Editor’s Note: While I do not condone the ad hominems in this article, the fact that it has uncovered that among the ancestors of Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, his father’s mother was the daughter of Giovanna Angela Maria Crema, a woman with a Jewish surname is a fact that, for me, as a cultural anthropologist gives a lot of weight to some of their observations. Here “Jewish” refers to heredity not religion. — Also, “Jewish” here is used in the modern Jewish sense of having another Jew in your absolute maternal line, since modern Jews define themselves as descendants of Jewish mothers, whether they have a Jewish father or not.

Nor is this evidence unimportant, because mothers are very important for children in the acquisition of their fundamental habits of socialization: that is, we get all our habits of speech and behavior, at the most basic level, from our mothers before we attain the age of reason. — Note, however, that some of the speculation in the article is wild and inaccurate. such as when they attempt to tie “Ligurian” to “Livorno”. The home town of Giovanna is Cortemilia: truly in the “hinterland of Liguria”, according to the ancient borders of that region. — Note well, however, that many surnames are shared by both Jews and Catholics. The surname “Crema” means cooked-cream, or custard, in Italian. — However, since this ancestor is an ancestor of his father, not mother, Pope Francis cannot be said to be “Jewish”.

I will add several observations: Cortemilia was a town which coined money in the Middle Ages, so it is likely that it had a resident Jewish population, since one of their trades was money-lending. The name of the progenitrix, when abbreviated with consonants G.M.C. could be an anagram for the Hebrew, gemilut chasadim, “deeds of loving kindness”, since in Hebrew there are no vowels and many words are signified in writing with simply 3 consonants. Cortemilia also had a castle named, “Bergolo”, which while not the origin of the family name, “Bergoglio”, does demonstrate that it is in the same lexical-toponymic zone as that origin. Finally, “Bergoglio” according to its origin, means “man of the mountain”, which could be a cryptic reference to a “man of Zion”, that is, a Jew, since Zion is the mountain upon which Jerusalem is built.

If true, however, Pope Francis would be the third recent pope with Jewish ancestry: with it reported that Pope John Paul II had a Jewish maternal grandmother (Zuzanna Rybicka), and that Pope Benedict XVI was the descendant on his maternal grandmother’s (Jachid Katerinna Nissel, Moravia), if I remember correctly, from a famous 14th Jewish Rabbi of Prague. — I am no expert in geneology, and the previous geneologies published on these two popes have been scrubbed from the web in the last 10 years.

Subscribe to FromRome.Info!

Please read our terms and conditions & check your email for Confirmation Notice after you press "Subscribe"!