Kinship

Last Friday we had the pleasure of hosting for dinner a couple that my wife and grandson had met in Germany a few months ago. The four had attended a meeting of cousins, descendants of an ancestor whose existence has been documented in Germany during the seventeenth century. The cousin who came to dinner and my wife are related only remotely. You have to go back eight generations to find their most recent common ancestors, a son and daughter-in-law of that seventeenth-century forebear.

Our dinner guests are accomplished, interesting, and engaging, and I liked them immediately. I felt pleased to welcome them as members of our extended family. But how strange, I thought, to consider them kin, since the amount of genetic material my wife shares with the cousin who came to dinner is so small that the chances are good that any two people randomly drawn from the Ashkenazi Jewish population would be as closely related as they are. Perhaps I wouldn't be so willing to regard our guests as members of our extended family were they not such an attractive couple, but the notion of shared kinship gives their luster an added shine.

Why is the idea of shared ancestry so powerful? It holds together families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, and those nations whose populations are homogeneous in origin. American educational systems try, with questionable success, to convey a sense of shared ancestry, or at least they did in my day, when I learned about my ancestors sitting down with Native Americans for the first thanksgiving, although Puritan ancestry was as mythical for most of my classmates as it was for me.

I identify myself as Jewish, even though I'm not religiously observant and attend synagogue services only when compelled by a social obligation, as when a 13-year old boy, the son or grandson of friends or relatives, is called to the Torah. Despite my secular orientation, I feel part of a lineage that began in the distant past and extends, with my children and grandchildren, into the future. Some regard that lineage as mythical too, although genetic testing has found that more than 90% of today's Cohanim, members of the Jewish priestly caste, both Sephardim and Ashkenazim, share six markers in their Y chromosome, which of course is inherited from their fathers, going all the way back to their founding ancestor, presumably the Biblical Aaron, who lived more than 100 generations ago. This demonstrates that the ancestors of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews once lived in Biblical Palestine. I'm not a Cohen, but if a shared descent can be demonstrated for these Jews, it's entirely possible with me. But even if my remote ancestors never spoke Hebrew in Palestine, never went up to Jerusalem bringing temple sacrifices, it doesn't matter. I feel part of an ancient tradition and a kinship with all Jews everywhere.

Still, I wish it weren't so. I'd prefer to regard all humans as related to me, as of course, if you go back far enough, they are. Any man's death diminishes me, wrote Donne, who perhaps expressed the notion best, because I am involved in mankind: and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

In a world of infinite desire and finite resources, a world in which scarcity leads to conflict, group solidarity provides a defense against the aggression of others. Group solidarity makes us exquisitely sensitive to accent because it's such a good indicator of group membership, marking a speaker either as a member of our group or not. Whether or not suspicion of the outsider is inborn, it probably takes a saint to overcome it. This sinner can only try his best to do so, even if he's not likely to succeed. Even though I'm prepared to regard my wife's remote cousin as part of my extended family, I'm still not able to regard all humans as my kin. Still, it's worth a try. I can start by being more civil in arguments with those who hold different political views from mine during this overheated, poisonous political campaign. They are no less patriotic than I am and no less worthy of respect, even if they're not related to me or my wife within the past eight generations.