Thrilling encounters in pursuit of my hidden religious heritage

JANE CARO began exploring the missing links in her family’s Jewish history and discovered a genetic thread that raised questions about her entire ancestral lineage

WHEN I WAS a kid, I thought my family was normal. I think this is a pretty common delusion and perhaps growing up is about recognising how essentially peculiar most families actually are. Outwardly, however, we Caros were pretty standard in the Australia of the 1960s and 70s. We lived in a modest weatherboard in the burbs, my father was climbing the corporate ladder, my mother was a stay-at-home housewife and my two sisters, one brother and I all went to the local public school.

It took me much longer than it should have to realise that one of our profound peculiarities was the stark absence of any religious tradition or belief, particularly in my father’s background. My mother was raised as a Methodist. Her parents met when they both worked as Sunday School teachers in Manchester.

My father, Andrew Caro, met my mother, Catherine Booth, at a dance in that same city, when he was down for the weekend from Cambridge. He quoted from Jane Austen’s Emma to impress my mother. Typically, he got the quote wrong and my mother corrected him. From that intellectual and literary (and pretentious) moment a lifetime’s love story was born, not to mention me and my siblings.

The Caros were posher than the lower middle-class Booths; my maternal grandfather was a draper who’d left school at 13, my paternal grandfather was a public servant who – like his son – had graduated from Cambridge via Manchester Grammar School. During the General Strike of 1926, my maternal grandfather had manned the pickets, while my paternal one had driven a bus as a strike-breaker.

The fact that they both ended their lives at the exact opposite end of the political spectrum from where they’d started is stuff for another article. Nevertheless, posh and conventional or not, there was literally no religion in my father’s family. Nada. Zip. Nothing. And no memory of one, either. No one was rejecting or lapsing from anything as far as we knew. Belief in a supernatural being of any kind was just irrelevant, almost peculiar, a mystery to the rational, pragmatic Caro clan.

When my parents announced their engagement, my maternal grandfather was not pleased. He took one look at my dad – short, generously endowed with nose, verbal, expressive, clever, exotic surname – and decided he was Jewish. My parents laughed about this to one another. How silly, how narrow-minded of Alfred Booth to assume on such flimsy evidence that dad was a Jew. Not that it should have mattered to anyone if he had been, of course.

Nonetheless, the rot set in early. My father and his father-in-law would never have much of a relationship. Dad cordially disliked the man he always called “old man Booth” and was disliked in return. I suppose he felt it was hard to suffer antisemitism when you weren’t – as far as you knew – even Jewish.

And this was the early 1950s. Britain was still exhausted from winning a war that had shown the world the devastating effects of antisemitism and racism. In 1940, Alfred Booth had been called up aged 39 to serve in the Eighth Army. A younger Jack Caro, protected by his position in the Tax Office, stayed home.

Young Brits like my mum and dad – in their early teens in 1945 – watched post-war newsreels of the liberation of concentration camps with horror, leading to an implacable rejection of any kind of racial or religious prejudice, at least for a time.

Fast forward half a century to Sydney, where my parents had migrated when I was five because my ladder-climbing father was offered a job. My posh Caro grandparents stayed in the UK, my lower middle class Booth grandparents followed us, rather courageously, in their sixties, after their other child, my Aunt Margaret Burgess, and her family, migrated to Sydney, too.

By 2016, all my grandparents and my aunt and uncle were dead, but there was a large and growing contingent of Caros and Burgesses living in various parts of Australia. By this time, I was pretty sure that old man Booth had been correct in his suspicions. One reason for this is that I had been contacted by someone from Tel Aviv wanting to reconnect the far-flung Caro clan and – as it turned out – convert us back to the faith.

I was happy to hear more about my ancestors and lost heritage but far too content with my atheism to respond to her attempts at evangelising.

I also had a thrilling encounter with the British/Australian/Jewish actor Miriam Margolyes in the make-up studio at Channel Nine in Sydney when she’d plonked herself down beside me one morning. We were both being primped to appear on the Today show. When I realised who was sitting next to me, I dissolved into fangirl.

“Oh! But you’re Miriam Margolyes! I love you!”

“Thank you. Who are you?”

“I’m Jane Caro.”

“Caro? You do realise we’re probably related!”

“No! But, God, I hope so.”

Which gave me a bit of a clue, too.                      

Apart from occasionally pontificating on morning TV, I was by that time earning my living as a columnist and writer. I had – and still have – a regular rotating column in Fairfax (now Nine) media. It was in that capacity that I was asked to have my DNA tested to help promote an SBS program, DNA Nation.

They wanted someone to write a column about the experience and, probably due to my exotic sounding surname – well, at least it’s not Booth – I got the gig. I doubt I would ever have thought of doing it otherwise.

Dutifully, my father and I sent our genetic material for testing. His DNA had to be excluded so my mitochondrial (inherited from my mother) DNA could be isolated. Dad was smugly sure that his DNA profile would be much more interesting than my mother’s mundane Scottish-English heritage.

How wrong he was. While my father’s Jewish heritage was confirmed and his lost (hidden?) ancestry rediscovered, it was my mother’s remarkable DNA that had the boffins requesting my results be checked twice.

All modern humans are related to one African woman who lived 200,000 years ago. Since then there have been many mutations in our DNA, leading to the rich and varied racial mix that the SBS program was trying to map.

Most people who look like me, for example, are Haplogroup H, which mutated about 30,000 years ago and is most common in Europe. I look very like my mother. However, despite our appearance, our DNA is Haplogroup L1. It is 100,000 years old unmutated and black African. Today, it is most commonly found among African pygmies. Maybe that explains why the women in my family are  so short.

As Professor John Mitchell from La Trobe University explained to me at the time, “the dilution” as he called it, must have started between 300 to 500 years ago. Basically, that means that a black woman had a daughter with a white man who had a daughter with a white man and so on and so on.

At some point, the last woman who knew about our African heritage died and took her secret to her grave. Now, thanks to modern DNA technology, it has been unearthed.

All of this is deeply fascinating –  to me, anyway – but what I also find intriguing is that my parents found each other. Two people who had no clue about their real, if very different, heritage. We do not know if my grandfather Jack knew he had Jewish antecedents.

We do not know if he or his father – the mysterious Wilkinson Caro – or his father’s father were the ones who lost their religion and decided to lose their cultural and ethnic heritage along with it. Maybe it was in response to antisemitism. The rumour was that an ancestor had married the Bishop of Manchester’s daughter and so had to reject his own heritage.

I suspect this is unlikely. Maybe he wed a local curate’s daughter, who has grown in status with the telling. My paternal ancestor’s decision to walk away from their Jewishness – in all its forms – was relatively recent, however, and so came as little surprise. After all, old man Booth had quickly guessed it long ago. The mystery of my mother’s hidden – and by hidden, I mean buried deep in a place beyond memory – ancestors, however, was astounding.

My mother’s family always prided themselves on being direct descendants of Catherine Menzies, the daughter of the head of the Menzies clan. When my great grandmother – the impressively named Charlotte Catherine Clavering Grey – crossed the Pennines to marry handsome, dark-eyed Welsh tenor Henry Jones in the 1890s, she was horrified to discover he ran a pawnbroker’s shop in a rough part of Manchester.

She remained a petty snob all her life, desperate to differentiate herself and her daughters from the people around them. If only she had known how different they were!

In tribute to the daughter of the Menzies chieftain, there has been a Catherine in every generation since – Charlotte called her eldest daughter Catherine, my mother is Catherine, I am Catherine Jane, my daughter has Catherine as a second name as does her daughter. Perhaps my ancestors have been so tenacious in maintaining that connection because, unknowingly, they wanted to bury another.

I was delighted to discover this remarkable heritage. I am also troubled by it: 300-500 years ago coincides with the notorious cross-Atlantic slave trade. The courageous women who survived long enough to pass on their mitochondrial DNA may have endured much suffering. Given the persecution of Jews throughout the centuries, there may have been much pain in my father’s family history, too. Why else bury the past so utterly?

My mother lost her Methodism doing the ironing one day listening to the radio as three representatives of different branches of Christianity argued the toss. As they bickered, it struck her with the force of a revelation that gods were all nonsense and she’s been an atheist ever since. As I have said, my father’s family are agnostic. They neither know nor care.

I do not identify as either Jewish or African. To do so would be presumptuous in the extreme. I have no interest in converting to any religion. I am, however, delighted to discover how rich and varied my ancestors were and how resourceful they must have been to overcome prejudice, persecution and worse to make sure they and their children survived.

I give no thanks to any god for that survival. Instead, I am grateful for the tenacity and determination of human beings.

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Miriam Margolyes opens a door to the chamber of secrets (SMH)

Illustration: Avi Katz