Happy 36th Birthday To Me! And Have I Been A Secret Jew This Whole Time?
A few quick reflections on a life well lived
Born at 4:23 AM on October 22, 1988 in Boston, Massachusetts. It's been a wild ride and it just keeps getting more exciting.
Thank you to everyone who has made these 36 years memorable, dangerous, challenging, difficult, amazing and legendary.
Above all, thank you to my parents, who, as you can see below got the party going.
Since then I’ve been to dozens of countries, traveled most U.S. states, lived in five of them.
Most recently I went to New York where I learned quite a bit about my past.
I’ll have more on the strange things which have been happening to me and all the new friends I’ve met from this Substack and X.com but thank you everyone.
Oh and before you go I recently learned some interesting family history.
I wrote a bit about Christopher Columbus here and what the new revelations that he’s Jewish really mean.
A Chabad-affiliated friend wrote to me and asked me if I had considered that I, too, might be Jewish.
So I did some digging. Turns out that maybe I am Jewish after all.
Sarah Grace Ramier was my great-grandmother Margaret Ellen Dow's grandmother. She was born in Bonaventure, Quebec, Canada -- which is where all the Acadians were deported to along with Louisiana.
Do you think Mike Johnson might also be a Secret Jew? What about Bill Barr? Discuss amongst yourselves. Johnson is more evangelical than the evangelicals and Barr is more Catholic than the Catholics — both tells of being something else. My own family solved this issue by having the girls raised as Catholics and the boys raised as Protestants. Strange stuff.
Anyway Sarah’s father Pierre came from St. Brélade, Island of Jersey -- the exact location where there exists today the only synagogue on the island. Pierre was born in 1795 — the year that Napoleon took power. He came to Quebec and died in America before being sent back to Quebec to be buried with his wife.
You can visit their gravesite which is in Port Daniel, Quebec, Canada.
This is the earliest mention of the Ramier surname. It means “wise councilor,” a role I’ve tried to do over the years. (Interestingly a Buddhist monk once told me that I was going to be the best friend and advisor to the most powerful man in the world.)
Did they hide their faith? Or still practice it covertly? This might also help get a sense of the history, which is often a lot more interesting than conventionally known.
The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Spanish Jews and the exile of around 150,000. The Huguenots and Acadians who settled in Colonial French Canada are assumed to be of Christian faith and ancestry. To support this hypothesis, the researcher uses a novel combination of methods drawn from historical records and artifacts, genealogies and DNA testing. In recent years, this combination of methods has led to the discovery that several of the Plymouth Colony settlers, Central Appalachian Colonial settlers, and Roanoke Colony settlers were of Sephardic Jewish origin. Thus, using the new methodology of ancestral DNA tracing, the researcher document that the majority of Huguenot and Acadian colonists in French Canada were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry. They are most likely descended from Sephardic Jews who fled to France from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1300s and early 1500s. The researcher additionally propose that some members of both groups continued to practice Judaism in the new world, thus becoming secret Jews or crypto-Jews. The researcher also finds evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in both groups.
Many of the Jews who stayed behind on the Isle of Jersey were rounded up and deported to France during the Nazi occupation of Jersey. Though none of the Jews sent to the Nazi concentration camps died I’m awfully glad Pierre got on that boat to the New World.
For what it’s worth we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of DNA pin pointing using genetics in the future.
Take a look at this fascinating abstract a friend of mine sent me about similar efforts in Russia. Here the Russians dug up and sequenced an old king.
The Rurikids were the reigning house of Rus’, its principalities and, ultimately the Tsardom of Russia, for seven centuries: from the IX to the end of the XVI century. According to the Primary Chronicle (the Tale of Bygone Years), the main chronicle of Rus’, the Rurik dynasty was founded by the Varangian prince Rurik, invited to reign in Novgorod in 862, but still there is no direct genetic evidence of the origin of the early Rurikids. This research, for the first time, provides a genome-wide paleogenetic analysis of bone remains belonging to one of the Rurikids, Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich (?–1294), the son of the Grand Prince of Vladimir Alexander Yaroslavich Nevsky (1221–1263). It has been established that his Y chromosome belongs to the N1a haplogroup. Most of the modern Rurikids, according to their genealogies, belonging to the N1a haplogroup, have the most similar variants of Y chromosomes to each other, as well as to the Y chromosome of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich. Genome-wide data of the medieval and modern Rurikids unequivocally indicates that they belong to the N1a haplogroup of the Y chromosome, starting at least from the XI century (since the time of Prince Yaroslav the Wise). All the other alleged Rurikids, both ancient and modern, being carriers of other haplogroups (R1a, I2a), possess high heterogeneity of the sequence of Y chromosomes, meaning that we cannot confirm their common ancestry. The most probable ancestors of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich in the male line were the men who left the burial ground Bolshoy Oleny Island on the coast of the Kola Peninsula about 3,600 years ago. The reconstruction of the genome of Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich indicates the contribution of three ancestral components to his origin: (1) the early medieval population of the east of Scandinavia from the island of Oland, (2) representatives of the steppe nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes of the Iron Age or the early medieval population of central Europe (steppe nomads from the territory of Hungary), and (3) the ancient East-Eurasian component. Reliable statistics were also obtained when the Scandinavians were replaced with the Medieval Russian Slavic populations of the XI century. Thus, for the first time, we have shown the complex nature of interethnic interactions in the formation of the nobility of medieval Rus’ on the example of the ancient Rurikid.
You could imagine a world in which all these historic figures are sequenced and people could upload their DNA to see how closely related they are to some of the historic greats.
Might this type of a project we work on with the Smithsonian?
And given that royalty is still very much still with us might these sorts of mapping projects actually begin to be necessary for national security?
For what it’s worth I’m investigating my own White Russian lineage and hope to find out more there. If you have any ideas please get in touch.
I’ve long believed that it’s actually a national security threat that you don’t know your genetics. The more you study your family the sharper you will be.
We need to know who is who, especially if we’re going to have a democracy.
Have a fabulous day! Don't worry, you aren't very old ;)
Happy birthday! ❤️