Matrilineage

There’s lots & lots of texts and web articles on why & when Jews “switched” to matrilinear descent. However, I found no evidence at all that this was ever applied in pratice to common Jews. I encourage everyone to try and look this up: For the characters in the Bible stories, everything is clearly patrilinear. Still today, Jewish children inherit surnames from their fathers. There’s lots of talk that this may have been different in earlier ages, but little to no evidence. Any Jewish society, even orthodox ones, would certainly accept a child as Jewish if it was raised Jewish, even if only the father was a Jew and the mother was not. Overall, Jewish society & religion are very patriarchal. Mail me if you spot any actual evidence for this purported Jewish matrilineage, I found none.

In theory, matrilineage could not apply to actual Jews, but for spooks, and spookhood is transferred through the mother. However, there’s many counterexamples to this, such as African-American celebrities, many of whom are descendants of a white slave-owner spooklord and his slave mistress. Judging by what I find in Miles’ papers, spook power can be transferred through either mother or father. But overall, spook society also seems to be very patriarchal.

So, what’s with all this fuss about matrilineage? At first, I thought that it was a pun with “obscurity”. But after reworking the Book of Leviticus, I found that many words for “woman” actually pun with “nobility”. So it’s probably not the mothers’ lines that count, but the aristocratic lines. That would match the children of crypto-aristoctatic slave-owners and their female slaves, some of whom where raised to spookhood.