Palin’s Jewish ancestry (Not)

(Note: Based on highly detailed genealogical information linked by Ron K., below, there is no basis to the claim that Palin has Jewish ancestry. See his further explanation of genealogical tables.)

According to wiki.answers.com, Sarah Palin is of half Jewish or even three quarters Jewish descent:

Sarah Palin’s mother (Sally Sheigam) was of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and so were both of her mother’s parents (Louise Sheigam and Shmuel Sheigam). Her father Chuck Heath can also be considered of Jewish blood because his mother, Beatrice Coleman, was of Jewish descent.

The story is also discussed at WorldWide Liberty, but with an ideological agenda of counteracting Jewish Democratic hostility to Palin over her Christianity.

Curiously, I said to a friend shortly after Palin was picked by McCain that I thought she had somewhat Jewish or Mediterranean features. But many Anglo-Saxons seem to be of a generic or quasi Mediterranean type, including medium to slight stature, brunette coloring, and prominent nose, reflecting, it is thought, the original Neolithic population of the British Isles, so I didn’t make anything of it.

- end of initial entry -

Speaking of Jews and Sarah Palin, here is an example of Jewish ethnocentrism so obnoxious it takes your breath away. Matt Littman at Huffington Post writes that he finds Palin unacceptable because, living in a state with only about 3,000 Jews, she probably hasn’t known any Jews in her life:

One [Jewish] person said to me that after the Georgia crisis, he was going to go McCain because McCain seemed safer on foreign policy. But when McCain picked Palin, he thought, “Are you kidding? What does this woman know about me?”

As a Jew, I don’t expect a candidate for our nation’s highest office to surround himself with Jews. I do, however, expect that they’d encountered a few along the way. And I believe Sarah Palin fails that most basic test.

Whew.

But a couple of paragraphs earlier, he had written this:

In a couple of weeks, I’m headed to a Jewish Center to speak as a surrogate for the Obama campaign. A McCain campaign surrogate will speak, too. A few weeks ago, I was worried about how the Jewish population was reacting to Obama. There is an enormous paranoia about Obama in the Jewish community. I’ve seen it at Temples, I’ve read it in emails, I’ve heard it first-hand. The fear of the unknown Obama is very disconcerting. Some of it has actually been pretty disgusting.

So Littman snottily disdains Palin because, he thinks, she hasn’t known any Jews in her life (though the assumption is idiotic since he has no idea whom she’s known in her life, and also she went to several different colleges and probably knew Jews there, and, as widely reported, she has an Israeli flag in her office) .Then he turns around and finds some of his fellow Jews’ fears over Obama’s possible lack of support for Israel “disgusting.” His rejection of Palin for utterly trivial, ethnocentric reasons is fine; but their worries over Obama for substantive reasons concerning Israel’s survival are “disgusting.”

Littman gets the Alan Dershowitz Chutzpah Award for “I’m a Jew, I Get it All My Way, and I Don’t Care What You Think about it.”

I guess Littman will be bent out of shape when he finds out that the insufficiently-in-contact-with-Jews Sarah Palin is of at least half Jewish ancestry herself.

- end of initial entry -

Ron K. writes:

I looked into this Jewish Sarah Palin claim, and found that no one making it has offered anything approaching evidence. Her dark looks probably come from an Irish grandfather, and the Mayflower claims of both her parents seem safe. (Most of those are on the “Sheigam” side!)

Here is a standard genealogy for Sarah Palin’s father and mother.

Note that the author bases part of his work on that of William Reitwiesner and Gary Boyd Roberts, two of the top presidential genealogists in the land, and whom I would trust long before an anonymous contributor at Wiki.answers.com, or anywhere else with “wiki” in the name.

Some sites are saying “Sheigam” was changed to “Sheeran” at Ellis Island. Any experienced researcher will tell you that kind of story is almost always bogus. Immigration officials copied the passenger manifests, which were filled out in Europe before departure.

Her mother’s father was Sheeran, not Sheigam, and he appears purely Irish. Her grandmaternal Gowers go back to Norfolk, England, not Lithuania. Her father’s mother was a Brandt, not a Coleman. (And even if she was, two of Saint Paul’s last three mayors were Colemans, but only one was Jewish.)

I went to Heritage Quest online and found her Sheerans and Brandts on the 1920 Census.

Anonymous claimants offer no verification, yet somehow “debunk” serious researchers? Compared to this, Joe Sobran is a Shakespeare scholar.

LA replies:

Thanks for this.

Who claimed to debunk serious researchers?

October 13

LA to Ron K.:

Do you have any insights into why someone would want to make up this whole thing, including her mother’s maiden name and her maternal grandparents’ name and background?

Also, those genealogical pages you sent me, while pretty clear for the first couple of generations back, get harder to follow further back in time, and the numbering system is confusing.

Also, it’s amazing that this much information is available. It seems it would take major investment of time to dig this kind of thing up.

Ron K. replies:

I don’t think the story was “made up” as much as it was wishful thinking. (There’s plenty of that among newbie genealogists, but it doesn’t survive long in the Internet age.) Someone saw a Sheigam/Sheeran connection somewhere, recognized Sarah’s mother’s name, and went with a hunch.

It’s not completely implausible. Look at John Kerry and Madeleine Albright. But in their cases, it was common knowledge there were mysteries in their parentage. In the Palin case, someone broke the most basic rule for researchers in any field—find out what is already known! They didn’t “debunk”; they didn’t know they had to.

But for the story to be true, three grandparents would have had to be misidentified, and in small places like Wasilla and Sand Point. Possibly, but not likely.

That numbering system is a traditional German Ahnentafel, or “ancestor table.” It’s very easy to navigate once you know the set-up. Going up the tree, an individual’s father has double that individual’s number, and his mother has twice-plus-one. Going down, divide by two for men, subtract one and halve for women, to get the child.

The number alone tells you the generation. Great-grandparents are 8-15, 2nd-greats 16-31, 3rd-greats 32-63, and so on; notice the powers of two. 4095 would be a ninth-great-grandmother in the maternal line; 4096 a tenth-great-grandfather in the male line.

Yes, it takes a “major investment of time” to make charts like that, but the New England Historic Genealogical Society has been around since 1845, so I think the time has been invested! Thanks to the Jesuits and Calvinists, who wrote everything down, French Canadians and Puritan-stock Americans have among the best genealogical records in the world for common folk. The completeness of Sarah’s chart is hardly unusual, and for the same reason it’s quite easy to find the cousinry of Madonna and Hillary Clinton to all these Canadian pop stars.

The extent of records varies widely by ethnicity. Blacks’ are terrible, Irishmen’s and Ashkenazi Jews’ not much better, Germans’ are good but hard to get hold of from overseas. It’s like surnames; Asians’ go back several millennia (which is why they have so few), Englishmen’s are 500 to 1000 years old; Scandinavians, otherwise so similar to the English, have only used them for a century. And the Icelanders still don’t have them.

LA replies:

I get it. Genealogists don’t have to start from scratch with Palin. They really just need the first three or so generations preceding Palin, and then hook into already established genealogies.

Ron K. replies:

Exactly. It’s like mining—lots of arduous digging and scratching on the surface, and then you hit the mother lode.

October 14

Ron K. writes:

The source of the Sarah-is-Jewish story is the “Voice of the White House” column on TBRNews.

Every other appearance flows from that one. I would take TBRNews with a grain of salt, even if it claims to have a “confidential DoJ report.” This is the same column that claimed Ann Coulter is a transsexual octoroon born Arthur Coltrane on a hog farm in Georgia (cf. last two paragraphs).

TBRNews is an unauthorized knock-off of the Barnes Review. I never thought I’d be reading Daily Kos, let alone linking to it, but this post uncovers the man responsible.

Oddly, this is the only Jewish or pro-Jewish site that bothered to ask, “is this true?” (There are numerous handy links in the comments.)

Here are both sides of SP’s ancestry on a single chart.

At least two names stick out. She descends from Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island and is credited with inventing freedom of conscience. (And I got to be the one to add her to the descendants section of Williams’s Wikipedia page. But Sarah’s own page is locked.)

She also descends from the sister of Joshua Tefft, the only New England colonist, and perhaps only American, ever to be drawn and quartered. He fought on the Indian side during King Philip’s War and was executed for treason. He claimed to have been an unwilling captive, but as Jill Lepore says in her book on the war, “For standing idly by while his “master” shot at English soldiers, Joshua Tift [sic] was either a traitor or a slave; either way, he was no Englishman.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 13, 2008 12:44 AM | Send