[Cross=posted at
RaisingKaine]
George Allen has a fascinating family history--one that his carefully contrived persona as a rural white working-class Virginian seems deliberately designed to obscure.
Yet evidence has begun to emerge that far from being a source of understandable pride, his family history has caused Allen to play deliberately to antisemitic bigotry.
As Eve Kessler reveals in an
article in yesterday's
Jewish Daily Forward, Allen's mother comes from "the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family. Her father, who was the main importer of wines and liquors in Tunis--including the Cinzano brand--was known in France, where he lived after World War II, as part of the family, according to French Jewish sources."
Well, if Felix Lumbroso--for that is the grandfather for whom Allen was named, is it not?--was an importer of wine and Cinzano, he surely brought more happiness to the people of Tunis than his faux-Neo-Confederate grandson has ever brought to the people of Virginia. Those broad Cinzano umbrellas are the signatures of European outdoor cafes--a far more welcoming banner than George Allen's revered Confederate flag.
There's more to be proud of. "Among the most famous members of the [Lumbroso] family," Kessler has discovered, " . . . was Itzhak Lumbroso, an 18th-century rabbi and rabbinic judge who wrote a commentary on the Talmud, 'Seed of Isaac,' that was the first book printed in Hebrew in Tunis."
Others in the family settled in Livorno, Italy, whose Jewish community "became wealthy and powerful traders, setting up branches in Tunis and ransoming Jews captured by Barbary pirates." H'mm--a family history that includes pioneering international business success and rescuing Jewish captives from Islamic kidnappers--you'd think it would be something a Republican senator would be delighted to acknowleddge, wouldn't you? At least Allen acknowledges the Italian connection, Kessler notes--but not its Jewish angle.
Lumbroso grand-pere has a more painful distinction, however. As Allen's sister recalled in her notorious (and now disavowed, disavowal of one's past being apparently a family habit) memoir, "'the Nazis took away my mother's father'" when they invaded North Africa, although as Kessler notes, "he escaped from harm."
A distinguished Jewish family history stretching back centuries, success in international markets, suffering for one's identity under the most hideous regime in history--definitely something to be proud of, right? And in the shameless manner of most polititicans, to tout as a boost to one's electoral appeal, yes?
Wrong. Not only does Allen fail to acknowledge his Jewish heritage--he apparently actively misleads people about it.
I hasten to add that Allen may be entirely innocent here. Perhaps Kessler's research, and those European Lumbrosos, are simply wrong, and Allen's family has either never been Jewish or (like mine) converted to Christianity many generations back.
But there's no evidence of that to date, and if it's true, perhaps Allen needs to come out and say so. Because right now there is evidence beginning to mount that he is deliberately suppressing his Jewish heritage.
Here's how he seems to be crafting a false family history just as he has created a false personal history with his cowboy boots and Confederate flags:
1. He has replaced the reason for his grandfather's imprisonment--his Jewish identity (which, by the way, would not have depended on adherence to religious Judaism)--with a Republican fable. According to Kessler, "Senator Allen told the Richmond Times Dispatch in 2000 that his grandfather was imprisoned because 'he sympathized with the Free French and the Allies and coveted the concepts of freedom of thought, expression, religious belief and enterprise.'" Not a word about the fact that he was imprisoned for being Jewish.
2. He has privately objected to journalists referring to his Jewish background and attempted to induce them to omit references to it from their publications. As Bob Gibson of the Charlottesville Daily Progress tells the New Republic's Ryan Lizza, "the only time that George Allen ever wanted a correction from me in 27 years of covering his races was when I wrote about his mother's Jewish family origins. He insisted, through a press secretary, that his mother was raised a Christian."
Whether she was raised a Christian is irrelevant--though Eve Kessler raises doubts about the claim. For as Kessler also points out, "If both of [Allen's mother] Etty's parents were born Jewish--which, given her age and background, is likely--Senator Allen would be considered Jewish in the eyes of traditional rabbinic law, which traces Judaism through the mother."
So why doesn't George Allen want people to know that he is Jewish? And more importantly, why should we care--isn't this just a personal matter, irrelevant to politics?
It's true that the hidden, or little known, Jewish heritages of Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, and Wesley Clark have recently made fascinating news. And Allen's Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, has written a splendid and revelatory celebration of his own, very different ethnic heritage. But if George Allen doesn't want to make a big deal out of his Jewish heritage, that might be his private right--except for the fact that his already established identity as an admirer of white Supremacists (Confederate and Neo-Confederate) and caster of contemptuous racial and anti-immigrant slurs leads inexorably to a far darker conclusion:
George Felix Allen doesn't want people to know that he is Jewish because some of the people he wants to appeal to, the people whose votes he most wants, the people he chooses to identify with politically, the people he agrees with, are antisemitic.
And so, perhaps, is he.
On this one, truly, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But only George Allen can do that--and right now, he's continuing a lifetime of silence that smells increasingly like the sickest kind of shame.