Interested, but Not Obsessed
I was sent a link to an article by Itamar Katzir about “The Jewish Obsession With Family Trees” [Sept 28, 2022] that appeared recently in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. 1
Katzir notes that some Israelis seem to have devoted an inordinate amount of time to study genealogy. Apparently these folks have created family trees with hundreds, in some cases thousands, of relations.
I admit to being a family history buff, but I think there is more to the story than Katzir discussed in the article. I do believe that Jews are probably more interested in family history than other groups, and I think there are some good reasons why that is so.
I will start with an overview of researching family history and then explain why Jews are {apparently} so interested in it.
Genealogy and Family History
There is a difference between genealogy and family history.
I consider genealogy as the study of a family with the goal of tracing lineages to demonstrate kinship and the pedigrees of its members. Genealogy can be displayed in a graphic showing a family tree, in a written narrative, or in a GEnealogical Data COMmunications or GEDCOM file (GEDCOM is a computer file format that lets genealogists swap information about their ancestors.)
Family history, on the other hand, I consider to be broader than genealogy; it covers lineage plus information about family members, the family’s history, and biographies.
People who are interested in family history use a variety of sources, including stories. DNA test results, written records, tours and visits to family heritage sites, as well as studying lineage and pedigree. All of these play an important role in studying a family’s history.
Stories
I found that it takes persistence and determination to get members of the family to tell their stories. Several times I was told, “Why do you want to know about that stuff? Life in the old country was terrible. That’s all you need to know.” This reluctance to discuss the past is common among older Jews. They don’t like talking about life in Europe and they especially don’t want to discuss the Holocaust. I took decades before historians were able to collect oral histories from Holocaust survivors. Fortunately, many of these are now available online. <https://holocaustcenter.jfcs.org/oral-histories/> They are very hard to sit through. The loss of millions of people is one reason Jews are interested in family history.
DNA Testing
The easy availability of DNA testing has made it easier for anyone to learn more about where they came from and who their ancestors were. As Katzir points out, quoting Haim Ghiuzeli, Director of the ANU-Museum of the Jewish People’s databases department. “There isn’t a single Jewish family in the last 120-140 years which hasn’t moved around at least once. Jewish migration is one of the things since the end of the 19th century affecting every family. Around 99 percent of all Jews around the world don’t live where their forebears lived 120 years ago. A nation of migrants always wants to know where they came from.”
DNA testing can show how your haplogroups 2—the collections of genes you inherited from your parents—match other peoples’, thereby giving you an opportunity to try to establish a family connection. The more people who have their DNA tested and who choose to share the results, the larger the pool of people to whom you may be related. DNA tests can also yield an “Ethnicity Estimate” which, theoretically, tells you approximately how much of your DNA likely came from different regions around the world. Most of my DNA is Ashkenazi 3 Jewish, but significant percentages are Greek and Italian. DNA results can also make you aware of your propensity to develop genetic diseases; unfortunately a common problem for Ashkenazi Jews.
Written Records
Names & Places
For many, but not all, people of European ancestry, written records for family members can be fairly easy to find. Records of births, marriages, deaths, and other events have been recorded for centuries and many volumes have been digitized and made available online. If there are problems, professional genealogists in Europe are available to go through dusty old documents looking for family members.
For two reasons, Ashkenazi Jews may have a tougher time. First, depending on the country, before the late 18th and 19th centuries, most Jews did not use fixed family surnames. People were called by their given names plus a patronym (the Hebrew word ben or bat meaning “son/daughter of…”) My great-grandfather would have been called Moshe ben Aaron. Unlike the Ashkenazis, Sephardic Jews have hereditary surnames that sometimes date back to the 1500s. Thus the earliest ancestor I was able to find a date for only goes back to 1769. The story is somewhat different for Chassidic Jews, who were more concerned about pedigree and some families in that group can trace their ancestry back to the Middle Ages.
The other problem has to do with the fact that the written records are in Polish, German, Russian, Yiddish, and a dozen other Eastern European languages. Online translation sites are a great help, except—spelling and transliteration vary enormously.
The primary online source of information about Jewish ancestry in Europe is the Jewish Records Index(JRI)—Poland <https://jri-poland.org>, which includes people’s names and the names of towns in Poland and nearby regions. You can search the JRI using the exact spelling of a name or phonetic pronunciation. The phonetic system they use is called Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex (D-M Soundex); a coding system which compensates for spelling variations in European Jewish surnames and European towns.
Unfortunately, D-M Soundex thinks that Zwickel sounds exactly like Speigel, which it does not. Searching the JRI using D-M Soundex was frustrating. When I searched for the exact spelling of my name I got very few hits. Eventually, I tried searching phonetically using a version of my name the way someone with a thick Yiddish accent would say it—Tzvikl. I discovered that different records spelled my family name Tzvikel, Cwickel, Cwikel, and Zwikl. The most common spelling in the JRI is Zwikel, butt here are some other variations depending on which country you search in: Zwickel, Zwikel, Tzvikel, Cwickel, Ćwikiel, Cwikel, Zwikl, Zwickelsky, Zwikielska, and Ćwiek.
When it comes to first names the number of variations is just as large, if not larger, since many Ashkenazi Jews used both Hebrew and Yiddish names. Fortunately for me, Ashkenazi Jews traditionally name children after relatives who’ve died 4. This keeps the person’s memory alive. It also means that the same first names appear often in the family. For example, my Hebrew name is Dov, meaning Bear. My great-grandfather’s was Berl (Yiddish for little bear) and my great-great Grandfather’s name was Wolf Behr (from the German & Yiddish Bär, meaning bear) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behr>
Spelling Hebrew or Yiddish names in English can be challenging. If you want to drive your family crazy, use any method of transliteration that strikes your fancy. Many transliterations from Polish/Yiddish are inconsistent. For the sake of consistency, I follow the YIVO system of Yiddish transliteration. Place names may be given in several different languages with different spellings. Consistency is elusive. Note that immigrants’ names were NOT changed at Ellis Island. 5
➢Translation: converting the meaning of words from one language to another {Zev in Hebrew means Wolf in English}
➢Transliteration: writing or printing a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or script: {זאב in Hebrew is written as Zev in English}
Dates
To make things more complicated, dates given in records for births, marriages, and deaths are not always accurate. The calendar we use today—the Gregorian Calendar—was not adopted in Great Britain until 1752 and Russia did not switch until 1918. For Jewish families, the year revolved around the religious holidays, not the calendar. Thus my grandmother was born “on the day after Purim” or March 5 in 1882 (or maybe 1883).
Tours and visits to family heritage sites
One popular way to learn more about your family is to visit the places where they lived before they emigrated to the United States. Thousands of Americans have traveled to Ireland, Italy, Germany and other countries to get a feel for what their ancestors experienced. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, the world has changed so much that it is hard to get a real sense of what it was like 100 or 15 years ago. Two world wars and, for Eastern Euroope the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, resulted in enormous destruction that obliterated many old structures and changed the landscape. American culture, with the help of the internet and inexpensive international travel have had a great impact on the old world. We were lucky to travel to Ukraine, Romania, Poland, and Latvia before local culture was drowned out by McDonalds, cell phones, Levis, and Coca-cola. For more information about Jewish heritage tourism, see <https://jewish-heritage-europe.eu/tourism-genealogy-2/>
One major difference about Jewish heritage travel to Europe is that so many sites were obliterated by the Nazis and later by the Communists. Guidebooks for Jewish heritage travelers are filled with comments about things that used to be there and are no longer visible. 6 Unlike Americans who travel to Ireland or Italy, it is possible for a Jew to visit an ancestral town or village and find nothing there that resembles the place their ancestors came from.
Why Family History is so interesting to Jews
I think that Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, are interested in family history for several reasons, including a need to feel an affiliation with a larger group, a strong desire to “fill in the blanks” left by emigration and the effects of the Holocaust, and a hope of finding interesting or celebrity connections.
A Need for Affiliation
As a tiny minority, people of Jewish descent are just ⅛ of 1% of the world’s human population. (It is not possible to tell how many of them practice the Jewish faith.) Since 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, to the 1800s, when they were persecuted and driven out of Russia and left Eastern Europe, to the 20th Century, when they founded the State of Israel, the Jews have been migrating from one place to another. As Katzir notes, “Around 99 percent of all Jews around the world don’t live where their forebears lived 120 years ago. A nation of migrants always wants to know where they came from.”
Thus, we have lost contact with our roots and feel disconnected. But we are connected, in ways that are difficult to put into words. Ashkenazi Jews share a common ancestry. In the 800s, Jews living in France and Italy were invited by the Holy Roman Emperor (possibly Charlemagne, but maybe his successors) to settle in the Rhine valley. This small group, estimated to be about 40,000 people, became the original Ashkenazi Jews.7 From this tiny number, an even smaller group became the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews living today. An article in Nature Communications says, every single Ashkenazi Jew living today can trace their ancestry to a small group of about 350 people who lived 600 to 800 years ago….8
Even more startling is the DNA evidence reported in The American Journal of Human Genetics, “ Some 3.5 million or 40% of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from just four “founding mothers” who lived in Europe 1,000 years ago. The mothers were part of a small group who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which was established in Europe as a result of migration from the Near East.” 9
The need to feel affiliated with a group is a strong motivator, especially for a population that has long been marginalized and persecuted. The need for affiliation was the subject of several books in the 1980s written by psychologist David McClelland (1917-1998) who was interested in what motivates people. Affiliation, he wrote, describes a person's need to feel a sense of involvement and “belonging” to a group.
I believe that the search for family history among Jews is part of their need to connect (or re-connect) with a larger group—to feel part of something larger than just a tiny minority.
Filling in the Blanks
When I told a cousin who had survived the Holocaust that I was planning a trip to Eastern Europe to see where my family came from, her response was, “Go. See what’s there. But there isn’t much to see.” The implication was that I would probably be disappointed.
The impact of the Holocaust and of the Soviet Iron Curtain that then cordened off Eastern Europe from the west, cut off the Ashkenazi Jews from much of their past. It has been my experience that people don’t really become seriously curious about their family’s history until they are at least 45 years old. By then, of course, it is often too late to ask older family members questions. Not surprisingly, many of those who survived the Holocaust were unwilling to talk about what life was like before and during the Nazi era—it was just too painful.
Going back through the written records with dates and places is helpful, but the best parts of learning about your family are stories that make it real. For example, my cousin’s recollection that the candy my great-aunt offered guests tasted awful helped me realize that it must have been ‘sugar-free’ and that probably meant that she was diabetic.
Finding Interesting Connections
I admit I was thrilled when I learned that actor Jeff Goldberg’s ancestor came from the same town in Ukraine as my grandfather. And it was wonderful to correspond with, and meet in person, a Nobel Prize winner from that same town. I also found relatives who had mental and emotional problems and one who had to skip town after a run-in with the mafia. So the search for family history can take the searcher to some interesting places. They say you should be careful when you shake your family tree, because you never know what will fall out.
Among those who are extremely invested in finding connections are the Ultra-orthodox Jews who deliberately set themselves apart from the rest of society. The Hassidim rely on matchmakers—shadchen—to find suitable candidates for marriage. One reason for this is their concern for pedigree—yichus. It is important to them to connect to descendents of prominent Jewish scholars or from wealthy, influential families. For the Hasidim, making these connections adds to the status of their families. Unlike most other Jews, they have access to genealogical records going back to the Middle Ages. Because these connections are considered so important, these families go to great lengths to trace their lineage back as far as possible, looking for an esteemed and valuable ancestor.
Discovering your lineage can make you feel more connected to the past and it gives you a great sense of perspective. I am in awe of the many generations of men and women who preceded me and whose DNA makes me who I am. I feel deeply indebted to them and knowing the obstacles they had to overcome, I feel obligated to them to be the best person I can possibly be.
In Summary
A strong interest in genealogy and family history is not limited to Jews—people from many other groups are also involved in searching for the past. Part of traditional Chinese culture, for example, involves a form of ancestor worship—remembering those who’ve passed on. It has major social and spiritual significance based on a range of traditional Chinese beliefs about family and piety. 10
Considering the increasing numbers of people from all over the world, I don’t think that the Jews are all that different from others in searching for the past. The only differences I can see are the many obstacles that make it more difficult for descendants of Ashkenazi Jews to do the research. If connecting with the lost world of Eastern European Jewry makes people feel closer to their roots and more in touch with their ancestry, that’s a good thing.
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1 “From Wuhan to Warsaw: The Jewish Obsession With Family Trees Yields Unexpected Results”' Itamar Katzir; Sept 28, 2022 Haaretz {With many thanks to Michael Cwikel, who forwarded this to me and inspired this entry}
2 Haplogroup: “Each haplogroup describes individual branches – or closely related groups of branches – on the genetic family tree of all humans. All members of a haplogroup trace their ancestry back to a single individual.” - <https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry-reports/haplogroups-explained/>
3 According to the “My Jewish Learning” website, “Jews from distinct geographic regions vary greatly in their diet, language, dress, and folk customs. <https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sephardic-ashkenazic-mizrahi-jews-jewish-ethnic-diversity/> Most pre-modern Diaspora communities are categorized into four major ethnic groups (in Hebrew, sometimes called eidot, “communities”):
Ashkenazim, the Jews of Germany and Northern France (in Hebrew, Ashkenaz)
Sephardim, the Jews from Iberia (in Hebrew, Sepharad) and the Spanish diaspora
Mizrahim, or Oriental Jews
Ethiopian Jews”
4 Sephardic Jews name children after a living relative. Some theorize that the Sephardic and Ashkenazi branches are actually one: Joel Davidi Weisberger, “Actually, a Significant Number of Ashkenazim are Descended from Sephardim” The Times of Israel May 16, 2019 <https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/actually-a-significant-number-of-ashkenazim-are-descended-from-sephardim/> and Alexander Beider “Many ‘Sephardic’ Jews Aren’t Actually Sephardic” The Forward, November 23, 2017 <https://forward.com/opinion/387971/many-sephardic-jews-arent-actually-sephardic>
5 “American Names / Declaring Independence”, by Marian L. Smith, INS Historian <http://www.iabsi.com/gen/public/imm_names.htm#changing_names>
6 Lowenthal, Marvin A World Passed By: Great Cities in the Jewish Diaspora History; 1990 re-designed edition, Joseph Simon/Pangloss Press
7 To get a sense of how small this number is, the average population of a county in the US was 104,435 in 2019 -Wikipedia
8 Carmi, S., Hui, K., Kochav, E. et al. “Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins”. Nature Communications 5, 4835 (2014). <https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5835 > <http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140909/ncomms5835/full/ncomms5835.html>
9 “Nearly Half Of Ashkenazi Jews Descended From Four 'Founding Mothers'”: <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060117083446.htm>American Technion Society. (2006, January 17). From “Counting the founders: the matrilineal genetic ancestry of the Jewish Diaspora” Behar DM, et al. PLoS One. 2008 Apr 30;3(4):e2062. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002062. The American Journal of Human Genetics <https://doi.org/10.1086/500307> and Public Library of Science PMID: 18446216 <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16404693/>
10 “Chinese Ancestor Worship: History, Traditions & More” JoinCake.org [Updated 8/30/2022] Joe Oliveto <https://www.joincake.com/blog/chinese-ancestor-worship/>
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