Hispania Mater et Matrix
In which Teófilo attempts to disentangle his ancestral roots in Spain and waxes proud about his Basque and more remote Jewish descent.
A Confluence of Many Rivers
I am myself and the aggregate of all that came before me; a small sea where many rivers from the past emptied themselves; and myself the fountain of many other such rivers that will run into the future.
The hobby of genetic genealogy tells me the story of how my ordinary birth in Ponce, Puerto Rico has been thousands of years in the making. I discovered by myself that, though we think we all come from some discreet location and country, the reality is that one’s origins lay far into a past remote both in time and space.
According to the current interpretation of my genome made by Ancestry.com, 52 percent of my genes are of European origins, of which 46 percent are of Iberian (Spain and Portugal) origins. This is followed by 29 percent of my genes deriving from Puerto Rico’s indigenous population, the Taíno people. Last, but not less important, 19 percent of my genetic ancestry can be traced to Africa: 11 percent of my African genetic lineage can be traced to Northern Africa, a genetic population that also extends to southern Spain and which I conflate into my Iberian ancestry, raising to 57 percent in reality. The remaining 8 percent is from coastal, equatorial Africa, pointing to enslaved ancestors brought to the New World as chattel property against their will.
The majority European percentage explains my ordinary Mediterranean looks. Drop me off anywhere from Israel to Morocco, from Spain to Turkey and I would fit in until I open my mouth to talk. I’m optically white, with a light olive pallor that turns a sickly, very light grayish green under the winter months’ sun.
Basque Roots and Looks
My looks are unremarkably Mediterranean and, I believe, Basque. On my mother’s side my roots are deep in the Basque Country of northern Spain. Spain’s population, of course, is a product of vast migrations of people during the deep past, before the advent of written history. The Basques were among the first to arrive to what became Spain, resisting assimilation from every following migration wave including the major Indo-European migration wave from the Caucasus that gave modern Europeans and their descendants their appearance, as well as the mother-tongue of most contemporary European languages. They were all hunter-gatherers at first until the dawn of the Neolithic and the discovery of agriculture.
Mazel tov!
Of note, two-to-four percent of my genes are shared in common with that of European (Askenazi) Jews. This should not come as a surprise since Iberia had a substantive Jewish population from classical antiquity until 1492 when they were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism, or expulsion from Spain - but these were the Sephardi, for whom there’s no DNA test at the time of this writing. Many chose exile but many others chose to stay in Spain, converting to Catholic Christianity. Many of these conversos or their descendants then migrated to the New World where social stratification was more porous. In America (North or South) they could hide their Jewish ancestry and be left alone by the ever-vigilant Spanish Inquisition.
I’ve received “Jewish genes” from both my father and my mother’s lineage. I remember my maternal grandfather say to me that his wife, my maternal grandmother, was a descendant of sefarditas, but other than his lore, I have no documentation to prove Jewish ancestors after the XVI century, when the Portuguese Judaeo-Converso Baltazar Francisco Mendes Castanho de la Sousa, joined the Spanish conquest of Mexico. His grandson, Lucas García de Torres, relocated to Puerto Rico during the following century and settled in San Juan. His descendants would run into my maternal line in the years ahead.
A Child of Two Covenants
I make this detour into my Jewish ancestry to show how proud I am of it. I am proud of all my ancestral lineage but I have a soft spot for those who have suffered oppression - the Jews, the Taíno, and the African ancestors as we’ll see further ahead in this essay. Now the Jews, as we know, are descendants of Abraham and I’m just thrilled to be that, debates about the historicity of Abraham notwithstanding, for being of Jewish descent makes a distant cousin of Jesus of Nazareth, his parents, and all of his disciples.
It’s said that St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, used to say that he wished he had been Jewish to have the honor of being from the same race as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. That’s how I feel. I thank God I’m the child of two promises, the one He made to Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars on the sky; and the one of salvation and transformation made by that other Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Glory and thanks be to God in the highest heaven.