fanned out across Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt and the Mediterranean basin in search of new lands in which to practice their faith.Some stayed in Spain, Portugal and Italy, and from there migrated to Europe.
Roth’s claim of Davidic descent is similar to those of many other well-known Ashkenazi Jewish families.
Often related through marriage and with intertwining family trees, they generally trace their lineages to great 18th and 19th century rabbis such as the Ba’al Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman, the first Lubavitcher rebbe and Saadya, the Gaon of Vilna, or further back to 16th century luminaries such as the Maharshal in Lithuania (Shlomo Luria) and the Maharal of Prague (Judah Loew ben Bezalel).
I spent an hour with the chair and then I went down and talked to the head of Breslov.
He asked me why the chair was so important to me.” She told him that the only thing she knew about her family’s history was that her great-grandmother Rivkah’s grandfather or great-grandfather had been Baruch, the (ritual slaughterer) of the town of Tiplik, and that he had carved Rebbe Nachman’s chair.
Pesach’s parents had been murdered in a pogrom, so Susan and her twin brother Mike, who grew up performing alongside their parents, knew little of their ancestry.
Her brother went on to become the famous Israeli actor Mike Burstyn, but Susan, a diminutive, energetic blond with a flair for the dramatic, left the theater at age 19 and married Michael Roth and became Orthodox.
Like other Jews, they followed varying routes to modernity, separating into Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi and other groups.
Some families, especially rabbinic ones, kept careful track of their pedigrees, passing the tradition of royal descent from generation to generation.
But through the centuries, plagued by perennial migrations and persecution, the vast majority of King David’s descendants, a number estimated to be in the millions, lost knowledge of the line…
The Ashkenazi Path Susan Roth discovered her family’s lineage through a chair.
This person was called , which translates as “head of the exile” or exilarch.