A Jewish Past?

By By Jan Voogd

Lineage is a funny thing. Madeline Albright could tell you. On any particular family tree, there are going to be people who want to remember and people who want to forget, and you can bet they aren't always going to be sharing the same branch. There is a story about a college student who wanted to get into a certain fraternity. The frat brothers were a little skeptical about him, because he had dark hair and, "Your name," they said, "Is it Jewish?" "No, I don't think so," he said. But over Thanksgiving break he went home to Kansas, and told his father about the question. "Well, son, I probably could have mentioned this before...." As it turned out, he was Jewish. For me it began at a party. I was talking to an art historian from the Netherlands to whom I had just been introduced. "Your name, it's Dutch?" he said. "Yes, it is. Dutch, by way of Germany." "And I think," he said, carefully, "it's a Jewish name."

My family's oral history has always been vague about our origins. A great-grandfather supposedly came over from Emden, Ost Friesland, in Germany, in the mid 1800s, bringing his wife and four sons. They settled in a small farming town in Iowa. It was said that the father died early on, and when the sons grew up, they would visit their mother, who never learned English, every Sunday morning. One of the sons became the town's first lawyer. One owned a hardware store that sold pianos. One went into real estate and insurance. The fourth owned the town newspaper.

A prevailing characteristic about small town Iowa, particularly in the 1800s, was that everyone worried about everyone else's business, everyone had opinions about how everyone else should live, and everyone was expected to belong to a church. If you were a Jewish immigrant family setting out to start a new life in America, and if you were leaving your homeland in part because your pursuit of happiness had been circumscribed on account of your religion, and if you were of a somewhat secular bent anyway, would it not be reasonable to play along with your vehemently Calvinist new neighbors in the hope that by doing so you would be allowed the freedom to succeed in the new country?

If that is what happened, I can't really blame them. But it does make my task formidable. With no living relatives to ask who would have been in on the secret, how can I be certain if my great-grandfather was Jewish or not? Books on immigration history yield insight, but few facts. That my great-grandfather's family supposedly came from the part of Germany called East Frisia, and that their name is Dutch, complicates things. The East Frisians were considered German by the Dutch, and considered Dutch by the Germans, and were virtually ignored by both. Histories of Dutch immigration tend to completely ignore Dutch-Jewish immigrants, as do histories of German immigration during the time period of the mid 1800s. Jewish histories tend to overlook the Dutch, and definitely do not focus on those immigrant Jews who were ambivalent or unenthusiastic about their religious background. The published German passenger lists have mention of only one family whose configuration and last name match my great-grandfather, but their first names are all different, and they came from Hamburg, not Emden. Of course there is the possibility of a typographical error on the list, but allowing for that, where is the certainty?

There is brief mention in some books, however, of a number of disaffected Jewish immigrants who came to the U.S. and, rather than settle in urban Jewish communities like those in New York City or Boston, chose to venture out West. There they could be free agents, as Jewish as they wanted to be at any given moment, giving up community and history in exchange for what they hoped would be the freedom to live outside the hostile judgment of a predominantly Protestant society. For the most part, because of the nature of their decision, the identities of these particular immigrants are lost to history, and their actual numbers are impossible to count.

I may never know for certain whether my great-grandfather was Jewish. People may disagree as to whether it is even very likely. But as I've uncovered for myself the interesting pieces that make up this history, I realize that while my own great-grandfather might or might not be Jewish, there are many people who little suspect that their great-grandfather is.

Jan Voogd is a writer and Collection Management Librarian at a university in Massachusetts.