Grandpa Was A Deity

“The journey I am about to take you upon began with my bastard birth and subsequent adoption. It emerged from a natural desire to learn more of ones root, ancestry, or genealogy than is available through the legal documents and guarded oral history which seem to have accompanied twentieth century adoption. All I really knew of my origins came from the original adoption papers: my birth mother was born with the good Irish Catholic name of Ryan, but her religion was unknown; my birth father had the surname of Schreck, was from Massachusetts and his religion was listed as Jewish. Thus, throughout my early years, my hyphenated identity was that of Irish-Catholic-German-Jew, being raised by parents who were Russian and Austrian Jewish. Their traditions – that you do not name a Jewish child after a living person, but only after the deceased so that their name “will remain alive in Israel” – indicated that, since the documents showed I bore his full name, my biological father had died prior to my birth. That reality was perfectly consistent with my being both the son of a Second World War soldier and a birth date that was also four months to the day from the Invasion of Europe. As you can see, I was a child growing up in light and shadow, with both known facts and facts which were unknown. But there were also those facts which were known to be unknown. I had two families, one I knew and one I had the names of, but did not know. I had a known religion, and one which were implied, but explicitly declared to be unknown by the person who should have known their own religion. There are things about our lives which we don’t generally consider. We are born into genetic lines and raised as part of families that endow us an identity built upon generations of ancestral history. Our ancestral history is composed national and religious identities which have changed during the course of world history. We can say we are English, but are we talking about the origin of our language and legal traditions, or our genetic heritage? Are we therefore Anglican – members of the Church of England – or do we belong to another religious group that has shaped the way our parents thought, and taught us to think? If English, does that mean our roots in Great Britain extend back before the Norman Invasion of 1066, before the Vikings in 793, before the Romans? Like autosomal DNA, each new culture was mixed to form a new historic genome defining who we are today. Our ancestral cultural environment defined our ancestors physical one, and so, even before we are born, our ancestral genome is at work influencing our potential future. The food that was customarily eaten defined the nutrients which nourished them as they floated within their mother’s womb; culturally customary sounds of music, speech, or even those associated with daily chores, were the first, and only, sounds a fetus has access to, and therefore can utilize, to guide the development of its neural connections. The very question of whether mom is culturally included, or excluded, from the intellectual environment of her family has an effect on those neural connections and the brain of the one who will emerge from her womb. Obviously, I consider and think about these things. But, any innate, or natural, curiosity I might have had in those areas was secondary to the curiosity about where my personal genetics had been and witnessed. That curiosity was stimulated by hours of sitting with grandpa Sam – Samuel Simon, my adoptive mother’s father – for whom I named two of my six children. Grandpa Sam’s stories of coming to America in the late 1800's; his tails of the America he had seen when he went to California; how experiencing the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake convinced him that life in New York would be less earth shattering. These things set my mind toward the way history, or historic events, affected my coming into being. On the other side of my adopted family there was a man I recall liking, but hardly had the opportunity to know – grandpa Philip. Philip was the same age as Sam, and had arrived at roughly the same time as grandpa Sam. But, whereas Sam had journeyed here alone, with only the ticket sent him by his older half-brother, Philip had been brought to America by his parents, and never went further west than the Hudson River’s Jersey shore. When Philip died, I was only ten; when Sam passed, I was twenty and had enjoyed many teenage hours “grandpa sitting.” Soon after his death, I learned that grandpa Philip was a Talmudic scholar, but decades would pass before I discovered his family line was directly connected to a long line of scholars whose origins went to one of the most famous of Hebraic scholars, The Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040-1105) – who claimed descent from a line that extended back to the Biblical King David. Through the use of gender DNA, and a brilliant daughter who gave me access to her Harvard online research facilities, I was able to make the genetic connections to historical events which form the basis for this book. In the process, I made a number of discoveries, and made new connections between well studied historical events and myths. Being, by adoption, in the line of The Rashi infers that I am connected to Beth-Lehem Judah the “City of David,” the Biblical City of Bethlehem in the tribal territory of Zebulun – the merchant tribe dedicated to support the scholars of Issachar. As merchants, the children of Zebulun had to be literate, traversing the various trade routes would have made them nomadic Hebrews; more important, their mandate was to cooperate both with each other, and those who engaged in purely academic pursuits. In a modern context, Zebulun represented the pragmatic scholarship of the economist, and Issachar represented scholarship which focused on the theoretical sciences, philosophy, theology and law.{b} This connection between merchant and scholar will take on its own traditional meaning when we get to the ancestral line of grandpa Philip and their curious acquaintanceship connection to the works of William Shakespeare. Our Starting Point You are about to embark upon a journey. The places, dates, times and events are real and established within the archaeological record. As for the people referred to, and those connected to the DNA line and genetic tribe we will be tracking, it should be remembered that their descendants are very real, and possibly your family line is among them. As for the rest, they were, at one time, real people who made a journey and had adventures which – while based upon real people and events – come down to us as mythology and elements of Abrahamic religious tradition. In many ways it is unfortunate that their lives were – like America’s Jim Bowie, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett – so colorful and so intertwined with history as to become legendary; eventually, intentional exaggeration combined with the usual simplifications, distortions, and confusion, we associate with the process that renders “men of renown” legendary. In many cases, the result is to place such “men of renown” outside the realm of “serious” historical discussion. Once they become mythological it is – to steal a phrase from the popular fictional TV character Adrian Monk – “It is both a curse and a blessing”. The curse comes from a form of thinking which disregards the dual relevance of myth as an emotionally tainted, or influenced, intellectual record of history within the context of the intended audience. The blessing? As we escape superstition, we trim that superstition – like so much fat encasing historical meat – and dissect the myth in a way which allows us to match the various components to their properly dated context and so reveal facts. In 1997, PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service) aired a two part documentary in which several noted historians flatly denied the possibility that Thomas Jefferson had produced children with his sister-in-law, Sally ...”