Washington, USA - Christine Axsmith was raised 100 percent Lutheran, with a lineage going back about 500 years on her mother's side. To Axsmith, Lutherans are "plain, simple, hardworking people" -- people like the German Americans she grew up around in the small, rural Pennsylvania Appalachian community of Strausstown.
Which is why it came as a surprise last year when she and her family, gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to bury her grandmother, heard the officiant say he would be reading Jewish prayers, the deceased's "favorites from her childhood."
"We all looked at one another and said, 'What?' " recalled Axsmith, 42, a software tester who lives in Columbia Heights.
Until that day, only Axsmith's aunt-- the deceased's daughter who had arranged for the graveside prayers--knew that Axsmith's father's mother had grown up Jewish in the small town of Pottstown, Pa. Although Axsmith was stunned to discover that her religious heritage had been partly hidden, a few things resonated: a curious affinity with Jews that began in college, a fascination with pre-Christian biblical archaeology, something that had been missing in her faith identity.
That something, she thinks, might be her Jewish roots. Last month, she began taking Judaism classes at a D.C. temple, and she attended her first Jewish service last week, on Yom Kippur.
"When I found out my grandmother was Jewish, I could understand what was going on within me," she said. "I wish I had known this decades ago."
Even as pundits debate the veracity and political implications of the revelation that the mother of U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) is Jewish, a disclosure that came during his reelection campaign, there are thousands of Americans like him, people who know what it's like to have a Jewish heritage unearthed.
The issue of veiled identity has a particular resonance with Jews: Scholars of U.S. religious history say that no other group experienced the phenomenon of having to change names and fabricate backgrounds to assimilate during the genocidal anti-Semitism of World War II and the bias that persisted.
"It's hard for me to think of any instances in which [another group of] people hid their religious identities," said E. Brooks Holifield, a professor of American religious history at Emory University. "And in part, that's simply because of the force of anti-Semitism."
Yet there is a broader story line: the changing role of religion in Americans' identities. In a time when people browse for churches, adopt religious customs from differing faiths and marry across faiths -- all at high rates -- the story of Henrietta "Etty" Allen coming clean to her son at the dining room table can seem almost quaint.
"Religion and spirituality are incredibly fluid today. To some lesser extent, that's always been true, but now we understand religious identity less as a fixed identity and more as something that is achieved," said Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a columnist for the Web site http://www.beliefnet.com .
The role that religion plays in shaping identity, however, remains potent.
Religion is not only a system of worship; it's a way of placing one's self socially, a way of seeing oneself as part of a group of like-minded people who may dress, pray, vote and raise their children the way you do. And some faiths, including Judaism, are as much about being a people as theology, about having a shared culture and history.
Stories such as those of the Allens and Axsmiths are sagas of questions that go unasked for decades. For some, the discovery of Jewish roots simply reveals an interesting genealogical fact. For others, it creates deep confusion about identity.
James Montel's discovery in his 20s that his mother was Jewish, not Protestant, set off a bomb that left scars in his family of eight children. After a search that led him to the root cellar in the French countryside where his mother's family had hidden for months from German soldiers during World War II, Montel, 43, eventually became an Orthodox Jew. He is now a high-tech worker and lives in Jerusalem.
Only in recent years, Montel said, has he been able to speak frankly about the subject with his mother, who "tried to forget and repress" her heritage when she moved to the United States to marry a Lutheran soldier. With almost all his siblings, however, the subject remains taboo. Several became Southern Baptists, established in social circles revolving around the church in Fayetteville, Ark., where Montel was raised and where, he said, Jews were "something strange, people from the North -- Yankees." He recalled his siblings worrying about his spiritual state as he explored Judaism.
"At the point of their lives when they found out, it didn't fit, because they already had their core. They weren't about to go back to the drawing board," he said. "It caused a major upheaval in our family."
Yet there had been clues. His father's interest in Hebrew. The unexplained story of why his mother's family had been captured by Germans. The defensiveness his mother had about being a member of a church, where her name could have been put on a list.
But in graduate school, when he was researching the Holocaust and came across his mother's relatives' names on a list of Jews deported from France, he felt "very disoriented." He was angry about what his mother had gone through. He wanted to explore the new legacy.
But even as Montel became intrigued by the idea that he was Jewish, there were times when he was torn.
"Especially growing up in the South, where you hear a lot of hell-and-fire preaching, I think that is a scary thing, to decide I am going to be Jewish and not Christian," he said. Accepting that "remains a gradual, long process."
This year, he said, his son will have a bar mitzvah, a Jewish rite of passage that Montel did not have.
"It just tears me to pieces, this feeling that something was stolen from me," he said. "I don't have the experience to guide my son through this."
Jeff Geschwind was 13 when he learned that his family was Jewish, not Catholic. He remembers being frozen with terror: "I thought we were going to Hell."
That's what happened to people who didn't accept Jesus, the priests in religion classes told him when he was growing up in France. And did this mean he was related to the people who killed Jesus? Who was he, if he wasn't Catholic? All the children in his Paris neighborhood were Catholic and went to a religious school, as he did. His parents and grandparents had lied to him.
For Geschwind's family, his discovery in 1971 set off a painful spiral that continues.
Geschwind had many questions about his grandparents, three of whom were Jewish. In an effort to protect their children, Geschwind's parents, they had sent them to Catholic schools and attempted to reinvent themselves as Catholics.
Yet Geschwind could feel, even as a boy, that certain things weren't to be discussed. By the time his sister told him that they were Jewish, the family pattern of silence was deeply ingrained. Questions remained unasked.
But Geschwind, 42, a Potomac radiologist, became eager to escape the "fabricated life" his family had crafted and the European anti-Semitism he knew was part of his legacy. In his 20s, he moved to the United States, where he developed a strong cultural identity as a Jew. But, he said, he remains deeply angry about his upbringing, disoriented about religion and conflicted about what to teach his children.
"I still fear to be openly Jewish," Geschwind said. "I can have this agnostic identity -- it's easier to handle."
Barbara Kessel interviewed about 200 people who discovered as adults that they had Jewish roots for her 2000 book "Suddenly Jewish." There were deathbed declarations and drunken confessions.
For people who come to such discoveries with a strong sense of who they are in terms of religion and other aspects, "this is just another piece of information," she said. But for those who don't, it fundamentally changes their lives.