"It's pronounced, 'Frankensteen'!"

[Spengler]

"It's pronounced, 'Frankensteen'!" on the Spengler Blog


by David P. Goldman


DNA samples from several dozen relatives of Adolf Hitler indicate that the monster of the 20th century very likely had some Jewish ancestry, reports the Jerusalem Post.  The newspaper explains, "His father, Alois, was thought by some to have been the illegitimate offspring of a maid called Maria Schickelgruber and a 19-year-old Jewish man with the family name of Frankenberger."

[Alexis]

I have a personal mistrust of journalists and other non-specialists wildly (mis)interpreting genetic data to jump to striking conclusions in order to write an easy paper, and a short read of the Wikipedia article on Haplogroup E1b1b has strongly reinforced that mistrust.

Indeed, we can read that

Amongst populations with an Afro-Asiatic speaking history, a significant proportion of Jewish male lineages are E1b1b1 (E-M35). Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18% to 20% of Ashkenazi and 8.6% to 30% of Sephardi Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population

That however hardly makes E1b1b1 a reliable marker of Jewish paternal ancestry, since it is possessed only by a minority of Jewish men.

Moreover, the most commonly occurring subclade of E1b1b1, dubbed E1b1b1a, is

widely distributed in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, i.e. The Middle East and Near East "up to Southern Asia", and all of Europe The European distribution has a frequency peak centered in parts of the Balkans (up to almost 50%) and Italy and declining frequencies evident toward western, central, and northeastern Europe.

Gene E1b1b1 is quite common in South-Eastern Europe among populations without any known Jewish ancestry. This useful article links to information that

about 9% of the population of Austria carries the E1B1B1 gene

Hitler being Austrian, it should not be too surprising that he had this gene ...

Regarding the story about Frankenberger, the article reprints its debunking by Ian Kershaw:

There was no Jewish family called Frankenberger in Graz during the 1830s. In fact, there were no Jews at all in the whole of Styria at the time, since Jews were not permitted in that part of Austria until the 1860s. A family named Frankenreiter did live there but was not Jewish. There is no evidence that Anna Maria was ever in Graz, let alone was employed by the butcher Leopold Frankereiter

[Spengler]

Alexis,

I don't know much about DNA. Perhaps you're right. But I only write about these things for fun.

[Pastaneta]

Well, about these Jewish genes...

We were this summer for a few days in Salzburg. We heard the following story.

In the 1600s the prince archbishop of Salzburg had a palace built for his mistress Salome Alt, She was the daughter of the Jewish head of the merchants of the city, and she and the prince archbishop had 15 children, 2/3 of them surviving to adulthood.

At the time (this being the counter reformation time) the Church was considering letting priests and archbishops marry and she was considered by all like his wife. To the point that when he lost a political struggle and was imprisoned, Salome Alt got his money and could live without any problem.