No one’s more English than me, right?
What do you get when you cross a German rabbi with the best pair of legs in County Kerry? It may sound like a joke from the politically incorrect days of my childhood, but there’s actually a serious answer. And it’s me.
One of my daughters recently took an Ancestry DNA test and the results were pretty intriguing, so I decided to follow suit.
It’s not that my origins were completely unknown to me. My mum came over to the UK from Ireland in the late 1950s to work as a nanny and, later, a nurse. She met my dad, who was a Jewish Londoner.
The interesting thing from my perspective is that I was born in a hospital in Earl’s Court (which sadly no longer exists), spent the first years of my life in Battersea and have lived within the Greater London boundaries ever since. If you met me, you’d probably conclude there was no one more English. I remember a student in Paris commenting on my name and accent (unmistakeably London middle class) and believing me to be the very epitome of Britishness.
And yet.
The fascinating thing about DNA is that it’s not interested in where you’re born, where you grew up, the school you went to or the job you do. It cuts through all that. And it reveals that someone like me — who pretty obviously ticks all the boxes for white British on every online form — is actually more European Jewish than I am English. And quite a lot more Irish than I am European Jewish.
I’ve always had an instinctive aversion to racism, which I consider a poison. But I’ve also been struck by its ridiculousness. The idea of racial ‘purity’ — so beloved of white supremacists — is a complete illusion. Many of us have a heritage which is rich and complex. And nowhere is this more true than in an island such as the UK, which has seen countless waves of immigration over the centuries.
My European Jewish heritage is pinpointed by DNA to Germany and the Benelux countries. We’ve been doing some amateur work on the family tree and from my great-grandmother Maria Davis, we’ve worked our way back to her grandparents — Maria Myers and Leman Zox. And old Leman married well, because Maria’s dad was a rabbi in Hamburg at the turn of the 19th century: Henry Henock Myers. My saliva sample didn’t lie.
The next step will be to delve a little deeper into my Irish history. It’s harder because records weren’t always great in the dim distant and even my grandmother was uncertain of her date of birth. But again, the DNA seems very precise. My grandfather reportedly said that grandma, who loved to dance, had the finest pair of legs in Kerry. And indeed, it’s to the south-western corner of the Emerald Isle that my DNA points. So maybe there’s an adventure and further investigation ahead.
Meanwhile, my younger daughter is training to be a professional dancer. Now, where did that come from, I wonder?
