Sunday, August 12, 2018

 

Prague: Possible Meeting Place For an "Impossible" DNA Match: Jew and Gentile




      Nadene Goldfooat                                                 

We have a DNA match found on GedMatch.com that must go way back to Prague, as her ancestors were from Bohemia. I'm talking about my only grandson's other grandma.   I'm trying to figure out how far back it goes, so it's important to look at the history of Jews in Prague. This is the first match outside of the Pale of Settlement and goes back much farther.   

 Her DNA matches 7 of us in our family.  The largest total on one of us was 30.5cMs.  The largest segment was 6.1cMs.  She had 11 matching segments with 10 of them under 5cMs.  The largest SNP was 877.  I have a feeling that each of us had our own pathway of matching this lady.  
                                                   The Jews in Rome thus wound up in Northern Italy, and from there spread out to Bohemia, Moravia and Poland.  Prague, Bohemia/Czechoslovakia, Cracow, Poland which is near the Czech Republic  and Lublin, Poland became Jewish centers after such German centers in Worms and Mainz, Germany in the 1000s.  
                                                             
Prague
.  The area of Prague  became the seat of the dukes, and later kings of Bohemia.  Prague contained an important slave market.  Jews had come to Prague in the 10th century as traders.   
                                                     
Duke Wenceslaus I (921-935) became a saint.  

 Prague was an important seat for trading where merchants from all of Europe settled, including many Jews, as recalled in 965 by the Hispano-Jewish merchant and traveller Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub.  Under Holy Roman Emperor Otto II the area became a bishopric in 973. Jews fought against the attacks of the Crusaders there in 1096.  They suffered from severe persecution and many were forcibly baptized by the Christians.  Things got a little better by the 12th century.  
                                                   

Until Prague was elevated to archbishopric in 1344, it was under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Mainz, Rhineland (Germany).  The Old New Synagogue of 1270 still stands.   
                                                            

Today of course,  Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic.  It used to be called Czechoslovakia. Many Jews had fled to Czechoslovakia from eastern Europe at the time of the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648 in Poland when 744 Jewish communities were wiped out, but ghetto regulations continued to be enforced and even the number of marriages were restricted by law.  Maria Theresa decreed in 1744 the general expulsion of Jews. Jews were then fully exiled from 1745 to 1748, and were only allowed to return after promising to pay exorbitant taxes.  They had to continue to live in ghettos.  By 1848, the Jews of Prague were granted full equality and 4 years later in 1852 the ghetto was abolished.  
                                                    
Bohemian cultural Region 
This is when Jews became interested in the German culture and less about the Czech culture.  Then the geography changed, because in 1938, 15,000 Jews from the Sudenten district (The Sudetenland is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans) ceded to Germany and sought refuge in Prague.  Anti-Semitism was running rampant in Germany by then.  A month later, the liquidation of the Prague Jewish community began.  There were 65,000 Jews in Prague in 1942 with about 25,000 being refugees and all were exterminated by 1945.  

What amazes me is that there was a small Jewish community there with 1,400 Jews , subservient to the Communist regime who had taken over until the 1989 revolution.  Since 1989, Jews have been living without malice, probably up until now since it's spreading all over the world again.  Tourists have been coming and viewing the magnificently preserved synagogues and cemeteries, rare finds in Europe as the 2nd World War destroyed so many.  

Resource:  https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-printing/
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/roman-rule-63bce-313ce
https://www.jta.org/1969/04/10/archive/prague-daily-warns-of-mounting-anti-semitism-in-czechoslovakia-asks-ban
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39973195

# posted by Nadene Goldfoot @ 4:15 PM
Comments:
Great!!! We are from Horovice, near Prague.
Bohemia. :) Thanks, Neal H. Hurwitz NY NY
# posted by Blogger nealhugh : 6:11 PM
 
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