Jewish Roots of Poland

Technically speaking, Christianity does have Jewish roots so you can say that all European cultures do have some Jewish roots to a certain extent. :-)


What exact time before the Nazi occupation of Poland were you referring to? Most scholars say that just before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, there were about 3.3 to 3.5 million Jewish Poles living in Poland. A total of 6 million Poles died during the Holocaust, half of which were Jewish.


It's a well known fact that at some time Poland did hold 3/4 of the total Jewish population. Poland was the center of Jewish culture. Do not even try to argue that this isn't true.


Haha! You know, based on my observations I do have to say that Jewish girls and Polish girls do indeed have big boobs most of the time. In my area, this isn't too common in other groups of people.

Jesus and his parents were Jews.

Jews didn't recognize Christianity as a religion, but merely as a weak extract of their own religion, which in fact it is. The godfathers of Christianity didn't like that, hence they made nasty remarks about the Jews. Too many idiots in history didn't see it as it was: an uttering of mere frustration at the refusal of the Jews to recognize and to convert to their religion, as it is a habit of Christianity to try and convert each and everyone to their religion. Hence you got all the crap that has been going on against the Jews throughout history.

>^..^<

M-G (rejects religion, but does not reject God, Jesus and Maria)

Jesus was a Jew?...Where did you get this idea?

Of course he was.

jesusisajew.org/Jesus_is_a_Jew.php


>^..^<

M-G (I know it doesn't fit in your views, but he was born a Jew)

Of course he was Jewish, but with a very strong Greek streak. But, that was common in Judaism at one time.

Jesus was a Jew. Being Jewish=Being a jew.

The interesting thing from the Jewish point of view are the Jewish Poles who rediscover their jewishness. I heard this story from friends in New York:

A jewish family in a suburb of New York employed a Polish cleaning woman who was in her 50s or 60s. On the first friday she worked there, while the cooking for sabbath was going on, she started crying for no apparent reason. When she tried to figure out what triggered the crying, she thought it might be the smell of the Chulent on the stove. The jewish family asked her if she ever ate chulent or knew what it was and she said she somehow felt that the smell was really familiar and it brought back vague memories of childhood.

After that, the woman and the jewish family did some reasearch among her relatives and they found out that this woman was born a Jew and was hidden during the war by a polish family. She was too young after that to have any memory of her original family, but the memory of the scent stayed with her. According to the story she decided to learn about Judaism and live as a Jew again. From our point of view a happy ending.

Maybe it's true, maybe not. But I'm sure stranger things have happened to Jewish children who were hidden.

yeah, blasphemy. tell'em joe!

But then again, the first notion that the world was round and not flat was considered a blasphemy as well.

>^..^<

M-G (yeah, go tell me!)

I'm curious as to what percentage of Jews in Poland either converted or intermarried (either by choice or force). I would have to think (contrary to popular belief) that it happened more than one thinks. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any affirmative information related to this matter.

yehudi

I remember watching a documentary on Poles discovering their Jewish heritage a while ago. If I remember correctly, it said that thousands of Poles have discovered in the past decade that they are Jewish or that they had very close ancestors who were Jewish. A lot of these cases were related to WWII and some of them had the same story as you mentioned; they were hidden by Polish families.

There has always been intermarriage. Anyone who thinks that he is pure Polish or Pure Jewish or pure ANYTHING (worldwide) is just wrong. As for Poland, there are the genes of Jews, Tatar Muslims, Armenians and many more.

This is the Poland that you don't know about:

Muslim:
Jewish:
Armenian:
Italian:
Commonwealth:

Actually the Jews in Poland left suprisingly little, the genetic research backs up history, Jews and Poles did not mix.

There was an odd Jew who became Polish, a few of them went on to become notable on various fields but in general both population lived side by side but not mingling on a more intimate level given how insular Jews were.

So no, an example of a Pole who has even one Jewish member of his family sometime in the past is exceptionally rare.

Another case is that some Jews polonised themselves relatively late but their numbers probably dont exceed thirty maybe forty thousand people in 38.5 milion country.

As for civlisation, Polish culture and civilisation borrowed heavily from Western traditions and married them with its own so even here Jews did not contribute anything significant.

The topic is just off it rocker.


4000 to be specific, there's sites and associations that are busy with that, approximately 4000 Polish citizens re-discovered their Jewish roots, again from a country of 38 milion people, hardly basis to speak of Jewish roots of Poland.

Considering the proportion of Poles to Jew in Poland I'd say most Jews have some Polish heritage.

The girl I've been seeing has a big nose and dark eyes, and mid-brown hair, but she's catholic. You reckon she may be a little bit Jewish? I thought the big nose could be slavic though, rather than jewish? Maybe I don't understand that right, someone explain please.

Having a big nose and dark eyes doesn't make you a Jew. What about gypsy? Arabic? Mediterranean? Black ancestry?

yeah, so maybe it's a slavic trait too? Just I always read it's a very common trait of the Jews, a big hooked nose, as she has

It's an ashkenazi stereotype created by Nazis.

Barr, you are not British, are you?

I am yes, so you think the big nose, is not a Jewish trait? Is it a slavic trait?

It is more likely for a Jew to have a big nose than for a Slavic. Middle eastern people tend to have rough features, while Slavs have more delicate ones.

By the way, get over your unrequited love. No one really cares about your emo feelings. Grow up and be a man.

And over 100,000 contacted the relevant agencies in the first couple of years of opening.

Not such a small number.

And out of said 100.000 approx 4000 turned out to actually have Jewish ancestors, from FŻP and they know their stuff.

Harasimowicz estimates there's maybe 50.000 polonised part-Jews in Poland which makes up less then 0.05% of the population.


And thats more correct, Poland when Jews came in numbers was already a stable and quite rich culturally and civilisationally, many habits and customs were invented in or borrowed from Poles but ethnically there was very little mingling.

Semitic genes are fairly strong and they would show up in the genetic map of Poland, they dont, in fact there's so few Poles with semitic genes that they fall into a gap of statistical error (0.5%).

Its common that Poles contact Jewish agencies, our families have been in turmoil during WW2 and nowdays many of us want our roots back and Jews were a large minority and they did recover many of their records but the actual number of Poles with Jewish roots is probably one of the smallest in the world as far as nations are concerned.

In fact despite all the wars Poles are one of the most (genetically as well) homogenous people in Europe.

Roots, remember aren't only about biological ancestry. Don't you think there's been centuries of cultural dialectic?

No, because Jewish culture had very little to offer, Jews themselves twisted the topic but the fact is for centuries Jewish culture was centred around sacrum, there was very little secular achievement and Jews by and large were uneducated masses and Jewish ghettos were uniformly poor.

Add to that that Jewish secular culture started to truly develop in late XIX century and you'll find that both cultures generally did not interlock and Jewish one being inferior to Polish (or in fact to any European culture) by principle of being less developed did not really contribute because for a very long time it had little to offer.

Ultimately after centuries of co-existence all we inherited from our Jewish citizens is a few synagouges, cemetaries and phrases in Polish thats as far as Jewish influence in Poland went.

If you want to look towards true contributors to Polish culture look to Germany, Italy, Hungary and Turkey.

Sokrates, do you have any credible sources on the genetic research that indicates that most Poles don't have any Jewish ancestors? I tried googling it but I'm not having any luck finding it.

Prof Rymuta from Genpol had an interview with Rzeczpospolita (his article was online) mail them they have an archive and an internal search engine they'll mail you back with the relevant article.

technopolis.polityka.pl/2008/zbadalem-swoje-geny

Another problem as pointed out here and in many other places is that quite a lot of Jews in Poland were not Jewish(semitic) at all, ethnically these guys were European converts or more specifically their descendants which would explain why the few Jews who did intermarry with Poles did not leave a semitic trace in our genepool, because they were ethnically Slavic, Germanic, Celtic or the mix of thereof and not Semitic, these genes are less stubborn and prone to getting diluted in Slavic-specific genes.

stupid discussion. naturally, if you go long enough back in history you'll find canibalistic *******, pedophile muslims, greedy jews or decadent romans beeing your ancesotors.

jews and poles lived, lets call it 30 generations together, with fooling around, premarriage pregnacy and so on, this meens going back in time, a pole had arthmetically ment 2^30=~1000000000 ancestors from that time, and this beeing more than humans existed back then, naturally every pole, except those inbreeds who lived in some closed villages, has jewish ancestors.

The Khazars probably didn't look like Europeans at all. They probably looked like Chechens and Georgians. They were a Turkic people. If the Ashkenazi Jews were descended from the Khazars we would be darker and more Asian looking. The reality is probably that the Khazars who became Jews (which was only the ruling class and not the whole population) assimilated with the other Khazars and stayed where they were, dropping Judaism. A few might have gone west towards ukraine and poland and eventually assimilated into the Ashkenazi communities who had spread from the Rhineland into the rest of central europe. I probably have more Polish blood than Khazar blood, but not much of either.

There's no such thing as half-Jews. Either your mother is Jewish or she simply isn't. Oh, and what exactly is Jewish? Is it a race? Or is it a tradition? Yup, it's a tradition. So to me, you're just another human being.

:)

Not really no. Most Europeans are descended from 3 major tribe groups not related to any of the above (Well Germanics are related to ancient Romans but thats through early interbreeding).

Genetic science disagrees with you sorry, more then 98% of Poles dont have any Jewish ancestor, they might have an European convert along the line but thats hardly an ethnic Jew.

Also there was hardly any "fooling around" the two groups simply did not mix, the cases where Jews did marry into a Polish family or vice versa were extremely rare.

@On Khazars.

At one time the majority of Jewish converts were indeed Khazars but in early and high medieval we're talking about European converts and their descendants mixed with said Khazar descendants.