Mother's ethnicity
In the wake of the Macaca controversy, the Jewish periodical The Forward reported that in all likelihood, Allen's mother Etty Allen, neé Henrietta Lumbroso, was Jewish "from the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family"<62>, and that therefore by the Jewish tradition of matrilineal descent, Allen himself would be considered Jewish. Although no mention is made of her mother's religion in Allen's sister's book, she does mention that the Catholic church, before marrying the couple, required Allen's parents to agree that any children would be raised Catholic, and as a result they decided to be married by a justice of the peace in the home of a Jewish friend; strongly suggesting that, unlike Allen's father, his mother was neither a born nor a practicing Catholic.
At a debate on September 18, 2006, WUSA-TV reporter Peggy Fox asked Allen "It has been reported that your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?" Allen is described as "recoiling as if he had been struck", and answering "furiously", "Why is that relevant—my religion, Jim's religion or the religious beliefs of anyone out there?" See Video of the question and Allen's response.
Previously, Allen defended himself against charges of racism related to the Macaca incident by noting that his mother's father "was incarcerated by the Nazis in World War II", implying that that was an incident of racism from which he had learned it was wrong, an assertion he repeated again after the debate.<63>
The next day – September 19, 2006 – Allen issued a statement to The Forward confirming his mother's Jewish ancestry. The statement read:
I was raised as a Christian and my mother was raised as a Christian. And I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line’s Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed.<64>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Felix_Allen Allen’s own African heritage casts a different light on the matter. Though Etty Allen seems not to have dwelled on it during her years in the spotlight as a coach’s wife, she comes from the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family. Her father, who was the main importer of wines and liquors in Tunis — including the Cinzano brand — was known in France, where he lived after World War II, as part of the family, according to French Jewish sources. If both of Etty’s parents were born Jewish — which, given her age and background, is likely — Senator Allen would be considered Jewish in the eyes of traditional rabbinic law, which traces Judaism through the mother.
http://www.forward.com/articles/alleged-slur-casts-spot... /
Lombroso, Lumbroso is the Sephardic family, members of which lived in Tunis, Marseilles, and Italy. The two forms of the family name are doubtless due to different readings of the Hebrew "לומברוזו".
Place names
Casal Lumbroso, Rome
Tunisian Lumbroso
Baron Abram Lumbroso (Abram Lumbroso) (1813, Tunis - 1887, Florence): Tunisian physician and scientist
David Lumbroso (1817, Tunis - 1880, Leghorn): Tunisian political agent
Giacomo Lumbroso: Brother of Abram Lumbroso; head of a prominent business house at Marseilles, where he was consul for Tunis till the latter came under the protectorate of France
Baron Giacomo Lumbroso (Giacomo Lumbroso): Son of Abram Lumbroso
Giacomo Lumbroso (born 1859, Leghorn): Italian physician
Isaac Lumbroso (?-1752): Chief rabbi of Tunis and rabbinical author
Isaac Vita Lumbroso (1793, Tunis - 1871, Leghorn): Father of Abram Lumbroso
Jacob Lombroso: Italian rabbi and physician, of Spanish origin; lived at the beginning of the 17th century in Venice
Italian Lombroso and Lumbroso
Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909): On his father's side he was descended from a family which for many generations had been rich in rabbis and Hebraists.
Daniela Lumbroso (born 1961, Tunis), Tunisian-French TV & radio presenter, see French article
Dino Lumbroso
Hubert Lumbroso
Marc Lumbroso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumbroso the mother is obviously a "pied-noir". A pied-noir (meaning black foot) is the familiar name for non-Arabic settlers in North-Africa :
Pied-noir (plural: pieds-noirs) is a term for the former population of European descent of North Africa, especially Algeria, which was divided into three French departments until its 1962 independence. It also includes the Algerian Jewish population, some of whose ancestors had fled Spain after the Reconquista. Literally Pied-noir means "black foot" in French. Supposedly, one way the colonists could be distinguished from the indigenous Algerians was by the black boots that the French wore. According to Le Robert French dictionary, it appeared around 1901 to refer to bare-foot indigenous Algerian stokers on boat at a time when coal was the main type of fuel. Given their working conditions, they would get their feet dirty in coal dust. By extension, the term pied-noir was applied to indigenous Algerians. At that time, European Algerians described themselves as Algerian in relation to metropolitan French and Européens or Europeans vis-à-vis the indigenous Arab and Berber population. But in the 1920s and 1930s, the term Algerian came to be monopolised by indigenous Arab/Berber Algerians as Algerian nationalism became a political force to be reckoned with. By 1955, European Algerians started applying the term Pied-noir to themselves. One of the most famous pied-noir was Albert Camus.
The Algerian Jews, however, had a different history. While a Jewish presence had existed since late Roman times, the majority had arrived as refugees from the Reconquista around 1500, when Sephardi Jews and Muslims were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. After centuries of dhimmi status, the local Algerian Jews became associated with the European-Algerian community following the 1871 décret Crémieux, when they largely embraced French citizenship and identity and adopted French culture and language over the course of just one generation. Before 1962 (independence of Algeria), both the European colons and the indigenous Jews of Algeria were listed under the name Européens (Europeans) for statistical or official purposes. They all considered themselves simply French, or Algerian, or African, each of these identities intertwined in their mind. The unofficial anthem of the pied-noir community is the Song of the Africans (Le chant des Africains).
However, many European settlers resented having to share their privileged position with the Jewish part of the native Algerian population. That resentment was expressed, for example, in antisemitic riots during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s and in strict enforcement in Algeria of the Vichy Regime's anti-Jewish legislation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieds-noirs I did some research about the Tunisian Jews. It's obvious that they accepted the French protectorate and became enthusiastic members of it because it liberated from the Muslim rule. The Germans were in Tunisia 1942-1943 and about 3000 men were sent to labor camps, but not exterminated. The Allies bombings caused probably more deaths than the Nazis. After the war most of them emigrated either to France (35 000) or to Israel (50 000). Only 3 000 live in Tunisia today. In the after war period several anti-Jewish pogroms happened in Tunisia, mostly "motivated"
by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
So Allen's mother had a typical pied-noir Jewish "French" Italian background and as such was probably "not found" of Arabs. And if the pieds-noirs lived mostly peacefully with them, there are many chances that she saw them with contempt. The Italian background explains the word "macaca", but not the French.
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