When Madeleine Albright was appointed U.S. secretary of state in 1997, the Washington Post disclosed that her Czech-born parents had been Jewish. Albright, who had been raised as a Christian, professed to be surprised by the news.
Barbara Kessel
Whether she was sincerely surprised is debatable, but the disclosure intrigued Barbara Kessel, a New York writer.
“This phenomenon of uncovering hidden roots fascinated me, and I was determined to do some research,” she writes.
Kessel placed an authors’ query in the New York Times Book Review and a posting on the Internet seeking non-Jews who had discovered they were of Jewish origin.
Of the 178 individuals who came forward, Kessel interviewed 166 in person or by telephone or mail.
The result is Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots (University Press of New England).
The book profiles the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 15th century, Jewish children who were placed in non-Jewish homes during the Holocaust, children of Holocaust survivors who denied their Jewish heritage, and Jews adopted by Christian parents.
Kessel’s modus operandi is to introduce the theme and let her subjects speak their mind.
Her chapter on Crypto-Jews is particularly instructive.
During the Inquisition period, Jews in Spain and Portugal could convert to Roman Catholicism, leave the Iberian Peninsula or die at the stake. A small proportion of Jews, unhappy with any of the above, lived openly as Christians but inwardly as Jews. Known also as New Christians, some of them settled in Latin America and later, in the southeastern United States.
Eventually, the vast majority of Crypto-Jews and their descendants were completed assimilated by Christian society. A few, however, never lost touch with their Jewish roots, and these are the people Kessel interviewed.
Maria, a Catholic to her priest and a Jew to her rabbi, talked about her grandmother, who kept separate pots and silverware for different kinds of food, and lit candles on Friday night.
Miriam told Kessel that her grandfather never ate pork and prayed in a foreign language, which, it turned out, was Hebrew.
Rogelio said that many members of his family had Jewish-sounding first names – Abraham, Zacarias and Elias –≠and that “all our men are circumcised.”
Kessel, in her discussion on hidden Jewish children, writes that they were traumatized twice – first when they were removed from their parents, and again when they were reunited after World War II. As she puts it, “Not only were they transferred from home to home, but when they rejoined their Jewish parents, they had to leave the church, which some of them had learned to love.”
Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, was one such child. “My Jewishness I had no choice about,” said Foxman, who was born in Poland. “Had my parents not survived, I would have stayed Christian. I was five when they came back for me. There was a fierce custody trial, and if I had been older, my caretaker would have won…”
Foxman is convinced that there are thousands of children who do not even know their parents were Jewish.
Yossi, a Jew from Holland who lives in Israel today, told Kessel his mother was so determined not to be targeted again as a Jew that she cut all her ties with the past.
“Having come from a practising [Jewish] family, this was a traumatic break with Judaism, but she had lost her faith and suffered tremendous anxiety about anti-Semitism,” Yossi said.
Yossi’s mother, having married a Christian, swore her husband to secrecy about her Jewish background. But when the Six Day War broke out, Yossi heard her wailing.”Oh, no, not again.” She feared that Israel would lose and that its Jewish citizens would be killed.
Yossi did not make the connection immediately, but as time passed, he became increasingly interested in Israel and wanted to be part of the Jewish People. In 1974, he made aliyah.
Rose, raised as a Catholic in Poland, discovered that her Jewish mother persuaded her father to join her in converting to Christianity.
“She was afraid to be Jewish,” Rose explained. “My father figured, God is God, so he went along with it. They sent me to a Catholic school and we all went to church together. But they must have had mixed feelings, because when my younger brother was five, they had him circumcised.”
Rose and her family immigrated to the United States in 1959, maintaining their Catholic identity. Fulfilling a promise, her father sent Rose on a trip to meet her relatives abroad.
Rose spent a year overseas, including three months in Israel.
“At first, the idea of being Jewish didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Later, as I read Holocaust novels like Exodus and Mila 18, it became more and more meaningful.”
Carol, born in Boston, is the daughter of a German Jewish woman who converted to Christianity before marrying her Lutheran husband in Germany.
When life under the Nazis became untenable, Carol and her family settled in the United States, where she was baptized. Yet, after her father’s death, Carol’s mother decided to move to Palestine, where her two sisters lived.
Recalling her days in Palestine, Carol said, “I remember going to my aunt’s kibbutz wearing my crucifix. When my uncle saw it, he ripped it off my neck and replaced it with the Star of David without any explanation. That was a traumatic moment for me. Nobody told me what was going on.”
Carol and her mother moved back to the United States in 1947, shortly after Arab-Jewish riots broke out. They returned to Israel in the wake of the 1948 war. In Israel, Carol embraced Judaism. “I absolutely identify now as a Jew,” she said.
In the final chapter, Kessel shines a spotlight on Shelley, who was adopted by a Mormon family but never really fit in because of her olive complexion and dark hair and dark eyes. Ultimately, Shelley found her Jewish relatives, studied in Israel and converted to Judaism.
Shelley’s story and that of all the others in Suddenly Jewish is emblematic of a larger reality – the allure of Jewishness despite the greatest odds.