Originally A Reply To a Quora Comment: Prejudice Against Redheads Isn’t Just An Anti-Irish “Holdover”

 (PS If you knew all of this before, read this just to nonetheless refresh your memory—and if you’re mad about it, nu? Ikh bin a Yidishe froy.)

That could be a part of it, although Anti Semitism was as well. Only later, for example, did I discover why it was a big deal that my granduncle Francis was known as “Big Red” in contrast to my granduncle Tony (z”l), “Little Red”—red hair, which both Jacob and Esau had, was a giveaway for being a Jew in Poland (maybe even all of Eastern Europe, though Poland is what I recall reading). My great-grandfather was a Jew born in Cumań (now Tsuman’) with his birth registered in Shumeve (Szumowo—and his father used a variant of its Yiddish name at Antwerpen when he immigrated to America the second time); and both of his parents were Poylishe Yidn with Litvishe and Vayaruslandishe roots. 

Their mother (z’l—a sheine Yidishe froy) was (and I wish that I knew to ask her when she was still here. Anyway, she was) a Jew with parents with roots in Budapest and Kesmark (now Kežmarok) as well as Locse (now Levoča), though they claimed Kacwin and Łapsze Niżne. Her Budapest-born father did have family in Odesa, though. 

It also, speaking of the Irish, actually meant that as well for an Ireland-born ancestor of mine (and it probably means a good number for a lot of other Irish as well, as the native hair color of Ireland is actually brown— and a lot of Crypto Jews ended up in Ireland, which I never knew for a long time). As you may have guessed by now, all of the aforementioned were Crypto Jews and/or descendants thereof— and for my Irish ancestor, I figured it out when it wasn’t just his daughter’s obituary mentioning a request to omit flowers (I had originally chalked it up to the fact that she married the DeBoy son of a Peltz whom may have also had Jewish heritage on his father’s side). His sister’s as well as his own mention the request, and his Irish-American wife had quite a nasty way of essentially sitting shiva for him—by erecting a gravestone with their final separation date as his death date, and he did not die until 20 years later.

(PS The gravestone reads February 23, 1915. Subsequent Censuses, a will that was somehow filed in 1932, and a 1937 obituary give a whole different picture—and previous Censuses already hinted at separations).