Hitler's genes do not matter. He was a Jew, IFF his mother was, which I doubt. I also doubt he was a "religious Jew."
Being a Jew because your mother was a Jew is just something that Jews say. If you don't believe in Judaism, there is no reason to take this tradition seriously.
Here is a density map for Y-chromosone DNA haplogroup E1b1b1 It appears to me that there is a 10-30% E1b1b1 density lobe which encompasses most of Switzerland and perhaps westernmost Austria, within 300km/186m of Hitler's birthplace in Braunau- not that far away. There are also 30-40% concentrations in south Italy and the southern Balkans- not impossibly distant for a Hitler forefather to have originated. Interestingly, by far the greatest E1b1b1 density occurs in Ethiopia and Somalia, thus giving rise to a strong suspicion that Hitler's most distant genetically identifiable male relatives were not northern Europeans, but east Africans.
Seems to me that Jews have the right to defined what is required to be a Jew; and it is more than something they say - it is part of the "right to return law." (If you can prove your mother was a Jew, Israel is by law required to let you enter.) Would you find it acceptable if Russians could determine what is required to be an American (or a Dane, if you are Danish)? -Of course not - American laws do that. Likewise, Jewish laws define what are the requirements to be a Jew. You are confusing "being a Jew," a mater for Jewish law to specify, with being or not a follower of the Jewish religion. I made this difference quite clear in my post 31, but you seem not to understand the difference. "Believe in Judaism" has nothing to do with being a Jew.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Braunau is a small town, not a metropolis where many diverse people mingle. The most likely explanation, given that his mother was illegitimate, and that she worked in a Jewish household, is that she was impregnated by a Jew. The article which I linked to earlier gave information about tests that could sort the matter out. The density map suggests that the gene spread upwards into Europe from Africa with the Islamic conquest. Did Hitler have a fairly recent Jewish or African ancestor? Very likely, he did. And more likely for the reasons I have given, Jewish. This is one of those odd occasions when an urban myth is scientifically tested, and the test adds validity to the myth. Jewish people may not have considered a person with a male Jewish grandparent Jewish, but the Nazi party considered them partly Jewish. They called them Mischling, or mongrel. A person with either three or four Jewish grandparents is considered to be a Jew. A person with exactly two Jewish grandparents is considered to be either a Jew or a Mischling of the first degree. A person with only one Jewish grandparent is considered to be a Mischling of the second degree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling_Test The Wansee conference elaborated on how these people were to be treated: Mischlings of the second degree" (persons with one Jewish grandparent) would be treated as Germans unless they were married to Jews or Mischlings of the first degree, had a "racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew", or had a "political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
The size and diversity of the town makes no difference. Any inhabitant's Y-DNA haplotype could easily have originated 1000s of miles away, 1000s of years before the town's foundation. It was Hitler's father who was illegitimate. There is no reason to assume that the unknown paternal grandfather was a member Jewish employer's household. In fact, no surviving records establish the grandmother's employment or residency in that household, and many authorities consider the story to be a concoction of war criminal Hans Frank, who could have been attempting to implicate the Jews in their own persecution. As the map I cited clearly shows, the article you linked provided a seriously incomplete description of the haplogroup's ethnic and geographical distribution, and it needs sorting out itself. I agree that Islamic invaders were the likely source. Scientific tests are in their present state of refinement not able to distinguish between Arab, Ethiopian, European and Jewish immediate ancestry within this haplogroup, and you would do well to stop making unscientific claims.
1. Of course the size of the town makes a difference. Most people married people a walking distance away. In fact, the bicycle is often cited as a major engine for genetic diversity, since men and women could cycle to the next village. People in Branau would have generally married people in Branau. A large town, and especially a city, draws people in from many sources. 2. Father. Thanks for the correction. 3. My reasons for saying that it was most likely a Jewish person, is not purely from the scientific evidence. I am not making a scientific claim that the blood tests suggest a Jewish origin. Jews only represent a small percentage of the ethnic possibilities. My claim is that the circumstances make a Jewish origin more likely than the other possibilities. Taking a leaf from the American justice system, a member of the Jewish household had "Means, motive, and opportunity" Good circumstantial evidence, but not enough to convict. It needs more evidence before one can be certain. I would like you to withdraw your accusation that I am making unscientific claims. Perhaps I have pressed my case a little over-hard, but that is only to stimulate debate.
It's the only thing. Otherwise you are just "ethnically related to people calling themselves Jewish".
Perhaps in your mind, but not in Israeli LAW. Approximately half of the Jews don't believe in Jewish religion (Judaism) So you think they are not Jews, even though they are both Jews according to the laws of Israel and self declaration that they are Jews and have or can get passports of the world's only Jewish state. As I mentioned earlier, my best friend in high school, the Rabbi's son, thinks he is a Jew, as his birth certificate states, and is now an atheistic Jew, one of very many with that POV. As Einstein did not believe in Judaism, you say he was not Jew. He was the world's most famous Jew. Again I note you are confusing being a Jew with being a follower of Judaism. To adequately mock you I have decided to believe in Judaism on Mondays. Islam on Tuesdays, Christianity on Wednesday, Buda on Thursdays, Witchhood on Friday, this being the 13th, the Hindu faith on Saturdays, and to piss God off, be an atheist on Sundays. - Am I a Jew or what? Again, your religious beliefs have NOTHING TO DO with your ethnic group. - Birth, not your brain, determines that.
Many religions stay part of a culture when the dogma is forgotten. I think it is reasonable for people to call themselves Jewish even if they are atheists. Hitler's, and his fellow fascists' view on the subject, while historically interesting, is completely worthless. It is rubbish. How did they take this nonsense so tragically seriously?
But they self-identify as Jewish. It doesn't matter what I think about their Jewishness, it only matters what they think. I'm perfectly free to reject my personal Jewish identity, even if my parents are Jews, and Jewish law has something to say about it. Jewishness apart from genetics is a human invention, it's just a label. I don't say he wasn't. It's not my business what he called himself.
Of course. Here you concede my point and disown your prior POV that "Jews are followers of Judiasm." -"The only thing" defining a Jew your said in your confused state, not knowing the difference between being a Jew (set by birth) and believer in Judaism (set by your brain and changeable.)
I see your point. I should modify it to say that Jews are people that either believe in Judaism, or accept Jewish identity. My point is that being a Jew is never set by birth except by Jewish religious or civil authorities. In other words, it makes no sense to apply the label to people who don't accept it, since it's a cultural artifact, not anything objective.
Internal migration left no hamlet untouched, as Hitler’s own family indicates: his parents, maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother were not from Braunau, and none of the three most frequently mentioned candidates for paternal grandfather were either. ... We cannot have the slightest idea of what anyone’s motives were 100 years after the fact without some kind of written evidence, and no written evidence exists. Living in the home does not constitute any kind of evidence, not even circumstantial, and in fact literally no evidence of any kind is known to exist. Also, it bears repeating that this entire story consists of testimony by Hans Frank, who is not a trustworthy source. This is the specific statement I was referring to: “Likely” is much too strong a position to take given the evidence, including the scientific evidence, now available. “Possible” or the equivalent would be acceptable.
Dictionary.com lists two slightly different etymologies, but the one from the Online Etymology Dictionary goes back the farthest, and in any case that's the one I always trust for (duh!) etymologies:crap "defecate" 1846 (v.), 1898 (n.), from one of a cluster of words generally applied to things cast off or discarded (e.g. "weeds growing among corn" (1425), "residue from renderings" (1490s), 18c. underworld slang for "money," and in Shropshire, "dregs of beer or ale"), all probably from M.E. crappe "grain that was trodden underfoot in a barn, chaff" (c.1440), from M.Fr. crape "siftings," from O.Fr. crappe, from M.L. crappa, crapinum "chaff." Sense of "rubbish, nonsense" also first recorded 1898. Despite folk etymology insistence, not from Thomas Crapper (1837-1910) who was, however, a busy plumber and may have had some minor role in the development of modern toilets. The name Crapper is a northern form of Cropper (attested from 1221), an occupational surname, obviously, but the exact reference is unclear. I worked with a lady whose surname was Crapser, perhaps yet another variant of the same name. They pronounced it with a long A, but they couldn't get everyone to do that. Finally they went to court and had the judge change it to Craypser. He didn't argue with them. Probably the quickest case he handled all week. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
We use the name "Jew" in three somewhat different ways: 1. A person who practices the Jewish faith, if perhaps only on Passover and Yom Kippur--even converts. 2. A person who identifies with the local or national Jewish community, practicing their social customs, marrying within the community, and having a disproportionate number of Jewish friends and acquaintances. 3. A person who is of Jewish/Hebrew ancestry, attested either by DNA analysis or bloodlines traced back through several generations, especially if he accepts the identification. Note that these groups of people overlap greatly, but they are definitely not identical. There are Jewish atheists (thousands), Jews married to Catholics (Jon Stewart) and Afro-American Jews (Sammy Davis Jr.). However, the Nazis used a definition of their own: anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent. The recursive logic was not really a problem because the grandparents of people who were alive in the 1930s and 40s lived in a culture in which almost all "Jewish" people in Europe (but not in America!) satisfied all three definitions. Hitler would have counted me as Jewish because my paternal grandfather was a "full-blooded Jew" by ancestry, even though his parents assimilated and converted to Christianity the moment their feet touched American soil. He had very little sense of "Jewishness" and I had none until I was grown up and met some "real Jews." My parents of course lived through WWII and could not ignore the tiny but nonetheless frightening possibility that Germany might defeat and occupy the USA. I wasn't told that one branch of my family was Jewish until the 1960s, when they felt pretty secure that the Nazis were not going to rise again. Fortunately they didn't live to see the Holocaust Denial movement. Note that the Jews themselves only count matrilineal ancestry, as you say. Among a population that was often under attack and its women raped, it was not always possible to identify someone's father. This is the reason that most Jewish converts are women. If a Jewish woman marries a Gentile man, her children will be Jews. But if a Jewish man marries a Gentile woman, they will not. So his parents lobby daily to convince her to "join the tribe." Theoretically she is supposed to take all the training and undergo all the rituals that a female child would, culminating (at least in America) in a bat mitzvah ceremony. But in many communities they will shortcut a lot of that stuff just to be able to say that their grandchildren are Jewish. Men who convert, on the other hand, have to do it all, even the circumcision. Those grandchildren are automatically Jewish (assuming his wife is).
But even then, it doesn't always get counted, especially if the family doesn't identify itself as such. Under Jewish law, former British prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill would have qualified as Jews. Disraeli was raised as a Catholic out of spite because his father had some dispute with the local rabbi, and he used to tell people he was of Spanish descent when they would ask why he didn't look British. They say Judaism is insular and not very inviting to converts, but I recently read that many historians think the adult circumcision requirement was one of the biggest impediments to early attempts to evangelize it. Christian evangelists dropped that requirement and the religion spread like wildfire soon after. On an interesting side note: there's pretty strong evidence that notorious German-Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel is at least half Jewish, the man waited a long time to research his own family tree. He even tried using it a few years ago to get Israeli citizenship so he could avoid prison time in Germany.
Yes, I recall reading that (with agnosticism) was the most common "religious POV" in modern Israel - I don't know or care if that is true, but have long wondered if the state of Israel can both (1) remain a Jewish state and (2) educate its population so well. I don't have solid evidence but have noted a strong tendency for people like me* and your ancestors to lose their religious faiths as they become more educated. Not all of course, especially not those some Jesuit priest instructed when they were young. What do you think? is a Jewish state compatible with high quality education for centuries? * My best high school friend, the rabbi's son, was a very devout religious Jew. He put his tifillen (spelling error) on every day before getting out of bed and even taught me how to “symbolically bind my heart and mind to the will of god” but not to his god, of course, as I was an equally devout Christian, my church's primary acolyte for a few years. Before he graduated from Harvard, with high honors, he was an atheist but I only made it to agnosticism before graduating from Cornell.
I don't know if anyone out there has a solid estimate, but based on personal anecdotes and reading, I would put the number of "Jewish atheists" at way, way more than just a few thousand. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find at least a million Jews proclaiming either atheistic or agnostic beliefs just in Israel alone. You don't have to be a devout, practising Catholic to call yourself an Irish or Italian American, right? It all depends on what's meant by "Jewish state". If it's a state that perpetually subsidizes certain religious practises and discriminates against others or against entire sectors of the population, then it won't have much of a future to look forward to. If it's a state where a majority of the citizens identify themselves as Jews in more of a national or cultural sense, fit some generalized criterion for being called Jews, and gives preference to immigrants who identify themselves thusly, then its future looks as bright as any other self-determining ethnic/religious majority nation state on the planet. I believe the religious elements of Jewish nationalism draw their main appeal from the perpetual history of worldly double-standards that continue to be applied to them as a people, and as a reaction to the even stronger religious nationalism of their most vocal opponents.
