Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
- Apr 7, 2018

Jewish? Yes & No.

Passover is the Jewish festival that celebrates the deliverance of Israel from the bondage of the Egyptians about 3,300 years ago. (That was a looong time ago.) Passover in 2018 began Friday, March 30 at sunset and ends today, Saturday, April 7.

My own sister married an Armenian/Turkish Jew, so her marital family with children is Jewish. But they are hard-hearted and have passed me over, for almost forty years now, not a kind word, not a penny to help me when I have been in need.

But this blog is not about them, this is my memoir. When I was about thirty years old my mother confirmed what I had heard as a child, that my maternal great-grandmother was a German/French Jew. In my early years I had already explored my maternal grandmother’s religion of Catholicism, reading the old and new testaments of the Bible through (Literally? Seriously?), taking a Catholic catechism class, and attending mass, but the demand that I espouse nonsensical dogma blocked me from full appreciation of Catholic pomp and circumstance. I could not be Catholic. True to form, I thoroughly explored this newly revealed Jewish connection, which was also confirmed by DNA testing years later. I took two quarters of Jewish studies at the University, I joined a No-Hebrew-Necessary congregation, and I took a Jewish studies class led by the well-respected rabbi of that congregation. I thought carefully for a few years, no, I could not be Jewish, no matter how much I responded to the intellectualism, the style of that religion. I would have had to have been raised to it, or brought into it by loving family members, neither of which happened. Not to mention that I do not have any aptitude for learning languages, my Latin being long forgotten through disuse (much like the language itself), and my French and Spanish being at the level of a two-year old (nouns and verbs), so Hebrew was lost to me.

Well, anyway both of those ancient religions celebrate with wine which I do not like.