researches individuals found in family trees on MyHeritage in its vast collection of digitized historical books. Unique to MyHeritage, the new technology uses semantic analysis to understand every sentence in every page in the digitized books, in order to find matches with very high accuracy. Book Matching has already produced over 80 million new matches for MyHeritage users. Every match is a paragraph from a book specifically about the person in the family tree, providing direct access to that paragraph and the ability to browse through the rest of the book.
By way of background, MyHeritage first launched SuperSearch™, its search engine for historical records, in 2012. In December 2015, the collection of digitized historical books was added to SuperSearch™. Very recently, MyHeritage has tripled the books in this collection to 450,000 books, with a total of 91 million pages. MyHeritage has assembled a team of curators who are adding hundreds of thousands of additional digitized books to the collection each year. The Book Matching technology was released a few weeks ago.
The Challenge
Even after books were photographed and converted to digital, searchable text using optical character recognition (OCR), they used to require a big investment of time and willingness to sift through endless false positives. For example, if you had a Moshe Solomon in your family tree, doing a text search in online books would return results for people called Moshe, or Solomon, with no regard to first or last name. Even if a Moshe Solomon were found, it would likely not be the one you were looking for. There was no way to search specifically for the Moshe Solomon from your family tree (for example, the Moshe Solomon born in the Bronx in the early 1920s who married a Lillian Greenberg).
Book Matching to the rescue
MyHeritage’s Book Matching technology overcomes these difficulties by automatically understanding narrative describing people in the historical books, including names, events, dates, places and relationships, and matching it with extremely high accuracy and speed to the 2 billion individuals in the family trees on MyHeritage. The technology can thus pick out the right Moshe Solomon from the Bronx, married to Lillian and born in the early 1920s, and provide the user a high-value source of new information about him, if such information was published. The matching process is repeated automatically as users grow their trees and as MyHeritage adds more books.
A Daunting Task Made Simple
In structured documents, such as birth certificates or census records, the type of information presented in the data is well-defined and consistent. It is clear where to find surnames, birth dates, and so on. For that reason, matching family trees to structured data can be straightforward.
On the other hand, in unstructured free-text data, like digitized historical books, facts such as names, events, dates, locations, and relationships can be written in many different ways and in varying contexts, and the information has no designated location or order. The challenges in creating computer algorithms that understand free text are significant. For example, while general phrases like “death”, “died” and “passed away” can all refer to a person’s death, so can less commonly-used phrases such as “expired”, “received a fatal gunshot wound”, “ended his earthly career”, or “summoned to the home beyond”. A date such as “In the 8th of December of the year of our Lord 1840” is synonymous to “Dec 8, 1840”. “Sara Cohen” might be referred to as “Sara, the youngest daughter of Mr. Cohen”, and so on. Specialized technology is needed to follow this, and MyHeritage has created such technology, which understands all these examples and thousands more, and pieces them together. MyHeritage has built numerous algorithms to harvest family history information from books. These have been tested and tweaked, iterated and perfected, to ensure a high level of accuracy. In the process, MyHeritage also successfully overcame millions of OCR errors and fixed them. For example, if the OCR process thought that a person was born in “]\lay”, it understands that it’s really May, “Apnl” is really “April”, and so on.
Currently, some books in the collection of digitized books are duplicated because they were contributed to the public domain multiple times by different groups. Nobody was able to figure out that some of them are redundant. MyHeritage is currently putting the finishing touches to specialized technology that is able to de-duplicate the books. Once this work is completed in the next few weeks, most of the duplicate matches will disappear.
Book Matching in Action
MyHeritage recently showed some leading genealogists their Book Matches, so they could see first-hand the matches found for their own family trees.
Dick Eastman of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter has been researching his family history for decades. He has about 2780 people in his family tree on MyHeritage, and he received about 500 Book Matches. The majority of the information in the Book Matches was new to him.
For example, Elizabeth Fifield, the aunt of Dick’s direct ancestor (8 generations), appeared in his family tree with only birth and death dates, and siblings.
An automatic Book Match was found for Elizabeth in the book “Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of the State of Massachusetts (by Cutter, William Richard, 1847–1918), a source that Dick Eastman may never have thought to examine himself.
The excerpt below is the section that was automatically found by MyHeritage’s Book Match. The exciting new information here lists Elizabeth’s husband, and other historical information about him and his family, such as their six children and their dates of birth — information that Dick did not previously have, and that now enables him to add a complete line to his family tree.
Jewish genealogist Rose Feldman has a family tree of 3712 people on MyHeritage. She has received 91 Book Matches. One of her matches was for her relative Martin Cherkasky, from the publication The Nation (Index to Volume 193, July–December, 1961). The match reveals her relative’s professional and social standing (a distinguished doctor, and head of a major New York hospital), as well as an interesting quote from Cherkasky himself about the impact of finances and greed on the medical profession:
Lawyer and genealogist Randol (Randy) Schoenberg is an avid researcher of Jewish Austrian-American family history. Randy is an active curator on Geni.com and has also placed some of the trees he is researching on MyHeritage. In one of those trees there is a Marshall H. Kashman, a distant relative of Randy from his wife’s side. He appears in the family tree with limited information.
In an unlikely place — a book called History of the 101st Machine Gun Battalion, 1922 — fascinating new details about this relative are revealed.
In that book, we can see Marshall’s position in the army, his profession in civilian life back in Hartford, Connecticut, that his nickname was “Kash”, and that he survived being gassed during WWI at Verdun. We also see a photo of Marshall as a young soldier.
Summary
Book Matching is a unique technology developed by MyHeritage and is available only on its service. It constantly researches all individuals in every family tree, inside hundreds of thousands of digitized historical books on MyHeritage. The matches are based on semantic analysis of narrative, and are therefore extremely accurate.
Many genealogists love census records, and birth, marriage and death records. Such documents are helpful when building a family tree. But they often contain little beyond names and dates, and rarely describe anything about the character of our ancestors and the key events that shaped their lives. Genealogy is more than just name-collecting. This is what makes Book Matching so valuable: it often reveals intimate details of our relatives’ and ancestors’ lives that one can only get from narrative in a book. Along with adding rich color to the family tree with no effort required from the user, Book Matches also prove to be extremely accurate: none of the genealogists who previewed this feature at RootsTech 2016 encountered a single false positive, among thousands of matches.
Book Matches are useful to seasoned genealogists and family history beginners alike, and offer high value to both. Even the most conservative genealogists, who value manual research and tend to avoid new technologies, will probably appreciate the fact that Book Matching reminds the genealogy community of the rich value of the books that have been in front of us all along. What’s Next?
Book Matching is currently available for English books only, but the technology will soon be enhanced by MyHeritage to cover additional languages. MyHeritage is constantly expanding its repository of digitized historical records, facilitating easier family history research. Jewish genealogists may receive fewer Book Matches than other genealogists, because Jewish genealogy has not been blessed with a plethora of historical genealogical publications about historical Jewish villages and hometowns. However, as MyHeritage adds historical books written in Hebrew, and enhances Book Matching to support the company’s Global Name Translation Technology, promising new opportunities for discoveries in books will unfold. The Mormon Church has digitized a large number of Jewish genealogy books. Potential cooperation may make those books accessible on MyHeritage, enabling even more matches through the Book Matching technology. So the present is exciting and the future is even more exciting.
How To Access Book Matches on MyHeritage
The Compilation of Published Sources collection is free to search manually. Viewing Book Matches requires a MyHeritage Data subscription. If you have a family tree on MyHeritage, simply log in to your family site and check your Record Matches via the Discoveries menu, and click the collection called Compilation of Published Sources. Your Book Matches will be displayed there. Also check your inbox for Record Match emails — these are sent regularly to MyHeritage users, delivering newly found matches. Any match you receive from a book is made possible by this new technology. If you don’t have a family tree on MyHeritage yet, you may open an account for free on www.myheritage.com and import your family tree as a GEDCOM file, or start a new tree. New matches will be automatically calculated for you, including Book Matches.
On the 100th anniversary of his appointment as the first Jewish Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Jewish Journal devoted four pages to the towering figure in American legal history, Louis D. Brandeis, recounting his unprecedented advocacy for free speech, the right to privacy, worker’s rights, federalism and Zionism. Generally, Brandeis’ biographers tend to credit Brandeis’ progressive views to his upbringing in Kentucky during the Civil War. As we approach the June 1st centennial of the US Senate confirmation of his appointment, we might ask what can more we learn by digging a bit deeper into his roots as the son of immigrants from Bohemia?
Louis Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856 in Louisville, Kentucky, the fourth child of Adolph Brandeis and Fredericka Dembitz. Adolph had been the first to arrive in America. Born May 13, 1822 in Prague as the sixth and youngest child, Adolph helped manage his father Simon’s cotton-print mill. The recession of 1845-47 led him to look for work in Hamburg, but as revolutions led by workers, students and nationalists broke out all over Europe in February 1848, Adolph returned to Prague, where typhoid fever kept him off the barricades. Disillusioned by the failure of the revolution, Adolph set off for the United States, which so impressed him that he soon convinced his extended family, including his fiancé Fredericka, to follow him. On April 8, 1849, twenty-six members of the extended Brandeis family in Prague (including the Dembitz and Wehle families) set sail from Hamburg for the United States. They settled first in Cincinnati, where Adolph married Fredericka on September 8, 1849, but soon moved down the Ohio river to Madison, Indiana, before finally settling for good in Louisville in 1851.
The numerous family ties in Louis Brandeis’ immediate family can be quite confusing. Louis’ mother Fredericka Dembitz was born November 15, 1826 to Dr. Siegmund Dembitz of Bratislava and Franziska (Fanny) Wehle of Prague. It is perhaps easiest to see some of the relationships from the perspective of Louis’ maternal grandmother Fanny. In 1835, Fanny’s brother Moritz Wehle married Amalie Brandeis, the sister of Louis’ father Adolph Brandeis. In the 1840s, Fanny’s brother Gottlieb Wehle also moved into a building belonging to Louis’ paternal grandparents Simon Brandeis and Sara (Fürth) Brandeis. Fanny and her husband Siegmund lived in Prussia, where Siegmund practiced medicine, but the children returned frequently for extended periods in Prague. Fredericka met and fell in love with Adolph Brandeis on one of these visits, in 1845, when Adolph was working at his father Simon Brandeis’s cotton-stamp mill across the street from the home of Fredericka’s uncle Moritz Wehle.
The family relationships did not end with the marriage of Adolph and Fredericka in Cincinnati. On the same day, Adolph’s brother Dr. Samuel Brandeis married Charlotte Wehle, a first cousin of Fredericka’s who had been orphaned and raised by her uncle Gottlieb Wehle. In 1856, the year Louis was born, Fredericka’s first cousin Regine Wehle, a daughter of her uncle Gottlieb, married Dr. Joseph Goldmark. Goldmark, born 1819 in Krzyż Wielkopolski near Warsaw, studied medicine in Vienna and became a leader of the failed 1848 revolution. Fearing punishment for exercising political and free speech rights in Austria, he fled abroad, eventually coming to America. (Regine’s sister Ida Wehle later married Joseph’s half-brother Adolph Goldmark.) In 1891, Joseph and Regine’s daughter Alice, born 1866, married Louis Brandeis. Louis and his wife Alice were therefore second cousins. But they weren’t the only cousins to marry. Louis’ uncle Lewis Dembitz, the most Jewish-oriented member of the family, married his own first cousin Wilhelmine Wehle. Louis’ sister Amy married her mother’s first cousin Otto Wehle.
Three of Louis’ grandparents came from Jewish families that had lived in Prague for centuries. Their surnames were toponyms, reflecting the towns in Bohemia and Germany from which their ancestors came to Prague, since the Middle Ages a distinguished center for Jewish learning and culture, and the economic and political capital of Bohemia. The Jews of Prague had been forced to reside in a cramped and overcrowded ghetto across the river from the splendid Prague castle, today the largest and best preserved ancient castle in the world. Beginning with Emperor Joseph II’s Tolerance Edict of 1782, Jews were required to learn German and some (such as the three doctors in Louis’ family) were even able to attend university. But special taxes and terrible marital and economic restrictions remained. From 1726, the Habsburgs had maintained a strict quota on the number of permitted Jewish families in Bohemia and Moravia. In practice this meant that often only the oldest son in the family could obtain permission to marry, and then only after the father had died. Other sons could marry only if they could afford to purchase a permit from a family with no male descendants. Jews were not permitted to change their residence and many professions were off limits. These restrictive laws were not lifted until after December 1848, when the 18-year-old Franz Joseph I succeeded his uncle Emperor Ferdinand. By then, Louis’ father Adolph, with little hope of ever being able to marry his fiancé Friederike, or find a successful career, had left for America. He succeeded in convincing his family to follow him because even after 1848, many economic barriers remained. Jews did not obtain full civil rights in Bohemia until 1867.
Louis’ paternal grandfather Simon Brandeis (1785-1856) was the son of Solomon Brandeis (1758-1829) and Judith (daughter of Simon) Lowositz (1762-1832). Solomon was the son of Herschmann Brandeis (-1792) and Sara (daughter of Löb and Schöndel) Pribram (-1803). Herschmann was the son of Salkind Brandeis (-1758) and Sulamith (daughter of Hirsch) Harfner. Salkind was one of over 100 Jews named Brandeis who returned to Prague in 1749, after being expelled from the city by the extremely bigoted Austrian Empress Marie Theresa. The family had been living in Prague at least since the time of the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Yehuda ben Betzalel Löw (-1609), whose daughter Gitel (-1635) married Rabbi Simon Brandeis (-1622).
Louis’ paternal grandmother Sara Fürth (1784-1867) was the daughter of Jonas Fürth (1764-1836) and Maria (daughter of Zacharias Mandelbum and Demuth (Fürth) Mandelbaum. Jonas was the son of Michael (1741-1791) and Rebekka (1733-1793) (daughter of Salomon Turnau) Fürth.
Louis’ maternal grandmother Fanny Wehle (1798-1840) was the daughter of Aron Beer Wehle (1750-1825) and Esther Fränkel (1772-1838). Aron Beer’s father Hersch (1723-1791) was the son of Rabbi Aron Beer Wehle (1675-1741), whose father Rabbi Meir Hersch Horschwitz (-1729) was the leader of Bohemian Jewry and died in of Volyně (Wehle). Esther’s parents were Issachar Bärman (1745-) and Esther (1747-) (daughter of Israel) Fränkel. Issachar’s father was Simon Aron Fränkel (1723-), son of Benjamin Wolf Frankel and Rebekka (Spiro) Fränkel (-1762), each stemming from illustrious families tracing back to the 1500s in Prague, Vienna, Fürth, Eisenstadt, Frankfurt and Worms.
Louis’ family had one further distinguishing characteristic and that is that many of them had been followers of the false messiah Jacob Frank (1726-1791), a Polish religious leader who claimed to be the reincarnation of an earlier self-proclaimed messiah from Smyrna Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676). Frank and his adherents adopted certain Christian customs and ultimately were baptized en masse, but Frank was nevertheless convicted by the Church of heresy and imprisoned for thirteen years, which only increased his fame as a martyr. Louis’ great-grandfather Aron Beer Wehle and his brother Jonas Beer Wehle were apparently the leaders of the Frankist movement in Prague, even though their grandfather Rabbi Aron Beer Wehle had been one of the signers of the cherem (censure) against Sabbatai Zevi. While the family remained ostensibly Jewish through the following generations, no doubt the lingering attachment to the Frankist movement and the feeling of alienation from the mainstream Jewish community contributed to the family’s decision to leave for America.
Although Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, his jurisprudential interests were likely influenced by his family history in Europe. If one were to look for plausible familial sources for Louis Brandeis’ greatest achievements, then we might suspect that his interest in free speech, worker’s rights and federalism was guided by the revolutionary activities of his father-in-law Joseph Goldmark, as well as the sympathies of his father Adolph Brandeis. His interest in Zionism was apparently influenced by the Dembitz family, especially his uncle, the attorney Lewis Dembitz. Lastly, the concern for privacy might stem from the Frankist family secrets of the Wehle family. The European Jewish seeds planted in American soil gave rise to this towering figure in modern legal history.
On January 10, 1774, two Jews –Moïsè Beniamino Foà (1730-1821) and Emanuele Sacerdoti (1719-1804) – met somewhere in the ghetto of Modena – the capital city of the Este Duchy in Northern Italy – with a specific purpose. They founded the “Nuova Società Tipografica,” a printing house for the publication of books in Greek and Hebrew for the Duchy and its university’s faculties. It represented the ultimate confirmation of the leading role of the Foà and Sacerdoti families within Duchy Jewish society [1] The two men were respectively the Duke’s bookseller and banker. They were prominent merchants, lay leaders of the Jewish community, owners of synagogues, and mediators between the Jewish Community and the City, Church and Ducal authorities [2].
Moïsè Beniamino Foà
[In memory of Aron Leoni z’’l, A great scholar, a gentleman, and a generous friend. This paper includes the results of an archival research made possible in part thanks to a grant from the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacoby Center at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem]
In 1771 Foà had opened the first “public library” of the Duchy, together with two acculturated Jesuits.3 The printing house, the public library, and the book shop of Moïsè Beniamino Foà functioned as cultural centers that circulated the main works of D’Holbach, Locke, Hobbes, La Mettries, Boulanger, Voltaire, Rousseau, and L’Enciclopédie within both the Jewish and the non-Jewish societies of Modena. [3] The decision to import into Modena the major works of the champions of the European Enlightenment can be considered a perfect expression of the gradual and complex path toward modernity taken by the Modenese Jewish lay leaders in the late eighteenth century [4].
If, as Kant pointed out, the eighteenth century was not an enlightened age, but an “age of enlightenment,” it was in the same sense an “age of definition” for Italian Jewry, despite the scarce attention it has received from historians.[5] During the eighteenth century, Modenese Jewish leadership’s path was characterized by a commitment to local Jewish affairs and an active role in the struggle for the improvement of Jews’ status, along with a vigorous involvement in the wider cultural and commercial affairs of the city, which itself lacked any real intelligentsia or ruling class.
By following merchants’ commercial and cultural choices I would like to explore this pattern as something autonomous and original. At the same time, it will be considered in connection with its future évenément– the coming of Napoleon to Italy, who promptly liberated the Italian ghettos. Moreover, by comparing Modena with the eighteenth-century Jewish merchant society of the city-port of Ancona (Central Italy), I will attempt to suggest a specific Italian gradual way to Jewish modernization in light of the close attention that recent scholarship has paid to diverse European “paths toward modernity.” My approach includes a genealogical narrative that goes beyond the base of family, kin and ethnic relations to analyze more extended personal, cultural and business intra- and inter-group relations. [6] I followed eighteenth-century Modenese and Anconitan Jews’ vicissitudes analyzing corpus of archival sources that includes internal registers of Jewish communities, correspondences of Jewish, municipal, and ecclesiastical institutions, family records, private contracts (such as wills and dowries), records of rabbinical tribunals, Inquisitorial records, memoirs and correspondence among Jewish individuals from Italy, Western, and Eastern Europe.
The choice of Ancona is deliberate, determined by both similarities and differences. Ancona is one of the few cities in the Papal State (together with Rome and Avignon) from which the Jews were never expelled, a fact that in itself deserves further attention. Ancona has long been familiar to students of early modern Jewish history because of the infamous 1555 auto-dafè, followed by the institution of the ghetto in 1556 and the immediate decadence of the Jewish community. [7] It was specifically that the strong conversionary pressure enacted by the Papacy and its various practical and legal consequences constituted for Anconitan Jewry the major factor of differentiation vis-a-vis the States in Northern Italy, such as the Duchy of Modena.
Cultural historians have generally viewed the Italian Renaissance as one of the main anticipatory movements of the modern age in terms of Jewish acculturation and negotiation within the wider non-Jewish society. It is almost assumed that the roots of modernity for Jews in Italy had already been laid down by the sixteenth century (if not earlier). Consequently, Italian Jewish acculturation between the early modern and modern age is often considered a fait accompli or is simply ignored. [8]
In so many areas, Jews, in fact, had always been almost Italian (read: in language, dress, and outlook); indeed, in places like Rome, the community was ancient. Likewise, emancipation, too, is seen as something that would “come of its own,” an advance that Jews so well acculturated could easily achieve once the old barriers to participation in civic society were removed, which is, of course, what happened under Napoleon.
Dealing with the newest historiography that has approached Jewish modernization, the variety of the Jewish experiences together with the political fragmentation of the States in the Italian peninsula does not to allow for clear classifications. [9] The new category of port Jews has been applied to understand better the dynamics that led to the integration through civil inclusion of Jewish merchants in the early modern period, concentrating mainly on Mediterranean and Atlantic ports, including Livorno and Trieste in Italy. [10] The 18th-century Jewish merchant society of the free-port city of Ancona (mostly neglected by historians), with its networks in Salonica and Recife, but at the same time under the yoke of the Papal State, does not enter in this category and, rather, complicates the analytic historiographical picture. [11]
Being this essay both a final report and a scholarly paper, it is organized in four sessions:
The Modenese Jewish Mercantile Society in the Eighteenth-Century;
Jewish Women in the ghetto of Modena;
Modenese Jews and their Meeting with Modernity;
Modenese Jews and Anconitan Jews: A Profitable Comparison.
This structure allows both a broad exploration of genealogical sources and the insertion of the analyzed sources in a coherent historical narrative.
1. The Modenese Jewish Mercantile Society in the Eighteenth-Century
Sacerdoti, and Foà families, mentioned at the beginning, together with other merchants — Modenas, Sanguinettis, Rovigos, Norsa, and Fanos– formed and maintained their role as community leaders through business, international inter-familial alliances, culture and religion for more than two centuries. [12]
Despite ghettoization, eighteenth-century Modenese Jewish leading families had developed a prominent, Italian merchant trading society — oligarchic and male-centered–, with established commercial networks throughout the Italian peninsula. Modenese Jewish merchants were book dealers, silversmiths, printers, and silk weavers. Since the mid-eighteenth century all of the city’s textile mills, which employed dozens of men and women, were owned by the Jewish merchant families, the Norsa, Usiglio, Rovigo, Sanguinetti, and Sacerdotal. [13] These merchants avoided cultural and commercial stasis despite the weak political administration of the city and Duchy. [14] The organization of the Este state was mostly feudal, with many privileged nobles or right-hand men of the Duchy in charge of administering and taxing a number of small agricultural communities. [15]
Modenese Jewish mercantile elites operated behind the scenes in the state’s cultural and commercial life. While they participated fully in the economy, Ducal authorities kept their presence to a low profile: while Jews could work behind the scenes, they could not formally engage in civic affairs. This meant, for example, that Jews in the Este Duchy could not participate in the general councils of the city and did not have the possibility to vote, as in eighteenth-century Mantua, Livorno and Trieste. Jews had been ghettoized in many of the Duchy’s cities and towns (such as Reggio Emilia, Scandiano, and Finale Emilia), but at the same time they held all of the State monopolies including those for brandy, glass, coral, diamonds, and even the Duke’s library. Moreover, both major entrepreneurs and small traders could conduct their activities outside the ghetto, in the squares and streets of the city. Starting at least in 1622 they could belong to any guild (by paying a fee higher than that paid by non-Jews), and could even buy property, both in the city and its countryside. As leaders within the Modenese Jewish mercantile elite, the Rovigo, Formiggini, Sacerdoti, Norsa, Levi, and Usiglio had the responsibility of paying the annual Jewish taxes required by the Ducal Chamber. They maintained their role of communal leadership through business, international matrimonial and interfamilial alliances, and cultural and religious influence. [16]
The Rovigos’ vicissitudes represent a perfect case of the Modenese Jewish mercantile society. The family’s business had expanded via silk spinning and textile commerce in the Este Duchy and Italian peninsula, during the seventeenth century; and then by the acquisition of land in the eighteenth century.[17] In 1693, Servadio Rovigo and his brothers (among them, Leone, Miriam’s grandfather) declared a patrimony totaling 237,000 lira, the second highest within the Modenese ghetto after the Fano family (250,000 lira).[18] In 1709 and 1711, Rovigos bought two huge farms in San Prospero, a small town near Modena. In 1754 these landed properties were totaled 19,500 and 16,400 lira, respectively. [19]
In addition, the Rovigo house had become one of the most interesting Jewish cultural and social centers within and outside of the Italian peninsula in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Thanks to the cultural activity of R. Abraham Rovigo (c. 1650-1713) — one of the most celebrated kabbalists and protagonists of the messianic-heretical Sabbatean movement in Italy– the Rovigo home was saturated with influences of Sabbateanism. Rovigo’s early fervor endured even after Sabbetai Tzevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666. [20] Within the limited ghetto space, a building with a modest façade hosted the family synagogue and the male confraternity Hazot Laila (midnight), which had been founded a few decades earlier by Abraham himself. [21]
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Modenese ghetto could boast nine synagogues, a renowned yeshivah, two schools, and twelve confraternities. The ghetto included two blocks; both overlooked a small square and faced two streets –Contrada Coltellini and Contrada Blasia. Every family had a place in the synagogue, according to the ritual they followed (Italian, Ashkenazi, and Sephardi). [22] The private houses of prayer of the seventeenth century (which belonged to the Formiggini, Rovigo, Sanguinetti and Usiglio families) were open to friends and acquaintances of the owners. Facing the ghetto square was the Ashkenazi synagogue, founded by the German Society in 1646 in the home of Nacmano Nacmani. The Spanish synagogue was founded after 1638 and before the end of the century: the building is located in Contrada Coltellini. [23]
The Formiggini synagogue, founded in c. 1650 and recognized as the “inalienable property” of the family, was situated on the fourth and highest floor of two connected apartments K 944 and K 945, which also faced the ghetto square.[24] The first of the relatively rare references in the Talmud and in more recent sources regarding synagogue architecture states that its position should be elevated because of the association between knowledge and ascent. On the same side, had been established the synagogues Grande and Piccola by different members of the family Modena, who settled in the city in the mid-15th century. [25]
Always in Contrada Coltellini, one of the two main streets of the ghetto, was located the Spanish synagogue, whose edifice still displays its original function because of the adjoining small courtyard for the Jewish holyday of Sukkot and the doors of ancient shops inside it. The synagogue of the Sanguinetti family was founded on Contrada Blasia n. 6, on the block of the ghetto facing the main street of the city (named, the Strada Maestra). It had a school for the children of the ghetto and a ritual bath (mikveh) for women. [26] Usiglio’s synagogue was established before the ghetto’s foundation in the still existing Levi Palace at the corner between Piazza Mazzini and Via Emilia, at the end of Contrada Blasia (the other main street of the ghetto) at the end of the sixteenth century. [27]
The confraternities (or havuroth) were based on two main models of the sixteenth century: some Havuroth such as Rahamim (‘mercy’) were charitable organizations, while other confraternities such as Hazot Laila (midnight), focused on the study of religious texts, including kabbalistic literature, often during the night or at dawn.[28] Hazot Laila was devoted to the regular recitation of a midnight rite (the tikkun hazot) mourning the Temple’s destruction and praying for its return, a practice popularized by R. Isaac Luria (ARI) in the second half of the sixteenth century. [29] Abraham Rovigo’s activities of prayer and study were combined with various forms of philanthropy. Scholars, emissaries from Eretz Yisrael, Sabbatean exponents, physicians and healers (one –a certain Judah from Lithuania– specialized in treating hysterical women) were often invited and funded by the Rovigos. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, for example, the presence of the maggidim (Jewish religious itinerant preachers) Ber Perlhefter and Mordecai of Eisenstadt as salaried teachers in the Rovigos’ yeshivah was instrumental in shaping a new form of devotional religiosity in the Modenese ghetto which became influential far beyond the Duchy’s boundaries. [30] In this way, Abraham Rovigo was able to combine his involvement in the Sabbatean movement with his philanthropic leanings.
2. Jewish Women in the ghetto of Modena
Wives, sisters and daughters of the above mentioned merchants appeared as ancillary elements of this oligarchic system. They were almost “silent” members of the Jewish community, instrumental mainly in forging important social and political alliances among the Italian Jewish merchant elite for the reallocation and transfer of estates. They did not take part in family business activities, and as widows they transferred control of their dowries to their sons. In sixteenth-century Modena, Jewish women from all of the social strata who inherited and freely disposed of property were considered unexceptional and unremarkable. But the well-to-do Jewish women of Modena receded even further from public life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while lower-class women remained active in society as simple workers (many were pedlars) and sometimes invested their own dowries as widows. [31] They were the recipients of dowries and patrimonies that grew considerably over the eighteenth century. Often, however, they renounced their property in favor of their brothers and sons through the donatio inter vivos (an irrevocable gift), an institution with a halachic equivalent, the mattanah gemurah. Devora Levi Formiggini (1693–post-1777), the daughter and wife of the affluent silversmiths Benedetto Vita Levi and Laudadio Formiggini — who joined the confraternity at its inception but declined to take part in some of the duties — shows the way women relinquished property over the course of their lives. Devora first renounced some of her property in 1718 in connection with her marriage contract. She gave up her rights to her paternal and maternal patrimonies by accepting a dowry of 7,500 lira. When she was widowed in 1766, Devora ceded property a second time: She gave up her dotal and extradotal patrimony by making another donatio inter vivos in favor of her sons. In return she received an annuity from the estate of her deceased husband Laudadio (900 lira plus another monthly payment of 15 lira), together with food and accommodation for the rest of her life in the house of her eldest child, Benedetto. [32]
A decade later, the octogenarian Devora faced the premature death of both her son Benedetto and his wife, Grazia Vita Levi (between 1776 and 1777). At that point, she transferred the guardianship of her five minor grandchildren to her oldest grandson, a man who would later emerge as the leader of Italian Jews during the Napoleonic age. [33] Whether her decisions were made independently or not, Devora prevented financial trauma for her family by passing her dowry onto future generations. Her actions were typical of the majority of well-to-do Modenese Jewish women at the time. [34]
A partial exception to this system was Miriam Rovigo (c. 1700–1778), the daughter of Lustro Rovigo who had married her uncle Raffaele Rovigo. In 1754, after the death of her husband Raffaele, her sons, Lazzaro and Leone, divided their properties. Miriam received her dotal and extradotal patrimony, which consisted of a spinning mill, three villas near Modena, a flat in the ghetto, and the spinning mill in the center of Modena. The real estate, together with livestock, facilities, machinery, seed, and credits, totaled 213,460 lira. The activities of the Rovigos included real estate, livestock, stamped leather, and a tannery in Modena, which was run on a sublease with another Modenese Jew, Abram Forti. Miriam committed herself to providing a 50,000 lira dowry for her young daughter, Sara, who married a member of the Sanguinetti family (her other daughter, Bonaventura, had already married with the same dowry). [35] In 1758, Miriam, to show “her passionate and maternal love” for her sons, through a donatio inter vivos gave them her portion of wealth in the family synagogue, silver ritual objects totaling 603 ounces, and furniture. [36] Miriam’s donation was not simply made for economic considerations. It symbolized Rovigo family unity and pride within the oligarchic Modenese Jewish society. Miriam managed her own business transactions but —like many other well-to-do Jewish women—she did not remarry. Both her patrimony and her day-to-day life seem to have been strongly connected to her nuclear family, and in particular, to her son Lazaro. [37] Miriam Rovigo was an exceptional case because of her strong initiative and autonomy, but she nonetheless remained an ancillary element in the consolidated social system of the Modenese ghetto.
This female passivity contrasts to the growing autonomy of Italian Jewish women from the early modern through the modern era that recent studies have stressed. In other cities, Jewish women invested their dowries as the financial basis for family firms. Women were named as heirs and administrators of business, women were testators, and women served as guardians of their minor children—even if widowed and remarried.38 Excluded from both family businesses and ownership and not surprisingly shut out from the other Jewish confraternities in the ghetto, well-to-do Jewish women in Modena fundamentally challenged their marginalization with the creation of a female confraternity, the Soed Holim (‘to Benefit the Sick’). Miriam Rovigo played a fundamental role in this: she recruited a group of twenty-two well-to-do Jewish women who, inspired by the famous verse “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself,” founded Soed Holim in the Modenese ghetto in November, 1735. [39] Their aim was to “help and assist all sick women, rich and poor, in the ghetto.” [40]
The Soed Holim membership register emphasizes Miriam’s role as the “first inspiring and inspired [woman] who took the initiative to set up Soed Holim in her house with all the other women, aimed at performing the mitzvoth [the Jewish precepts], [41]” according to Leone Moisè Usiglio, the confraternity’s male scribe. While Jewish women in Italy had gathered in confraternities for at least a century, Modena’s Soed Holim is noteworthy for being the earliest European female Jewish confraternity with a complete pinkas, or register, stretching from 1735 to 1943. [42]
Fifteen years after Soed Holim’s foundation, on the first of the Hebrew month of Tevet 5511 (December 29, 1750), an unusual procession of men and women paraded through the two streets of Modena’s ghetto, arriving at Miriam Rovigo’s home. The members of Soed Holim were making their first “public” donations of community charity: a dowry to a poor Jewish girl, and wood for the fireplaces of all the poor families in the ghetto. The confraternity wanted to honor the minor holiday of the new moon (in Hebrew Rosh Hodesh: literally, the “head of the month”) and to prove the sanctity of their confraternity through an explicit reference to the month in which its activities began (December 22, which was the 6th of Tevet). [43] A public celebration in which women were the primary actors challenged the male-dominated society of an Italian ghetto, and did so from within. The founders and members of Soed Holim, were wives and daughters of the most influential families in the Jewish society of Modena. [44] They had organized the havurah, or confraternity, with a specific female self-consciousness from its very start. They employed women over ten years of age as assistants, servants, administrators, and representatives, and involved them in their weekly and monthly meetings. The participation of each of them varied over the years, but evidence shows that during the second half of the century 15 members of the board along with 10 servants (out of total female Jewish population of 470-480) were always more active than others in the confraternity. [45]
Over the years, the women of Soed Holim issued loans and invested in bonds and property through their confraternity, using collective profits for a number of activities. Their sisterhood provided care for the sick and burials, as well as donations of food, wood, and money “for all of the poor families of the ghetto. [46]” Their work aided at least 75 needy families out a total Jewish population of almost 250 families and 1,220 people (6 percent of the overall Modenese population in the mid-eighteenth century). [47] The living conditions of Modenese Jewish society had worsened since the beginning of the century, with the entry of the Estense Duchy into the bloody European Succession wars, which afflicted both Jews and Christians alike for years. [48] The confraternity of Soed Holim worked to ease these living conditions through systematic charity provided to the most vulnerable groups in Modena’s ghetto.
3. Modenese Jews and their Meeting with Modernity
Confraternal activities were a vehicle for both modernization and negotiation within ghetto society. The complexity of the social negotiation and the gradual process of modernization within Modenese Jewish society in the eighteenth century is even more clear through the lens of cultural and commercial choices. Let us consider two short and complementary examples connected to acquiring books. In 1788 Moisè Beniamino Foà bought for the public library of Modena the opera omnia by Guillame Raynal, an author whose works were forbidden to be read in Venice and in France because of his anti-authoritarian and anticlerical beliefs. [49] In 1791 the above mentioned Nuova Società Tipografica printed the Lettere piacevoli se piaceranno by Giuseppe Compagnoni, an Italian intellectual, later known as a Jacobin. This work consists of a fierce statement of the supremacy of the Jewish people over ‘other civilizations’ – considering intellectual figures such as Spinoza and Mendelssohn – as well as a polemic attack against recent anti-Jewish works by Catholic authors (such as Giambattista D’Arco). [50] Remarkably, many sections of the book were cut off by the State’ censor and accepted without polemics by Foà himself. [51] Clearly, Compagnoni’s pro-Jewish argument was perceived as a danger to the balanced system that regulated Jewish-Christian relations for it brought the Jewish question to public attention; on the contrary, Raynal’s beliefs were not.
Let us consider the second point of my talk, the événement that is the arrival of Napoleon, who promptly liberated the Italian ghettos. How did the silversmith Moisè Formiggini (1760-1810), son of the above mentioned Benedetto, perceive Napoleon’s conquest of Northern Italy and the establishment of the Cispadana Republic in 1796? Moisè Formiggini was born to one of the most influential families of Jewish silversmiths in the city. [52] Laudadio (1690–1765) and Benedetto Formiggini (1720–1776) expanded the family business by reinforcing their relations with the Este Dukes and the nobility (both were appointed as the Duke’s silversmiths), extending their trade to the neighboring Gonzaga Duchy and the Papal State, and, finally, via a series of strategic marriages that forged important alliances within the Italian Jewish mercantile elite, including the Olivettis of Turin, the Vitas of Lugo, and the Pintos of Livorno. [53] After the premature death of his parents Benedetto Formiggini and Grazia Levi (?-1777), in 1776 and 1777, Moisè became the guardian of his five siblings, Vita, Salomone, Luigi Raffaele, Consola, and Ventura. Moisè’s business strategies followed those of his father, except for an increase in the extension of credit and a reduction in the trade of jewels other than diamonds. Moisè always preferred foreign markets, causing some to accuse him of giving important commissions to foreign silversmiths and consequently impoverishing the local silver-working economy. [54] He then married Anna Levi, daughter of David, an influential Modenese silk trader.[55] In 1784, when Formiggini’s brother Salomone reached maturity, the family patrimony totaled 711,264.13.12 lira. [56] By 1791, Moisè’s guidance had increased the capital to 1,052,444.5.8.57 When the French troops arrived, Moisè was also the Duke’s silversmith. [58]
Growing up in a well-to-do family, Formiggini had to grapple with the difficulties of life in the ghetto, where Modenese Jews had been enclosed since 1638, yet he was, to a certain degree, able to vivre noblement, as was the case among some influential merchant families of the Sephardic Diaspora. He was fluent in Italian and knew French and Hebrew.[59] He owned (outright) one of the most important ghetto synagogues and could travel through the Italian states (including the Papal State) with carriage and pair. He and his brothers also owned a number of buildings in the city, including shops and apartments, as well as farms in the countryside near Modena. [60] Additionally, Moisè participated in the Jewish community’s administration as head (massaro) of the Kehillah, as leader of the confraternity Gemilut Hasadim ve-Rahamim devoted to social welfare, and as a mediator between the Community and both city and ducal authorities beginning in at least 1782. [61] As we have already emphasized, Modenese Jewish confraternities formed the institutional basis for the welfare of the entire Jewish society. The contributions of the community’s affluent members, both through voluntary philanthropy (called “l’entrata di casella”) and through confraternal duties, served the needs of the lower social strata of the ghetto. [62] And, like the other principal affluent merchants within the Modenese Jewish mercantile elite, Formiggini was responsible for paying the taxes required of Jews to the Ducal Chamber; during the eighteenth century, these totaled 200,000 lira a year. [63] When Napoleon opened the doors of Modena’s ghetto in September 1796, this freedom did not find him and the other 1246 Jews (who constituted a full 6% of the city’s population), [64] unprepared in terms of both civic and political participation.
There was no sudden awakening, nor was there a loss of tradition. Moisè Formiggini was the first Italian Jew elected to office in the government of the Cispadana Republic that incorporated the Duchy of Modena during the Napoleonic period. Most importantly, he opened new cultural, political, and legal inroads toward Jewish integration and complete legal emancipation, which were based on the diffusion of a French-oriented lay culture, the political unification of Northern Italian Jewry, and the adoption of the Napoleonic civil Code. His cultural choices clearly reflected his political agenda; on the one hand Moisè was reading the Enciclopédie, and on the other hand he was reading the writings of Sephardic philosophes such as Isaac Pinto, Benedetto Frizzi, and Bernard Valabrègue, rather than Moses Mendelssohn and his followers. [65]
4. Modenese Jews and Anconitan Jews: A Profitable Comparison
Let us consider how the assets of Modena’s lay leadership can be useful in the assessment of whether some general -social and cultural- patterns emerged among Italian Jewish communities by means of a comparative perspective. A preliminary examination of the sources reveals the existence of a network of Italian Jewish merchant families, such as the Fermis, Morpurgos, and Coens, who forged an oligarchy that functioned to help the community after 1555, which lasted more than two centuries. Moreover, when in 1732 Moisè Fermi, a Jewish merchant and physician, brought about the election of Ancona as a free-port, [66] the decadence of the Jewish community began to wane. Italian and Sephardic merchants thrived; the Jewish population increased dramatically, from nearly one thousand at the beginning of the eighteenth century to almost 1600 (more than 10% of the total population) at the end of the century. [67] At the time, the leadership of the Fermi, Morpurgo, and Coen families was characterized by a high involvement within the organization of the Jewish community, broad commercial networks in the Mediterranean and in the New World, and finally, a certain degree of commercial cooperation with the Christian mercantile class of the city.[68]
Modenese Jewish mercantile élite was mainly composed of Italian and Askenazic families arrived in the city since the fifteenth and the sixteenth century; in addition, with a group of Portuguese merchants from Livorno and Amsterdam settled in Modena in 1650s. Anconitan Jewish mercantile élite was much more variegated. In includes Italian Jews and Sephardic Jews who arrived in the city in different times, before 1550 from Spain and Portugal and in the seventeenth century from Ragusa and Constantinople. [69 ]Moreover, in the early eighteenth century families from Northern Italy such as the Morpurgos from Gradisca who in 1717 settled in Ancona for commercial purposes.[70]
Evidence shows strong ties between both Modenese and Anconitan Jewish traders in terms of marriage and commercial unions throughout the ghetto period, until the arrival of Napoleon. Both Italian and Sephardic merchants from Ancona and Modena developed an extensive network in the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean, organized by kinship, religion, and commercial considerations. In 1767, for example, the marriage between Isotta Morpurgo from Ancona and Calmo Sanguinetti from Modena brought the union of two important families of silk merchants and the reinforcement of earlier common business. [71]
Anconitan and Modenese Jewish merchants through business, the transfer of estates, cultural and philanthropic activities, and international interfamilial alliances developed an oligarchic and male-centered system. In a much similar way to their Modenese counterparts, wives, sisters and daughters of Anconitan Jewish merchants appeared merely instrumental mainly in forging important social and political alliances among the Italian Jewish merchant élite for the reallocation and transfer of estates. They did not take part in family business activities, and as widows they transferred control of their dowries to their sons. [72]
Two examples will suffice, regarding, respectively, the social negotiation and cultural formation of the Jews of Ancona. In 1775 Pope Pius VI, driven by a renewed missionary zeal for the conversion of the Jews, published an edict whose goal was to undermine religious Jewish life by forbidding private teaching and imposing the requisition of Hebrew books. Remarkably, the municipality of Ancona refused to enforce the edict, and embarked on a strong defense of the right of the Jewish community to cultivate its culture and identity. [73] Since the 1780s, the culture of influential merchants such as Ezechia Morpurgo seems to have been oriented toward the Prussian Haskalah together with Italian and Latin literature. Through their commercial relations with the Jews of Trieste, the Jews of Ancona read Moses Mendelssohn, together with Christian Whilhelm Dohm and Naftali Hertz Wessely.[74]
The meeting between Napoleon and Anconitan Jews is even more illuminating. In February 1797, according to a Hebrew chronicle, Ezechia Morpurgo and the other Anconitan Jews after their liberation welcomed Napoleon in the main synagogue as a messianic, even godlike personage, and I quote – “singing the Song of the Sea,” “our spirits were alive and our souls, which had been dead to us, returned within us.[75] ” In contrast, Moisè Formiggini, as a political interlocutor, had met with Napoleon in the city hall, asking for the admission of Modenese Jews as “active citizens” into the new government. The Anconitan Jews adopted a more conventional position. Therefore, in February 1798, Ezechia Morpurgo of Ancona was the first Italian Jew to be elected as a tribune in the new Roman Republic, created by Napoleon, which incorporated the city of Ancona.[76] Despite important differences, Anconitan Jewry was similar to Modenese Jewry in that it had neither a sudden awakening, nor a loss of tradition.
Recent historiographical contributions have approached Jewish “modernization” via analysis of phenomena that are common to many European Jewries, such as cultural and social integration, economic integration political and legal emancipation, nationalism, voluntary community, enlightenment, secularization and breakdown of tradition. My decision to investigate Italian Jewry in the eighteenth-century by means of broad research themes, such as the lay leadership, goes in this direction. Whether inspired by French culture -as the case of Modenaor by the Prussian Haskalah –as in the case of Ancona- Italian Jewish merchant societies created their own special brand of acculturation and integration, which helped their Jewish communities adjust to ghetto life and face change and transformation. Their conduct was a definitive agent in the shift in the Italian Jewish society rather than the production of contemporary scholars. Through them, we can hear a new, fruitful and enlightening Italian voice in the European Jewish scene.
Notes
This paper includes the results of an archival research made possible in part thanks to a grant from the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacoby Center at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem; I am grateful to the Institute for its support. I wish to thank in particular Professor Sergio Della Pergola who has been my supervisor for this project and as usual tremendously supportive in every phase of the research. In addition, I am in debt to Doctor Renato Spiegel from the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for showing his catalogue of the Archive of the Jewish Community in Ancona during its redaction, making accessible the documentation, and sharing his insightful thoughts.
1 Archivio di Stato di Modena (ASMO), Camera Ducale, Biblioteca, Busta 7, and ibidem, Arti e Mestieri, Stampatori, buste 36a and 36b).
2 On the history of Jews in Modena see Andrea Balletti, Gli Ebrei e gli Estensi (Reggio Emilia, 1913), Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin, 1963), 301-303, 343-345, Franco Bonilauri and Vincenza Maugeri eds., Le Comunità ebraiche di Modena e Carpi, (Florence, 1999), Federica Francesconi, Jewish Families in Modena from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Emancipation (1600-1810) (diss., University of Haifa, 2007); Id., “Jewish Women in Eighteenth-Century Modena: Individual, Household and Collective Properties,” in Jutta Sperling and Shona Wray eds., Across the Religious Divide: Women’s Properties in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1800) (New York, 2010), 191-207; Id. “From the Ghetto to Emancipation: the role of Moisè Formiggini,” in Francesca Bregoli and Federica Francesconi, eds., Tradition and Transformation in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Jewish Integration in Comparative Perspective, Jewish History 24, 3-4 (2010), 330-353.
3 On the Ducal Library see Luigi Balsamo, “Editoria e biblioteche nella seconda metà del Settecento negli Stati Estensi,” in Berengo and Romagnoli eds., Reggio e i territori estensi, vol. 2, 505-531; Id, “Gli ebrei nell’editoria in Italia nel ‘600 e ‘700,” in Italia Judaica III (Rome, 1989), esp. 60-65; Giorgio Montecchi, Aziende tipografiche, stampatori e librai a Modena dal Quattrocento al Settecento (Modena, 1988), 123-140. See more in the following pages of this essay.
4 On Moisè Beniamino Foà see Balletti, Gli ebrei e gli Estensi, 366-372. See four different and updated editions of Catalogus Librorum qui Venales prostant Mutinae et Regii apud Mosem Beniaminum Foà Serenissimi Ducis Francisci III Bibliopolam published in Modena respectively in the years 1770, 1775, 1780 and 1788, ad vocem.
5 For an overview, see Francesca Bregoli, “Jewish Modernity in Eighteenth-Century Italy. A Historiographical Survey” in Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 67-78.
6 For a splendid study on Jews in the eighteenth-century based on cross-cultural commercial networks see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers. The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early-Modern Period (New Haven, 2010).
7 On the history of Jews in Ancona in the sixteenth century see the recent following contributions Ariel Toaff, “Nuova luce sui Marrani di Ancona (1556),” in Studi sull’ebraismo italiano (1974) 261-280; Marc Saperstein, “Martyrs, Merchants and Rabbis: Jewish Communal Conflict as Reflected in the Responsa on the Boycott of Ancona,” Jewish Social Studies 43, 3/4 (1981) 215-228; Renata Segre, “Nuovi documenti sui marrani d’Ancona (1555-1559),” Michael 9 (1985) 130-233; Shlomo Simonsohn, “Marranos in Ancona under Papal Protection,” Michael 9 (1985) 234- 267; Benjamin Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities and their “Raison d’État”: Ancona, Venice, Livorno, and the Competition for Jewish Merchants in the Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review 6,2 (1991) 138-162; Bernard Dov Cooperman, “Portuguese “conversos” in Ancona: Jewish Political Activity in Early Modern Italy,” in Iberia and Beyond (1998) 297-352; Aron di Leone Leoni, “Alcuni esempi di quotidiana imprenditorialità tra Ferrara, Ancona e Venezia nel XVI secolo” Zakhor 4 (2000) 57-114; Viviana Bonazzoli, “Una identità ricostruita: i portoghesi ad Ancona dal 1530 al 1547,” Zakhor 5 (2001-2002) 9-38 and Ead., Una dinastia mercantile ebraica del secondo ‘600: i Costantini (Trieste, 1998).
8 For an important exploration of the question see recently David Myers, “Introduction,” in David Myers, et al. eds., Acculturation and its Discontents. The Italian Jewish Experience between Exclusion and Inclusion (Toronto, 2008), 3- 15. For an important analysis of early modern patterns of modernization see Jay Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: the Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (Philadelphia, 2004), esp. 35-58.
9 For a summary of the state of the field on Jewish modernization see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? (Oxford, 2007), pp. 56-81, David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry. A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010), pp. 207-226, Francesca Bregoli and Federica Francesconi “Introduction,” in Bregoli and Francesconi, eds., Tradition and Transformation, 235-246.
10 Lois Dubin has defined participation in general civic councils and the possibility to vote –as in Mantua, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, and Trieste – as “civil inclusion” and a positive step along the path to emancipation: Lois Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, 1999) and Id., “Subjects into Citizens. Jewish Autonomy and Inclusion in Early Modern Livorno and Trieste,” in Jahrbuch des Simon-DubnowInstituts 5 (2006), 51-81. David Sorkin dealing with processes of integration and port-Jews as well has argued that “civil inclusion points to freedom from disabilities, or most disabilities, but not freedom for participation in politics or administration (that is, political inclusion),” David Sorkin, “Port Jews and Three Regions of Emancipation,” in Jewish Culture and History 4,2 (2001), 31-46. For a reassessment of the categories of “civil inclusion” and “port Jews” taking into account the context of Livorno see the articles Francesca Bregoli, “Two Jews Walk into a Coffeehouse”: The “Jewish Question,” Utility, and Political Participation in Late Eighteenth-Century Livorno” and David Sorkin, “Beyond the East-West Divide: Rethinking the Narrative of the Jews’ Political Status in Europe, 1600-1750” in Bregoli and Francesconi, eds., Tradition and Transformation, 309-329 and 247-256.
11 For mentions of the participation of Anconitan Jews into international commercial networks see Anthony Molho, “Ebrei e marrani fra Italia e Oriente ottomano,” in Corrado Vivanti, ed., Gli Ebrei in Italia, II. Dall’emancipazione a oggi (Turin, 1996), 1009-1043. On the eighteenth-century Jewish society of Ancona see Giuseppe Laras, “Una “sommossa” nel ghetto di Ancona sul finire del secolo XVIII,” in Emanuele Artom, Luciano Caro, Sergio Sierra, eds., Miscellanea di studi in onore di Dario Disegni (Turin, 1969); Werther Angelini, “Tra cinquecento e tardo settecento: preparazione e maturità dell’attività mercantile degli ebrei ad Ancona,” in Ariel Toaff and Simon Schwarfuchs, eds., The Mediterranean and the Jews. Banking, Finance and International Trade (XVI-XVIII Centuries) (Ramat-Gan, Francesconi, 1989), 11-38; Viviana Bonazzoli, “Sulla struttura familiare delle aziende ebraiche nella Ancona del ‘700,” in Sergio Anselmi and Viviana Bonazzoli, La presenza ebraica nelle Marche. Secoli XIII-XX (Ancona, 1993), 139-154.
12 Francesconi, Jewish Families. On the history of the Este Duchy see Luciano Chiappini Gli Estensi (Milan, 1967) and Lino Marini, Lo Stato Estense, in I ducati padani, Trento e Trieste, Storia d’Italia, ed. by Lino Maini, Giovanni Tocci, and Aldo Stella (Turin, 1979), vol. 17, 3-211. For an important study on the eighteenth and early-nineteenth Italian history see Stuart Woolf, “La storia politica e sociale,” in Dal primo Settecento all’Unità. Storia d’Italia, vol. III, 5-228 (Turin, 1973).
13 Archivio Storico Comunale di Modena (hereafter, ASCMO), Statuti ed atti diversi delle corporazioni d’Arti e mestieri. Arte della Seta poi collegio sopra la nobil Arte della seta della città di Modena, XV; ASCMO, Camera segreta, Arte della Seta, Denunzie dei mercanti, merciai, tentori, librai e tellari della città di Modena, n. 10; ASCMO, Camera Segreta, Arte della Seta, Registri del collegio 1755-1800; ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Arti e Mestieri, busta 34/b. For a useful and well reserached overview on silk merchants and entrepreneurs in eighteenth-century Modena see Franco Gibellini, Produzione e commercio della seta nel modenese nel secondo Settecento, Tesi di Laurea, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Bologna, a. a. 1989-90. On the economy in the eighteenthcentury Este Duchy, see Odoardo Rambaldi, “L’economia dei territori dei ducati estensi,” in Marino Berengo and Sergio Romagnoli eds., Reggio e i territori estensi dall’Antico regime all’età napoleonica (Parma, 1980), vol. 1, 53- 100.
14 Francesconi, Jewish Families, passim. For similarities and differences with the Christian world see David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher, “Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long Term Development”, in David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieur, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300- 1900), (New York and Oxford, 2007), 1-32.
15 Marini, Lo Stato Estense, 100-114. Francesconi, “
16 In 1622, Jews were admitted into the Guilds of Silversmiths and Jewelers; Francesconi, Jewish Families, 133-34; Archivio Storico Comunale di Modena (ASCMO), Camera Segreta, XXI, Statuti delle Arti della città di Modena – Orefici, fascicoli nn. 582-592. On the admissions of Jews in the other guilds and their participation in the commercial life of the city see Francesconi, “Strategie di sopravvivenza di una minoranza in una capitale europea: Commercio, filantropia e cultura degli ebrei modenesi (secoli XVII–XVIII),” in Federica Francesconi and Luisa Levi D’Ancona, eds., Vita e società ebraiche di Modena e Reggio Emilia durante l’età dei ghetti, (Modena, 2007), 9–41, esp. 32-39.
17 Useful documentaion in preserved in ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Arti e Mestieri, Arte della Seta, busta 34/b. On Rovigo family, see Francesconi, “Strategie di sopravvivenza,” 9–41.
18 These data have been calculated from sources located in ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Ebrei, busta n. 15, “Denunce dell’Arte dei Merciai ebrei aperte dal Magistrato al 6 febbraio 1693.”
19 ASMO, Notarile, Fondo Nicolò Giannozzi, filza 5242, n. 1418, June 9, 1769. Miriam and Lazzaro sold to Giacinto Solieri two of their landed properties, located in San Prospero for 38,000 lira. Servadio and Leone and Raffaele and Lustro Rovigo (the future husband and the father of Miriam) were two couples of brothers.
20 On the Sabbatean movement see Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, trans. by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, 1973). Specifically on Abraham Rovigo and his connection to Sabbateanism see Scholem, The Dreams of Mordechai Ashkenazi, a Follower of Shabbetai Zevi (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1937); Isaiah Tishby, “R. Meir Rofe’s Letters of 1675-80 to R. Abraham Rovigo,” (Hebrew) Sefunot, 3-4 (1960), 84-90; Isaiah Sonne, “Visitors at the House of R. Abraham Rovigo,” (Hebrew) Sefunot, 5 (1961), 275-95.
21 On Rovigo’s house and the various activities there see also Francesconi, “Strategie di sopravvivenza,” 24-26, 29- 31.
22 Archivio della Comunità ebraica di Modena (ACEMO), busta 19 G, fascicolo 11; busta Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777.
23 ACEMO, buste 19 G, fascicolo 11; Istromenti e Testamenti 21 A, Memoriale del 1643; Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777; Oratori (Sinagoga spagnola). ASMO, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ivi, n. 141, 1805.
24 ACEMO, buste 19 G, fasc. 11; Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777; Oratori (Sinagoga Formiggini); Tempio Israelitico. ASMO, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ibidem, n. 141, 1805. On Formigginis and their synagogue see in the next pages.
25 On the “Sinagoga Grande” see ACEMO, 19 G, fascicolo 11; Estimo 17 E Memoriali 1776-1777; C 28, “Arredi e oggetti sacri”. ASCMO, Atti amministrativi, anno 1869, Ornato, F. 746/1, n. 29, “Contrada Coltellini”; ASMO, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ivi, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1805), n. 141. On the “Sinagoga Piccola” see ACEMO, buste 19 G, fascicolo 11; Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777; Oratori. ASCMO, Filza Contratti 1903; Filza Blasia e Coltellini, fascicoli 2-4; ASMO, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ibidem, n. 141, 1805.
26 ACEMO, buste 19 G, fascicolo 11; Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777; Oratori. ASCMO, Filza Contratti 1903; Filza Blasia e Coltellini, fascicoli 2-4; ASMO, Notarile, busta 1087, 1689, n. 58 (Testamento di Abram Modena); n. 45 (Testamento di Lelio Modena); ivi, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ivi, n. 141, 1805.
27 ACEMO, buste 19 G, fascicolo 11; Estimo 17 E, Memoriali 1776-1777; Oratori (Sinagoga Usiglio); Tempio Israelitico. ASMO, Ufficio centrale del Censo (1791-1803), n. 541; ibidem, n. 141, 1805. ASCMO, Ornato, fascicolo 425, 1924. Sui restauri del 1914 a Palazzo Levi si rimanda anche a G. Bertuzzi, Trasformazioni edilizie, cit., pp. 40- 42.
28 Along with the pre-ghetto Hevrot Ghemilut Hasadim (1516), Talmud Torah (1594) and Haverim Machshavim (for the study of the Kabbalah and the recitation of poems 1614), were established Kove’e Ittim (those who establish the times [for the study of the Torah]) (1654), for the instruction of children and adults; Ha-Mishmeret Ha-Boker ve HaErev for the study during the evening and night of Bible texts utilizing famous commentators such as Rashi; the Misnaioth U-Mishmeret Ha-Kodesh (1717) for the evening reading of the Mishnah; the Hazot Iom (1763) for the evening reading and study of comments; Hazot Laila for the recitation of psalms at sunrise with duties of members to actively take part in it; the Manhamadod for the reading of Bible and Prophets; the Kabbalat Shabbat for the perform of special prayers, songs, psalms on Friday evening before the arrival of Shabbat; Mesapperim Teillim for the everyday perform of psalms and instruction of young people; Malabish Harumim (1716) to dress poor fathers of family and for the perform of psalms in the evening. Furthermore, during 18th century were established also the Ashmoret Ha-Boker (1700) for the distribution to the poor of clothes each Friday evening in order to honour the Shabbath; Hevrat Rahamim (1744), that was similar and unified to the Ghemilut Hasadim and that was founded 9 years earlier. Finally, Pirkeh Shirah (1750) for the performing of prayers, poems in Hebrew and psalms in the morning. See in addition Francesconi, “Fra ‘sacro’ e ‘profano’: spazi urbani e vita ebraica a Modena dal Rinascimento all’età moderna,” Studi della Deputazione di Storia Patria Modenese 52 (2004): 119-45.
29 On the history of Hazot Laila see Elliott Horowitz, “The Eve of Circumcision: A Chapter in the History of Jewish Nightlife,” Journal of Social History, 23 (1989), 45–69 and Id., “Coffee, Coffeehouses and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry,” AJS Review 14 (1989), 17–46.
30 On the presence of Ber Perlhefter (d. after 1701) and Mordecai of Eisenstadt (1650–1729) at Rovigo’s house along with other visitors see Sonne, “Visitors at the House.”
31 See Federica Francesconi, “Jewish Women,” 191-207.
32 ASMO, Notarile, Fondo Niccolò Giannozzi, filza 5238, n. 666, June 20, 1763; Biblioteca Estense of Modena, Archivio Familiare Angelo Formiggini (AfAF), cassetta 1, fascicolo n. 31, June 20, 1763, “Obbligazione assunta per parte della Compagnia Ebraica Covegnè Gnitim a favore dell’eredità di Laudadio Formiggini.”
33 AfAF, cassetta 1, fascicolo n. 37, July 7, 1770 (notarial act by Gaetano Radighieri). On Moisè Formiggini, see Francesconi, “Moisè Formiggini.”
34 A much similar pattern has been individuated among affluent Jewish families in eighteenth-century Ancona by Viviana Bonazzoli, ‘Sulla struttura familiare,” esp. 146-148.
35 ASMO, Notarile, Fondo Gaetano Tonani, filza 5227, n. 87, October 17, 1754; ibid., n. 96.
36 ASMO, Notarile, Fondo Giuseppe Antonio Cavicchioli, filza 5370, n. 59, July 4, 1768. The document reports the donation that took place on August 2, 1758.
37 On the vicissitudes of Miriam see Francesconi, “Jewish Women in Eighteenth-Century.” On the importance of the nuclear family for Italian Jews, see Kenneth Stow, “Marriages Are Made in Heaven: Marriage and the Individual in the Roman Jewish Ghetto,” Renaissance Quaterly 48 (1995), 452-91; Id., Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle, 2001), esp. 11–12.
38 See Luciano Allegra, Identità in bilico: Il ghetto ebraico di Torino nel Settecento (Turin,1996); Cristian Galasso, Alle origini di una comunità: Ebree ed ebrei a Livorno nel XVII secolo (Florence, 2002); Stow, “The Jewish Woman as Social Protagonist: Jewish Women in Sixteenth Century Rome,” in Claire Honess and Verina Jones, eds., Le Donne delle minoranze: Le ebree e le protestanti d’Italia (Turin, 1999), 87–100.
39 The verse is from Leviticus 19:18; Archivio della Comunità ebraica di Modena (ACEMO), Archivio aggregato della Soed Holim (Register) [hereafter SH-Register], November 22–December 21, 1735. The archive consists of a folder of unpaginated documents written in Italian with Hebrew insertions.
40 Ibid.
41 SH-Register, November 22, 1735.
42 It ceased functioning in 1943, as a result of the beginning of the Nazi-Fascist domination in Italy. The existence of Soed Holim is mentioned in B. Rivlin, Mutual Responsibility in the Italian Ghetto: Holy Socieities 1516–1789 (in Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), p. 52; Luisa Modena, ‘Note a margine della vita delle donne ebree modenesi nell’epoca del ghetto’, in Bonilauri and Maugeri, eds., Le Comunità ebraiche, 141–60, esp. 152–53 (with some misunderstandings). Regarding early modern Italy, there is evidence of the existence of two Compagnie delle Donne in Venice in the 1640s and in Florence at least since 1669, both of which were devoted to the dowering of brides; unfortunately, documentation has not been preserved. See Stefanie Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford, 2005), p. 404; Carla Boccato, “Aspetti della condizione femminile nel ghetto di Venezia (secolo XVIII): i Testamenti,” Italia 10 (1993), 105–35, esp. 120.
43 SH-Register, November 8, 1750; August 23, 1751.
44 Members included Miriam Rovigo and her mother Grazia Rovigo, Devora Formiggini, Rosa and Grazia Fano, Sara Levi, Bellina Norsa, and Buonaventura Sanguinetti,
45 This analysis is based on SH-Register and a database I created of the Jewish population in the ghetto for the period 1766-1796 through mainly the following documentation: ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Ebrei, filza n. 15; ACEMO, 2.14 – Denunzie de poveri sussidiati al Collegio de Signori Notari; 2.15 – Denunzie delle anime all’ufficio dell’Abbondanza 1766-1796); 2,16-Distinta delle donne cristiane che di tempo in tempo prestano il loro servizio in ghetto 1760-1782.
46 SH-Register June 20, 1756.
47 In 1775, for example, their work aided at least 76 families needy people out a total Jewish population of 1,207 including 247 families. See footnote n. 7. for the non Jewish population see Marini, Lo Stato Estense, 100.
48 For the history of Modenese Jews in the eighteenth century, see my doctoral dissertation Francesconi, Jewish Families, esp. 131–89. 49 The Ducal Library was transformed into a public institution in 1767 while the University opened in 1771 thanks to the collaboration between Foà, Duke Francesco III, and the Jesuit and ducal librarian Francesco Antonio Zaccaria. It was a complex, ambiguous, and utilitarian relationship that was inspired by different ideologies and a common preference for French lay-oriented culture in the social context of Modena. The relationship between the three is paradigmatic of the Jewish condition in late eighteenth-century Modena. The daily contact and fruitful cultural exchange between Francesco III, Antonio Zaccaria and Moisè Beniamino Foà did not—this is the point—extend to intercultural and religious appreciation: their collaboration fostered and was fostered by a high level of reciprocal professional esteem, but without any substantial Jewish-Christian rapprochement. The collaboration, for example, did not have any influence on the Jewish community’s vain struggle to release the young Sara Usiglio, who was kidnapped from the ghetto after false rumors circulated about her intentions to convert, and who died incarcerated in the Holy House of the Catechumens in 1763. On the Ducal Library see Luigi Balsamo, “Editoria e biblioteche nella seconda metà del Settecento negli Stati Estensi,” in. Berengo and Romagnoli eds., Reggio e i territori estensi, vol. 2, 505-531; Id, “Gli ebrei nell’editoria in Italia nel ‘600 e ‘700,” in Italia Judaica III (Rome, 1989), esp. 60-65; Giorgio Montecchi, Aziende tipografiche, stampatori e librai a Modena dal Quattrocento al Settecento (Modena, 1988), 123- 140. On the vicissitudes of Sara Usiglio see Andrea Zanardo, “Catecumeni e neofiti a Modena alla fine dell’antico regime,” in Bonilauri and Maugeri eds., Le Comunità ebraiche di Modena e Carpi, 121–39, esp. 135.
50 Compagnoni’s work is also important with respect what it has to tell us about political events regarding Jews that occurred in the Este Duchy during the last decade of the eighteenth-century. Compagnoni’s pro-Jewish argument was perceived as a societal danger not so much for its implicit request to change the old system regulating JewishChristian relations, but for the idea that this change would have been based on French ideas of natural justice and the Rights of Man, which consequently implied political changes in the Italian peninsula, including n the Este Duchy. Thus Compagnoni’s work was considered much more dangerous for the Este state than the opera omnia by Guillame Raynal, which included the much discussed Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, quoted in Formiggini’s talk, and was forbidden even in Venice, because of his anti-authoritarian and anti-clerical beliefs (BEMO, α z. 10.10, Atti del Congresso). On the vicissitudes of Compagnoni’s work, see Vittore Colorni, Studi sull’ebraismo italiano (Rome, 1974), 73-74 and Lynn Gunzberg, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley, 1992), 24-40. Both of them emphasize the idea that Fabrizi was shifted away his loyalty from the Duke in his censorial revision of Compagnoni’s Saggio; rather it seems to me that Fabrizi was perfectly aligned with new ducal political attitude. See on this point Montecchi, Aziende tipografiche, 135-140. Furthermore, in 1792, Ercole III organized a broad transnational censorial operation aimed at stopping the influx of French books to the Italian peninsula. Moisè Beniamino Foà had bought Raynal’s works for the Ducal public Library in 1788 without protest, Catalogus Librorum qui Venales prostant Mutinae et Regii apud Mosem Beniaminum Foà Serenissimi Ducis Francisci III Bibliopolam (Modena, 1788), ad vocem–.
51 Then in 1792 Compagnoni republished his book in its complete version along with footnotes that explained the Fabrizi’s censorial interventions in Venice.
53 AfAF, Cassetta 1, Fascicolo 25; Notary Niccolò Giannozzi, August 18, 1763; Registro dell’Archivio dell’azienda, anni 1740-1760.
54 On these vicissitudes of the Formiggni, see AfAF, Memoriali and Giornali di Cassa, cassetta 2, fascicolo 47, September 28, 1784. On the hostility of the Guild of Silversmiths and Jewelers because of his foreign markets’ preference see Giorgio Boccolari, L’arte degli orefici a Modena (Secc. XV-XX) (Modena, 1991), 44.
55 AfAF, Memoriali and Giornali di Cassa, cassetta 2, fascicolo 47, September 28, 1784.
56 Ibidem.
57 AfAF, Cassetta 2, fascicolo 63, Scrittura di scioglimento di Società seguita tra Flaminio, Moisè e Salomon zio e nipoti Formiggini. Notary Ettore Poppi, September 21, 1791; ibid., fascicolo 65, Società di commercio stabilita fra i fratelli Moisè, Salomon e Raffaele Formiggini. Notary Ettore Poppi, October 22, 1791. 58 BEMO, Collezione Ferrari-Moreni, Calendari per la Corte for the years 1776-1796 and ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Ebrei, Busta 15, Regolamenti e pagamenti tasse degli ebrei.
59 For a comparison, see Richard Menkis, “Patriarchs and Patricians: the Gradis Family of Eighteenth-Century Bordeaux,” in Frances Malino and David Sorkin eds., From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (Detroit, 1998), 11-43.
60 AfAF, Cassetta 2, fascicolo 63, Scrittura di scioglimento di Società seguita tra Flaminio, Moisè e Salomon zio e nipoti Formiggini. Notary Ettore Poppi, September 21, 1791; ibid., fascicolo 65, Società di commercio stabilita fra i fratelli Moisè, Salomon e Raffaele Formiggini. Notary Ettore Poppi, October 22, 1791. In 1795, Formiggini bought a huge farm in Saliceto, a small town near Modena, for 160,000 lira. AfAF, cassetta 2, fascicolo 68, Scrittura privata colla quale Moisè Formiggini acquista delle terre in Saliceto Panaro da Aronne del fu Moisè Sanguinetti, Notary Ettore Poppi, August 19, 1795. On the Formiggini synagogue see AfAF, cassetta 1, fascicolo 7.
61 ASMO, Archivio per Materie, Ebrei, busta 15, Atti relativi alla contabilità fra lo Stato Estense e l’Università israelitica di Modena (1780-1799); Costituzione della Compagnia ebraica della Misericordia della Città di Modena (Modena, 1791); Prammatica instituita da osservarsi dalli singoli dell’Università di Modena per un triennio (Modena, 1793)
62 I found the formulation used for the first time as “il sistema della casella” in ASCMO, Atti di Amministrazione Generale del Comune di Modena (1796-1853) 28 (22 ottobre – 20 novembre 1798), Fascicolo Consiglio 3 novembre 1798.
63 See ASMO, Camera Ducale, Calendari per la Corte for the years 1775-1796 and ibid., Ebrei, Busta 15, Regolamenti e pagamenti tasse degli ebrei.
64 Archivio della Comunità ebraica di Modena, 2.15 – 52. Denunzie delle anime all’ufficio dell’Abbondanza 1766-1796 (unpaginated documents).
65 Francesconi, “From Ghetto to Emancipation,” 330-353. 66 See the important study by Alberto Caracciolo, Le port franc d’Ancône. Croissance et impasse d’un milieu marchand au XVIIIe siècle, (Paris 1965), 54-55. 67 These data have been calculated by combining different sources: Central Archive for the History of Jewish People (CAJHP), IT/AN 111 Stato delle Anime degli ebrei di Ancona 1709-1818; IT/AN 47 Attività degli ebrei; IT/AN 63 Verbali 1788-1796; IT/AN III Stato delle anime e Regolamenti del ghetto; IT/AN 2 II/II Porto franco and IT/AN 17/02.
68 Archivio di Stato di Ancona (ASAN), Archivio Notarile, L. B. Naldi, vol. 1279, F. Franchi, voll. 2388-2392, F. Silvestrini, voll. 2712, 2713, 2716, 2722, 2727, 2730-2735;
69 CAJHP, IT/AN 111 Stato delle Anime degli ebrei di Ancona 1709-1818; IT/AN 47 Attività degli ebrei; IT/AN 63 Verbali 1788-1796; IT/AN 2 II/II Porto franco and IT/AN 17/02.69 CAJHP, IT/AN 111 Stato delle Anime degli ebrei di Ancona 1709-1818; IT/AN 47 Attività degli ebrei; IT/AN 63 Verbali 1788-1796; IT/AN III Stato delle anime e Regolamenti del ghetto; IT/AN 2 II/II Porto franco and IT/AN 17/02; ASAN, Archivio Notarile, L. B. Naldi, vol. 1279, F. Franchi, voll. 2388-2392, F. Silvestrini, voll. 2712, 2713, 2716, 2722, 2727, 2730-2735. Moreover see the following useful studies: Bonazzoli, “Struttura familiare,” Caracciolo, Le port franc d’Ancône, Molho, “Ebrei e marrani.”
70 Bonazzoli, “Struttura familiare,” 140.
71 Archivio di Stato di Ancona (ASAN), Archivio Notarile, F. Silvestrini, vol. 1921, cc. 277.
72 Bonazzoli, “Struttura familiare,” 146-148.
73 Renzo De Felice, “Gli ebrei nella repubblica romana del 1798-1799,” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 50/3 (1953), 35-62, esp. 37-38.
74 ASAN, Archivio Notarile, P. Lipponi, vol. 2116, Testamento di Diamante Morpurgo (cc. 9 verso – 12 recto), February 3, 1794. See for references to Anconitan rabbis and their acceptance of Naftali Wessely’s Divrei shalom veemet (1782); see Dubin, The Port Jews, 124-133. Useful documentation I have been able to consult is kept at Charles Y. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, Special Collections, RosenbergLewin Collection, folders 2-8.
75 The Hebrew chronicle has been published by Daniel Carpi, “Rabbi Jacob Cohen’s “Sepher Ma’ase Nissim”. A Hebrew Chronicle about the Jews of Ancona during the Years 1793-1797,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, XLIX (1982), pp. 123-160. For a recent and interesting discussion of this source see Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of the Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley, 2003). 151-152. 76 On the participation of Ezechia Morpurgo and other Anconitan Jews to politics and government in the Napoleonic period see Carmelo Trasselli, “Processi politici romani dal 1792 al 1798,” Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento XI-XII (1938): 1-74; Maria Savini, La repubblica anconetana (1797-1798). Documenti tolti dall’Archivio Storico di Ancona (Florence 1907), ad vocem. More recently see De Felice, “Gli ebrei nella repubblica,” 35-62; Geoffrey Symcox, “The Jews of Italy in the Triennio Giacobino, 1796-1799,” in Myers et al. eds., Acculturation and Its Discontents, 148-163.
Figure. Portrait of Moise Meniamino Foà. SOURCE: BPRe, Ritratti di reggiani illustri,frame 2115, inventario 1824, formato 9×12cm. Riferisce Andrea Balletti che si tratta di «un ritratto a penna, tracciatouna sera del 1821 dalla mano maestra di Samuele Iesi di Correggio sopra unpezzo di carta. Rinvenuto dal mio amico Leopoldo Resignani fra gli obliatidocumenti di famiglia, fu per consiglio mio regalato alla Congregazioneisraelitica di Carità di Reggio Emilia», cfr. BALLETTI, 1930, p.229.
Among the many challenges one faces in Jewish genealogical research is the paucity of sources relating to female given names and surnames. This was clearly illustrated at the lecture of Dr. Lea Haber–Gedalia in the 2015 IAJGS Annual Conference in Jerusalem [1]. There are many reasons, among them the fact that women are not allowed to appear as witnesses in the rabbinical courts, thus depriving us from a primary source. Hence we must rely upon unusual resources when seeking to fill out our family trees.
So far the major source or reservoir of female given names and surnames are the marriage contracts (ketubot) and divorce (gittin) collections in different libraries and universities, or tombstones (matzevot) which survived destruction and depletion. Surviving pinkasei mohel (circumcisers’ logs) provide details about the mother such as those recorded by a mohel from Nurenberg, Alexander Tachauer[2], who mentions the mother’s surname, or Maatook Dabby, a mohel in Alexandria between 1928-1952 [3], who mentions the mother’s given name and surname. But in general there is great difficulty in obtaining women’s names in a systematic manner or order over a long period of time.
Many attempts have been made over the years to index Jewish given names and surnames, most of which have focused on a specific country or region. The most recent of these (in 2015) was a consolidated dictionary of Sephardic given names by the late Mathilde Tagger [4]. This very useful research tool includes a bibliography listing all the major works that were published so far in this domain [5].
While Tagger’s work covers quite well the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), Egypt, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Erets Israel and even the Caribbean Islands it seems that there are serious gaps as far as Syria, mainly Damascus, Lebanon and even Iraq are concerned. The Syrian city of Aleppo is a relative exception, benefitting from the publication in 2012 of a detailed study of the city where the composition of given names is discussed in some detail.[6]
This article is an attempt to begin to fill in just one lacuna, namely the Jewish female given names in Damascus between 1583-1909. Based on the same source as in the author’s recent article in AVOTAYNU [7], the following is an overview of the Jewish female given names as they appear in the Shari’ah courts within the city of Damascus.
It is important to remember, based on the experience of almost every Jewish genealogist, that there might be quite a difference between the person’s given name as it appears on the Jewish marriage/divorce document or his/her tomb inscription and the name he was known by outside the community. One of the first scholars who discussed the issue of Jewish female given names in both in Aleppo and Damascus, was Eliyahu Strauss-Ashtor in his monumental book on the history of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under the Mamluks (rulers of Syria prior to the Ottomans). Strauss-Ashtor was the first to note that Hebrew given names were very rare among Syrian Jewish females and almost all of them bore Arabic names, though he cautions that the Jews may have used Hebrew given names in their inner circles and correspondence [8].
Our research is based exclusively on Muslim/Ottoman documents, not Jewish ones. Of the 84 female given names extracted, only half appear in Tagger’s index based on prior research. This is a clear indication that Damascus female given names were beyond the scope of the literature published thus far. While the female Damascene given names we encounter in Tagger’s compilation are mainly Biblical/Hebrew, such as Esther, Miriam, Rivka, Sara, Mazal, Hanna and Rachel, in our own research we have found a far greater number of Arabic names such as Faridah, Qamar, Azizah, Ghazala and Jamila, or Turkish/European ones such as Adele, Bulisa, Katherine, Victoria, Roza and Kadun.
The Arabic female given names which are not included in Tagger’s volume include names such as Zahia, Zina, Zarifa, Rahima, Mudallala, Mufaddala and Shaqra [9]. We were surprised to encounter several given names which have distinctive Islamic flavor such as Zainab and Kulthum [10].
It is interesting to note the absence of any Spanish/Ladino given names from the list. This may be an indication that either there was no sizable non-Mizrahi Sephardic community in Damascus so they are not reflected in the volume that is the source of our data, or that the Sephardic Jews somehow managed their affairs without the need to turn to the Muslim courts.
European given names mentioned above appear only at the end of the 19th century: Adela(1894), Katherine (1886), Victoria (1894), and are another indication of the increasing European influence on the Jewish community in the city, probably following the opening of the Alliance Francaise school there.
The Jewish female given names found in the Shariah courts are as follows:
Jewish Female Given Names Found in the Records of the Damascus Shariah Courts
Name
Language
Year
Tagger
Adela
European
1894
Yes
Asiyyah
Arabic
1733
Awnia
Arabic
1716
Aziza
Arabic
1770
Yes
Badra
Arabic
1758
Yes
Bajura
1822
Banat
Arabic
1700
Barah
1885
Bida
Arabic
1805
Bina
Arabic
1895
Buland
Turkish
1895
Bulisa
Turkish
1892
Yes
Diba
1835
Dinar
Arabic
1885
Yes
Ester
Hebrew
1751
Yes
Farida
Arabic
1894
Yes
Ghazala, Gazala
Arabic
1741
Yes
Habiba
Arabic
1733
Yes
Hanna
Hebrew
1731
Yes
Hannla
Undetermined
1884
Yes
Hasana, Hasna
Arabic
1787
Yes
Jamila
Arabic
1905
Yes
Kalsen
1878
Karaz
Arabic
1905
Katherine
European
1886
Khala
Arabic
1759
Kulthum
Arabic/Islamic
1888
Laila
Arabic
1709
Yes
Latifa
Arabic
1716
Lea
Hebrew
1787
Yes
Lora, Laura
European
1894
Yes
Lulu
Arabic
1751
Yes
Malka
Hebrew
1788
Maluk
Arabic
1757
Marhaba
Arabic
1689
Mariam, Miriam
Hebrew/Arabic
1689
Yes
Mazal
Hebrew
1787
Yes
Miahura
1822
Mirki
Ashkenazi/Yiddish
1888
Muanasa
Arabic
1787
Mudallala
Arabic
1757
Mufaddala
Arabic
1743
Muhsina
Arabic
1743
Muna
Arabic
1700
Nada
Arabic
1878
Najma
Arabic
1744
Yes
Nammura
Arabic
1887
Nuzha
Arabic
1878
Qadun, Kadun
Turkish
1842
Yes
res. Beirut
Qamar, Kamar
Arabic
1585
Yes
Rachel
Hebrew
1709
Yes
Rahima
Arabic
1729
Rahlu
1905
Rahma
Arabic
1733
Yes
Rihan
Arabic
1751
Rika, Riketta, Ricca
European
1702
Yes
Rita
European
1757
Yes
Rivka
Hebrew
1796
Yes
Rogina, Regine
European
1890
Yes
Roza, Rosa
European
1878
Yes
Ruh
Arabic
1744
Rumia
Arabic
1787
Yes
Rushan
1788
Saleha
Arabic
1798
Samha
Arabic
1702
Samiha
Arabic
1787
Sara
Hebrew
1765
Satut
Arabic?
1757
Sawsan, Suzanne
Arabic
1893
Yes
Sebastia
Latin/italian
1702
Setin, Cetina?
Spanish?
1719
Shaqra
Arabic
1729
Ster, Ester
Hebrew
1787
Yes
Stirun
1787
Sultana
Arabic
1712
Yes
Tasbin
1744
Victoria
European
1894
Yes
res. Beirut
Warda, Wardia
Undetermined
1788
Yes
Zahia
Arabic
1884
Zahra
Arabic
1738
Yes
Zainab
Arabic/Islamic
1770
Zakia
Arabic
1729
Zarifa
Arabic
1802
Zina
Arabic
1787
* Indicates that the given name was found in “Dictionary of Sepharadic Given Names”
[1] Dr. Lea Haber-Gedalia, Female Surnames – Difficulties and Challenges in Genealogical Research, talk delivered at the 35th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, Jerusalem, July 8, 2015.
[2] Tachauer, Alexander, The Circumcisions Book of Alexander Tachauer 1914-1956 Jerusalem, 2002 (privately published, in Hebrew).
[6] Bornstein-Makovetsky, Leah, A City Of Sages And Merchants: The Community of Aleppo (Aram Tzova) During The Years 1492-1800, Ariel, 2012 (in Hebrew), pp. 259-260.
[7] Rosen, Jacob, When the Jews of Damascus Started Using Surnames?, AVOTAYNU Volume XXXI, Number 3, Fall 2015.
[8] Strauss, Eliyahu, A History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria Under the Rule of the Mamluks (3 vols.), Jerusalem, 1944-1970 (in Hebrew), pp. 332-333.
Geni.com, host of the online World Family Tree, and Family Tree DNA, a global leader in genetic genealogy, announced today that they have partnered to integrate Family Tree DNA test results into Geni’s World Family Tree. Today the partners activated a project that has been one and a half years in the making!
As of today, Geni supports three major DNA technologies to enhance the World Family Tree – Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA and autosomal DNA. Users can now link their Family Tree DNA account to Geni and have their DNA test results transferred accurately to their Geni profile with a single click.
Now you can confirm your relationship to individuals in your direct paternal line (Y-DNA), direct maternal line (mtDNA) and relatives across all lines via autosomal DNA. You can also discover new relatives via DNA matching. Read more about using DNA to verify relationships in your family tree.
DNA tests are an increasingly popular method that is being used by genealogists to discover their family’s origins and find new relatives. By combining the power of genetic testing with Geni’s World Family Tree, users will be able to confirm or refute connections with confidence, increasing the accuracy of the tree. Uploading DNA data to the World Family Tree will highlight situations where the documented genealogy doesn’t sit well with the biological descendancy. These discrepancies are often caused by mistakes of genealogists, adoptions or infidelities. DNA data will also help separate fact from fiction, as is sometimes the case with people claiming descent from royalty.
The new integration with Family Tree DNA is secure and automatic, making it free of errors that could occur with manual data entry of DNA information. Privacy is strictly enforced and raw DNA data points such as markers and mutations are never shown on Geni. DNA results are displayed on profiles only as haplogroups and matches. Additional privacy settings allow you to control precisely how Geni manages your DNA information on profiles.
In addition, we have used public online information from Ysearch and Mitosearch —public services operated by Family Tree DNA, for uploading and comparing Y-DNA and mtDNA submitted voluntarily by test takers from various services. Geni has loaded this public data, and our fantastic team of curators has merged the data into the World Family Tree. As a result, Geni celebrates its DNA launch with DNA data points on more than 228,000 people, making it the most DNA-rich collaborative family tree in the world, from day one. These are exciting times for Geni.
Let’s take a look at DNA test results on Geni.
Profile Page
Profile pages will now show icons indicating which DNA tests have been taken or propagated to the profile, and the resulting haplogroup for Y and mitochondrial tests. You can control who will see this information on your profile using the “DNA Haplogroups” setting on your profile privacy page. Set it to Public to allow all Geni users to see the haplogroups, or Private if you want only your close family members (fourth cousins and closer) to be able to view this. Click ‘details’ to view the results in more detail on the new DNA tab on your profile.
On the profile page, a new tab labeled DNA was added, as shown below.
Clicking on this tab will display information on this profile’s DNA test results. Here you can upload your own DNA test results or see a list of relatives who have already uploaded their test results to the tree. On your profile, you also have the option to view a list of living people in your tree who can be tested for Y-DNA, mtDNA and autosomal DNA test that may match yours.
The profile DNA tab displays an overview of the DNA for the person as well as details of each of the three test types:
If you have taken a Family Tree DNA test before, you can upload it to your profile in a few clicks. Simply click on the link “transfer your DNA results” to transfer your results from Family Tree DNA to Geni.
You will then be asked to log in to your Family Tree DNA account to connect it to your Geni profile.
Click the checkbox to accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and then confirm Family Tree DNA’s access to your Geni account by clicking ‘Authorize’:
Once you have authorized the application, your Family Tree DNA account will show that it is connected.
After linking your accounts, your DNA test results will be automatically uploaded to your Geni profile and appear on the DNA tab (this is usually completed within a few minutes).
The results will also be propagated to other profiles in your tree, showing you who may be related through your paternal line (Y-DNA), maternal line (mtDNA) or autosomal DNA (close relatives). Greater confidence can be obtained by testing more relatives – click the links to view lists of living relatives who can be tested.
For example, if you have completed a Y-DNA test, your results will be propagated to your father’s profile.
Confirm Relationships
You can gain more confidence in the connections in your family tree now that relationships can be confirmed with DNA test results.
In the DNA tab, a green checkmark will appear next to relationships that have been confirmed by DNA.
Relationship paths are even better now that they can be confirmed with DNA. If a relationship has not yet been confirmed, a button will appear suggesting to confirm it with a DNA test.
A relationship path is considered confirmed if both people have matching DNA tests, or two or more propagated DNA results that match:
In the example below, mitochondrial DNA test results were used to confirm the relationship between an aunt and a nephew.
When you click on ‘View details,’ you are automatically directed to the DNA tab of the profile to show which DNA test results confirm the relationship. The green check marks indicate which results that were matched to the profile have been used to confirm the relationship.
Review Conflicts
A yellow triangle will alert you when there is a conflict with other DNA test results that have been added to the tree so that you may investigate further.
When you click on the link to view the conflict in detail, you will be provided with a tree view of the conflict.
You can also click on the ‘Profiles’ tab to view the list of conflicting profiles.
To help you pinpoint the discrepancy, click on the link to view a list of additional relatives that can be tested.
DNA Matches
Users will be transferring new DNA information to Geni every day. As this happens, we will be looking constantly for new DNA matches in your tree. When a new match is found, you will be automatically alerted. You can view your DNA Matches under your notifications at the top right corner of the page.
Clicking on the DNA Matches notification will take you to a page that details your matches, organized by DNA test type.
From here, you can view a list of matching profiles for each test type.
Family Tree View
We’ve also enhanced the family tree view to show you which relatives have had DNA test results added to their profile. In your family tree, a black DNA icon will now appear for each relative who has been DNA tested.
Merging Profiles
DNA tests have also been added to the merge comparison page so you can confirm your Tree Matches with even greater confidence. A green checkmark will indicate matching test results, while a yellow triangle will indicate a conflict.
Meet Relatives in Haplogroup Projects
Geni provides a DNA project for each haplogroup, as a meeting place for users who may be related and wish to share their family trees to find overlaps and merge duplicate profiles. Profiles that share the same haplogroup, determined either through testing or propagation, will be automatically added to the project. You can opt out of being included in DNA haplogroup projects in your profile privacy settings by making your DNA Haplogroups private. Users can edit the About section of each project to add more information about the haplogroup.
Privacy
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Twenty years ago I accidentally discovered my own great-grandmother’s matzeva (tombstone) in a small cemetery in Kezmarok, Slovakia, a town by then devoid of living Jews. This astounding discovery spurred me to examine thousands of other abandoned, unvisited, ignored, and forgotten matzevot all over Europe in the hope that others like myself would benefit from my help in locating the graves of their ancestors.
As a former software engineer in aerospace, I found it useful to begin my analysis of each matzeva by using an analytical tool to understand the factors that affected its creation, even before attempting to decipher its inscriptions. The tool that I use is known as a functional (or activity) model and was based on a specific analytical tool adopted by the United States Air Force for the design and manufacture of aircraft.
A functional model such to this one can be used to understand the design and creation of any artifact of genealogical interest — including a tombstone!
A Modeling Technique, IDEF0
The US Air Force modeling system that I adapted is commonly known as the “ICAM Definition for Function Modeling” (IDEF0). The system used not only by the Air Force but by industry in general to model the decisions, actions, and activities of an organization or system. Seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF0
As shown in Figure 1, the standard Functional Model contains five main concepts:
Function or activity: the object or outcome which is to be created. For the aircraft industry, at the highest level, the function would be to “Produce an Aircraft”; for our present purposes: “Produce a Matzeva.”
Input: Data or consumables needed by the function/activity
Output: Data or products produced by the function/activity
Constraints: Commands (constraints) that influence the execution of a function/activity but are not consumed
Mechanisms: The means, components or tools used to accomplish the function/activity. Represents allocations (i.e., who or what works on the activity).
A Process Model for Developing a Matzeva
Applying this concept to the activity or function of producing a tombstone, I adapted the five concepts of the standard IDEF0 model as shown in Figure 2:
Function: Produce a Matzeva
Input – Existential Artifacts: What was known of the deceased, notable facts, accomplishments of his or her life, and personal attributes. What artifacts can be found of, but not limited to, the person’s existence, such as names, documents (BMD records), synagogue records, titles/honorifics, accomplishments, obituaries, newspaper articles, rabbinic or scholarly dynasties, tribal identification (Cohen or Levi), military records, books written)
Constraints – Content: Since the dimensions of the matzeva are finite and limited, how much information will fit, and dependent on the memorial’s medium, can be inscribed? Are abbreviations (rashe tevot = Hebrew acronyms) necessary and which ones? Should some imagery be added, and what should it convey? Which language(s), religious traditions and rituals, chronograms, prose/poetry style, font, environment (place, time), calendars, should be included? These again are not a complete list of possibilities.
Mechanisms – Decision Makers: Who are the people involved in deciding what should be inscribed on a particular matzeva? Was it only the surviving family or friend? Did they consult a knowledgeable person? In the countries in which the deceased lived, did survivors, engravers, rabbis/scholars, and secular authorities impose limitations on what could be included?
Output – Memorial: The matzeva itself is the final, “carved in stone” product.
Analyzing and Deciphering a Tombstone/Matzeva
Once we have analyzed the environment in which the matzeva was created, we reverse gears by using our analytical tool to decipher the inscriptions found on the matzeva. While a primary goal is to identify the individual buried beneath the stone, as genealogists we are also interested in learning as much as possible about that person’s life and circumstances.
The concepts at this stage are described as follows:
Input – Inscribed Memorial (Input): The “tabula inscripta” (the “carved in stone” inscription) on some solid medium. (stone, metal, etc.)
Constraints – Content: Language(s), religious tradition & ritual (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi, whether orthodox, conservative, reform, possibly even Jews who were so removed and may have requested their preferences in advance), chronograms, anagrams, imagery, prose/poetry style, font, environment (place and time), rashe tevot (acronyms), Biblical/Talmudic references.
Mechanisms – Researcher: The researcher extracts what was inscribed, identifies persons and relationships, solves mysteries/puzzles, explains imagery, expands rashe tevot, calculates dates, determines a tribe (Cohen/Levi/Israelite), and accesses supplementary material (such as BMD records, synagogue records, obituaries, newspaper articles, family trees, scholarly works).
Output – Claims Pertaining to a Person’s Life and Circumstances: Claims concerning the names of the deceased and their family members, dates and places, titles and honorifics, relationships, accomplishments, dynasties, and status (Cohen, Levi or Israelite).
Summary
Having an understanding of how a particular matzeva was created, including the resources that were available to the stonemason/carver and/or the constraints which guided him, a genealogist or researcher may draw more reliable inferences about the deceased beyond the claims presented in the matzeva’s plain text. The discipline of modeling functional models, while demonstrably valuable in understanding the creation of matzeva, may also guide genealogists to better synthesize all types of genealogical artifacts, thereby improving the quality of our research and the breadth and accuracy of our discoveries.
Yehuda Leib of Shpola (c.1725 – 1811) – better known as the Shpoler Zeide (Yiddish for “Grandfather of Shpola”) or Saba Kadisha (Hebrew for “Holy Grandfather’) – was a beloved Chassidic folk rebbe, great kabbalist, and a revered tzaddik (saintly or holy man) about whom many Jewish folk tales, stories, and legends abound.[1],[2],[3],[4] He was a first-generation disciple of the Baal Shem Tov.<[5][6]<[7] His mentors were Rabbi Pinchas [Shapira] of Koretz הרה”ק מקאריץ and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonnoye.[8][9]
Yehuda Leib was born in a small village close to the town of Uman, in the Ukraine. His parents were Boruch Gerondi and Rachel.[10], [11] He and his wife, Pesya Mirel, had four sons: Boruch Gad (b. 1763), Abram (b. 1767), Yankel (b. 1770), and Peisach (b. 1775). They also had at least one daughter.
According to legend, the Shpoler Zeida received his Zeida nickname when, at his circumcision, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism, blessed him: “Let it be God’s will that you shall be a Zeide (grandfather) to the Jewish people.” [12], [13], [14] After the Czar’s 1804 edict mandating that Jews adopt surnames, Yehuda Leib and his descendants became known by the Zeida surname.[15]
Although the Shpoler Zeida was considered a true folk rebbe, he steadfastly refused all titles, never accepting a rabbinical position. Instead, he served as a shochet (ritual slaughterer), faith healer, teacher, and a loyal spokesman for the Jews before heaven, and he ordered his sons to act in the same way.[16], [17]
The Shpoler Zeida died in 1811; he outlived his mentor, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz, by twenty years and the Baal Shem Tov by fifty years, but their teachings and beliefs were inextricably intertwined.[18] He was such a beloved and revered tzaddik that Chassidic Jews make frequent pilgrimages to his gravesite, and annual seudas (memorial dinners) are still held in his honor on the 19th day of Shvat by his descendants all around the world. His fame lives on in popular culture, and there is even a Facebook site dedicated to him.[19]
The Shpoler Zeida was a leader of the early Chassidic movement, and the reverberations of his life and teachings are still being felt today. And yet, there is little in the way of tangible evidence of his existence. He founded no rabbinical dynasty, he left behind no writings, and there are no known portraits of him. The Shpoler Zeida did, however, leave a tangible and very valuable gift behind – his DNA.
The Shpoler Zeida touched the world, and left his genetic fingerprints on it. Now, thanks to recent advancements in the science of genetic genealogy, we can identify those fingerprints. In this genetic genealogy research study, we focus on identifying the genetic fingerprint or signature of the Shpoler Zeida through Y-DNA testing of his paternal descendants.
Chassidim visiting the Shpoler Zeida’s Ohel in the Shpola Cemetery, Ukraine, 2008
The tombstone of the author’s great-grandfather, noting descent from the Shpoler Zeida [20]
The authors (upper left) presenting a talk on the Shpoler Zeida’s family tree, at the annual Shpoler Zeida Seuda, Crown Heights, NY, January 23, 2011
Methods
The Y-DNA tests were conducted by Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) of Houston, Texas. Standard DNA Y-chromosome segment (DYS) markers, also referred to in genetic testing as short-tandem repeat (STR)[21] markers, were tested at the 37 STR marker level for three pedigreed paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida, and for three other descendants who, through traditional genealogical research methods, were identified as being possible paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida.
Y-DNA passes down from father-to-son without recombination and largely unchanged, except for infrequent mutations (changes) that occur along the hereditary line, which is why the Y-DNA genetic signature of a male descendant represents that of his ancestral paternal lineage.[22] That is also why, for the purpose of identifying the Y-DNA signature of a paternal lineage, it is essential that all descendants of the lineage are son-after-son.
The value of testing Y-DNA STR markers comes from identifying a Y-DNA signature (haplotype) for them and comparing that Y-DNA signature to others in a database.[23] They are useful for genetic genealogy because a unique Y-DNA signature distinguishes one paternal lineage from another. They can then be used in conjunction with Family Tree DNA’s Y-DNA comparative database to discover genealogical connections or historic ancestry.[24]
In order to establish the Y-DNA genetic signature of a particular common paternal ancestor, the Y-DNA of descendants of that paternal ancestor must genetically match one another. Ideally, these descendants should be from at least two different sons of that common ancestor, with each descendant representing a different cousinly paternal line. Matching Y-DNA results from three or more different paternal lines provides additional confirmation and validation of the Y-DNA genetic fingerprint or signature.
Identifying Pedigreed Paternal Descendants of the Shpoler Zeida
Genetic tests, including Y-DNA tests, are not a substitute for traditional genealogical research. In order to establish the Y-DNA genetic signature of a particular paternal lineage, pedigreed descendants of that lineage must first be identified for testing. Although the Shpoler Zeida has a large family with thousands of descendants, pedigreed lines with living paternal descendants, descending son-after-son, are rare.
Locating and testing pedigreed paternal descendants of an individual who was not a rabbi, and who was born in the Russian Empire nearly three hundred years ago, presents unique genealogical challenges. Extensive genealogical research of the Shpoler Zeida and his descendants by the authors laid the necessary groundwork for identification of living paternal descendants for this Y-DNA study.
We began our research with a search of the Kiev archives for Shpola censuses and vital records for the Zeida family.[25], [26], [27] In those documents, we found all of the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal descendants through the first four generations of his family. Using rabbinical books, tombstone inscriptions, immigration and naturalization records, U.S. censuses, birth, marriage, and death records, social media, and other genealogical sources, we traced the Shpoler Zeida’s descendants through twelve generations, to produce a family tree comprising over 2,500 of his descendants.[28]
This page from the 1834 Shpola census lists Yankel, son of Leiba Zeida (the Shpoler Zeida), together with Yankel’s wife and children. Yankel was age 46 in 1816; he died in 1832.[29]
From this extended family tree, we identified six living paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida for Y-DNA testing. For the purpose of our analysis, these six descendants were divided into two different groups. The first group consisted of descendants for which the paper trail provided strong evidence of their being son-after-son descendants of the Shpoler Zeida. David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide belong to this group. The lines of descent for these three pedigreed paternal descendants are presented in Table 1.[30]
The second group consisted of descendants for which the evidence of their being son-after-son descendants of the Shpoler Zeida was more equivocal; i.e., there were more uncertainties in their paper trails. Possible paternal descendants Aaron Joseph Zeide, Miron Zeide, and Yuri Zeida belong to this group. Genealogical evidence, together with the Y-DNA results for each group of descendants are presented and discussed separately.
As shown in Table 1, David Seide and Yisrael Seide are descendants of the cousinly paternal lines that descend from the Shpoler Zeida’s grandson, Boruch Gad (son of Yankel), who is their most recent common ancestor, while Michael Zeide is a descendant of the cousinly paternal line that descends from a different son of the Shpoler Zeida, Abram.
The most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of these three paternal lines is the Shpoler Zeida; hence, if the Y-DNA of these three descendants genetically match one another, that would establish his Y-DNA genetic signature.
Table 2 presents the Y-DNA test results for David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide. The Y-DNA results showed a genetic match of 33-to-35 allele values at 37 STR marker locations between the three pedigreed paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida. Each of them had between one and three non-matching allele values that were not shared by the other two descendants.
Y-DNA Test Results for Pedigreed Paternal Descendants of the Shpoler Zeida
Because the sample size is too small to determine which of these non-matching allele values represents ancestral allele values for the lineage, and which represent mutations, they are all considered to be “possible ancestral allele values” (indicated by the green shaded cells in the table). This distinctive pattern of allele values at 37 STR marker locations represents the Y-DNA haplotype for the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal lineage.
The R-M173 haplogroup for the three pedigreed descendants was predicted by FTDNA on the basis of their haplotype.[31] Additional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)[32] genotyping was conducted for the pedigreed descendants to further refine the initial haplogroup/subclade classification.[33] This haplogroup/subclade classification, together with the Y-DNA haplotype, comprises the Y-DNA genetic signature or “fingerprint” of the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal lineage.
Based on their Y-DNA haplotype, all pedigreed Zeida descendants were initially classified as belonging to the R-M173 haplogroup. The R-M173 haplogroup which is defined by SNP mutation M173, was historically known as R1 and has been common throughout Europe and South Asia since pre-history and has many branches [34], [35] It is the second most common haplogroup in Indigenous peoples of the Americas following haplogroup Q-M242.[36]
The R1a-M173 Haplogroup
The majority of Ashkenazi Levites belong to Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, which is one of the most common haplogroups throughout Europe and Western Asia and on the Indian Subcontinent.[37]Haplogroup R1a1 was found at elevated levels among a sample of the Israeli population who self-designated themselves as Levites and Ashkenazi Jews (Levites comprise approximately 4% of Jews). Behar reported R1a1 to be the dominant haplogroup in Ashkenazi Levites (52%), although rare in Ashkenazi Cohanim (1.3%).[38]
The R-Z93 subclade of the R1a haplogroup (formerly known as R1a1a1b2) is distinguished by several unique markers including the M420 mutation. R1a-Z93 is the main Asian branch of R1a, one of three principal downstream subclades of R1a which split from each other about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago.[39] It is found in Central Asia, South Asia and Southwest Asia (including among Ashkenazi Jews).
R1a-Z93 is the marker of historical peoples such as the Indo-Aryans, Persians, Medes, Mitanni, or Tatars, and pervades the genetic pool of Arabs and Jews.[40] Based on descendant testing, it appears most likely that the sultans of the Ottoman dynasty belonged to haplogroup R1a-Z93, although this has not yet been officially confirmed.[41]
In an effort to further define downstream SNPs for pedigreed Zeida descendants, FTDNA’s “R1a-Z93 SNP Pack,” which tests for 107 additional SNPs, was ordered for them. The Y-SNP branch R1a-Z94 of R1a-Z93 is defined by the F3105, S340, and Z94 subclades, and a number of downstream markers, including Z2124.[42] Z2124 has five direct subclades, including Y2632.[43]
All three pedigreed Zeida descendants were found to belong to the Y2632 subclade. The full branching structure of this subclade may be designated as: R1a-M173>Z93>Z94>Z2124>Y2632. This particular subclade appears to represent a small non-Levite branch of R1a.[44] Taken together with the Y-DNA haplotype, this subclade comprises the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal lineage.
Time-to-Most Recent Common Ancestor (TMRCA) Predictions
In this Y-DNA study of the Shpoler Zeida’s lineage, as in our previous studies of rabbinical lineages, the common ancestor of pedigreed descendants is already known, and therefore, does not need to be estimated. Conducting Y-DNA testing of pedigreed descendants, however, does offer the advantage of being able to evaluate and assess current predictive models for estimating the time-to-most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for their accuracy.
FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model was used to predict the TMRCA probabilities for the three pedigreed paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida; David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide. In comparing Y-DNA STR marker results for the purpose of estimating the probability of the TMRCA, each pedigreed Zeida descendant was compared to the other two pedigreed descendants.
David and Yisrael Seide’s TMRCA probabilities are based on 37 STR markers; the others are based on 25 STR markers because Michael Zeide did not appear on the other pedigreed descendants’ genetic match lists at 37 markers. These probability predictions are presented numerically in Table 3 and graphically in Figure 1.
Mean Probability of the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) Living within a Specified Number of Generations for Pedigreed Paternal Descendants of the Shpoler ZeidaFigure 1
David and Yisrael Seide’s most recent common ancestor, Boruch Gad Zeida (1802 – 1858), preceded them in the Shpoler Zeida’s lineage by five generations (see Table 1). FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model predicts only a 43.4 percent chance of their most recent common ancestor (MRCA) living within five generations.
Yisrael Seide’s and Michael Zeide’s most recent common ancestor, the Shpoler Zeida (1725 – 1811) preceded them in the lineage by seven generations. FTDNA’s time predictor model predicts a 51.4 percent chance of their most recent common ancestor living within seven generations.
Michael Zeide’s and David Seide’s most recent common ancestor, the Shpoler Zeida (1725 – 1811) also preceded them in the lineage by seven generations. FTDNA’s time predictor model predicts a 23.9 percent chance of their most recent common ancestor living within seven generations.
As shown in Table 3 (right column), the actual TMRCA for generations 5 through 7 fell between the 30.7 and the 46.4 percent mean probability predictions for this study. This is consistent with the results of previous Y-DNA studies which showed that the FTDNA time predictor model consistently overestimates the TMRCA.
Y-DNA Test Results for Possible Paternal Descendants of the Shpoler Zeida
Table 4 presents the Y-DNA test results for Aaron Zeide, Miron Zeide, and Yuri Zeida, and compares their results to those of the three pedigreed paternal Zeida descendants, David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide.
Aaron Zeide and Miron Zeide have matching allele values at 37 of 37 STR marker locations, but they match the three pedigreed paternal Zeida descendants at only 11 of 37 STR marker locations (non-matching allele values are indicated by the blue shaded cells in the table). Their identically matching allele values indicate that they share a common paternal ancestor, but it also leaves little doubt that their common paternal ancestor does not belong to the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal lineage. Indeed, their Y-DNA test results identified them as belonging to a completely different haplogroup (Q-M242) from that of the pedigreed paternal Zeida descendants (R-Z93).
Yuri Zeida matched the three pedigreed paternal Zeida descendants on only 10 of 37 STR marker locations tested. His Y-DNA test results identified him as belonging to the E-L117 haplogroup. His widely disparate allele values and haplogroup classification (E-L117) indicates that he is descended from a different paternal line from all of the other Zeida descendants.
These Y-DNA results effectively rule out paternal descent of these three descendants from the Shpoler Zeida. When Y-DNA results for presumed paternal descendants of a lineage do not match, it generally means there is an interruption somewhere in the paternal lineage. Some of the more common possible explanations for such breaks in the lineage, include mistakes in the paper trail, undocumented surname changes, adoptions, and non-paternal events (NPEs).
In this case, it was discovered that there were, in fact, errors introduced in the lineage for Aaron Zeide, Miron Zeide, and Yuri Zeida. These lineage errors are explained in the following Discussion of Results.
Discussion of Results
The Shpoler Zeida’s lineage dates back almost three centuries. Through traditional genealogical research, we were able to identify and locate three living paternal descendants having well-documented pedigrees, who descend from two different sons of the Shpoler Zeida.
The close genetic match between all three pedigreed Zeida descendants – David Seide, Israel Seide, and Michael Zeide – validates the authenticity of their pedigree, and their distinctive allele pattern at 37 STR marker locations represents the haplotype of their most recent common ancestor, the Shpoler Zeida. Their haplotype, in conjunction with their haplogroup classification, R1a-M173>Z93>Z94>Y2632, represents the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida.
The modal (most frequent) allele values reported at 37 STR markers for the pedigreed Zeida descendants in this study match those reported by Wim Penninx for a small cluster of Ashkenazi non-Levite Jews who are not closely related to the larger Levite R1a group.[45] In his data, Penninx found a relationship between the size of a branch and the TMRCA. He postulates that this relationship is most likely caused by differences in the time of arrival of the progenitors of the branch in the Ashkenazi countries; early arriving progenitors have a large TMRCA, and are also larger in size (e.g., the R1a Levites group).[46]
Penninx considers the small non-Levite cluster as a small branch of the R1a haplogroup, with a recent TMRCA. He suspects that the most recent common ancestor of this branch arrived late in the Ashkenazi countries, and that the Jewish common ancestor arrived in the Eastern Ashkenazi countries directly from the Middle East.[47] His hypothesis is supported by the results of this study, since the same modal allele values that he reported for the small non-Levite cluster represent those of the Shpoler Zeida (b. 1725).[48]
These results of this study are consistent with those of multiple Y-DNA studies of Jewish lineages which have demonstrated that the FTDNA time predictor (TiP®) model tends to overestimate the actual time-to-most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) in the vast majority of cases. However, in this study, the overestimates were even more pronounced.
For instance, the TiP model predicted a 95 percent probability that Yisrael Seide and Michael Zeide’s most recent common ancestor (the Shpoler Zeida) lived within twenty generations, when, in fact, he lived within seven. The known TMRCA fell between the 30.7 – 46.4 percent mean probability predictions in this study; a range of between 50 – 95 percent using the FTDNA time predictor model has been reported by these authors in previous Y-DNA studies of rabbinical lineages. [49], [50], [51],[52] Similar findings were reported by Unkefer, who indicated that the actual documented TMRCA generally falls between the 50 percent and the 95 percent probability predictions. [53]
This Y-DNA research study of the Shpoler Zeida’s paternal lineage presented several unique challenges. Because the Shpoler Zeida was not a rabbi and did not found a rabbinical dynasty, there are few family trees, yichus letters, or published genealogies of his family in rabbinical sources. The pedigrees of many of his descendants are therefore not as well-documented as are other rabbinical lineages of his day.
Our search of the Kiev archives for Shpola census and vital records was undertaken in order to corroborate or complete the documented paper trail for our pedigreed and possible paternal descendants. The records search was successfully completed, and we were able to verify and/or complete the paper trail for all tested descendants.
Unfortunately, during the process of reconstructing the lineage for the descendants who had uncertainties in their pedigrees, some errors were introduced into the paper trail. These errors greatly complicated interpretation of the Y-DNA results. For instance, David Seide and Yisrael Seide were found to be close genetic matches, and Aaron Joseph Zeide and Miron Zeide were found to be identical genetic matches at all 37 STR marker locations tested.
David and Yisrael Seide, however, did not genetically match Aaron Joseph and Miron Zeide. Having what we believed was a complete paper trail documenting paternal descent for all four descendants, we had no way to distinguish which pair of results represented the true genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida. To further complicate the issue, Yuri Zeida’s Y-DNA results did not match either pair of descendants.
Fortunately, additional Y-DNA testing enabled us to find and correct these lineage errors. The first step was identifying a sixth descendant from a completely different branch of the Shpoler Zeida’s family to test. If that descendant’s Y-DNA results matched those of either David Seide and Yisrael Seide or Joseph and Miron Zeide, we would then know which pair of descendants represented the true genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida.
We identified Michael Zeide as the sixth Y-DNA test candidate. Michael descends son-after-son from the Shpoler Zeida’s son Abram, whereas David and Yisrael Seide descend from his son Yankel (see Table 1). Aaron Joseph and Miron Zeide were thought to descend from the Shpoler Zeida’s grandson Shmuel, while Yuri Zeide was thought to descend from a previously unknown son, Fayvil, whom we identified from the Shpola census.
Michael Zeide’s Y-DNA test results were found to match those of David and Yisrael Seide, thereby confirming that the three pedigreed descendants were indeed paternal descendants of the Shpoler Zeida, and that their haplotype and haplogroup represented the Shpoler Zeida’s genetic signature. It also meant that errors were introduced into the lineages of the possible paternal descendants during the process of reconstructing their paper trails. We proceeded to examine their paper trails and supporting documents to locate the possible source of these errors.
The first error was introduced during the reconstruction of Aaron Joseph and Miron Zeide’s lineage. From the existing paper trail, their common ancestor was known to be Shmuel Zeida. In our analysis of the 1834 Shpola census, Shmuel Zeida, born circa 1778, was listed as being a son of Boruch. Because the Shpoler Zeida had a son named Boruch (b. 1763), we interpreted this to mean that Shmuel was Boruch Zeida’s son, and the Shpoler Zeida’s grandson.
However, in light of the fact that Aaron Joseph and Miron Zeide’s Y-DNA results do not match the Shpoler Zeida’s genetic signature, we believe that their ancestor Shmuel was not a paternal descendant of the Shpoler Zeida. Instead, we believe that he married a daughter of the Shpoler Zeida, and adopted her Zeida surname.
In 1804, an edict issued by Czar Alexander I mandated surnames for all Jews living in the Russian Empire.[54] Shmuel was 26 years old in 1804, and based on the birth year of his son Boruch (1794), was married prior to the Jewish surname mandate. Adopting the surname of famous ancestors was considered an honor, and was a very popular tradition at that time.
Hence, adopting his illustrious father-in-law’s Zeida surname subsequent to the 1804 surname mandate is a very plausible scenario. In support of this scenario, the book Ish ha-Pele mentions a Rabbi Shmuel who married the only daughter of the Shpoler Zeida without mentioning her name.[55]
The second error was introduced during the reconstruction of Yuri Zeide’s lineage. From the existing paper trail, his ancestor was known to be Fayvil Zeida. In our analysis of the 1834 Shpola census, Fayvil Zeida, born circa 1788, was listed as being a son of Leib. We interpreted this to mean that Fayvil Zeida was a newly-identified son of Yehuda Leib Zeida (the Shpoler Zeida).
In light of the fact that Yuri Zeide’s Y-DNA results do not match the Shpoler Zeida’s genetic signature, we believe that Fayvil Zeida married the Shpoler Zeida’s granddaughter and adopted her surname. Fayvil’s first wife Ruchlya (b. 1793) could have been the daughter of any of the Shpoler Zeida’s four sons. We considered the following set of facts in choosing the most likely candidate to be her father:
The Shpoler Zeida’s eldest son, Borukh Gad, was born c. 1763, but he died in 1788, which eliminates him as Ruchlya’s father.
The Shpoler Zeida’s second eldest son, Abram, was born c. 1767. Abram had a son Yankel, who was born in 1792, just one year before Ruchlya.
The Shpoler Zeida’s third eldest son, Yankel, was born c. 1770. His wife, Perlya was born c. 1776. Their only son Borukh was born in 1802. We consider Perlya, who was only 17 years old in 1793, as unlikely to have been Ruchlya’s mother. In support of this inference is a rabbinical source which documents Yankel’s descendants, but make no mention of Ruchlya.[56]
The Shpoler Zeida’s youngest son, Peysach, was born c. 1775. He did not have any known sons, and his wife Gudya was born in 1791, just two years before Ruchlya.
Based upon the above set of facts, we believe that the Shpoler Zeida’s son Abram is the best candidate to be Ruchlya’s father. In support of this inference are name patterns – Ruchlya named her youngest son Avrum Zavel (b. 1808). It is very likely that he was named after her father Abram, who is known to have died young.[57]
The fact that these three descendants all have the Zeida surname, but descend from different patrilineal lineages, illustrates the difficulty that confronts many Ashkenazi Jews – their common ancestor often predates the era in which Jewish surnames came into use.
As surname use became mandatory for Jews in most of Europe during the late 1700s – early 1800s, the descendants of those common ancestors adopted a variety of surnames based upon the places they were from, their occupations, nicknames, spouses’ surnames, parents’ given names, the decisions of the kahal,[58] or the whims of the local authorities.[59], [60]
In this study, a son-in-law and a grandson-in-law of the Shpoler Zeida adopted their wives’ Zeida surnames. Male surname changes make tracing Jewish lineage even more difficult using traditional genealogical methods, and emphasizes the importance of Y-DNA and other genetic tests as an essential component of Jewish genealogy.
Recommendations for Future Study
The identification of the Shpoler Zeida’s Y-DNA genetic signature is a significant research finding with many implications for the field of genetic genealogy, particularly for individuals of Jewish descent. As is the case for most pioneering genetic genealogy studies, the Shpoler Zeida Y-DNA study raises many new research questions, and opens many new promising research avenues to exploration.
Based upon the closely matching Y-DNA results of three pedigreed paternal descendants of two different sons of the Shpoler Zeida, we have succeeded in identifying the haplotype and haplogroup that characterizes the Y-DNA signature of the Zeida paternal lineage, back to their most recent common ancestor, the Shpoler Zeida (1725–1811).
This Y-DNA genetic signature is based on the testing of 37 STR markers, which is sufficient for genetic matching purposes when testing descendants of known pedigree who share the same common ancestor. Due to different allele values at four specific STR marker locations among the three pedigreed descendants, however, there is some degree of uncertainty regarding which allele values represent ancestral values, and which represent mutations. These uncertainties can be reduced by testing additional descendants, and by testing at more STR markers, in order to determine modal allele values.
We tested for 107 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) downstream of R1a-Z93 in this study, which led to the identification of the R-Y2632 subclade. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques such as FTDNA’s Big Y test will be useful in further defining downstream subclades and in identifying the terminal SNP. Undoubtedly, as other descendants of the Shpoler Zeida’s lineage are identified, and additional STR markers and SNPs are tested, the Shpoler Zeida’s Y-DNA genetic signature will be further extended and refined.
We compared known, documented TMRCAs to predicted values using FTDNA’s time predictor (TiP®) model, and found that the model significantly overestimated the TMRCA. This finding was consistent with the results of our previous Y-DNA studies of rabbinical lineages. [61], [62], [63], [64] These Y-DNA studies provide useful validation data for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of current STR mutation rate-based models. Research studies which employ such validation data are needed to improve the accuracy and reliability of current STR mutation rate-based models.
The finding that the modal allele values reported at 37 STR markers for the pedigreed Zeida descendants in this study match those reported by for a small cluster of Ashkenazi non-Levite Jews that is not closely related to the larger Levite R1a group, and the associated hypothesis that such small clusters are often an indication that the most recent common ancestor arrived late in the Ashkenazi countries directly from the Middle East, is an interesting premise that bears further study.
In theory, age estimates of clusters based upon SNPs have the potential to be more accurate than those based upon STRs, but emerging phylogenetic-based methods which employ next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques are still evolving, and more fundamental genealogical research is needed. Y-DNA research studies, such as the recent study by Unkefer et al., that examine Jewish clusters as haplogroup subclades, can provide valuable clues to the ethnic and geographical origins of a lineage before the most recent common ancestor migrated to the Ashkenazi countries.[65]
As NGS tests become more widely available and used, and the full genome database grows, emerging phylogenetic methods may play a larger role in identifying new descendants of rabbinical lines and in defining the Y-DNA genetic signature. In addition to phylogenetic-based methods, recent advancements in STR methodologies may also make more accurate determinations of mutation rates, TMRCAs, migration patterns, and ethnic origins possible.[66], [67]
Summary and Conclusions
The Shpoler Zeida’s lineage dates back nearly three centuries. Extensive genealogical research of his family laid the necessary groundwork for identification of three son-after-son descendants of his lineage for this Y-DNA study. Based upon the matching Y-DNA results of these three pedigreed descendants, we have succeeded in identifying the haplotype and haplogroup that characterizes the Y-DNA signature of the lineage back to their most recent common ancestor, the Shpoler Zeida (1725–1811).
The close genetic match among the three pedigreed descendants of the Shpoler Zeida’s lineage; David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide, together with their well-documented paper trail, provides a high degree of confidence that their distinct allele pattern at 37 STR marker locations, in addition to the R-Y2632 SNP, which defines their haplogroup, accurately represents the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida.
One of the more gratifying aspects of this study involved identifying the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida, and then using that genetic signature to either confirm paternal descent from his lineage, or to bring to light possible mistakes in the paper trail.
The validation of the line of paternal descent for David Seide, Yisrael Seide, and Michael Zeide; the lineage corrections for Aaron Joseph, Miron, and Yuri Zeide, and the identification of Ruchlya Zeida as one of the Shpoler Zeida’s granddaughters, were all genealogical discoveries that were made possible through the comparison of their Y-DNA results to the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Shpoler Zeida.
These lineage validations and corrections provide a classic illustration of how traditional and genetic genealogical methods can work hand-in-hand to break through brick walls and solve genealogical problems that neither method is capable of resolving alone. As more and more Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews turn to genetic testing as a way of discovering their roots, it is becoming increasingly clear that characterizing the unique Y-DNA genetic signature of the historically significant rabbinical lineages with well-documented pedigrees, will play a critical role in the ultimate success of these endeavors.
As Y-DNA genetic signatures are identified for a growing number of rabbinical lineages, and the number of families represented in the DNA databases increases, the likelihood of finding a match to a well-documented lineage increases.[68]
Y-DNA research studies of the Bacharach,[69] Polonsky,[70] and Katzenellenbogen rabbinical lineages,[71] and the Savran-Bendery[72], [73] and Twersky Chassidic dynasties,[74] have demonstrated the intrinsic value of identifying and characterizing the Y-DNA signature of a rabbinic lineage in an effort to bridge the major gaps in the paper trail for both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
The Shpoler Zeida did, indeed, touch the world, and left his genetic fingerprint upon it. With the successful identification and characterization of that genetic fingerprint, we hope to enable many current and future generations of previously unknown descendants to connect themselves and their families to this illustrious tzaddik, and to discover their remarkable lost Jewish heritage.
Notes
[1] Yitzhak Alfassi: “Encyclopedia L’Chassidut,” Volume 2. Mosad HaRav Kuk, Jerusalem, Israel, 1986, p. 332. The Shpoler Zeida’s years of birth (1725) and death (1811) are cited in this rabbinical reference.
[3] Yehuda Yudl Rosenberg: “Tiferet Maharal mi-Shpoli.” Piotrokow, Poland, 1911 (reprinted in Israel in 1968).
[4] Mordecai L. Kalmanson, Editor: “The Shpoler Zeide: Biographical Sketches, Tales, and Musical Works of the Great Tzaddik, Reb Yehuda (Aryeh Leib) of Shpola.” The Shpoler Zeide Family Society, Brooklyn, NY, 1983.
[5] Wikipedia: “Tzaddik.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzadik. The title of tzaddik is generally given to personalities in Judaism who are considered saintly, such as a spiritual master or rebbe (Yiddish word for rabbi). The root of the word tzaddik means justice or righteousness.
[6] Levi Halevi Grossman: “Shem ve-She’arit.” Betzalel Printers, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1943, p. 101. “Tzaddikim of the generation related to him [the Shpoler Zeida] with honor.” The title of “tzaddik of the generation” refers to holy men who can perform miracles or act as a pipeline between man and God (see note #3 above).
[9] Levi Halevi Grossman, Editor, Shem ve-She’arit. Tel Aviv, Israel, Betzalel Printers, 1943, p. 101.
[10] Yehuda Yudl Rosenberg, 1911, Op cit. Rabbi Baruch’s surname is mentioned as Gerondi in several secondary sources, including Rosenberg’s book, and also in Menashe Miller’s Ish ha-Pele. However, there is no mention of this surname in any primary genealogical sources, so its validity cannot be independently confirmed.
[15] Following his death in 1811, the Shpoler Zeida’s descendants adopted the surname Zeida. There are many variants of the English spelling of the surname, including, Zaida, Zaide, Zadin, Zayda, Zayde, Zeida, Zeide, Zeyda, Zeyde, and the most common American variant, Seide.
[20] Jeffrey Mark Paull, standing by the tombstone of his great-grandfather, Nathan Polonsky, Mount Judah Cemetery, Queens, NY, January 23, 2011. The tombstone inscription reads:
Here is buried an honest man, descendant of the Saba
Kadisha (holy grandfather) from Shpola, and descendant
of Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz,
Menachem Nachum,
son of Aharon David, of blessed memory,
passed away on 5 Tishrei, 5690.
May his soul be bound up with the living.
[21] A short tandem repeat (STR) is a repeating nucleotide pattern that can be counted. In specific locations on the Y chromosome, men who are descended from a common male ancestor will usually have the same number of nucleotide repeats.
[23] Haplotype refers to an individual collection of specific short tandem repeat (STR) mutations within a given genetic segment. ISOGG defines the term “genetic signature” as: “another name for a haplotype” http://isogg.org/wiki/Genetics_Glossary. FTDNA defines it similarly https://www.familytreedna.com/learn/ y-dna-testing/. In our view, the haplogroup is also an essential part of the Y-DNA genetic signature of a paternal lineage, and STRs and SNPs both serve as defining components of the Y-DNA genetic signature.
[25] State Archive of Kiev Oblast: “1818 Census of Shpola.” Fond 280, Inventory 2, File 381, p. 532.
[26] State Archive of Kiev Oblast: “1834 Census of Shpola.” Fond 280, Inventory 2, File 572, p. 780-789; 804.
[27] State Archive of Kiev Oblast: “1858 Census of Shpola.” Fond 280, Inventory 2, File 1382, p. 151-152; 173-174; 185-189; 215-216.
[28] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “The Shpoler Zeida Family Tree.” The genealogical information presented in the descendant chart shown in Table 1 is derived from this tree, created by the authors, and contains over 2,500 of the Shpoler Zeida’s descendants, including source documentation for each descendent. For genealogical research requests, please contact the study authors: https://independent.academia.edu/JeffreyMarkPaull.
[29] State Archive of Kiev Oblast: “1858 Census of Shpola.” Fond 280, Inventory 2, File 572, p. 780.
[31] Wikipedia: “Haplogroup.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup. Haplogroups are branches of the human phylogenetic tree. A haplogroup is comprised of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor having the same single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation in all haplotypes. In human genetics, the haplogroups most commonly studied are Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) haplogroups and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups, both of which can be used to define genetic populations. The special feature that both Y chromosomes and mtDNA display is that mutations can accrue along a certain chromosome segment and the historical sequence of these mutations can be inferred.
[32] A Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP), is a mutation of a single nucleotide from the reference value at a specific location on the chromosome; a single-nucleotide substitution of one base for another. To be classified as a SNP, two or more versions of a sequence must each be present in at least one percent of the general population. SNP names are assigned by the individual, company, or organization that first identifies them.
[33] A clade or haplogroup refers to a set of people sharing a common ancestor. A subclade is a subdivision of a haplogroup. Within a subclade, the individuals are more closely related to each other, with a more recent common ancestor, than the larger haplogroup.
[38] Doron M Behar, Mark G Thomas, Karl Skorecki, Michael F Hammer, et al.: “Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries.” American Journal of Human Genetics, 73 (4): 768–79, 2003.
[39] I. Rozhanskii and A. Klyosov: “Haplogroup R1a, Its Subclades and Branches in Europe during the Last 9,000 Years.” Advances in Anthropology, Vol. 2, No. 3, 139-56 (2012).
[49] Jeffrey Mark Paull: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: A Case Study of the Polonsky Rabbinical Lineage.” 2013, Op cit. Using FTDNA’s time predictor model, the author found that the actual TMRCA fell between the 58.6 percent and 89.5 percent probability predictions.
[50] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: The Savran-Bendery Chassidic Dynasty.” Op cit. Using FTDNA’s time predictor model, the authors found that the actual TMRCA fell between the 53.8 percent and 93.3 percent probability predictions.
[52] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Identifying the Genetic Fingerprint of a Tzaddik that Touched the World: The Shpoler Zeida.” Op cit. Using FTDNA’s time predictor model, the authors found that the actual TMRCA fell between the 23.9 percent and 51.4 percent probability predictions.
[53] Rachel Unkefer: “Interpreting Y-DNA Markers: A Primer.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Spring 2014. Using McGee Utilities to calculate TMRCAs, the author reported: “In situations with known family trees, the number of generations back to the known MRCA tends to be smaller (more recent) than the 95 percent probability prediction in the vast majority of cases we have studied. The actual documented TMRCA usually falls between the 50 percent probability predictions and the 95 percent probability predictions.”
[54] Czar Alexander I: “Imperial Statute Concerning the Organization of Jews.” Article 32, December 9, 1804.
[58] The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe: “Kahal.” http://www.yivoinstitute.org/pdf/kahal.pdf. A kahal is an executive board chosen to run an autonomous Jewish community. A kahal served as a Jewish community council, or as a decision-making committee of a kehilah.
[59] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “The History, Adoption, and Regulation of Jewish Surnames in the Russian Empire – A Review.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Fall, 2014.
[61] Jeffrey Mark Paull: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: A Case Study of the Polonsky Rabbinical Lineage.” 2013, Op cit.
[62] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Connecting to the Great Rabbinic Families through Y-DNA: The Savran-Bendery Chassidic Dynasty.” 2015, Op cit.
[64] Jeffrey Mark Paull, Jeffrey Briskman, and Yitzchak Meyer Twersky: “The Y-DNA Genetic Signature of the Twersky Chassidic Dynasty.” 2016, Op cit.
[65] Rachel Unkefer, J.B. Royal, and Wim Penninx: “Y-DNA Evidence for an Ashkenazi Lineage’s Iberian Origin.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Volume XXXII, Number 1, Spring 2016.
[66] T Willems, M Gymrek, GD Poznik, C Tyler-Smith, and Y Erlich et al.: “Population-Scale Sequencing Data Enable Precise Estimates of Y-STR Mutation Rates.” American Journal of Human Genetics 98(5); 919-933, May 5, 2016.
[67] G David Poznik, Yali Xue, Fernando L Mendez, and Thomas F Willems et al.: “Punctuated Bursts in Human Male Demography Inferred from 1,244 Worldwide Y-chromosome Sequences.” Nature Genetics 48: 593-599, April 25, 2016.
[68] Rachel Unkefer: “From Kansas to the Rhine: A DNA Journey through Europe’s Rabbinic Capitals.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, Winter 2013.
[69] Rachel Unkefer, “From Kansas to the Rhine: A DNA Journey through Europe’s Rabbinic Capitals.” 2013, Op cit.
[72] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Y-DNA Genetic Signature of the Savran-Bendery Chassidic Dynasty.” 2015, Op cit.
[73] Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman: “Connecting to the Wertheim-Giterman Rabbinical Lineage through Y-DNA.” AVOTAYNU: The International Review of Jewish Genealogy, Volume XXX, Number 3, Fall 2014.
[74] Jeffrey Mark Paull, Jeffrey Briskman, and Yitzchak Meyer Twersky: “The Y-DNA Genetic Signature of the Twersky Chassidic Dynasty.” 2016, Op cit.
Biographical note: Both study authors, Jeffrey Mark Paull and Jeffrey Briskman, share a genetic connection to the Shpoler Zeida. Jeffrey Mark Paull is a direct descendant of the Shpoler Zeida. His 2nd-great-grandfather, Aharon David Polonsky, was married to Pesya Brayna Zeida, the 2nd-great-granddaughter of the Shpoler Zeida. Jeffrey Briskman shares a connection to the Shpoler Zeida through his daughter, Miriam Briskman, the granddaughter of Rivka Geisinski. Rivka was the 2nd-great granddaughter of Pesya Mirel Zeida, who was the 2nd-great-granddaughter of the Shpoler Zeida. Pesya Brayna Zeida and Pesya Mirel Zeida were first cousins, their common ancestor being the Shpoler Zeida’s grandson, Boruch Gad Zeida.
In February 1939, Rosa Katz Adler wrote to to Mrs. Herbert H. Lehman, wife of the New York Governor. She was desperate for assistance in bringing her young daughter Lotte to the United States. Rosa’s letter is one of hundreds addressed to the Lehman family from refugees seeking advice and aid as they attempted to flee Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Governor Lehman was well known for wielding his political power and personal resources to assist relatives and a few other individuals to leave Europe and settle in their new home.
Rosa had come to New York from Meiningen, Germany on a tourist visa on October 28, 1938, hoping to arrange affidavits so that her husband and daughter could follow her to the U.S. Her husband Lothar had obtained a visa to get to England, but he was unable to procure papers for their daughter. In the fall of 1938, probably on Kristallnacht, Lothar was sent to a concentration camp (or, according to a cousin, he may have been imprisoned locally), but he was released a few weeks later. Rosa was still desperate. Her husband might now have a possibility to flee, but her daughter did not.
Rosa wrote to Edith Lehman:
“Our daughter, Lotte, who is 2 ½ years old, does not have the possibility to leave Germany and I do not know what will happen to the child… Can you advise me or help me in any way to bring her to the United States? She is such a tiny child she surely cannot take a job away from anyone or do anyone any harm… If my child is forced to remain in Germany, I am sure that neither my husband nor I will ever see her again. She is our only child, and we naturally love her very dearly and the thought that any harm might come to her is unbearable for both of us.”
The files at Columbia University that contain Rosa’s desperate appeal give no clue as to whether the Lehmans were able to help Rosa Adler, nor do they hint at the the ultimate fate of this family. However, through online records and by locating and interviewing relatives, I was able to learn what happened to them.
Lothar and Lotte, arrived in New York together by ship in May 1941 – over two years after Rosa’s appeal to Mrs. Lehman. The passenger record shows that they were heading to Lothar’s wife, Rosa Adler. If working on her own, one can only imagine the extent of Rosa’s efforts to obtain their affidavits and passage. And who would have provided an affidavit for them?
Refugees needed to make it clear that they would not require government assistance, and surely Rosa was not in a financial position to provide this assurance to the government. Further investigation into the family’s history was necessary to answer this question.
Rosa’s passenger record from October 1938 provided more information about her family (see below). The U.S. resident to whom Rosa would go was Morris Kohn. So, who was he?
Although Rosa’s last contact in Europe was her husband in Meiningen, I knew that she had been born in Bad Wildungen, a town near Kassel with a small Jewish community (in 1933, a population of about 150).
I knew a bit about Bad Wildungen because in 2014, Johannes Groetecke, a local historian of the Jewish community there, had won an Obermayer German Jewish History Award for his research on the area’s former Jewish community. I wrote to him and inquired about Rosa, and given whom she would be meeting in America, I assumed that her maiden name might have been Kahn or Kohn. But the name did not mean anything to Groetecke.
What was her maiden name, then? This question was answered on a Social Security application I located for Lottie (Lotte) Susan Adler, married name Tannenbaum, from July 1952. She identified herself as the daughter of Rosa Katz and Lothar Adler. Morris Kahn/Kohn’s identity was still unclear. The answer was to come later.
The online booklet reveals that a David Katz was the father of four children, one of whom, Rosa, immigrated to America. David survived Theresienstadt and immigrated to Israel. However, his wife Sara died in Treblinka.
Rudolf and his family settled in Buffalo, New York, where, according to Ralph, one of the resettlement committees set them up in business upon their arrival. When he first arrived, Rudolf worked in a factory, and he later set up a shoe store, a business he was familiar with from Europe. Zita died in 1967 and Rudolf in 1978.
The fourth sibling, Flora, survived six years of forced labor camps and eventually moved to Buffalo, where she worked for Rudolf in his shoe store. Later she ran her own store in Buffalo. According to her nephew, Ralph Adler, she was a lovely person, kind and even tempered. However, her husband suffered greatly from his experiences in the camps.
And what became of Rosa and Lothar’s daughter Lotte Adler? According to Ralph, Lotte had a difficult life. She was married and divorced, and never had children. Lotte Adler Tannenbaum died in 1995.
As for the identity of Morris Kahn/Kohn, it turns out that his original name had been Katz, and he was Rosa’s uncle, a brother of her father, David Katz. Why did he change his name? Obviously it was not to sound less Jewish! According to Ralph, Morris (originally, Moritz) had left Germany to avoid military conscription around the time of the First World War, and he changed his name in order to avoid being identified by the German government.
Do we think that Rosa Adler might have been assisted by Governor Herbert H. Lehman or his wife Edith? It would seem unlikely because we could find no evidence that the Adlers were related and no further correspondence was to be found in the files, and neither Ralph Adler, nor his sister Renate Mooers, now living in California, was aware of any such connection. Further research will be undertaken to determineif there is additional correspondence with or about the family in other Lehman collections.
Letter from Columbia University, Herbert H. Lehman Collections, Box 1195, A C-17-127
For more information on the Lehman rescue activities see Karen S. Franklin, “Against the Odds: American Jews and the Rescue of Europe’s Refugees, 1933-1941. Researching the Mayer Lehman Charity Fund,” in Michael Berenbaum, ed., Remembering for the Future: Armenia, Auschwitz and Beyond(St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2016), 107-120.
The Avotaynu DNA Project seeks male participants for a study of Western Sephardi paternal DNA lineages. Eligible participants must be direct paternal line descendants of members of the historic Western Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, London, Livorno, Venice, Bordeaux, and Southwest France, and their New World offspring communities in Curacao, Suriname, and North America.
The project, led by pioneering genetic genealogist Dr. Karl Skorecki of the Technion, aims to shed light on the origins of the Western Sephardim and to establish a strong dataset of DNA results, grounded in archival research, in order to stimulate further intensive studies. At least 50 men will be tested. Participants must supply an accurate paternal genealogy with as much information as possible. DNA testing kits will be provided at no cost. Individual privacy will be protected and the results of the study will be published.
If you are interested in participating or know someone who might be eligible, please contact Project administrators Adam Brown and Michael Waas at WestSephDNA@gmail.com for further information.
Of all the grandparents I never got a chance to know, I feel closest to my mother’s father Lucian. Perhaps it was my mother’s vivid storytelling that made him seem accessible. I’ve inherited his talents and his temperament; so I was told. Sometimes I fantasize that I can time travel to Poland in the 1930s and meet my grandfather Lucian. How would I introduce myself to him? How would I communicate with him? He didn’t speak English, and I speak neither Polish, Russian, German, Italian—nor, for that matter, Latin. How would I make myself known to him? I’d have to bring photographs. Would he gasp in shock on first seeing me, the way a relative from overseas did, because I look so much like my grandmother Natalia?
As I write, Lucian’s image glows from a wall. Well into middle age my mother discovered the one extant photograph of her father. It was a group photograph, and Lucian is peering over a head from the third row in the back. My mother took the picture to a photographer, and Lucian’s face was enlarged and isolated. It now rests as a lamination on one of my walls, next to a profile of Natalia.
On my wall, my grandparents are reunited. Natalia is gazing at Lucian, and Lucian is looking straightforward, and ahead. A dark cap covers his bald head, his mouth is sensuous, and heavy lids hood his eyes. If I look from a certain angle, it appears as if Lucian is looking at me. What does he see? Lucian was demanding. Would my grandfather like me? Would he approve of me? What a gift it would have been for him to see his first grandchild born on his birthday. With the grandfather I never knew, I share a birthday. What else do we share? What else might we have shared?
Lucian Skotnicki, my grandfather, known informally as Lotek, was born on December 6, 1889 in Sochacew, a village on the outskirts of Warsaw, in what was then a rebellious area of Tsarist Russia. When he reached military age his father Moshe, a country doctor, injected him with the cholera bacterium in order to keep him from being conscripted into the Russian Army. As a side effect of the induced illness, Lucian lost his luxuriant black hair. It never grew back. He would be bald for life.
As a financially struggling student Lucian marketed himself as a tutor. He was consequently hired by a wealthy Warsaw family to help their youngest daughter with her homework. Sixteen-year-old Natalia fell in love with the sensuous-lipped and prematurely bald young man, an idealistic youth who was passionate about politics and social justice. They promised themselves to each other, and planned to marry. When Natalia’s mother got wind of the romance she ordered the tutor out of her house. Natalia was the youngest of three unmarried sisters, and seeing the youngest marry first would have shamed the older siblings. Also, this tutor was from the provinces, the son of a country doctor who accepted payment in the form of produce from his patients’ farms and fish from the local streams. This near-peasant was considered completely unsuitable for the sophisticated, city-bred Natalia.
Lucian retreated, and licked his wounds. At the outset of the First World War he somewhere found the funds to go what was then called “abroad,” for studies at the University of Zurich.
Life in Zurich during the First World War must have been an exhilarating experience for an intelligent and receptive young Pole. Neutral Switzerland served as a sanctuary, and its capital city became the centre of espionage, as well as a safe haven. The cafes and cabarets were teeming with artists, pacifists, philosophers, and revolutionaries engaged in heated debates. Did Lucian attend a Dadaist performance at the Café Voltaire? Did he cross paths with Lenin before the Bolshevik set off to lead his country in revolution? What is known is that, while abroad, Lucian discovered Italy and fell in love with all things Italian. This youthful affinity would have far-reaching effects.
Whatever his experiences, Lucian returned, post-war, to the newly formed republic of Poland, still a firebrand, but now a more cosmopolitan one, remaining both for the rest of his tragically short life. Setting up practice in Sochacew, the newly minted attorney remained stubbornly single, though not celibate. He entered into an affair with a local beauty who was married and the mother of a young daughter. This scandalous liaison was an open secret that became the talk of the small town.
In the mid-1920s Lucian’s first love Natalia was suddenly widowed, and in an unknown fashion he found her again. Destiny had been delayed, but it could not be denied. The Universe was offering them a second chance, and they seized it. The second time around, no overbearing mother could stop them. At the end of 1927, Lucian and Natalia were finally married. Before the end of 1928 Natalia would give birth to my mother, the only child they had together, a girl Lucian named Renata, the Italian version of “reborn.” The name proved a fortunate one. During the course of her long life Renata would have to reinvent and renew herself many, many times.
It seems as if Lucian and Natalia were brought together only long enough to produce my mother. Family interference soon tore them apart, and they were separated in 1935. I have made it my mission to ensure that my mother will be their lasting legacy to the world.
An exhausting legal battle followed in the wake of their separation. Lucian agreed to a divorce on condition that he was given sole custody of Renata. He reasoned that it was only fair, since Natalia had two other children of her own by her first marriage to her cousin Lipa Młynek. Natalia refused and argued that, as the mother, she had the right to sole custody of her child.
The presiding judge placed the decision in the hands of seven-year-old Renata. Without hesitation, she chose to go with her father.
Because of her half-sister’s hostility to Lucian and, by extension, to her, Renata felt like an outsider in her mother’s home. Natalia was torn between her child with Lucian and her two fatherless children. With Lucian, Renata knew she would come first. The judge then granted the couple joint custody, and a legal separation. Lucian and Natalia never divorced. Each year, for the few years left to them, Lucian and Natalia would reunite on Renata’s birthday. Tentatively they would reach out to each other, and shyly touch hands. Renata embraced her birthdays for no other reason than it gave her one day out of the year when she could have her parents back together again.
Natalia remained in Warsaw. Lucian returned to Sochacew, and to his mistress. In the late 1930s Lucian’s mistress gave birth to a second daughter who, it was rumoured, was not her husband’s child, but Lucian’s. Debate over the girl’s paternity is pointless. This child’s life would end in Treblinka.
Lucian seemed to recognize that Renata would be his legacy. He treated his only legitimate child as apprentice, successor and heir. In order to accelerate Renata’s academic progress he had her home-schooled. By the time he decided to register her in the local school, Renata was ready for the second grade.
Lucian supervised Renata’s reading and her academic studies, bringing in a tutor when she demonstrated a weakness in math. He demanded her best, and he got it. By the time Renata was ten years old, she was ready for high school.
Like her counterparts in North America, Renata was mesmerized by the magic of talking motion pictures. Conveniently, her best friend’s father owned the local kino. Renata and her friend spent many enchanted hours in the darkened hall, sighing with Greta Garbo, swooning over Robert Taylor, and lustily singing along with Disney’s seven dwarfs as they heigh-hoed off to work. Consequently Lucian enrolled the budding film buff in the international Shirley Temple fan club. He opened a charge account for her at the town’s ice cream parlour. He also sent in a photograph of Renata to the local newspaper, which was running a children’s beauty contest. Renata came in first runner-up. Officially, at the age of four, Renata was pronounced the second-most beautiful little girl in Sochacew. Proudly Lucian displayed the newspaper announcement and photograph on his desk. How I wish that photograph had survived, and I could have it now.
Renata read Dawid Kuperfeld in Polish translation, which introduced her to Charles Dickens; decades later, she would introduce me to the original, in English. She read Anne of Green Gables, which introduced her to the country that would become her adopted home. Most particularly Renata read Uncle Tom’s Cabin: how she cried at the plight of Stowe’s black slaves. The lawyer’s daughter had inherited her father’s sense of social justice. This privileged girl could never imagine that, within a few years, she would be enslaved, too.
Impatient, defiant and fearless, Lucian was as much ahead of his time as a hands-on parent as he was as an advocate. He built the town library. He created a drama circle and performed flamboyantly in its amateur theatricals.
It was understood, and accepted, that Renata would inherit her father’s law practice. She sat beside him in the town courtroom as he pleaded for the marginalized and fought for the underdog. He poured into her his love of great literature, his passion for social justice, and his blazing contempt for prejudice, ignorance, and narrow-minded fools.
Lucian was a maverick. Flaunting his disdain for organized religion, he would saunter in front of the rabbi’s home on Yom Kippur, blatantly puffing on cigarettes. He revered Mahatma Gandhi and wept at the death of Marshal Pilsudski. He also quoted Oscar Wilde. Lucian gave soaring orations denouncing the fascist government that followed in the later 1930s, a government that took it cues from the neighbouring Third Reich. He vociferously decried the renewed harassment of Jews. When warned to tone down the defender declared, “I am not running in a popularity contest!”
Lucian was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and stuck in a small town. He alienated both the Catholic and the Jewish communities, and almost willfully courted disaster. He made life harder on himself than it needed to be, but his painfully honest nature wouldn’t allow him to live any other way. Who can judge whether isolation or conformity is harder? Lucian refused to shift with prevailing winds. I have discovered that I can be no less than the same way.
In 1937, the enemies Lucian had made found a way of having him disbarred. He hired a young lawyer to front for him in the courtroom, while continuing to work on cases behind the scenes. At the same time he went to work as an agent for an Italian insurance company. Along with a copy of Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 Days, Lucian bought a policy for Renata, telling her, “When you’re 21, this policy will pay off and you’ll have money to travel the world.” The Italian insurance company refused to honour the policy when Renata filed a claim belatedly in 1954. She was again refused when she tried once more in 2004, yet before she was wenty-one Renata would travel in ways Lucian could never have dreamed.
In April of 1939, Lucian was in the middle of one of his regular card games with the town mayor and his cronies, and he was winning. In recent years the mayor had joined the ruling fascist party. He instructed Lucian to donate his winnings to the party. Lucian refused. The mayor accused him of a dangerous lack of patriotism. Lucian retorted, “I’m a better patriot than you, you son-of-a-bitch mayor!” The mayor’s response was to have Lucian arrested on charges of insulting the majesty of the government. A trial was held on the afternoon of April 27. Lucian was found guilty and sentenced to internment at Bereza Kartuska, a concentration camp already established. The Polish fascist party was anticipating what was to come.
In the evening, in his apartment, while ten-year-old Renata slept in an adjoining room, she later surmised that her father, who suffered from angina, felt the first stirrings of a heart attack. Perhaps he gasped and reached for the drawer that held his medication, but it was already too late. In old age, confronting her own end, Renata began to question the circumstances surrounding her father’s death. Through her work with a Jewish genealogy group, she discovered documents in her father’s handwriting. He had built and owned the triplex they lived in, most likely with Natalia’s money. He moved in his parents and his divorced sister.
When Natalia was driven out by Lucian’s mother Lucian’s married mistress, with her husband and her children, moved in upstairs. There was a janitor who lived on the premises. In an atmosphere when and where anti-Semitism was exploited and rewarded, the janitor’s disrespect and insubordination led Lucian to fire him. When the janitor refused to accept his dismissal, Lucian had to resort to legal measures in order to have him evicted. The janitor’s offenses must’ve been egregious, because a Polish judge ruled in Lucian’s favor.
The eviction was scheduled for April 28. Renata remembered being wakened by the sound of “a commotion.” Can a man dying and alone cause a commotion? Unless her memory was playing tricks on her, she began to believe she heard the scuffle of feet. By the time she reached her father’s room, he was dead. She fled out the door, into the corridor, and screamed for help. Her cries were answered by her aunt Salka and her father’s mistress Ina, who came running down the stairs from the upper floor. Renata then telephoned her mother in Warsaw. Lucian was one of the privileged few in town who owned a phone.
Aunt Salka and Ina stayed up with the distraught child all through a terror-ridden night. Lucian’s body was wrapped in a white sheet and laid on the floor. A candle was lit. Jewish male neighbours sat vigil and took turns keening and wailing over the dead body until dawn. Come morning, Lucian’s corpse was lifted into a plain narrow box and driven, by horse and buggy, to the Jewish cemetery. During the war this cemetery would be destroyed, and in Communist Poland it would be paved over by a parking lot. Later it was remade as a children’s playground.
Renata returned to Warsaw with her mother and her brother but briefly. She was unhappy in her mother’s home and, setting a template, rescued herself through resourcefulness and wit. She insisted on completing the school year in her father’s hometown. Her education must not be interrupted. Already the girl was honouring her father’s memory.
From the time of Lucian’s death until the end of June Renata lived in the apartment she had shared with him, seeing no one, speaking to no one. Her meals were prepared by the housekeeper, who stayed on to look after her. Her aunt kept an eye on her from next door, and her father’s mistress looked down on her from upstairs. Renata grew thin and wasted, but her grades did not suffer. If anything, they were even better than before. Each afternoon after school she headed to the Jewish cemetery, spread her textbooks and notebooks and pens and pencils on the grass, and spent the rest of the day doing her homework at the site of Lucian’s grave.
After my father’s sudden death over 30 years ago, I clung to my remaining parent. All I wanted was to keep my mother with me into my own old age, so that I wouldn’t have to live on for too long without her.
If not for a doctor’s negligence in repeatedly dismissing the symptoms of a slow-growing cancer, I most likely would have. Where does one park such pain? I do my work, part of which is preserving and safeguarding my mother’s legacy as a Holocaust educator. After this easy-to-catch cancer killed my mother I was startled to discover, in her bookcase, a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s seminal novel of the American South seemed out of place sitting in a personal library dominated by Holocaust literature. Then I thought again. A small town lawyer defies the mores of his time and place by defending a black man falsely accused of rape. The events are seen through the eyes of his fictional ten-year-old daughter, who grows up to become a writer who immortalizes her parent in an autobiographical novel.
In Lee’s novel, the hero Atticus Finch explains to his young daughter Scout that the expression “to kill a mockingbird” means to “hurt someone who has done no wrong.” Scout thereafter learns to live with the existence of evil without succumbing to despair. My personal journey into family history has taught me much about my grandfather Lucian, who made it his life’s mission to combat evil, and my mother Renata who, through her own courage, as well as the heroism of her older siblings, and devoted allies, managed to survive it. Both father and daughter were able to adjust to a world in which evil thrived. In the world in which we live, where justice and heartbreaking injustice seem to co-exist, can we?
The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem is attempting the first-ever demographic and genealogical study of a national Jewry as a whole, from its inception to the present day. This article describes the project, its aims, methodology and preliminary results. We use specially developed data retrieval methods that enable the access of available online sources, and we demonstrate that the extensive datasets we have generated are amenable to multidisciplinary analysis and interpretation. Utilising detailed information from the Scottish Census in 1841 till the 1911 Census (the most recent available under access regulations) and vital records from the middle of the nineteenth century to date, plus newly digitised Scottish newspaper and court records, a new and clearer picture of Scottish Jewry emerges. In presenting demographic and historical results already available from the study, we challenge some conventional perceptions of Scottish Jewry and its evolution.
By way of illustration, the article presents some of the preliminary demographic and historical results of the study, which challenge conventional wisdom. Among other things, the study reveals the migrant and transitory nature of the Jewish population in the nineteenth century and documents its stabilisation and eventual decrease in the twentieth century, on the basis of birth, marriage and death rates; and its dispersal throughout the country, beyond the major concentrations in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Hopefully, this study will serve as a model for other genealogical research into defined groups, religious or otherwise, at the national level.
The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem is sponsoring a major project “200 Years of Scottish Jewry – a Demographic and Genealogical Profile.”36 The study’s aim is to research a definable ethno-religious group at the national level – in this case, the entire Jewish community in Scotland, from its emergence as a formal entity in 1816/17, with the founding of a synagogue in Edinburgh, to the present day. As far we know, no similar genealogical analyses of any other national Jewries exist and thus we hope that the project will encourage further studies of Jewish communities of similar size and age. It also may stimulate genealogical studies of other ethnic, religious, or other groups at the national level.
The study endeavours to examine, systematically and for the first time, various aspects of Scottish Jewry as an immigrant group. These include the following:
Identifying Scotland’s Jews and locating their provenance, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe.
Ascertaining their numbers over time by analysing birth, marriage and death records.
Mapping the dispersal patterns of the Jewish immigrants throughout Scotland and the emergence of organised communities in 7 smaller towns and cities. This aspect includes residential shifts within Glasgow and, to a lesser extent, Edinburgh, reflecting progressive socio-economic changes in the two major concentrations of Scottish Jewry.
Producing occupational analyses and identifying various communal, religious, business, cultural élites, as they emerge.
Generating a “Family Tree of Scottish Jewry.” The published data will permit users to trace family relationships with Scottish Jews and in many cases with relatives who came from abroad. The creation of such a national Jewish family tree will be totally innovative.
The study also took note of a considerable body of Jews passing through Scotland on their way to the United States and other destinations. These Jews, whom we describe as transmigrants, were far more numerous than those settling in Scotland. The processes of their travel to the country and onward passage that we have revealed have also added to our understanding of Scotland’s Jews.
There are very specific reasons for our decision to select the Jewish community of Scotland for this genealogical experiment. Scottish Jewry is easy to demarcate and define. Its age, just 200 years old, and size, totaling around 70,000 individuals over these two centuries, make the project feasible. By way of contrast, it would have been impossible to attempt a similar project for the much larger and older Jewish community of England since its numbers, over four and a half centuries, run into millions. The primary records and sources for the project are readily available and the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre in Glasgow (SJAC) houses extensive collections of documents and other materials essential to this study.
More critical from the perspective of a modern genealogical study, almost all the vital records (births, marriages, and deaths) are accessible online for the period under review. In addition, the first national censuses of Scotland in a modern form date, every ten years (or decile), from 1841 on – that is, just 25 years after the inception of the Jewish community in Scotland. The censuses from 1841 to 1911 are now in the public domain and accessible online. The numbers of Jews in Scotland from 1816 to 1841 were small, running from a few score at the beginning (many of whom are known by name) to 323 enumerated in the 1841 census. As we shall show, one can identify the Jews in Scotland from 1841 and 1911 with some confidence. A greater problem exists with identifying Jews in the century after 1911. Fortunately, there are other reliable sources at hand to fill the larger part of the missing data. This allows a reliable reconstruction of evolution of the community over the last hundred years with only small and acceptable margins of error, again enabling new understandings of the evolution of Scottish Jewry.
Data Retrieval – Methodology
1.The Project and its IT Challenges
Before the launching of the present study, the present co-author and project PI (principal investigator) had conducted a preliminary investigation37 with the aim of locating and extracting every Jew in the Scottish Census Schedules and Statutory Civil Records from 1841 to 1901, i.e. all the Jews in Scotland in the 19th century, except for 300 to 400 in the decades prior to 1841. This was a huge task, and there are questions at the academic level about the feasibility of the exercise. After all, the Scottish Censuses and Civil Records do not mention religion. Some marriage records noted the religious rites or form of the ceremony and some early death certificates indicate the burial ground or cemetery section, but the online indexes did not include such details and so searches by religion per se were not possible.
The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) in Jerusalem approached the subject from a somewhat different perspective, seeking to elaborate a demographic and genealogical profile of Scottish Jewry since its inception in 1816/17. With the full cooperation of the present author and PI, IIJG decided to adopt the preliminary work and extend it to cover the 20th century, taking advantage of the recently released 1911 Scottish Census and also Statutory Civil Records, which are accessible online up to the present day. This task was fraught with inherent difficulties and methodological challenges, since beyond 1911 there were no “snapshot” lists of the Jewish population in Scotland at hand to use for reference or as starting points. Moreover, much of the study would hinge on tracing Jewish families identified and pursuing Jewish surnames after 1911 when, to complicate matters, many Jewish families begin to anglicise their names and, in so doing, take on surnames commonly used by non-Jews.
2. Censuses and the Search Process
The PI tested various techniques and methods in the preliminary study before settling on the methods employed to extract data from the Scottish Censuses from 1841 on. He designed special tools for searching the Ancestry38 and the ScotlandsPeople 39 (SP) websites that were essential to the study.
Initially, he selected the 1901 Census as a target for analysis, primarily to identify as many Jews as possible living in Scotland at that time. His reasons for this were several:
When conducting the preliminary feasibility study, the 1901 census was the latest available.
The 1901 census was accessible through 2 (two) somewhat different data sources– Ancestry and SP. During the data extraction process a third source became available on the FindMyPast40 (FMP) website.
Ancestry was chosen as the primary site to use. The company could not display the census images due to licensing issues, but they had enriched their online database by extracting/indexing every field from the census returns. Its database also allowed the listing of all members of a located individual’s household.
Economic and convenience considerations also favoured the Ancestry website. Searches and extractions from it could be done online at any time for a reasonable fee, whereas SP was costly and/or inconvenient.
The mass immigration of Jews from mainland Europe into Scotland took off the 1880s and 1890s. It was therefore expected that almost every Jewish household in 1901 would have at least one family member who had been born in mainland Europe and thus be could be identified by name or in another way, such as place of birth.
Hence, the initial step was to search the 1901 Census on Ancestry for individuals born in various Central and East European countries, plus Palestine. The project used ‘Wildcards’ and other advanced techniques to catch multiple spelling variants of Jewish names. Then, it trawled every separate field of data in the Ancestry 1901 Census database. Next, it compiled the search results into files on Excel spreadsheets. Finally, it merged the files and removed duplicate records. Thereafter, the PI processed all positively identified records a second time and extracted every associated household member. Again the PI removed all duplicate records.
The interim result from these first stages of this process resulted in a consolidated file of around 37,000 records. The PI manually reviewed these records on the basis of given names. Where necessary, he examined other available primary records for identified families, flagging those that were definitely Jewish or possibly Jewish. Of individuals listed as coming from Russia and Poland, the vast majority were clearly Jewish. A negligible number were Russian/Lithuanian miners immigrated in the 19th century to work in coal mines in Lanarkshire, but as they tended to use distinctively non-Jewish given-names and since mining was not a typically ‘Jewish occupation’, they could confidently be rejected. Individuals from Germany were more difficult to classify, as their surnames and given names reflected the greater assimilation of German Jews into the general population at home. Many of these German families entered the final lists on the assumption that they may have had some Jewish ancestry.41
The end result of the process was a file extracted from the 1901 Census, containing around 9,000 individuals, residing in around 1700 households, who were almost certainly Jewish. This multi-step exercise then was repeated methodically for all decennial censuses from 1841 to 1891.
The PI went on to compare the refined 1901 Census file with data provided by the SJAC 42 for Glasgow and Edinburgh derived from earlier, independent research. The list generated from Ancestry had missed a few families, in which every member was born in the UK. These families were in the SJAC data-files. Extractions from the 1901 Census only overlooked some 100 individuals, while it identified around 2,700 more individuals than in the SJAC records.43
Of the 9,000 Jews in Scotland in 1901, approximately 3,000 claimed to be born in the country. The search for these individuals came in the wake of the investigation of births data (below).
The 1911 census became available during the course of the present study and at present (March 2016) is only available on the SP website. It was therefore not possible to use the same techniques as used for the previous censuses on the Ancestry site. Instead, the PI searched comprehensively for every surname in the lists compiled, as well as all combinations of given- name and surname, except for common and shared surnames. This search method proved highly effective on the 1911 census.
The numbers of Jews we have compiled agree reasonably well with those quoted in the Jewish Year Book. We also searched for people mentioned in various books published about Scottish Jewry. In particular, we used Abraham Levy’s The Origins of Scottish Jewry (Glasgow, 1958) and Abel Phillips’ to help identify the earliest, pre-registration period, congregations. In all probability, we have overlooked some genuine Jews, while we have almost certainly included a few non-Jews in our lists.
Overall, however, we believe our numbers are close to the actual numbers (see Assessment below).
3. Births and the List of Surnames
The individuals who claimed in the Censuses 1841 to 1911 to be born in Scotland bore around 700 unique surnames. To this list was added all unique surnames that appeared in the SJAC Scottish Jews database. An automated search was then done on the SP website for births from 1855-2014 for all of these unique surnames to test how common those surnames were in the Statutory Birth Records. The PI reviewed the results and manually divided them into two categories – rare and common surnames. Many of the Jewish families had typically Jewish surnames that we do not find among non-Jews in Scotland or only very rarely (Mandel, for example). Others had surnames that were ‘common’ surnames and not predominantly used by Jews. These searches produced a huge number of birth matches. A few examples of Jewish families using ‘common’ surnames were Alexander (29,000 hits), Baker (4,000 hits), Banks (6,000 hits), and Brown (172,000 hits).
The PI developed scripts to search for relevant Scottish Birth Certificates on the SP website. These scripts automatically extracted pages of index results to Excel spreadsheets with the fields for Year, Surname, Forename, Sex, District, City, County, MR, and Record Reference pre-populated.
The following logic was used to determine scripted searches conducted on the SP website:
If an exact spelling match was found for a given Jewish surname and it was not a common surname, then all records for that surname were searched for and extracted
If an exact spelling match was found and it was a common surname, then only that precise “surname + given-name” combinations from the Censuses were looked for and extracted. As a result, some family members in common surnames cases may have been missed – e.g., children who died young or were otherwise missing from the census.
If an exact spelling match was not located but a ‘fuzzy match’ (see below) was found then only the precise “surname + given-name” combination from the Censuses were searched for and extracted. Again, there is a possibility that a few family members may have been overlooked when bearing the same fuzzy-spelling surname.
If no match, exact or fuzzy, was found, then certain manual searches were done for badly transcribed names.
Birth Registrations were searched for using a plus or minus 5-year range around the birth year suggested by the census returns.
Soundex and metaphone searches were not conducted since, for practical purposes, these tools are only appropriate for English names and pronunciation, and not for European Jewish names.
The SP website also accessed “fuzzy matches,” a distance technique developed by Vladimir Levenshtein,44 a Russian Jew. This technique, which forms the basis of most spell-checking systems, compares the similarity of two names and is very successful at finding matches between names corrupted by poor handwriting/transcription or misheard foreign-sounding names in both the Census data and Birth Registrations. Table 1 provides some examples of fuzzy matching at work, where the same parents’ names, occupations and often addresses are found in both the census and birth records and it is almost certain the individuals listed are the same people. We have accepted those cases where the match seems perfect.
Table 1. Matches using Levenshtein Distance
The PI manually processed Births Results File to flag all records that were definitely or possibly Jewish. There were approximately 23,000 records in this file. These included Jewish births up to 1901 that did not appear in a census. Reasons for the omissions might have been that these people may have died or left Scotland before their first census date; the census takers missed them; they had assumed a married surname before the census(es); or, finally, they were in fact included in the census(es) but were indexed under mangled and ultimately unrecognizable names.
If, while viewing a record image, the PI noted that another birth on the page was for a Jewish individual and that person did not appear in the Births List, then he added the individual manually to the list. If a birth record contained information that was unclear due to a poor quality image, a damaged record, bad handwriting etc., then the PI looked for and viewed corresponding parents’ marriage record, if held in Scotland, to try to identify the correct information. The full marriage information was extracted into a separate Marriages List.
In total, the PI and a team of extractors examinied about 28,000 birth certificates, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Over 3,500 of the Jewish people listed on these birth certificates were found in the censuses to 1901 – others died young or, in far greater numbers, left Scotland for elsewhere.
4. Marriages
he list of Unique Surnames compiled in 2 and 3 above was processed yet again by another script through the SP website, searching for all matching marriages (both bride and groom) in the 1855 to 2014 period. The search results indexes were extracted to a Marriages File for further manual processing. In all, the PI and the team of extractors examined and extracted index results for 13,000 marriages.
The Scottish Birth Registrations referred to many couples, who were wed outside Scotland. Where their marriages took place in England and Wales, most references to their marriage records were found by searching the Ancestry and FindMyPast England and Wales marriage indexes. This exercise also proved useful in determining precise spellings of the names of the groom and bride.
Additionally, the PI searched references to couples married in ‘Poland’ (or towns in southern Lithuania that were once in the Suwalki Gubernia of Poland) in the Jewish Records Indexing – Poland (JRI-PL) databases.45 He only verified a few such matches in this resource. Marriages conducted in other places abroad (especially the former Russian Empire, where most foreign-born Scottish Jews came from) could not be cross-checked. 5. Deaths
he list of Unique Surnames compiled in 2 and 3 above was then processed by still another script through the SP website, searching for all matching deaths in the 1855 to 2014 period. The search results indexes were extracted to a Deaths File for further manual processing. All told, the PI and the team of extractors retrieved index results to almost 20,000 deaths and then re- processed them for positive identification.
6. Other Sources utilized to identify Jews in Scotland
Besides the Scottish Censuses and Statutory Birth, Death and Marriage Records, other sources were available to identify people not listed or not (yet) located on those official records. These included:
England and Wales Censuses 1841-1911 – searching for Jewish families where at least one member was born in Scotland.
Irish Censuses for 1901 and 1911 – searching for Jewish families where at least one family member was born in Scotland. (Religion was included in the Irish Census).46
The Jewish Echo weekly newspaper in Glasgow, (1928-1991) – extraction of all “Personal Announcements” into a separate file, for comparison with the data compiled thus far. The announcements extracted for further searches relate to Births, Bar mitzvahs and Bat mitzvahs (for searches into birth registrations 13 or 12 years earlier), Engagements, Marriages and Wedding Anniversaries and Deaths. Since some events announced in the Jewish Echo took place outside of Scotland, not all events were to be found in the Statutory Registrations.
SJAC: Glasgow and other Hebrew Burial Society47 records – examination of almost complete lists of Scottish Jewish burials, for comparison with the Deaths List previously compiled.
SJAC: British naturalizations _ examination of almost complete list of Scottish Jews who became Naturalized British subjects, for corroboration and expansion by searching the online “Discovery” catalogue of the British National Archives48, as well as a parallel database available on Ancestry.
7. Assessment
The methodology described above has proved effective in the goal of generating a comprehensive database of Scottish Jews since the community’s emergence early in the 19th century. As regards the 19th century, the list of Jews can be regarded as almost complete, within a reasonable margin of omission. As regards the 20th century, the listings are less complete, mainly because of the absence of accessible Census returns. This deficiency was made up in large part by the availability of statutory Birth, Marriage and Death Registrations, coupled with data extracted from other sources. In brief, a ramified and reliable database, unique of its kind, has been generated, which can serve as a solid basis for multi-disciplinary analysis and interpretation, whether genealogical, demographic, statistical, historical or sociological.
Creating an Historical Narrative: What the Data Tells Us Earliest Jews and the Beginnings of Community
The story of Jewish medical students, mainly from England, but also from the United States of America and the West Indies, who were studying and graduating at the University of Edinburgh from 1779, has been known for some time.49 They were attracted mainly by the absence of the religious tests, which prevented their entry to Oxford and Cambridge. However, it is the online searches of Scottish Court Cases which have revealed the presence of a previously unknown group of Jewish artisans residing in Edinburgh during the 1780s. One of their number was dispatched to London for training as a shochet (ritual slaughterer) to provide kosher chickens for the fledgling community. Digitized press publications have enabled the identification of the date for the formation of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation and its first synagogue, the first official Jewish body in Scotland. This study has determined the year of establishment as 1817, rather than 1816 as previously held.50 Similarly, we have determined the date for the first account of the Glasgow Hebrew Congregation to be 1821, at the time of a visit to the city by Sir Moses Montefiore, rather than a couple of years later, as generally accepted previously.51
Figure 1. Synagogue Building in Richmond Court, Edinburgh, purchased 1825.
Immigration and Population Growth
The Jewish community in Scotland expanded steadily, and at times rapidly, throughout the 19th century, mainly due at first to immigration from Germany or Holland. In the last quarter of the century, the bulk of immigration came from Central and Eastern Europe. Table 2 illustrates a rapid rate of community growth coupled with a low level of ‘persistence” (continued residence in Scotland), indicative of the high percentage of Jews moving on, often to England but more usually across the Atlantic.
Table 2: Jewish Community Growth during the 19th Century
Note: *Persistence indicates the numbers from the previous Census still present at the next one.
As shipping records indicate a drop in travelers reaching or passing through Scotland after 1911 we have been able to show, using figures for births and deaths, that subsequent population growth was largely a function of natural increase rather than inward migration, apart for the arrival of around a thousand refugees from Central Europe during the 1930s.52 By the beginning of the 20th century the Jewish population in Scotland became more settled and more stable. The study has confirmed a relatively young Jewish population with a comparatively high birth rate and low death rate. This ensured that natural growth would more than compensate for an almost complete halt in immigration with the outbreak of World War I. In the absence of Census returns, it is not possible to achieve absolute numbers for the Jewish population of Scotland for the century between 1911 and 2011. However, with the aid of Statutory Birth, Marriage and Death records and extensive data drawn from other sources mentioned in the Methodology section above, its parameters can be clearly delineated and its order of magnitude can be ascertained. Within that broad framework, we can observe certain trends:
(1) The number of Jews in Scotland peaked in the 1930’s at about 20,000, a level that was maintained till around 1960.
(2) The inflow of Jewish refugees from Central Europe during the 1930s and 1940’s, including the Kindertransport children admitted to Britain following Kristallnacht in November 1938, was balanced by migration to England and the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
(3) The Jewish population began to diminish in the 1960s. The number of births was decreasing, deaths increasing and an increasingly well-educated population was moving south or emigrating. This decrease has continued in recent decades, reflecting a rapidly aging population, ongoing emigration and assimilation.
(4) We have precise figures for self-declaring Jews in the Scottish Censuses of 2001 and 2011. Besides the numbers of Jews who identified themselves as Jewish – 6,448 in 2001 and 5,887 ten years later – we can consider, based on Census research elsewhere that possibly as many as a third more can be added to these numbers.53
Dispersal of Jews and Emergence of Smaller Communities
The methodology employed in this study enabled us to track the dispersal of Jews throughout Scotland and indeed to follow certain families and their movements over several generations. At the turn of the twentieth century there were small groups of Jews in the towns of Falkirk, Dunfermline, Greenock and Inverness.54 This study has indicated that communities were established in these towns, sometimes with as few as thirty Jews, or about a dozen families. They would often employ a minister, a religious functionary not always possessing semicha (rabbinical ordination), who would act also as shochet and cheder (religious school) teacher to educate the community’s young. They opened small synagogues, frequently no more than a room in the minister’s flat. Jewish communities were often slow to declare the formal, and necessarily public, establishment of a ‘Hebrew Congregation’, the title taken by all official Jewish communities throughout Scotland. Thus, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee, and in the other small communities, synagogues were regularly in existence for a number of years before public exposure, often due to concerns over possible expressions of prejudice in the wider population. In Aberdeen, for example, there were already sufficient Jews in 1871 to found a community but the actual formation of the Aberdeen Hebrew Congregation dates only from 1893.55
Most of these regional communities experienced major numerical decline in the period after the Second World War. Table 3 shows that of the seven smaller communities, only those in Aberdeen and Dundee, still exist today.
Table 3
Provincial Jewish Communities in Scotland
Note: A community’s demise is often hard to determine. The asterisk (*) in the Present Status column indicates when all community activity clearly ended<
Jewish Population Shifts within Glasgow
The accurate identification of Jews in Glasgow on a city-wide basis has enabled us to chart the movement of Jews out of the initial areas of settlement, as the community expanded and more prosperous elements emerged. The first Jews in the early 19th century were concentrated north of the River Clyde around the city centre, in the Blackfriars area. Gradually, a movement westwards occurred to larger houses and away from the tenement buildings in the centre of Glasgow. Later arrivals, from the 1880s, tended to settle south of the river, in the Gorbals area. Figure 2 illustrates the pattern of settlement of the core of the 6,900 Jews in Glasgow identified in the 1901 Census. Of interest is the substantial Jewish element just to the north of the river, who felt a greater cultural affinity with the new institutions and synagogues being formed, often on an East European model, in the Gorbals, rather than with the “cathedral” synagogue of the established community at Garnethill in the north-west of the city.
Figure 2. This map, derived from the 1901 Census, indicates where Glasgow Jews resided by Census Enumeration Districts. The highest concentrations are coloured black and the next level in red. The smallest concentrations are coloured yellow and green with intermediate areas in blue.
Births, Marriages and Deaths
As Statutory Birth Registration only began in Scotland in 1855, we cannot regard the earliest data as completely reliable, since some births were not recorded properly or even not registered at all. Nevertheless, it can be seen from Figure 3 that, in the decades between 1841 and 1881, around 40% of the community were born in Scotland.
Figure 3.
The remarkable growth in the number of Jewish births that occurred throughout the latter half of the 19th century can be observed in Figure 3. While only 106 Jewish births were identified for the 1850s, the number grew to 583 during the 1870s on the eve of the great migration of Russian Jews that began in the 1880s. Twenty years later, during the 1890s, 2,785 births were recorded. The number reached a peak a decade later, between 1900 and 1909, when there were 4,576 births. In other words, from 1900 on, natural increase had become a larger factor in community growth and stability than immigration, a development not identified in earlier community studies.
Table 4: Jewish Births, Marriages, Deaths, and Natural Population Change in Scotland 1910-2000
Table 4 illustrates the significant Jewish population growth through natural increase, especially during the two decades after 1910, a trend that continued through the 1950s. This natural increase of around 5,000 between 1910 and 1960 explains the growth and subsequent stabilisation of the Jewish population in Scotland. The year 1946 represented the beginning of the baby boomer era, which raised the number of Jewish births and maintained community numbers. However, from the 1960s on, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births and the Jewish population began to diminish. The numbers of births dropped steadily during the 1990s and beyond, falling to under 400 during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The mapping of the places of marriage for the Jews living in Scotland has provided important data regarding the geographical origins of Scotland’s Jews. During the course of the nineteenth century, most marriages of Jews who came to settle in Scotland took place in Poland and the Russian Empire (mainly Lithuania, and to an extent Latvia). These areas had the geographical advantage of easy access to Baltic shipping ports and although the geographical spread of migrants expanded from the 1890s, the great majority still hailed from Poland and Russian Lithuania. Following the expulsions of Jews from Moscow and tensions in St. Petersburg in 1891, small numbers of Jewish immigrants of means from those cities arrived in Scotland.
Figure 4. Origins of Scottish Jewry on the basis of marriages abroad.
As many of the immigrants were young couples with small children, it took longer for the numbers of local marriage to grow. They increased very gradually and peaked only in the 1940s, when around 1,600 Jewish weddings took place in Scotland. Thereafter, there was a slow but steady decline in the number of marriages, falling to under 350 in the 2000s. The reasons for this phenomenon were several. There was all but no immigration after World War II, while many of the wartime refugees moved on. The community at large was aging and beginning to decline in size. From the 1960s on, more Jewish school-leavers received a higher education and chose to study at English universities in cities such as Manchester and Leeds, where there were large Jewish communities. Few returned to set up homes in Scotland. Indeed, many of the marriages were made up of couples in which one partner was from outside Scotland, further inducing the newlyweds to revert to and remain in England. In the last 20 years, the reduced numbers may also have been affected by increased social mobility, a gravitation of young people to London and the effects of modern lifestyles, including partnering and late marriage, plus a tendency to wed outside Scotland, all in keeping with trends in the wider society.
Death figures for the nineteenth century bear witness to a high child mortality rate.56 In the 1870s, before mass migration from Eastern Europe was underway, about half of all Jewish deaths occurred in those aged under 16 years, with a majority aged less than 1 year. While figures were comparatively small in the 1870s, the growth in the size of the community over the next two decades and concomitant rise in the number of deaths permits a clearer assessment of patterns and trends. Infant mortality remained high until after the World War I, although Jewish fatalities were perhaps less than those in the wider community.57 Only in the 1930s did the number of child deaths begin to fall significantly, eventually dropping to negligible rates in recent decades. Thus the number of births came to far outstrip deaths, for some 30 years. The 1950s were, however, the last decade in which births exceeded deaths. The number of deaths peaked in the 1970s, when a distinct trend indicated an ageing population, unable to sustain itself by natural growth. While the number of deaths gradually began to fall – to around 1,600 between 2000 and 2009 – it was clear that overall demographic shift and decline was accelerating, as Table 5, which takes three representative post-war years, shows.
Table 5: Jewish Births, Marriages, and Deaths in post-war Scotland
Note: These figures do not include marriages where just one partner was Jewish and births and where the child was not recognized as Jewish by religious law.
Occupations
Census returns have provided easily tabulated information on the occupations of the individuals living in Glasgow from 1841. In the early years, the predominant occupations among the Jews population were described as merchants or agents, usually dealing in goods demanded by Glasgow’s developing middle class, such as clothing, furs and jewelry. There was also ready employment for the Jews arriving in the city in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, engaged in the so-called ghetto trades of tailoring and furniture-making. Tailoring became the dominant Jewish occupation from 1881. In a list submitted to a House of Lords Select Committee in 1889, Jewish master-tailors in Glasgow numbered twenty-eight, of whom about half were located in the Gorbals district.58 Interestingly, a short time after 1891 almost 14% of the Glasgow’s Jews moved into occupations associated with the thriving tobacco industry (though this percentage rapidly reduced in subsequent decades with the acquisition of more occupational skills).
Hawking and peddling became a common form of activity from 1881 onwards, not only as a primary immigrant occupation but also as a means of making initial business contacts and even laying the ground for setting up in business independently.59 In 1881, more than a quarter of the Jews in the Gorbals lived by this occupation. Ten years later, their numbers exceeded that of tailors. In 1911, the number of Jewish peddlers, hawkers or travelling salesman in Glasgow alone was over 500, indicating the pervasiveness and persistence of this precarious way of life. The proportion in Edinburgh was reported to be even higher.60 Small shop-keeping in the Gorbals also became significant by 1891. About a third of the shops were butchers, bakers and grocers, probably catering in large part to the kosher food needs of the Jewish population. General merchants, small manufacturers and traders multiplied in the first decades of the mass migration from the Russian Empire but their numbers declined as the twentieth century progressed as the shape of business changed. Less predictably, the community included blacksmiths, tinsmiths, bricklayers, coal merchants, a postman and a golf club maker. One woman, Martha Green, was identified as a nut-cutter in a biscuit factory.
>With the detailed data generated by the study we can now understand the factors that led all of Scotland’s Jewish communities, even the smallest, to set up a wide range of organisations. Most had welfare societies, providing support for their poorest members. Many also had educational, social, cultural and political groups. In Edinburgh, the multiple social, cultural, educational and welfare activities were organised through the synagogue. In Glasgow, with its greater size and resources, many of these bodies had independent identities. Thus, the Jewish Board of Guardians, Talmud Torah (afternoon and Sunday religious school), the Jewish Old Age Home, the Maccabi sports club, the Glasgow Zionist Organisation and Youth Movements, such as Habonim and Bnei Akiva, had their own premises. Women’s societies were active in raising funds for worthy Jewish charities and encouraging the participation of women in communal activity. Despite small numbers, such activities took place in communities from Ayr to Inverness, indicating the attachment of these small, often remote groupings to Jewish traditions and values. Over time, the<
Development of Religious, Business, Professional, Cultural Elites
In describing the changes in the character of the Jewish community brought about by the large scale immigration, the narrative of the emergence of the various elites sheds light the nature of the evolving community. Rapid acculturation, educational achievement and professional aspiration were powerful factors in the social transition of the community from the ‘ghetto trades’ of peddling, tailoring and cabinet-making into large-scale commercial enterprises and later into the professions, especially medicine.
The first Jewish businesses reflected a move into more conventional retail activity. Most remained relatively small but others, such as the chain of department stores run by the Goldberg family, showed considerable innovation in commercial enterprise. Some families became involved in the Scottish distilling industry. A leading figure in the whisky trade, Sir Maurice Bloch, was highly active in community organisations, local politics and philanthropy. One of the most prominent British Jewish entrepreneurs, Sir Isaac Wolfson, grew up in Glasgow and in addition to his ownership of hundreds of businesses of different kinds, he was a renowned supporter of Jewish and university charities, eventually honoured with colleges in his name in Oxford and Cambridge. Scottish Jews moved into the legal profession in substantial numbers after World War II.
Such a professional element as existed in the early community was composed mainly of the rabbis, reverends and other religious functionaries who officiated in the various communities around Scotland. An examination of digitised newspaper reports and city directories has corrected accounts of the early religious leadership in Edinburgh and established that the first minister in Edinburgh was Meyer Rintel, while his contemporary, Moses Joel, served the community later in the century. Joel and Rintel were to be the first of upwards of 250 rabbis and ministers who have served the various Scottish communities until present. While the smaller communities did not possess the resources to retain ministers for more than a short period, leading to a high turnover rate, Glasgow and Edinburgh were home to many distinguished rabbis and chazanim (cantors), over the years. Rabbi Samuel Hillman, who was the communal rabbi in Glasgow from 1908 till 1914, became a dayan (religious judge) in the London Bet Din (rabbinical court). Rabbi Salis Daiches led the Edinburgh community with great distinction between 1918 and 1945. He did much to acquaint the wider Scottish public with the Jewish community and its concerns, as did Rev. Dr. I. K. Cosgrove in Glasgow. Other rabbis, including Rabbis Naftali Shapiro, Benyamin Beinush Atlas and Jacob David Lurie, were proud representatives of a more traditional religious orthodoxy of the Eastern European kind. Rabbi Dr. Wolf Gottlieb, a refugee from Vienna, was head of the Glasgow Bet Din from 1956 to the early 1970s and combined strict Orthodoxy with an openness to secular intellectual enquiry.
There were a few medical practitioners in Glasgow and Edinburgh from the middle of the nineteenth century on, their numbers only becoming significant in the twentieth century. Thus, among 62 Jewish medical workers identified in the 1911 Census, there were 30 medical students as well as the first four Jewish doctors to practise permanently in Scotland. The sons and daughters of immigrants arriving in the 1880s were the first to take advantage of the open nature of the Scottish education system. By 1912, Jewish student societies had been formed at the universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with a majority studying medicine and smaller numbers planning to take up other professional callings, among which teaching was prominent.62 Many of the Jews who entered the medical profession distinguished themselves, with such outstanding figures as Noah Morris and Sir Abraham Goldberg, both appointed Regius Professors of the Practice of Medicine at Glasgow University. Refugee psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners, especially the analyst Karl Abenheimer and the neurosurgeon Joseph Schorstein, who arrived from Germany and Austria during the 1930s, made an acknowledged contribution to a previously underdeveloped speciality in Scotland.63
At one time, the Scottish High Court of Justice boasted several Jewish members, including Sir Gerald Gordon, a leading exponent of Scots law, and Lady Hazel Cosgrove, the first woman to serve as a High Court Judge. The Scottish art scene was also enhanced by Jewish immigrants. Benno Schotz came to Glasgow from Estonia in 1912 and entered Glasgow’s renowned Charles Rennie MacKintosh School of Art, eventually to become Professor of Sculpture and the Queen’s ‘Sculptor-in-Ordinary’ in Scotland. Schotz nurtured the talent of refugee artists, like Yankel Adler and Josef Herman, who passed through Glasgow during the war years.
Transmigrants
The study has revealed that most Jews reaching Scotland from the middle of the 19th century until the outbreak of World War I were in fact transmigrants, that is migrants who used Scotland as a staging post on the route to North America. We have already noted the low level of persistence though the nineteenth century, indicating that only a minority of Jewish newcomers in Scotland remained there a decade later. An interesting statistic that confirms the fluid nature of the Jewish population in Scotland is that in 1901 there were only 14 Jews over the age of 46 years who were born in Scotland before Statutory Birth Registration was introduced in 1855, since all other Scottish-born Jews in that age-bracket had departed. Generally speaking, most of the Jewish transmigrants crossing Scotland and Britain were drawn by the attractive prices for onward passage offered by English and Scottish shipping companies. Throughout the period of the great migration, Glasgow was a popular port for transmigrants heading for North America, especially New York, second only to Liverpool. This remained the case despite the alternative option of sailing directly to North America from Hamburg or Rotterdam, and even from the Baltic from 1903 onwards. Following a serious cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which led to over 8,000 deaths there, transmigration patterns within Britain changed dramatically. Most migrants reaching Glasgow did not dock at Leith on the east coast of Scotland but landed instead in the English ports of Grimsby or Hull, where trains were at hand to transport them to Liverpool or Glasgow. The numbers of transmigrants travelling via Glasgow peaked in 1906 and 1907, due to the Allan Line’s success in drawing passengers to Glasgow to sail its North America routes
Conclusion
This project set out to construct a detailed demographic and genealogical profile of a national Jewish community. With its accurate detailing of community size, population growth, movement, settlement and dispersal, a picture of the Jewish community in Scotland has emerged which has challenged and changed many previously held perceptions. The statistics for births, marriages and deaths have shown how natural growth fuelled an increase in community size after immigration tailed off after 1914. It has shown how the number of Jews in Scotland has contracted dramatically in recent decades, as an ageing population produced an excess of deaths over births and younger elements moved elsewhere. The study has also indicated the attachment of immigrant Jews to religious life even in the small centres around the country, where groups of just thirty people were enough to establish a community with a synagogue and a minister. The review of digitised newspaper archives has revealed how Jewish events were recorded in the national and local Scottish press and has cast fascinating new light on the beginnings of Jewish life in the country. In brief, our understanding of the history and the social narrative of Scottish Jewry has been decisively revised.
About the Authors
Dr. Kenneth Collins, formerly a general medical practitioner in Glasgow is currently Visiting Professor in Medical History at the Medical Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow. He has published widely on the history of the Jews in Scotland and is Chairman of the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre.
Dr. Neville Lamdan studied at Glasgow University, Dropsie College, Philadelphia, and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1965). A retired Ambassador, he served in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1965-1971) and the Israeli Foreign Ministry (1973-2003). He helped found the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in 2006 and is currently its Chair. He is a well-known proponent of the scientific study of genealogy and its recognition as an academic discipline.
Michael Tobias studied at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities and qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries. He is Vice President Programming of JewishGen, Inc., and Co- Founder and Board Member of Jewish Records Indexing – Poland. He was Database matching consultant to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims. He was awarded the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Lifetime Achievement award in Washington in 2011.
Discussion Questions
This project has produced detailed demographic and genealogical information on the Jewish community of Scotland since its inception 200 years ago and has permitted comparison with national Scottish data obtained from birth, marriage, and death records and from Census information. We pose here some discussion questions that arise from the study and its findings:
The methodology in this study was designed to identify members of a specific religious group. Would it need to be modified to apply to members of a national or ethnic group and, if so, how?
Could the approach in this study apply to national Jewish communities of similar size such as Denmark and Switzerland, or larger Jewish communities whose geographical roots are similar to those of Scotland, such as South Africa?
Could the data generated by this study by used to build a Family Tree of Scottish Jewry and if so, what would be its likely characteristics?
>Like many other countries in Europe, Scotland has experienced significant immigration over the past decades. These communities, mainly from the Indian sub-continent and from Poland, have distinctive national and religious affiliations, and experience the same pressures of settlement, dispersal and acculturation. Can the Jewish experience in Scotland serve as a model for their integration into in Scottish society and its life?
<To Cite this Article: Collins, K., Lamdan, N., & Tobias, M. (2016, Spring). 200 years of Scottish Jewry: A demographic and genealogical profile. Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 8(1), 63-83.
Notes
36 The mission of the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) is to advance Jewish genealogy and promote it as a recognised branch of Jewish Studies at the university level. It has sought to move well beyond the study of individuals or family units into areas with wider scope and relevance.
37 Michael Tobias, (2012). A Study of 19th Century Scottish Jewry, M.Sc., Genealogical, Palaeographic, and Heraldic Studies, University of Strathclyde.
49 Kenneth Collins, Go and Learn: the International Story of the Jews and Medicine in Scotland: 1739-1945 (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 43-44; Kenneth Collins, “Levi Myers (1767-1822): An eighteenth century Glasgow medical graduate from South Carolina,” Journal Medical Biography, 2014, epub 0967772013518471. Matriculation records for all medical students at the University of Edinburgh give details on the origins of the students from 1740, Edinburgh University Library Archives.
50 Abel Phillips, A History of the Origins of the First Jewish Community in Scotland: Edinburgh, 1816, Edinburgh, 1979.
51 See Kenneth Collins, Second City Jewry: The Jews of Glasgow in the Age of Expansion 1790-1990, Glasgow, 1990, p.19, where he mentions both dates.
52 Estimated to be ‘thousands’ by Rayner Kolmel, German Jewish Refugees in Scotland, in Kenneth Collins, editor, Aspects of Scottish Jewry (Glasgow, 1987), p. 57. Other estimates put the figure around 1,000. See Kenneth Collins, The Growth and Development of Scottish Jewry, 1880-1940, p. 50, also in Aspects of Scottish Jewry.
53 Marlena Schmool, Jews in Scotland: The 2001 Census, in Kenneth Collins with Ephraim Borowski and Leah Granat, Scotland’s Jews: A Guide to the History and Community of the Jews in Scotland (Glasgow, 2008), pp. 56-59. Marlena Schmool was Community Research Director for the Board of Deputies and based on a 13% rate for Jews not answering the voluntary question in Leeds, a community of similar size and with a similar age profile she estimated the 2001 Jewish population in Scotland at 7,450. This left a further 1,785 Jews who answered another question in the Census saying their upbringing was Jewish but they now followed no religion. The Director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, Dr. Ephraim Borowski, suggested in a footnote, based on the Canadian Census, that the number of undeclared Jews, based on a religion question, rather than an ethnic one, could be as high as 33%.
54 The only detailed published account of the small Jewish communities in Scotland is: Nathan Abrams, Caledonian Jews: A Study of Seven Small Communities in Scotland, Jefferson, NC, 2007.
55 Nathan Abrams, Caledonian Jews, pp. 20-21
56 Kenneth Collins, Be Well! Jewish Immigrant Health and Welfare in Glasgow 1860-1920 (West Linton, 1920), p. 80, indicated that Jewish infant mortality was around a third lower than in the wider community.
57 Kenneth Collins, Be Well!, pp. 78-82.
58 Julius Pinto, “Jewish Master Tailors in Glasgow,” Fourth Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System, 1889 (Henry Hansard and Son printers, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1889), col. 26056.
59 David Daiches, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood, Edinburgh, 1954. See also Kenneth Collins, Second City Jewry, pp. 47, 62, 153.
60 Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England 1870-1914 (London, 1960), p. 60.
61 Kenneth Collins, Be Well!, pp. 50-77. See also the comparison between Jewish provision for care of patients with tuberculosis in Glasgow and London, pp. 86-90.
62 Kenneth Collins, Go and Learn, pp. 83-97.
63 Kenneth Collins, “Joseph Schorstein: R D Laing’s Rabbi,” Journal of the History of Psychiatry, June 2008, 19 (74:2), pp. 185-201. Kenneth Collins, The Glasgow Department of ‘Psycho-Semitics’ 1940- 1960: “The Jewish Thought of Joseph Schorstein and Karl Abenheimer,” Jewish Historical Studies, 45, pp. 23-40.
The Avotaynu DNA Project has entered its second phase and now seeks male participants for a study of Eastern Sephardi paternal DNA lineages, specifically men whose family directly descends through Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Rhodes and related areas. Eligible participants must be direct paternal line descendants of members of the eastern Mediterranean.
Adam Brown, a representative of the study team will be in Seattle at the conference of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies at the Seattle Sheraton from Friday 8/5 through Friday 8/12 and will be happy to meet with any individual or group which wishes to participate either at the Sheraton or at another location in Seattle of your choosing. Please contact Adam at WestSephDNA@gmail.com for more information or to make an appointment.
The project, led by pioneering genetic genealogist Dr. Karl Skorecki of the Technion, aims to shed light on the origins of the Sephardim and to establish a strong dataset of DNA results, grounded in archival research, in order to stimulate further intensive studies. At least 50 men will be tested. Participants must supply a paternal genealogy with as much information as possible. DNA testing kits will be provided at no cost. Individual privacy will be protected and the results of the study will be published.
Relevance: A DNA study may offer insight into the early international distribution of the Sephardi community as well as the genetic origins of its parent Iberian Jewish community. Alongside genealogical research adhering to the Genealogical Proof Standard, historical research and other academic disciplines, this can then serve as an anchor for a more extensive study of former Iberian Jewish populations. Given the relatively limited number of generations – corresponding autosomal markers in this cohort may serve in the future as a bi-parental marker reference for population admixture.
Support: The Genetic Study of Western Sephardic Jewish Men is supported by the Avotaynu Foundation (New Haven, CT), the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy (Jerusalem), and the Brown Foundation (Teaneck, NJ).
In today’s world, interest in Sephardic Jewry is greater than ever before, particularly with the recent laws in Portugal and Spain enacting the right for descendants of Iberian Jews to reclaim nationality that had been revoked by the Expulsion. The Portuguese Jewish Nation, the “reluctant cosmopolitans” of the Age of Colonialism and Imperialism, transcended empires, and linguistic, religious, national, and ethnic boundaries. Born in the enforced baptisms by King Manuel of Portugal in 1497, they considered themselves (both practicing Jews and enforced Catholics) to be “Homens da Naçao“, Men of the Portuguese Hebrew Nation, (Portuguese A Nação Hebrea). This notion of a separate nation is the starting point of our project.
A Nação Hebrea lived between worlds and identities, while establishing trade and kinship networks around the world. Centered historically in Iberia, Amsterdam, London, Livorno, and France, the Nation expanded throughout the world, leaving their imprint stretching from the New World to Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and India. Alongside these developments, the Nation has left an extensive material culture and archival legacy to study. With the continuing development of digital technologies, and the move towards the democratization of information through digitization, it has become much easier to study this community as a whole. One of the tools that has been used to great effect before on targeted mass population studies has been the creation of Relational Prosopographic Databases, allowing scholars from different fields to access a whole host of information about the people studied.
What is a Relational Prosopographic Database? As defined in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London in their Postgraduate Online Research Training website, “Prosopography is the study of groups through collective study of their members. This requires biographical data for large numbers of individuals, but the information available for many individuals may be quite limited, and consist of scattered references in different documents that need to be connected together and recorded in databases that can facilitate investigation of larger patterns.[1]” Several successful examples of Relational Prosopographic Databases include “Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England”[2] ,”The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”[3], and the “China Biographical Database Project”[4]
This project intends to build a holistic, interdisciplinary prosopographic database of the Portuguese Jewish Nation, allowing academics, ‘citizen scholars’, and genealogists, to research the community and help increase the depth of understanding of this multifaceted people. The proposed database will be an innovative and open research tool giving access to those interested in the history of the Portuguese Jewish Nation to a wealth of biographical and relational information on the members of the Nation, and allowing all researchers, lay and academic to access, to engage with, and to enrich the wealth of information available. Researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Genealogy, Genetics, Geography, Heritage Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology,
The team behind A Nação Hebrea, led by Drs. Aron Sterk (University of Lincoln, UK) and Florbela Veiga Frade (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal), Ton Tielen (Archivist, Dutch Red Cross, Netherlands), and Michael Waas (MA candidate, University of Haifa, Israel), is proud to announce the formal opening of our project with the receipt of the Malcolm J. Stern Grant from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Our team is advised by a diverse and renowned multinational scholastic team and is building partnerships with several undergraduate and graduate institutions across the world. In addition, the team is a partner to the Western Sephardi yDNA project, providing historical and genealogical analysis for the candidates and providing the first, interdisciplinary work under the framework of the project.
I was born into a Roman Catholic family in Havana, Cuba, but from a young age, I felt Jewish and inexplicably was drawn to all things Jewish. After converting to Orthodox Judaism at age 34, I found clues along my maternal line that showed I might actually descend from Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert. Thus, started the longest road I have ever walked.
[This article is based upon a presentation at the 37th International Conference of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) held in Seattle during August 2016—Ed.]
Finally, I was able to prove to myself and to my family that we did descend from a direct, unbroken maternal Jewish lineage spanning 22 generations and going back to 1405 in pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. This costly and extended effort grated on my nerves, alienated my family and, at times, made me doubt my visceral instincts. In the end, I had amassed boxes of documents that included Inquisition court cases, Catholic baptism certificates, notarial deeds, and marriage and death certificates on each one of my grandmothers. Most importantly, I totally satisfied the Orthodox Beth Din (rabbinical court in Israel) that I did indeed descend from such a lineage. For more than ten years, I researched my family’s past, crisscrossing through many small villages in Spain and Portugal, looking for and hoping to find my Jewish ancestry. Not only was the prospect of succeeding a daunting one, but the possibility that I had no Jewish ancestry at all petrified me, because I had always felt Jewish in my soul. What if I was wrong?
My search had been extremely difficult as I hit genealogical brick walls along the way. My family was not exactly cheering me on to find this heritage, so it was a very painful process. After all the years and heartache this search took, the rabbinical acceptance was not nearly as important an accomplishment as the fact that, having become active on social media, I had found thousands and thousands of individuals like myself, innately Jewish but born into Catholic families and now scattered around the world. These individuals looked to me to lead the way back home to their own ancestry. I knew that most had neither the resources nor the wherewithal to walk the same road.
I published three books, My 15 Grandmothers, How I Found My 15 Grandmothers (Mis 15 Abuelas (Spanish title), hoping that they would serve as a guide to those crying out and trying to “come home.” I began to speak publicly and often in the United States, Israel and Latin America. I held many hands through my travels, but I knew that no matter what I did, it just would not be enough. It saddened me that what I had done for myself, I could not do for all of those who wanted to break their bonds to the Catholic Church. It also caused me great grief to know that I had held Jewish history in my hands in musty archives all over the Iberian Peninsula, and that few knew just how much of our history remains available, waiting to be unearthed.
Sometimes miracles happen, and they come in strange and unexpected ways. I experienced one of those miracles first hand at the 2014 IAJGS conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was approached by Sallyann Sack, editor and co-owner of AVOTAYNU, a true pioneer and maven in the Jewish genealogy world, and Ambassador Neville Lamdan, chairman of the board of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) in Israel. We sat down for a cup of coffee, and they asked what I would do for future generations with the knowledge I had amassed if money were no object. I had never before given this even a second’s thought, yet slowly, and on a paper napkin, in that hotel coffee shop, I explained and detailed the bones of the project we have today. That napkin turned into a tablecloth and the tablecloth into a flag that we will now carry home as we bring this project to light.
I contacted Professor Abraham Gross of Ben Gurion University in Israel, head of the Institute for Sefardi and Anousim Studies at Netanya Academic College. His familiarity with Sephardi and Anousim history, as well as his current work with descendants of converso Jews, seemed to make ours a logical association. Thrilled that he agreed, we set out together to put flesh on the bones of this important genealogical and academic project to which the IIJG has enthusiastically added its support and sponsorship. Together, we will make our dreams come true.
The Converso Project
The Converso Project aims to establish a comprehensive genealogical database of the diaspora of the New Christians, Jews who converted to Christianity more than five centuries ago in Spain and Portugal and their descendants up to the end of the 18th century.
At the academic level, our goal is to make a significant contribution to New Christian studies and, at the family historian level, to assist individuals seeking to explore their New Christian roots. The term New Christian is one historians use when speaking of Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Catholic Spain and Portugal called them New Christians, and their governments made a distinction between them and those who had always been Catholic, whom they called Old Christians.
Brief Historical Background
Life became precarious for Spanish Jews during the second half of the 14th century, but the primary blow that undermined that highly successful and prosperous Jewry struck in the summer of 1391. It was a watershed moment that was to shake Hispano-Jewish communities to the core. A wave of “popular” persecutions, which swept throughout Castile and Aragon, left a bloody trail of Jewish martyrs on the one hand and, on the other hand, an unprecedented number of conversos, Jewish forced-converts to Catholicism (in Hebrew, anousim). Scholars estimate the number of those conversos to be as high as 100,000 individuals. Two more waves of conversions in the following quarter century sealed the tragic fate of Spanish Jewry.
While a remnant of the former Jewish communities struggled along, the conversos, now called New Christians, (henceforth NC, interchangeable with conversos and other common appellations such as marranos and crypto-Jews), entered Christian society and did well for themselves. They prospered while occupying positions that had been closed to them prior to their conversion.
It took a full generation of a forceful rejection of outward Jewish practices for the NC to adapt to their new, underground status. They would go to Church on Sundays and practice all outwardly Catholic rituals, but at first did not relinquish things such as not eating pork, cleaning the house for Shabbat and other Jewish practices. The charge of Judaizing––namely, retaining a measure of Jewish identity, whether in practice or only in belief in the “Law of Moses”––became common as New Christians were caught practicing these rituals underground. Everyone knew who they were, and the NC did not blend easily into the Old Christian Society; old habits and customs were hard to break.
A virtual civil war between Old and New Christians developed in the middle of the 15th century, eventually leading to the establishment of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 in order to root out the so-called “Jewish heresy” from within Spanish Catholic society. The Church set up Inquisition tribunals in several cities throughout Spain. After a decade, the Inquisition issued a recommendation to expel all professing Jews from Spain, having reached the conclusion that the NC would persevere in their heresies as long as other openly observant Jews remained among them. The Edict of Expulsion of April 1492 decreed that by the end of July that year, no Jew would be allowed to set foot on Spanish soil unless he had converted to Catholicism. Jews were invited to convert or leave the country with only the clothes on their backs.
Those who left and joined Jewish communities around the Mediterranean Basin (mainly North Africa and the Ottoman Empire) are the ones who today are called Sephardic Jews. Many still retain elements of their Spanish background: names, music, language, cuisine and customs.
The situation was quite different for the former Jews who stayed behind in Spain after the Expulsion. Now, as new converts, they joined the ranks of the earlier NC. They also became targets for investigations by the Inquisition tribunals. At that point, families began to change their names and adopt aliases in order to obscure their Jewish backgrounds, thus making it difficult for modern-day scholars to identify who was whom and to what family they belonged. Endogamy, marriage within the group, became a characteristic of NC society, and ultimately, most NC families were connected in some way, many in multiple ways.
In 1492, many Spanish Jewish refugees crossed the border into Portugal. After five years, they too, along with the Jews of Portugal, were forced to convert by order of King Manuel. Hence, another large group of New Christians was created. The perceived problem of judaizing in Portugal eventually brought about the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536.
In the 16th century, many NC left Iberia and found havens in Christian territories such as Ferrara, Livorno and Venice, Italy; Bayonne, Bordeaux and Rouen, France; and Antwerp, Belgium. In the 17th century, others found their way to new communities of NC refugees in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Still others fled to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America, including some islands in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The Spanish Inquisition, however, extended its long arm to those distant places in the Americas by setting up tribunals in major cities such as Cartagena, Lima and Mexico City. Likewise, the Portuguese Inquisition reached the NC who settled in Brazil.
Generations have passed since the abolition of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in 1834 and 1831 respectively. Most have thought that those who remained in Iberia, Latin America and elsewhere had assimilated into their surrounding Christian society and were lost forever to the Jewish People.
Incredibly, and often after a complete loss of awareness of their Jewish roots, a phenomenon has unfolded in the past two decades in which descendants of those medieval and early modern NC have come out of the shadows of history. They seek to learn more about their Jewish roots, identify with their ancestral heritage and even take the ultimate step of openly returning to Judaism.
This phenomenon, which started as a trickle, has been spreading fast and wide, and today covers virtually the entire Western Hemisphere, where it forms a vibrant movement of large and unpredictable proportions. This can be seen from numerous Internet forums and social media, as well as the growing number of approaches to individual activists and Jewish organizations now devoted to those bnei anousim (descendants of the anousim). The potential effects of this dramatic development have yet to be understood and addressed by world Jewry and the State of Israel. These returnees could dramatically alter whom we see as Jews, as well as the number of Jewish people who want to stand up and be counted as such.
Academic and Individual Implications
No matter the nature of their inner identity, NC operated within a Christian world. Yet the history of the group is a part of Jewish history, amenable to academic study and scrutiny, in the first instance within the field of genealogy. On the individual level, genealogical research is the one major tool that the bnei anousim can utilize in their attempt to identify and verify their roots. Their need for authentication may be an internal one, for their own peace of mind, and an external one, to be recognized by Jewish authorities as zera yisrael (of Jewish descent). It goes without saying that by enhancing the self-identity and Jewish awareness of the bnei anousim at the group level, genealogy can provide a tangible bridge from past to future with consequences both for the individuals involved and the Jewish people.
Methodology
A major goal of this project is to enable contemporary descendants of the New Christians to connect genealogically to their Jewish ancestors. Another goal is to provide tools to enable scholars to perform analyses never before possible, such as studies of migration patterns and demographics of the NC diaspora including their occupations, family customs, longevity and much more.
To reach these goals, large swaths of data must be analyzed not only to follow the diaspora of the NC, but also to track their migratory patterns and genealogical data. To do this, we have analyzed the different sources and information that exist, but mostly have been hidden and/or unused by scholars. Among the sources are the original Inquisition records of Spain, Portugal and other outlying Inquisition tribunals in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere.
Especially useful are the many records of marriages, births and return to Jewish life in Amsterdam and London. In these two cities, the New Christians changed their names back to their old Jewish ones from their Christian names and, after a while, began to lead normal Jewish lives again including all the rituals of brit milah (circumcision), marriage and more. We also will use sources from Brazil and the Caribbean islands, where some NC moved after leaving Spain and Portugal. Some went directly from Portugal while others migrated first to Amsterdam and then to the Caribbean.
From these “stops along the way,” data will be collected from the Inquisition records themselves, primary sources such as Church and synagogue records, existing family trees of families evaluated to be genuinely NC as well as selected secondary sources from historical studies, dissertations and similar material.
All of this data will be put into a database that includes not only names and dates but also relationships and aliases. Individuals working for the project will digitize records in various types of collections all over the NC diaspora. In a way that is similar to Ancestry.com, the database will be able to access the data from all the individual uploads and, hopefully, find the same person first in Spain, then in Amsterdam and finally perhaps, in a Caribbean island. That way, for example, those who suspect that they come from one of these NC families can follow their own information back and maybe see that they were stuck going back in time because they could not find the Jewish reference. We will show all the aliases a single person used, and using our data, a person doing a search may conceivably see that the Juan Ramos they were following but could not trace further back in time, actually was a person named Moses Levy.
Challenges
Much important work conducted by numerous historians to date is scattered in various books, dissertations and articles in many languages and in various countries. These studies contain a wealth of data, although almost all that work has been carried out with the goal of recording history, without genealogy in mind. To make use of this material, its reliability is crucial. The project directors will establish criteria by which to consider secondary material trustworthy enough to be utilized for the project.
In this context, the issue of how to deal with existing family trees owned by private individuals is even more problematic. Project managers will check and verify each such tree before it is integrated into the project’s databases. The reason such a thorough review must be done is that only information from approved sources will be allowed as a genuine source. If someone approaches us with a Crypto Jewish family tree, we will look at the source of information for each person on that tree. Is there an original birth certificate or Church document? What type of documentation accompanies each name on the tree? Some trees have no sources; others are taken from random books that we cannot approve for the project. At the end, all names in our master database will have primary data sources.
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition records hold extensive genealogical data, but the size of each judgment or court case is daunting. After the 15th century, not all files dealt exclusively with the crime of judaizing. Some dealt with witchcraft, sodomy, or other types of behaviors that the Church considered heretical. Project managers will seek ways to access this huge body of material easily and efficiently. For example, dissertations and other published historical works may facilitate access to certain files because through the centuries, one or another academic has already taken a single file and studied it in depth; in such cases, we can access information straight from the dissertation. To cope with the problem of having to have a specialist physically read through the thousands of Inquisition court cases—each with 300 pages or more—we will consider accepting, at least in part, both primary and secondary sources that will be methodically identified and described in extensive bibliographies. This means that if an academic has already reviewed a particular case in detail to use for his own dissertation or used a particular case in a bibliography, then we will probably feel comfortable extracting the genealogies that are in these files. Of course, this only will be done on a case-by-case basis.
Project Outputs and Sources
The project will generate a comprehensive database accompanied by a user guide. The massive amount of personal information will enable quantitative and statistical studies that are mainly, but not exclusively, demographic. The ability to actually trace the diaspora of the New Christians may yield fascinating solutions to historical riddles. For example, I know that my family lived as Crypto Jews in the Braganza area of Portugal in the late 1600s, because I have Inquisition documents to show that they were constantly caught there. I know that eventually many of these Crypto Jews left for Amsterdam, but no records exist of ships leaving or arriving in Amsterdam. Historically, all we have are records—via their marriages and cemetery records—of the same Jews suddenly appearing in Amsterdam. I see the names of my family showing up in Amsterdam, but I cannot trace a true line because of the missing pieces. I also see my family names in the Curacao community, but again, I am missing the linking pieces. These are the riddles of the New Christian Diaspora that we hope to clarify when we are able to database all the names and dates along with their histories and genealogies. Such a database should also change the historiography of the Iberian Inquisitions (related and unrelated to the New Christians), because we will know the exact migration paths of the Iberian Jews. This database will enable descendants of Iberian Jews who now are scattered throughout the world, to search for—and perhaps to locate––family information that otherwise would not have been available to them.
Since we began to design this project, we realized that sources frequently are found in unexpected places, and not all are digitized. Earlier this year, the authors visited the Amsterdam City archives, the Ets Haim Library archives of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue as well as the Archives of the Rosenthaliana Collection at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Gross conducted similar searches in London, while I worked in Jamaica with Dr. Ainsley Henriques who has been recording Jewish Jamaican history for decades. We found much data to upload and digitize that has never been seen before. Months ago I started to upload much of this data myself to explore potential problems in reading medieval handwriting and deciphering the aliases that NCs used. Sometimes calling themselves by two or three different names, they wove a truly tangled web. Yet, having done this work myself for my own history, I know that it is entirely possible to untangle these webs.
Conclusion
This multi-tiered project will gather information that has been accumulating for centuries in multiple sources and in various countries throughout the world. The amount of data is staggering, but bringing it all together into one genealogical database will create a new scholarly tool of inestimable value. For Jewish historiography, the project will open up new horizons that have been closed until now. In addition, individuals seeking their Iberian Jewish roots also will find this database invaluable and well suited to their needs.
Figure 4 California Marriage Record, Sam HODES to Caroline FRIEDMAN
Now you can confirm your relationship to individuals in your direct paternal line (Y-DNA), direct maternal line (mtDNA) and relatives across all lines via autosomal DNA. You can also discover new relatives via DNA matching. 
