The Ancestors of the Schwartz Family Were Black People!
MAY THE SCHWARTZ BE WITH YOU! An illustration of what the ancient hunter-gatherer may have looked like | CSIC
Years ago, my grandmother, Bubbie Perlmutter, told me that our family name was not “Schwartz” but “Negri.” This Latin name made some sense since I had grown up being told that we were immigrants from a group of Jews who had fled the inquisition and ended up in Austria during the time of Franz Joseph. But why were we called “black.. the meaning of Negri?” The mystery became worse when I learned that “Negri” was not name in Spain, it was an epithet .. like today’s “N word.” I also learned that light skinned family members, on getting to Italy, adopted “Balascio” .. the name of our city in Spain (Valencia), as their last name. So, I guessed that we were darkish, like Moors. It is not hard to imagine some Honkey Spaniard calling my ancestor a Nigger! This would not upset me but I know it would upset many of my relatives. My wife and I lived in a Black urban development while I was in medical school. We chose Academy Homes only because the rent was very cheap and the people we met there are really nice. THEN we discovered that our neighbors were black. We learned that this mattered when my relatives refused to visit us. To be fair, Barbara and I do not remember whether my father and mother ever visited, but everyone else said no. Then, a few years ago, I got a surprise. My genome analysis said that our Schwartz ancestors were not semites! Rather we were (and are) descended from the first modern humans in Europe … the Cro Magnons who painted the cave drawings and colonized southern parts of the British Isles as the ice caps withdrew.
Did I paint this?
But, where did the dark skin come from? New genetic analysis of an ancient tooth has shown that the European hunter-gatherers of the stone age had dark skin! The answer seems to be that our family arrived in Spain ling before the white people. The findings, detailed in the journal Nature, support the idea that light skin evolved not to adjust to the lower-light conditions in Europe compared with Africa, but instead to the new diet that emerged in the Middle East after the agricultural revolution. These Schwartz ancestor people also had blue eyes. Where did these come from” white, dark skinned Europeans, my cro mangon ancestors! This could exaplain the eye mutation may have emerged in the small population of the ancient hunter-gatherers and migrated with them north as the ice caps receded before the Caucasians invaded with their farms and white skins. Unfortunately, my family does not have blue eyes. interestingly, many Askenazi Jews also have blue eyes. This raises a fascinating question: Is the Cro Magnon genome integrated with Jews who lived in Spain, that is eastern Jew we now know also came as emigrants from Spain.