WHEN Ms Madeleine Albright was first mentioned late last year as a likely candidate to replace Mr, Warren Christopher as US Secretary of State, the rumour spread among Arab leaders that she was Jewish. But as far as anyone who checked into the matter could establish at the time, Mrs Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, came from solid Catholic stock.
The discoveries of the last few days, to the effect that the new Secretary of State does indeed have Jewish roots - she lost more than a dozen relatives in the Holocaust - and furthermore that Israel's leaders knew all this for the past two years, could complicate the already immensely complex task facing Ms Albright - arranging for a resumption of Israeli Syrian peace negotiations.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Washington for talks with President Clinton and the new Secretary of State on precisely this issue, is insisting in interviews Ms Albright's origins are irrelevant - so much so that the previous prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres did not even bother to inform him about them.
Mr Netanyahu cites a previous Jewish Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger, to prove his point, asserting that Dr Kissinger operated "in the interests of the United States. Period."
But the bizarre circumstances surrounding the exposure of Ms Albright's family history - the initial Washington Post reports, followed by Israel's confirmation that it was aware of her family past - can hardly have boosted Syrian confidence in a US administration already regarded by Damascus as heavily pro Israeli.
At the very least, Ms Albright's Jewish links will give the Syrians a pretext for making a tactical claim of antiArab bias - as the Palestinians did just a few weeks ago, in accusing the Jewish US mediator, Mr Dennis Ross, of overly proIsrael sympathies during the tense talks before the Hebron accord.
Ms Albright's Jewish background apart, the climate is, in any case, hardly encouraging for an Israeli Syrian breakthrough. Thursday's Netanyahu Clinton summit clearly failed to produce a formula for resuming the talks, which broke off a year ago when Israel protested against Syria's failure to condemn a spate of Islamic extremist suicide bombings' in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The Syrians are demanding that negotiations continue from where they left off in the Peres era - which was, reportedly, on the brink of a Golan Heights pullout in return for normalised relations. But Mr Netanyahu is understood to have ruled a full Israeli withdrawal from the heights.
What's more, President Hafez al Assad of Syria is reported to be in poor health - recovering, depending on which anonymous intelligence sources you choose to believe, from a near death coma or prostate surgery.
Israel, though taking a tough stance against compromise on the Golan Heights, is actually in more urgent need of a deal - being desperate for an accord that will enable it to pull its forces out of their low level war with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon. In such circumstances, Mr Assad could well feel that time is on his side.