At Passover I usually write at length about Jewish origins, from the Hill Country of Israel, to the Nile Delta to my own Ashkenazi roots in what is now Latvia near the shores of Lake Lubanas, where one of my ancestors took the name "Luban" when Jews in the Russian Empire took last names.

This year I have no new insights on Passover and, though I have been able to push my Luban ancestors back one more generation (finding my great-great grandfather Jankel Luban's father was named Enoch Luban), I have nothing really new to say about my Jewish roots.

Instead, during Passover, I am finding myself planning a trip to the villages in Germany my Lutheran ancestors came from.  read more »

This comes from the Jewish Heritage E-Report (June 27, 2008)
World News about Jewish Art, Architecture & Historic sites from the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM)
Edited by Samuel D. Gruber / Contact and send news items to
samuelgruber_at_gmail.com

Jamaica: Documentation of 18th Jewish Cemetery at Hunt's Bay
(Ainsley Henriques, Rachel Frankel, Anne Hersh and Samuel Gruber contributed to this article)  read more »

Race, ethnicity, culture, family...all important to people. But usually we think of these things completely separate from reality.

I have been reading several books that together have put some of this into perspective. Each of us are part of the whole sweep of human evolution, and we are all related in a very real, genetic way.

This man might be your ancestor:

(Ramesses II, king of Egypt, 13th century BC)

Yep, I bet lots of people today could, if only we had all the information, trace their ancestry back to this man. I would guess somewhere in the millions of people today are his descendants.

Go back far enough and we are all related. This is a fact. Or, more precisely, every little piece of our DNA ultimately derives from a common ancestor that can be traced back to some specific time and place.  read more »