One of the stories in our family is that when my grandfather went to marry my grandmother, one member of his family (it's never been said who) took him aside and said, "Remember to hold your head high. You are a Romanian and they are only Polacks". My grandfather used to take great delight in repeating this story in front of my grandmother. As long as none of her family were around she didn't mind, even joining in by saying, "The only thing worse than a Polack was a Litvak (Lithuanian)."
Perhaps thinking our family is descended from a long line of intellectual mystics, who under the rule of the Moors in Spain were elevated to positions of authority so great that one even was senior advisor to the ruler of Cordova, is just another sign of our snobbishness. Who wouldn't prefer claiming them as ancestors to saying we've just been scrabbling around for the last two thousand years trying to survive wherever they will let us live?
Although there is no proof, I keep stumbling across little things that revive my belief in the theory. I was sent a couple books by the Israeli author Haim Sabato to review, and he is a Sephardic Jew. His family had lived in Syria for two thousand years until they moved to Egypt and then Israel.
On the cover of the one book Aleppo Tales (Aleppo being the area where the Jews came from in Syria) is a picture of a family gathering. Staring up at me from the page are the faces of young women who are identical to my mother when she was their ages. I do mean ages, from toddler to it looks early twenties. All the young women look identical to what my mother looked like at those times in her life.
Just to make sure it wasn't me making something out of nothing, I handed the book to my wife to see her reaction. Her first words were, "They look just like that picture of your mom as a young child, and also that one of her as a teenager".
It's not really proof about anything, but it did make my heart beat a little faster for a few moments and revive my hopes that maybe we are indeed descendants of the wise and the gifted on one side of the family. It's a nice fantasy family history that every so often looks very real.
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