I’ve been on the Jewish genealogy beat lately, and it’s a fascinating area. Not only does it make for some fun researchin’ (the lack of name uniformity is outrageous), it plays an outsize role in genealogical culture and its intersection with the mainstream. For various reasons, savory and otherwise, people seem very interested in whether a given cultural figure is Jewish or not, and they’ll settle for ¼, ⅛, or even less if they can get it. If you’ve been on the internet awhile, you’ll know there are entire websites devoted to satisfying the public’s insatiable need to know whether or not any given celebrity is a “member of the Tribe.”1
Anyway, lots of people are Jewish, even more people are not. The idea that Elvis of all people could be Jewish had honestly never entered my mind, but maybe I’m the weird one.
You would think, based on the news coverage over the years, that there was some strong evidence Elvis’s great-great-grandmother was Jewish. It’s in Wikipedia, so it’s basically canon. That’d be an interesting genealogical tidbit! The modernist poet Robert Lowell’s great-great…grandmother was a Sephardic Jewish woman from South Carolina and I always found that interesting, given he’s otherwise the uberWASP. Elvis would be similarly interesting, though he’s no WASP.2 What are the chances that this truck-driving son of Tupelo, by all appearances your typical southerner–aside from the whole king of rock n’ roll thing–would be descended from a Jewish woman? And how did she end up marrying a Tennessee dirt farmer before the Civil War?
Well the chances are pretty low. And the news coverage, as I was saying, is pretty poor. The evidence is terribly thin. But now we know what passes for proof at Snopes: if it’s published in a bona fide hardcover book, it must be true. Which is a shame, because Snopes did yeoman’s work back in the good old days of chain emails.
Here’s the first half of the claim, courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:
The large crate sat unopened in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse here for more than four decades, concealing a little-known fact about one of America’s cultural icons.
Inside was the headstone of Elvis Presley’s mother, Gladys, which had been stored in the Graceland archives along with 1.5 million other items since 1977. And on the upper left side of the long-unseen marker — designed by Elvis himself — is a Star of David.
Yes, the King of Rock and Roll had Jewish roots.
…
Stories of Elvis’ Jewish heritage have long been in circulation, but when it comes to a legend like Presley — whose death is not even considered settled fact in some quarters — it’s not always easy to separate fact from fiction. With the headstone now on public display and an accompanying sign proclaiming “Gladys’ Jewish heritage,” any lingering doubts can finally be erased.
Some of my doubts are lingering, actually. All this section tells us is that Elvis himself believed he had Jewish roots.3 But Elvis believed a lot of things! For instance, he believed the police badge he got from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (courtesy of Richard Nixon) meant he could “legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.” A couple million Americans at least believe they are descended from a Cherokee princess. But they’re not. Some others believe they are descended from George Washington. But they’re probably not.
Anyway, let’s see what the JTA has to say about Elvis in particular:
[Vice-president of Graceland] Marchese says Elvis’ maternal great-great-grandmother was a Jewish woman named Nancy Burdine. Little is known about Burdine, but it’s believed her family immigrated to America from what is now Lithuania around the time of the American Revolution. According to Ancestry.com, Burdine was born in Mississippi in 1826 and died in 1887.
It’s not unusual to be mistaken about your own heritage. It’s common. It is unusual to be descended from an Ashkenazi Jew from LITHUANIA born in 1826 in MISSISSIPPI. EMPHASIS FOR IMPROBABILITY.
I say unusual and improbable. It’s not impossible. There were Jews in antebellum Mississippi, without a doubt. The first congregations were formed in Natchez and Vicksburg as early as the 1840s. Something tells me Elvis’s ancestors weren’t city people, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The 1850 Census shows 1,190 native Germans in the state, of whom a sizable portion, as indicated by their names, were probably Jewish. Some of them even lived in rural areas.4 Only nine people were born in Russia–Lithuania was then a part of Russia–though they were probably all Jewish.
I picked 1850 because it’s the first census requiring respondents to provide their birthplaces. But it was also at the very beginning of mass post-1848 revolutions immigration to the United States. Most of the German-born residents of Mississippi probably came there only within the previous two years. Elvis’s great-great grandmother was born in Mississippi. If her family immigrated before she was born, that takes us back into the early 1820s at latest.
I’m going out on a limb here. I don’t have data to back it up. But I’ll say it anyway. No Jews from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Russian Empire immigrated to the American South during the American Revolution. Also, “Ancestry.com” is not a source. When JTA cites to Ancestry.com, they are citing to a “Public Family Tree,” which is to say, something a semi-anonymous person typed into their computer one day and which 1100 other semi-anonymous people proceeded to copy into their own family trees.
But, pray for me, I looked it up.
It’s a horrible mess. Everything that could be wrong with Nancy Burdine is wrong. She was born in 1805, died in 1860, and was married in 1886. Not the usual order of operations. Or, say the more reasonable trees, she was born in 1805, married in 1850, and had her first child in 1851, at age 46. Or she had a few children with Tackett before marrying him, then married him, then had a bunch more into her fifties. All incredibly unlikely. Many trees give her father as “Dr. John Fletcher Burdine,” born in Culpeper co., Virginia in 1772. How exactly does that fit with the Lithuanian Jewish story? I don’t offer these things to attack the Ancestry trees themselves. A leopard can’t change its spots. Rather, I offer them to show that nobody involved here really cares about the truth. If the journalist actually searched Nancy Burdine on Ancestry.com, all of this junk would have come up. But the journalist doesn’t care. Nobody cares. When it comes to genealogy, the story is everything.
But onward. To be fair, you can eventually find some trees placing Nancy’s birth in 1825. But that means she gets new parents (the again not Jewish Henry Dickinson Burdine). And there is a distinct sense that her birth date was backed into not because the proof led there, but because it prevented her from bearing children in her fifties.
In any case, I searched in vain for a single tree identifying Nancy’s parents as Jewish immigrants. Even Ancestry.com users, an epistemically indifferent lot if there ever was one, couldn’t muster the gumption to enter such a colossal whopper into their databases.
For the coup de grace to this Graceland silliness, turn to Wikitree. It’s an online family tree too, I admit, but you can usually tell when an individual is well-sourced. Elvis’s ancestry is well-sourced. When you get to Martha Sue (Tackett) Mansell, Elvis’s great-grandmother and the supposed daughter of Nancy Burdine, we find that Nancy Burdine wasn’t even her mother! Wikitree points to the evidently not insane Roots of Elvis, by Julian C. Reilly, wherein:
The unproven union between Abner H. Tackitt, 1803-1889, and a Nancy J. Burdine (no dates), has been spread “across Internet Family Trees” as fact. However, NO EVIDENCE has ever been given, with any of these “Family Trees,” to prove the Tackitt connection by any verifiable sources.
Contrast that with the patently insane Old World Roots of the Cherokee (by our friend Donald “Panther” Yates), wherein we are first subjected to a grisly story about DNA testing Elvis’s stained bedsheets, then told that his great-great grandmother Nancy Burdine was not only “a professed Jewess,” but also the daughter of the Cherokee or Choctaw woman. You can’t knock the efficiency.
So. Elvis’s great-great-grandmother was not Jewish. She wasn’t even his great-great-grandmother. And, to finally dispose of the obvious: if she were Jewish, would that make him halachically Jewish? She being his mother’s mother’s mother’s mother and all that? I don’t know, I don’t particularly care, and in any case it’s a moot point.
These websites like to say people are members of “the Tribe” when they get tired of saying Jewish. Keeps things interesting!
Don’t get me started. Or do. I’ll write about it sometime.
Actually it doesn’t even tell us that, given reports that Elvis joked about “covering his bases” when it came to the whole afterlife thing.
For example, one “M. Barstine” 56-years old and German-born, was living in the household of 22-year old farmer Joseph Sutton, his wife, and two children, in unincorporated Lawrence County. I’d love to know his story.
"And, to finally dispose of the obvious: if she were Jewish, would that make him halachically Jewish? She being his mother’s mother’s mother’s mother and all that? I don’t know, I don’t particularly care, and in any case it’s a moot point."
I agree that the hypothesis that Elvis was (or is, if you think he's still around) Jewish is highly questionable.
But the question above that you don't care about is the only question that matters, if you mean Jewish from a religious point of view, which is what everybody else who considers the question is referring to. The answer, by the way, is Yes. Otherwise, they wouldn't even be trying to trace him to a single purely maternal Jewish ancestor. And so, in addition, if a maternally Jewish female ancestor married a low-life dirt farmer or a wealthy WASP doctor, that has no bearing whatsoever on the question. The daughter would still be Jewish.
Jewish biological ethnicity is a completely different meaning of the term Jewish. From that point of view, I if either spouse was Jewish, the offspring if 50% Jewish. Religiously, it's all or nothing. Certainly, as far back as early 19th century, there would likely not be a detectable autosomal DNA trace, but if Elvis's mitochondrial DNA haplotype were known, that would weigh on one side of the scale or another — strongly, in case of some haplotypes.
The fact that current place names are used to name origins is completely irrelevant. Often, these days, people report the old-country origins of their families using the names of those places NOW. My grandfather immigrated from Laižuva, Lithuania, even though Lithuania did not exist as a country then and in Yiddish it was Lyzeveh. He always said Russia, and indeed it was part of the Russian empire when he emigrated. A couple of generations earlier, it would have been the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. For lookup, Jewishgen.com always uses contemporary political divisions and names, extending to the exact spelling, including special characters, that are used in the current official language of the region. They do supply tools to help you find it if you know it by a different name.
Finally, part of the story that you don't discuss is that, at least according to those who believe it, Elvis's mother believed she was Jewish and told him not to tell his father. According to this narrative, that is why Elvis had the Jewish star placed on her tombstone after his father's death. Though, as you point out, not all these beliefs are well-founded, it is also the case that some are, so that should also be considered.