On being Jewish

Recently, I was happily surprised to learn that a Pinay like me has Jewish antecedents. This was when my eldest daughter, who knows everything (she studied at Philippine Science High School in Quezon City and at Yale University), found an online link from the National Genetics Institute in the United States that can identify one’s racial strains.

It seems that my paternal grandfather, who hailed from Memphis, Tennessee, had Jewish blood from the Ashkenazi tribe. (With a surname like Taylor, one would not have easily connected that with Jewishness, like one would with “Rosenberg” or “Baumgartner”).

Back in the days when the United States was experimenting on its only colony, my kano Lolo arrived in the country after enlisting in the US Navy. He ended up being demobbed in Cebu where the inevitable happened: He married a Cebuana and produced 10 children, the eldest being my father. My lola was surnamed Alferez and could possibly have descended from Arab traders, with “Al” in a surname indicating Arabic links.

Since there was no DNA testing in those days, mysiblings and I had no idea that Jewish blood ran in our veins. We knew we had a Spanish grandfather as well as a Chinese great-grandfather on our maternal side. The rest of our bloodline is, of course, Malay mingled with Spanish on my mother’s side. Her grandfather came from Asturias to seek his fortune in Spain’s Asian colony, and settled in Tayabas.

So this is why I feel like a mélange, a real halo-halo. It’s more of a mix than that of Barack Obama’s lineage. Soon after he became US president, he described himself to a New York Times interviewer as “a mutt like me.” Indeed, Pinay mestizas like me know we’re mutts, or mongrels. It’s a mixed blessing.

I could wake up one day and put on jeans and speak through my nose if I felt kano; or put on a whirly skirt, click some castanets and speak kastila; or line my eyes singkit- style, put on a cheongsam and mince around. All depending on my mood.

Many years ago, my older brother Danding, whowas born with very wavy (almost kinky) hair, liked to say that our family surely had African-American blood. His reason was that since our paternal Lolo came from the US South, he might have had black ancestry. Unfortunately, Danding died before my daughter made the discovery about our having Jewish blood, with no African connections at all.

Today, I feel some pride about the revelation of familial Jewishness, but I also feel sad because of what keeps happening in Israel and Palestine. That tinderbox of a region generates empathy for the Palestinians, whose land was usurped, while it inspires admiration for the Israelis who’ve carved out a prosperous fertile place in the desert and populated it with refugees who fled from Nazism. And I’ve read of Israelis engaging with developing countries by providing technology and aid. A piece in the Inquirer once reported on a Filipino agriculturist going to Israel to learn new techniques to enhance our tropical produce.

The nice thing about learning I’m partly Jewish is that I somehow feel connected to famous folks like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Anne Frank, Sergey Brin (the Google creator), even comedian Woody Allen (original name: Allan Stewart Konigsberg). But I feel glad that I’m fortunate to have been born in a country that has welcomed immigrants from around the world who’ve integrated and survived a succession of mendacious administrations, to become a fine example of multiculturalism.

———— Isabel T. Escoda has written books on Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong and has contributed to the Inquirer since the 1980s.