#My mother often claimed that we had Jewish ancestry and that a great-grandmother of mine was Jewish
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Oh this is scathing
#German memory culture is so fascinating#Also to some extent french#My mother often claimed that we had Jewish ancestry and that a great-grandmother of mine was Jewish#Turns out she'd based that on ''Women talking a weird language'' coming to visit her grandmother#anyway after a whole round of genealogical research we learned that i actually have an Austria-Hungarian great-great-great#grandfather#that is; my great-grandma was talking her mother's home language with cousins that were from three towns over#and they spoke very bad Serbo-Croatian amongst themselves and often just switched to french#but my mother constructed in her mind this whole thing about us being part Jewish and she used to be fascinated by#Woody Allen Roman Polanski Claude Lanzmann the Marx Brothers Jewish humor etc.....#(My mother also spent six months in Germany as a teen during student exchange. i blame them)#But yeah this idea that since i'm neurotic and i had a big nose i was somehow secretly Jewish was drilled into me#She also thought that since my grandpa is Andalusian he probably had some Sephardic blood#Which. What exactly is supposed to be meant here by blood ??? Völk ? Blut ? one-drop rule ??????????#anyway this brand of philosemitism is becoming more and more repulsive to me#Jews are not an enlightened scholar-priest-stand-up-comedian caste with magical blood. They're an imagined community#Same as every other nation; religion; family; culture. Like everybody else they are as good or bad or interesting as imagination allows#And if we have to do weird philo-ism of an outgroup devoid of content let us do what writers have done for 500 years and#Write about talking animals#I'd rather we all collectively hallucinate the houyhnhnms as the quirky fun minority rather than cast real people in that role#or the pigs Napoleon was part of or whatever
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