Nadene Goldfoot
In the nineteenth century, religion played a less important role in Germany. It was replaced by theories about the differences between races and peoples. The idea that Jews belonged to a different people than the Germans, for instance, caught on. Even Jews who had converted to Christianity were still 'different' because of their bloodline.
My answer to the Nazis about whether Jews are different from other races and peoples or not is because they believed we were very different enough and evidently they didn't like it as they plotted and worked at eradicating all Jews in the whole world.
The Nazis considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior “Aryan” race. They saw the so-called Aryan German race as the strongest, and most valuable race of all. They had lost WWI and were trying to give them a shot in the arm of pride, evidently, which had been tarnished. It's sad to think that it all depended on winning wars or not. It's harder to accept that we lost 6 million people because of their lies.
Scientific fact shows that there is no such Aryan race, by the way.
They thought Jews belonged to a separate race that was inferior to all other races.
Actually, a good part of German men's Y haplgroup is either R1b or R1a and even more I. I is found in most present-day European populations, with peaks in some Northern European and Southeastern European countries. Haplogroup I appears to have arisen in Europe.
According to the Nazis, Jews were not Aryans. ( By saying this they were denying them the right to citizenship--taking away their equality.) Jews had lived in Germany since Roman days since they have found Jewish soldiers in the Roman garrisons. By the 9th century there were town with lots of Jews such as Metz. In the 10th century Worms had many Jews.
Here's where Reformed Judaism didn't help those Jews at all. Nazis didn't care if we were Reformed, Conservative or Orthodox Jews. We all were destined for the gas chambers or being shot like in a shooting galley. One Jewish grandparent and you were doomed.
The Nazis believed that the presence of Jews in Germany threatened the German people. They believed they had to separate Jews from other Germans to protect and strengthen Germany. The Nuremberg Laws were used as an important step towards achieving this goal.
According to the Nuremberg Laws, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a full-blooded Jew. A grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community. Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion (Judaism), and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews. Your parents could be assimilated, maybe even Christians, but those grandparents !
The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was a law against what the Nazis viewed as race-mixing or “race defilement” (“Rassenschande”). It banned future intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and people “of German or related blood.” The Nazis believed that such relationships were dangerous because they led to “mixed race” children. According to the Nazis, these children and their descendants undermined the purity of the German race. They admired or thought of themselves as blonde blue-eyed people, a standard set for themselves; yet Hitler himself was the opposite.
This legal definition of a Jew in Germany covered tens of thousands of people who did not think of themselves as Jews or who had neither religious nor cultural ties to the Jewish community. For example, it defined people who had converted to Christianity from Judaism as Jews. It also defined as Jews people born to parents or grandparents who had converted to Christianity. The law stripped them all of their German citizenship and deprived them of basic rights.
According to our own basic Jewish law, one is Jewish if they had a Jewish mother. It was mothers who not only gave birth to the child, but raised it as well, educating the child and how they acted was copied by the child.
According to the Civil Service Decree, a German could be classified as "non-Aryan" if only one grandparent was Jewish. To further complicate the definitions, there were also people living in Germany who were defined under the Nuremberg Laws as neither German nor Jew, that is, people having only one or two grandparents born into the Jewish religious community. These “mixed-raced” individuals were known as Mischlinge. They enjoyed the same rights as “racial” Germans, but these rights were continuously curtailed through subsequent legislation.
Well, my answer is that I'm Jewish and proud of it. I'm one of the 2% Jewish population making up the USA, and am also part of the rare 0.02% of world population of Jews. I'm proud to have genes from Jewish people, and have found through DNA that I have genes that go back to Rashi, born in 1040, a very famous French rabbinical scholar who commented on different pages in the Bible. Jews have had so many bottlenecks in our history and I'm here and alive ! That's an accomplishment and a gift of life. l'chaim ! So many Jewish lines of families existing for generations since Moses were wiped out. So few of us left to carry the ball and represent the Jewish people.
I'm also Nationalistic and view Israel as deserving of its existence as well, being I now have Israeli citizenship after living there for a little over 5 years. But as far as being different, it's in the genes and what they carry for me from my ancestors. Everyone's genes have nucleotide bases and almost all (99.9%) are exactly the same in all people; and-not get this shock, Mr. Nazi, 97% of our nucleotide bases are the very same as the chimpanzee's.
The question should be whether environment or genes decide on our personality, our decisions, our politics and beliefs. My Jewish genes certainly seem to be helping me along.
When Marie Jana was born, her father was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. The signing of the Munich Agreement in September 1938—and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia by Adolf Hitler's troops—forced the family into exile because of their links with Beneš.
Josef and Anna converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1941. Marie Jana and her siblings were raised in the Roman Catholic faith. In 1997, Albright said her parents never told her or her two siblings about their Jewish ancestry and heritage. I had always heard that her birth parents had died and she was adopted.
However, such as person as the past Secretary of State, was Madeline Albright, who didn't know of her Jewish heritage until the Washington Post told her. She has decided to remain a Catholic. So with her, it's all environment, she thinks, probably. I think her skill comes from her genes, however. I'm a big proponent of genes having much to do with us. Environment, in my opinion, can magnify or deter our skills. It can squash all the good that our genes can give us if bad enough, though many of us have risen out of the ashes of the Holocaust from baby to adulthood.
I've been thinking a lot lately, and see squashing our religion as reflective of losing our values given to us through our genes, however. I see Jews off track who have given into Hellenization. Perhaps we were protected by our history of values found in our religion; that fence around us like the kashrut laws keeping us in remembering that we have standards to live up to. Our job since the beginning has been to set a good example. It's a heavy expectation considering all that has happened to us.
