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Home » Krauthammer’s Law extended: we are all Jews now

Krauthammer’s Law extended: we are all Jews now

The New Neo Posted on by

Charles Krauthammer’s column “Turning up Jewish” is both funny and serious. Funny because his thesis–that, scratch a politician these days, and you get a Jewish ancestor–though hyperbolic, is based on the odd but true fact that it’s now a campaign plus to talk about Jewish roots, and such roots seem to turn up in the most unlikely of places. Serious because it reflects on two controversial points: the fact that Jews are high-achievers, overrepresented and illustrious in so many fields; and the phenomenon of the Jew who keeps the fact of his/her Jewishness (or Jewish birth) a secret, even from his/her children.

The last two points would each require a book–or a thousand books–to explain, or to attempt to explain. I’m not going to tackle them right now. But what of all those Jewish ancestors? I don’t know what’s made it something politicians want to talk about lately. But, given that they do, I don’t think it’s so very strange that so many are popping up. The fact is that most of us have far more variety in our ancestry that we believe. So if you’re looking for such a thing, it’s not all that hard to find.

Krauthammer states his law as follows: Everyone is Jewish until proven otherwise. He’s talking about politicians, and he’s exaggerating to make a joke. And the politicians of whom he speaks are mostly rather closely related to their secret Jewish ancestors, as it turns out. But if you go back in time long enough, perhaps everybody is Jewish. In fact, perhaps everybody is everything, or a tiny little bit of everything.

Go back only two generations and each person has four grandparents; one step further gives eight grandparents. Mathematically speaking, it doesn’t take all that long to hit the big big numbers. In fact, I read a book ages ago (I recall it as The Tower of Names, although my efforts to look it up right now have failed me–both Google and Amazon have drawn an uncharacteristic blank) that asserted one only has to go back a surprisingly small number of generations and we all are related, because the number of ancestors expands and interrelates in some elegant mathematical fashion I no longer remember.

If any person looking for a single Jewish ancestor is willing to go back far enough, one wouldn’t be all that hard to find, even though Jews themselves are surprisingly scarce, given their enormous visibility and the amount of hatred directed their way.

Geneology buffs–and I’m not one of them–are a bit like those who believe in past lives. That is, they tend to pick and choose among ancestors. Whoever talks about the ancestor who went to debtors’ prison, or the past life in which one was a ragpicker? It’s the illustrious or royal ancestors or lives we prefer to talk about. For geneologists, they are probably also the easiest to research, as well. But they are the tip of the iceberg.

The bottom of that iceberg is the far larger number of unknown and inglorious progenitors, and those of different ethnic origins. So if it’s Jews you’re looking for, you can probably find them.

Comments

Krauthammer’s Law extended: we are all Jews now — 37 Comments

  1. Hi folks. When you see headlines like these what is your first reaction? Is it some manifestation of empathy? Or something else?

    09/30/06 DoD Identifies Army Casualty
    Pfc. Christopher T. Blaney, 19

    09/30/06 KUNA: Basra governor survives assassination attempt

    09/30/06 dpa: Eight killed in attacks in Baquba

    09/30/06 Reuters: Gunmen kills translator in Hilla

    09/30/06 Reuters: Roadside bomb kills one, wounds 4 in Iskandariya

    09/30/06 Reuters: Car bombs wounds 10 in Kirkuk

    09/30/06 Reuters: Suicide car bomb kills 3 in Tal Afar

    09/30/06 Six Iraqis wounded in car explosion, including Iraqi police officer

    09/30/06 DoD Identifies Marine Casualty: Lance Cpl. James Chamroeun, 20

    09/29/06 DoD Identifies Army Casualties: Staff Sgt. Edward C. Reynolds, Jr., 27

    09/29/06 Reuters: Gunmen firing from car kill three Iraqi soldiers in

    09/29/06 Reuters: Two roadside bombs explode near National Theatre in Baghdad killing one passer-by and wounding 10

    09/29/06 Reuters: Motar fire kill woman in Mahmudiya

    09/29/06 Reuters: Two policemen killed in Baghdad

    09/29/06 Reuters: Six gunmen killed in Hawija

    09/29/06 Reuters: Gunmen kill Sunni leader of Marsoumi tribe

  2. Jewish ancestry is kind of like American Indian ancestry. I’ve always wondered how many Americans have a great (plus) Indian grandmother or grandfather. Also, many Europeans are direct descendants of Jews who had to convert after the Reconquista. Franco and Perez are both Jewish names, and there are many others.

    I think it’s funny that Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Albright, and now Allen are finding that their Jewish ancestry has political value or is possibly a hindrance. It depends on their constitutency or job possibilities.

    Anyways, as you said, go back a few generations, and we have many relatives in common. I also know many many American half-Jews, so think about all their progeny. In a hundred years, probably most Americans will have Jewish ancestors.

  4. I saw an article recently that said that almost everyone alive today has some European royalty in their background. I wish I could find the link.

  5. Neo, the book you recalled may be “The Mountain of Names” by Alex Shoumatoff, subtitled “A History of the Human Family.” Fascinating.

  6. Your remark re genealogy buffs reminds me of a passage in Plato’s Theaetetus (spoken by Socrates, describing the philosopher vs. other men): “…And when people sing the praises of lineage and say someone is of noble birth, because he can show seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praises betray an altogether dull and narrow vision on the part of those who utter them; because of lack of education they cannot keep their eyes fixed upon the whole and are unable to calculate that every man has had countless myriads of ancestors and progenitors, among whom have been in any instance rich and beggars, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks. And when people pride themselves on a list of 25 ancestors and trace their pedigree back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of their ideas seems absurd to him; he laughs at them because they cannot free their silly minds of vanity by calculating that Amphitryon’s 25th ancestor was such as fortune happened to make him, and the 50th for that matter…”

  7. rickl, if you are dealing with the family of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Poland, it wouldn’t be a surprise. The royal officials gave up after identifying about three hundred royal offspring. And his son Maurice, Marshal De Saxe, wasn’t a wallflower either.

  10. “because the number of ancestors expands and interrelates in some elegant mathematical fashion I no longer remember.”

    Hope this makes some sense. If it does many years of computer science and algorithm analysis to the rescue!

    Geneology trees are a structure known as a “proper binary tree”. You have a root (in this case, you) and it has two branches (your parents). Each one of those nodes (your parents) has two branches and so on. The more general for is a “k-way tree” or “n-ary tree” with K being the number of branches. So if you find a species that has three parents you can easily find the math for them.

    In the case of a binary tree the number of nodes on a level is 2^N where n is the “depth of the tree (in this case the number of generations back).

    For example – the 0’th level (you) has 2^0 (1). The 1’st level (your parents) has 2^1 or two. You grandparents are 2^2 or 4. At 8 generation back you have 256, at 16 you 65536, at 32 you have over 4 billion. At 64 generations you have 18 with 18 or so (I may have miscounted by one) zeros after it – a REALLY big number.

    Though, obviously, at some point this math breaks down. What causes this math to be inccorect is that, after going back so far, you start getting repeated entries. That is at 32 generations back a LARGE portion of the entries are the same person (it is no longer a proper binary tree but a directed non-cyclical graph and has completely different math to represent it).

    Because of the way people breed (also the way the graph is constructed) it would be *really* hard to truly have everyone on the planet as your ancestor. You may have enough slots there for it (you do at 16 generations) but it will not happen.

    Interestingly enough you only inheret the DNA of your mitochondria from your mother. The way it is transmited it is possible to take two people and see how realted they are – they can also calculate what they call a “mitochondrial eve”. That would be the most recent mother everyone on the planet shares (the mother of all I suppose) – it goes back to about 200,000 years. I do not know if (like above) this is a product of the method not working if you back too far, or if we do all have a common mother if you go back far enough. I do not know the math/theory behind it.

  11. Unless you once swam with the fishes you are decended for a Jew like it or not. One of a hundred thousand that can document their family has been in america for over 200 years probably can correctly clain to be part American Indian. The rest like to make the claim for some social reason unknown to anyone but themselves.

  14. Here in Poland everybody who’s Left or seem to be one, the Right claims must be Jewish. Anyone not Catholic enough is being called a Jew.My first reaction to that fellow calling sen.Allen a Jew was that he must have meant it pejoratively.But from your comments I gather I must be wrong.God bless Amerika.Janek

  15. The fact is that most of us have far more variety in our ancestry that we believe.

    I don’t think there are many truly “black” folk either. The importation of slaves into the US began in 1619 and ended in 1799 when Georgia finally banned it. From the beginning, folks have been screwing around, as folks do, and I think we are all pretty much smudged out these days.

    Let’s hear it for those pesky hormones.

  16. I, too, practice genealogy as a hobby. But since the binary tree is not a good description of human descent, due to inbreeding, I would say that we are not all descended from everybody, but that all that currently live are descended from the same, relatively small, number of ancestors that had the largest number of progeny. (See Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, for an interesting description of the case for the theory that we are all descended from a relatively small group (approx 150 persons) living in Africa around 50,000 years ago.) That is why most living people have more kings than rag-pickers in their genealogical trees: kings would usually have more children than rag-pickers.

  18. Pete:

    When I see headlines like that, I think, “Gee, what a tiresome set of creatures we humans are. Would that we all could get along.” Or, “What awful lengths humans go to for power and influence—on all sides and for different reasons, some good, some bad.”

    When I see someone like you posting headlines like that, I think, “What a tiresome creature Pete is, and why doesn’t he get a life? Or, conversely, “If he feels so passionate about the situation, why doesn’t he do something other that troll and b***ch and moan? Something like volunteer for a service-oriented NGO, or a UN peacekeeping force, say in Darfur or Bosnia?”

    And then I think, “Because he’s kind of pathetic, that’s why, and would never lift a finger other than to type.”

  19. Scrapiron:
    One side of my family has been here since circa 1690. Yep, Amerind is definitely in there, once or twice, can’t remember. On the other side I have a Jewish great-grandmother. Guess I fit in.

    Stumbley:
    for some reason Pete rails at being called a troll. Does his post have anything to do with Neo’s post, any thread, or is it an attempt to hijack? I like what you think.

  20. On the links to Deans World blog – note that in the comments one or two people that actually know what they are talking about agree with what I wrote. You can not quote someone who doesn’t understand the math as proof for dealing with the math.

    We do not all necessarily have jewish people in our back ground. For some areas of the world you most likely do (just as most old US families have native american ancestors) – but it is doubtfull that a chinese family that lives in an isolated mountain area has any jewish ancestry.

    What we have is a common ancestor. Lets say we go back and have a nomadic hunting north african tribe. One branch splits off and goes east leaving settlers as you go. One of the branches eventually becomes Jewish, another Chinese, and aanother Japanese.

    Think of it this way – is you aunt or cousin an ancestor of yours? No – while related they could be mostly a completely different race than you through marriage.

    Ancestry only works as a binary tree in the very short term, very far and you and up with a graph – thus when you use binary tree logic you will get erroneous conclusions.

  22. Stumbly

    You are just what I expect to find on this blog. I am glad I’m here. You know nothing about me yet you would like to think you do. But worse yet, you attack me based on your assumptions about me. Why is that?

    Please join those of us that speak out to stop the madness that America has become. You are not powerless. The rest of the world will not sit idly by as our country continues along this horrific path.

  23. I’m hurt by pete’s gross malfeasance. Stumb isn’t the kind of person one should expect on this site. At least if the one comes from a Leftist viewpoint.

    Why is that?

    maybe because logic works. I know, I know. Everyone knows Stumbley, Ariel, and Neo-neoCon can’t use logic, but I think we just hit a quantum juncture personally. On one branch, lies the Left, one another branch, lies the right. Is the left right about the right not being able to use logic, or is the right, right about the left not able to use logic.

    One of the deductive premises for the world is that people will mind their own business. As with Darfur, people just don’t care. Not even when they have the power to help with little risk to themselves. How will people mobilize themselves to fight America, when they neither have the power nor are they safe from American reprisals personally? Human nature is too flawed to handle pete’s programs of purification, in my view.

  24. I see pete has reverted to troll type while I’ve been away. It can’t simply comment, but must capture and pervert the thread to its ends.

    I eagerly await it putting into action its program to not “stand idly by” since I adore target rich environments and area weapons and, as a simple minded American, am uncomfortable with the ambiguity of anything other than an “Us and Them” world.

    How do you suppose the entity that calls itself “pete” will become a target called pete. Something really dramatic?

  25. One of the very surprizing scientific news about human genealogy came from genetic survey of different race and etnic grops that is now possible by using polymerase chain reaction. Very small quantities of DNA can be tested and compared for regular patterns including hundreds genes. To avoid complications of mixing male and female genes, in these surveys used non-recombinating parts of genome, that is Y-chromosome to study male lineage of ancestry, and mitohondrial DNA, which is inherited only by female lineage. These studies proved that all nowadays humans do belong to ancestry of very small group of common progenitors. THey also allow to date branching of race and etnic groups and to build genealogical tree of these groups. It has also nearly concided with the tree of languages, built independently by methods of mathematical linguistics. Effect of alpha-male on population diversity also was recognized: there are more than 15 million direct male ancestors of Chingiz-Khan in different parts of the world, and hundred thousand ancestors of medieval Ireland warlord O’Neil.

  26. I had heard of a “genetic bottle neck” that had occurred in our species. H. sapiens must have come pretty close to the brink at one point. Would that be accurate to say?

  27. “H. sapiens must have come pretty close to the brink at one point. Would that be accurate to say?”

    No, it’s just the way population growth and genetics work. Again you can not think of this as working in a nice proper way.

    If it was the case that we were “at the brink” at some point there would be very very little genetic differences today (see the genetic variation of cheetah’s).

    In many cases (such as mitochondrial eve) we are talking *common* mother, not the only female alive. And, of course we are all decended from a relative small group of humans. The very first ones – by definition – had to be a small group. And given how we have always had wars and (even when not warring) you just have natural selection for recources it is most likely not even the very first humans as our most recent small group of ancestors.

  28. Your comment reminded me of a somewhat lengthy “essay” I posted a few years ago at Frontpagemag.com. It was within the context of the ongoing debate about slavery reparations. I’ll re-post it below, in case anybody’s curious.
    _____________________________________

    I think I tried to make this point once before, over a year ago, but let me address the issue again.

    To argue that one is a victim entitled to some sort of recompense because some of one’s ancestors suffered oppression is to employ a selective memory of history to engage in a self-serving fraud. When we trace our ancestors back in time, with each generation we regress the number of our ancestors grows by a factor of two – 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. By the time we have traced our ancestry back, say, 20 generations, the number of individuals from whom we are biologically descended is conceivably as high as 2 raised to the power of 20 (a figure that may be reduced somewhat by the fact that in many societies it is, or was, common for cousins to intermarry). 2 to the 20th power equals 1,048,576 people. Can any of us possibly account for who all of these people were, where they came from or how they lived their lives?

    No matter what our respective heritages may be, if we were to look at our pasts honestly, we would find that we are descended from literally every imaginable type of human being. Some of our ancestors were kind and some were cruel; some were intelligent and some were stupid; some were erudite and some were ignorant; some were brave and some were cowardly; some of our ancestors oppressed innocent people and some of them were themselves oppressed people.

    I’m a good example of that principle. I identify myself as Persian by heritage. Persians built huge empires by conquering many other different peoples – Ionians, Babylonians, Lydians, Egyptians, Afghans, Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis – and ruling them with an authoritarian iron fist. On the other hand, Persians have been conquered, brutalized or exploited at various points in history by Macedonians and Greeks, by Arabs, by Mongols and more recently by European colonial empires. Ordinary Persians, moreover have lived under the dictatorial hand of their own rulers, whether they were shahs or ayatollahs. Ultimately, when you consider my complicated past (a past which is no more complicated than anybody else’s), it makes no sense to call me either an “oppressed” person or an “oppressor”. I can truthfully deserve these labels based only upon how I myself treat others, or how I am treated by them.

    When a person is fond of emphasizing his connection to a particular ancestor or group of ancestors, he is engaging in a kind of narcissism. He wants to underscore that connection, because in some way it flatters him. If some of your ancestors were great artists, or brilliant scientists, or brave soldiers, you may be inclined to point proudly to th

  29. I guess my comment was too long, because it got cut off in mid-sentence. So here’s the rest of it. I apologize for the long-windedness.
    _________________________________

    ….When a person is fond of emphasizing his connection to a particular ancestor or group of ancestors, he is engaging in a kind of narcissism. He wants to underscore that connection, because in some way it flatters him. If some of your ancestors were great artists, or brilliant scientists, or brave soldiers, you may be inclined to point proudly to them, because the association in some nebulous way makes you feel that you are creative, brilliant or brave. You are unlikely to talk much about those other ancestors of yours who were artistically incompetent, scientifically clueless, or yellow-bellied cowards.

    In a politically correct society such as ours, the same principle holds for those who point endlessly to their enslaved ancestors. People who talk about how much their slave ancestors suffered don’t really give a rat’s rumpus about their ancestors, except insofar as emphasizing the historical connection can bolster the illusion that the slave’s modern day descendants are also in some nebulous way oppressed. What he gets out of this is firstly a confirmation of his delusions of moral superiority to those he labels his oppressors, and secondly he gains a certain power that we’ve talked about elsewhere, the power to manipulate people with guilt trips, and to wield this weapon as a way of squeezing concessions out of them.

    This is the kind of narcissism and selective memory that permeates the thinking of the reparations activists. What is so frightening about the implications of their behavior is that, given what I have just laid out about human ancestry, every single one of us could conceivably sue someone else for reparations to atone for injustices that their ancestors inflicted on ours.

    What kind of a world would be living in if everybody were running around incriminating someone else and filing litigation against him because of things that happened centuries ago? By the logic of the reparations people, I could sue my 2-year-old adopted Chinese daughter on the grounds that her 13th- century Mongol ancestors raped and pillaged my 13th-century Persian ones.

    You just think about the absurdity of that the next time Randall Robinson or some other smooth-talking race-baiter insists he’s got a good moral case for bilking the government or private corporations out of billions. And remind the fool that even if some of his African ancestors were slaves, it’s a REALLY good bet that some other African ancestors of his were slave owners themselves. Just as no one should have to pay for the bad deeds of one’s distant forebears, no one can rightfully claim an entitlement to anything, based upon sufferings incurred so long ago that no one living today could have had any influence on it whatsoever.

    Thank you for patiently allowing me

  30. Hi folks. When you see headlines like these what is your first reaction? Is it some manifestation of empathy? Or something else?

    Without a doubt my first thought was: holy crap, this guy sure goes out of his way to make Muslims look like savages. And at the same time interrupting a discussion about Jews. Dude, you’ve got major anti-Semitism problems.

  31. Thats a great point Justin. Pete uses these little snippets in an attempt to shame us ‘crypto-nazis’, yet it really only serves to highlight the threat imposed by Islamofascism.

    Pete, are you more likely to die in a car accident in Iraq than a terrorist attack? Wasnt that your argument for why we needn’t worry about it here?

    If we must be overtly concerned that “fighting terrorism only creates more terrorists” we might as well convert now.

  32. Chestertone once noted that there are two categories of peoples: those that read books and those that read only newspapers. Progress of mass culture in direction of sheer imbecility nowdays, it seems, created a new category: peoples who satisfy all their information requirements by glancing through headlines.

  34. Got a calendar today from the Holocaust Musuem. It was illustrated with various artifacts–diaries, pictures, letters, even a model of the Lodz ghetto–that belonged to Jews and others who were exterminated by the Nazis in various concentration camps.

    A quote from one letter in particular caught my attention. In this letter a Jewish woman in the Dabrowa ghetto, Tola Goldblum, wrote the following to her sister who was in Canada:

    “I can feel at this moment–the pain in your heart when you receive this letter. It was not our fault. We are innocent. OUR FUTURE IS LOST and it cannot be changed.”

    Tola, her husband and son died in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

    If we are not clear-sighted, resolute, ruthless and decisive, Islam will win its war against all Infidels, and if it does, we will be the ones whose “future is lost” and who will be writing letters like this and smuggling them out of the new ghettos and concentration camps or stuffing them in a hastily dug hole for someone in the far future to find.

  36. ” I saw an article recently that said that almost everyone alive today has some European royalty in their background.”

    As odd as this sounds coming from a Pacific Islander, I wonder if I happen to have any such blood. The Philippines was ruled by Spain for some time, after all, and my family has said that Spanish blood enters our bloodline at some point in the past.

    Although given the Chinese side of the family, it’s far more likely to have some ancestor from the Forbidden City than from any throne in Europe. Still, it’d be an interesting thing to research, if I ever found the time.

  37. Every American is “African-American.”

    In fact, every human being on the planet is “African-_____.”

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