VP Sara and the myth of the Jewish ancestor

A hot issue today is the request of the United States government for the Philippines to take in 50,000 Afghans to temporarily stay in the country while the Americans fix their papers. An opponent to this request is Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, resulting in criticisms and backlash. One criticism being thrown at VP Sara is that her maternal family, the Zimmermans, benefitted from the benevolence of the Philippine government when her Jewish ancestor was one of the German Jewish refugees who found refuge in the country during the Holocaust. But the question is, were the Zimmermans really Jewish refugees during World War II?

When Rodrigo Roa Duterte was elected president in 2016, one of his first state visits was to Israel. Our relationship with the State of Israel has always been special due to the refuge we gave to more than a thousand Jews escaping the Holocaust in Europe during WWII. So, naturally, their reception for President Duterte and then Mayor Inday Sara was more than just perfunctory; in fact, the Israelis were more than welcoming due to a claim made by PRRD that his former wife, and the mother of his three children, was the daughter of one of the Jewish refugees saved by President Manuel L. Quezon's Open Doors policy.

The Israelis embraced the Dutertes like one of their own, especially since the Israeli media made such a big deal of the so-called Jewish connection with a Philippine president. But all the hoopla about the Zimmermans being Jewish was nothing but the usual unverified oral history of a Filipino family plus the Philippine media's laziness to conduct a simple check of PRRD's claims of his former wife's Jewishness. While President Duterte cannot be blamed for believing in the Zimmerman family's oral history, we can put the blame on the media's inability to verify facts. Here are the genealogical FACTS:

Elizabeth A. Zimmerman, the ex-wife of PRRD, was the daughter of two Filipinos: Godofredo Baldazo Zimmerman and Purisima Fortunado Abellana. Godofredo was born in 1916 as “Godofredo Baldazo” although his biological father, George John Zimmerman, recognized him as his son, which gave him the right to bear Zimmerman as a surname.

George J. Zimmerman, Elizabeth’s grandfather, was born in Peoria, Illinois, to German immigrants, Michael August Zimmerman and Maria Augusta Wenzel. George was a teacher sent to Hilongos, Leyte, in the 1910s to become the Superintendent of Schools. It was there where he met and had a child with Cristeta Baldazo. Less than a year after Godofredo’s birth, George returned to the United States and enlisted in the army. He never returned to the Philippines and married Josephine Mathilde Johnson and had three daughters: Helen May, Georgiana, and Josephine. Their descendants are scattered in Washington, Minnesota, and South Carolina.

VP Sara’s Zimmerman lineage comes from Unterlangau, Bavaria, Germany, and German-Jewish genealogists say that while there are German Jews with the name Zimmermann, this does not make all Zimmermans Jewish in origin. Census data from the district of Oberviechtach between 1900 and 1939, of which Unterlangau was a part, show that the district's population was overwhelmingly Catholic with just a single-digit number of Jews. Furthermore, US census and other records list Michael Zimmerman and his family in Illinois as Lutherans.

Of course, DNA testing in the Zimmermans has further disproven the Jewish claim. Their ancestral breakdown clearly do not show any Jewish heritage since a German-Jewish grandfather (as claimed) would have shown up as 25% Ashkenazi Jew. But the family's DNA result shows 0%, which means a non-Jewish ethnicity.

Journalists must always make sure that before they use genealogical tidbit to make a political point, they must first fact check the information they simply rehash, otherwise they'd end up looking lazy and stupid. The “Jewish connection” of the Dutertes came from PRRD's unverified oral history, which the Israeli media simply accepted, which then became the source of Philippine media, as well. So much for journalistic integrity.