I didn’t grow up with language for our Jewish heritage, but I did grow up with a sense that our family carried something old. It wasn’t spoken about and it wasn’t framed as identity in the way we might speak about it now. It was more like an undercurrent that was present, steady, and unnamed.

It was my aunty who stayed curious. She asked the questions others didn’t think to ask. She traced names, followed fragile threads, and refused to let our family story fade into nothing. As I’ve grown older and she shared more, the shape of our Jewish heritage began to come into focus, not as a sudden revelation, but as a sense of things quietly falling into place.

Through her research, we’ve come to understand that our story was marked by exile. In the late 1400s to early 1500s, our Jewish ancestors were driven from Yugoslavia, forced to leave because their faith made them unsafe. Like many Jewish families at that time, they moved west through Europe, eventually reaching England. This wasn’t migration in search of opportunity, it was survival.

By around 1535, Wyllym and Ekyzabeth Myson appear in English records in the small town of Wratting in Suffolk. Even then, our family name was already shifting. Over time it changed again and again from Myzon, Misson, Missen, Mison, and finally settling as Mizen in the early 1800s. I see the change like the adaptation of a family learning how to remain while the world required them to bend.

Our direct line later settled in Helions Bumpstead, near the Suffolk–Essex border, where generations lived and worked from the late 1700s onward. Some branches stayed close, others moved on to places like Norfolk and Birmingham, but the roots held, even as the family spread.

When they arrived in England, they became Wesleyan and later Baptist, not as a rejection of their Jewish faith, but as a response to persecution. For Jewish families at that time, public faith could mean danger. Conversion offered safety. What was Jewish didn’t disappear, it went underground. Belief learned how to survive quietly, moving into lived values that would endure without drawing attention.

They worked with their hands as thatchers, carpenters and builders, people who made shelter and repaired what others relied on. Even now, traces of those trades remain in old business names scattered through Suffolk and Essex, and in the homes my grandfather built in Perth. There is something about that rhythm that feels familiar to me, as though it has been passed down not only through story, but through instinct.

There are gaps in the story. Attempts were made to trace the line further back, to reconnect England with Eastern Europe, but much has been lost through death, neglect, and destruction. The devastation of the twentieth century erased more names and records. Jewish history carries this kind of silence, not as absence, but as restraint. What isn’t spoken is often what has been most carefully preserved.

This week, events in Australia have unsettled me deeply, as they rightly should. A place associated with ordinary life and openness was suddenly marked by terror and loss. I found myself thinking about how suddenly fear can enter a public space, and how displacement begins, not always with loss, but in the moment a place no longer feels safe to stand in. It stirred something older in me, something that reaches back through my own history, to generations of Jewish people who learned what it meant to live with that kind of vulnerability.

Over time, I have come to understand how displacement taught my ancestors how to carry faith held quietly, memory guarded fiercely, and compassion shaped by vulnerability. Their story continues to shape the way I move through the world today. It has taught me to value faithfulness over visibility, endurance over certainty, and mercy over entitlement. It has shaped how I think about belonging, how I understand suffering, and how I hold hope in a fragile world.

In moments like this, I feel the weight and the gift of inheritance. I understand more clearly why Jewish memory doesn’t stay neatly in the past. This week I’ve noticed how it lives in the body, and why faith shaped by exile knows how to bend without breaking.

Carrying Jewish lineage while following Christ doesn’t feel like a contradiction to me. It feels like a continuation of a story shaped by covenant, exile, and hope. My faith in Christ doesn’t erase what came before, it rests within it. It honours a people who learned how to survive, how to remember, and how to trust God across centuries of uncertainty.

The edges of this story don’t meet neatly. They never have. But they hold. And through centuries of leaving and becoming, they have carried me. And so, in these days, aware of the mercy that has carried my own people, may that mercy now hold those who grieve.