Frida Kahlo’s genealogy, at least on her father’s side, was finally established by historical researchers Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle for their book on Guillermo Kahlo’s photographic work, >Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo (2005). The historians learned that Guillermo Kahlo was the scion of a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. Left uncertain was whether Frida’s Jewish ancestry was 1) via her paternal grandmother, Henriette Kaufmann, 2) via crypto-Jewish roots on her mother’s Spanish-Mexican side, or 3) a complete fiction. Personally, I’ll take Frida at her word. As cruel as it seems to me for an art exhiition curator to ignore Frida’s Jewish identity, it seems even more obnoxious to question it. I imagine that Henriette Kaufmann’s family was Jewish and hailed from Arad, not very distant from my own ancestral roots in Nagyvárad, Transylvania. . . . → Continue reading: On Frida Kahlo’s Jewish Identity