Undid revision 1164637321 by Onceinawhile (talk) rv WP:SYNTH. That's what the source says. There's nothing there related to scales of conversion Tags: Undo Reverted |
the major Middle Eastern component of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA is already well established; this statement as rendered here comes very close to antisemitic realms Tags: Reverted Visual edit |
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'''Zionism, race and genetics''' is the use of [[racial theories]] and [[genetic studies on Jews]] in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including Jewish ethnic unity and the descent-based claim to the biblical [[Land of Israel]]. Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the [[National myth|ethno-nationalist]] myth of common descent".<ref name="Hirsch">{{harvnb|Hirsch|2009|pages=592–609}} "The work of Jewish race scientists has been the subject of several recent studies (Efron 1994; R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000; Kiefer 1991; Lipphardt 2007; Y. Weiss 2002; see also Doron 1980). As these studies suggest, among Jewish physicians, anthropologists, and other 'men of science' in Central Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent (Doron 1980: 404; Y. Weiss 2002: 155). At the same time, many of these proponents agreed that the Jews were suffering a process of 'degeneration, and so their writings advanced the national project as a means of 'regeneration' and 'racial improvement' (R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000: 17)... In the Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization. 'Race' was an integral concept in certain versions of nationalist thinking, and in Western identity (Bonnett 2003), albeit in different ways. In the discourse of Zionist men of science, 'race' served different purposes, according to the context in question. In some contexts 'race' was mainly used to establish Jewish unity, while in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jews. The latter use was more common in texts which appeared in Palestine. It resulted from the encounter of European Zionists with Eastern Jews, and from the tension between the projects of nation-building and of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in the East."</ref> This "racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism" was originally a reaction to European [[anti-semitism]].<ref>{{cite journal | last=Egorova | first=Yulia | title=The proof is in the genes? Jewish responses to DNA research | journal=Culture and Religion | publisher=Informa UK Limited | volume=10 | issue=2 | year=2009 | issn=1475-5610 | doi=10.1080/14755610903077554 | pages=159–175|url=https://dro.dur.ac.uk/14438/1/|quote=At the same time, the idea that Jews are a people connected to each other on a ‘biological’ level has been promoted by Zionist ideologues. This racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism was a response to the shift from Christian anti-Semitism to racial anti-Semitism, which occurred in Europe in the late nineteenth century.}} |
'''Zionism, race and genetics''' is the use of [[racial theories]] and [[genetic studies on Jews]] in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including Jewish ethnic unity and the descent-based claim to the biblical [[Land of Israel]]. Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the [[National myth|ethno-nationalist]] myth of common descent".<ref name="Hirsch">{{harvnb|Hirsch|2009|pages=592–609}} "The work of Jewish race scientists has been the subject of several recent studies (Efron 1994; R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000; Kiefer 1991; Lipphardt 2007; Y. Weiss 2002; see also Doron 1980). As these studies suggest, among Jewish physicians, anthropologists, and other 'men of science' in Central Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent (Doron 1980: 404; Y. Weiss 2002: 155). At the same time, many of these proponents agreed that the Jews were suffering a process of 'degeneration, and so their writings advanced the national project as a means of 'regeneration' and 'racial improvement' (R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000: 17)... In the Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization. 'Race' was an integral concept in certain versions of nationalist thinking, and in Western identity (Bonnett 2003), albeit in different ways. In the discourse of Zionist men of science, 'race' served different purposes, according to the context in question. In some contexts 'race' was mainly used to establish Jewish unity, while in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jews. The latter use was more common in texts which appeared in Palestine. It resulted from the encounter of European Zionists with Eastern Jews, and from the tension between the projects of nation-building and of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in the East."</ref> This "racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism" was originally a reaction to European [[anti-semitism]].<ref>{{cite journal | last=Egorova | first=Yulia | title=The proof is in the genes? Jewish responses to DNA research | journal=Culture and Religion | publisher=Informa UK Limited | volume=10 | issue=2 | year=2009 | issn=1475-5610 | doi=10.1080/14755610903077554 | pages=159–175|url=https://dro.dur.ac.uk/14438/1/|quote=At the same time, the idea that Jews are a people connected to each other on a ‘biological’ level has been promoted by Zionist ideologues. This racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism was a response to the shift from Christian anti-Semitism to racial anti-Semitism, which occurred in Europe in the late nineteenth century.}}</ref> |
||
The application of the Biblical concepts of [[Jews as the chosen people]] and the "[[Promised Land]]" in Zionism, particularly to secular Jews, requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Haddad | first=Hassan S. |authorlink=:ar:حسني حداد| title=The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism | journal=Journal of Palestine Studies | publisher=[University of California Press, Institute for Palestine Studies] | volume=3 | issue=4 | year=1974 | issn=0377-919X | jstor=2535451 | url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2535451 | quote=The Zionist moveinent remains firmly anchored on the basic principle of the exclusive right of the Jews to Palestine that is found in the Torah and in other Jewish religious literature. Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations… We can summarize these beliefs, based on the Bible, as follows. 1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews. The purity of the Jewishness of the land is derived from a divine command and is thus a sacred mission. Accordingly, settling in Palestine, in addition to its economic and political motivations, acquires a romantic and mythical character. That the Bible is at the root of Zionism is recognized by religious, secular, non-observant, and agnostic Zionists… The Bible, which has been generally considered as a holy book whose basic tenets and whose historical contents are not commonly challenged by Christians and Jews, is usually referred to as the Jewish national record. As a "sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine," it has caused a fossilization of history in Zionist thinking… Modern Jews, accordingly, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites, hence the only possible citizens of the Land of Palestine.|pages=98–99}}</ref> This is considered important to the State of Israel, because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "[[Gathering of Israel|Gathering of the exiles]]" and the "[[Return to Zion]]", on the assumption that modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Jews of the biblical stories.<ref name=McG1>{{harvnb|McGonigle|2021|p=36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD)}}: "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."</ref> In this absence of this biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people,"<ref name=McG1/> whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return".{{sfn|McGonigle|2021|p=(c.f. p.218-219 of PhD)|ps=: "The [Israeli national] biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."}} A Jewish "biological self-definition" has become a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers have never doubted that evidence will one day be found, even though so far such facts have "remained forever elusive".<ref>{{harvnb|Abu El-Haj|2012|p=18}} "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to “see,” especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive… Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."</ref> |
The application of the Biblical concepts of [[Jews as the chosen people]] and the "[[Promised Land]]" in Zionism, particularly to secular Jews, requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Haddad | first=Hassan S. |authorlink=:ar:حسني حداد| title=The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism | journal=Journal of Palestine Studies | publisher=[University of California Press, Institute for Palestine Studies] | volume=3 | issue=4 | year=1974 | issn=0377-919X | jstor=2535451 | url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2535451 | quote=The Zionist moveinent remains firmly anchored on the basic principle of the exclusive right of the Jews to Palestine that is found in the Torah and in other Jewish religious literature. Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations… We can summarize these beliefs, based on the Bible, as follows. 1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews. The purity of the Jewishness of the land is derived from a divine command and is thus a sacred mission. Accordingly, settling in Palestine, in addition to its economic and political motivations, acquires a romantic and mythical character. That the Bible is at the root of Zionism is recognized by religious, secular, non-observant, and agnostic Zionists… The Bible, which has been generally considered as a holy book whose basic tenets and whose historical contents are not commonly challenged by Christians and Jews, is usually referred to as the Jewish national record. As a "sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine," it has caused a fossilization of history in Zionist thinking… Modern Jews, accordingly, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites, hence the only possible citizens of the Land of Palestine.|pages=98–99}}</ref> This is considered important to the State of Israel, because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "[[Gathering of Israel|Gathering of the exiles]]" and the "[[Return to Zion]]", on the assumption that modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Jews of the biblical stories.<ref name=McG1>{{harvnb|McGonigle|2021|p=36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD)}}: "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."</ref> In this absence of this biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people,"<ref name=McG1/> whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return".{{sfn|McGonigle|2021|p=(c.f. p.218-219 of PhD)|ps=: "The [Israeli national] biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."}} A Jewish "biological self-definition" has become a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers have never doubted that evidence will one day be found, even though so far such facts have "remained forever elusive".<ref>{{harvnb|Abu El-Haj|2012|p=18}} "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to “see,” especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive… Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."</ref> |
Revision as of 06:43, 10 July 2023
Zionism, race and genetics is the use of racial theories and genetic studies on Jews in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including Jewish ethnic unity and the descent-based claim to the biblical Land of Israel. Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent".[1] This "racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism" was originally a reaction to European anti-semitism.[2]
The application of the Biblical concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the "Promised Land" in Zionism, particularly to secular Jews, requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites.[3] This is considered important to the State of Israel, because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "Gathering of the exiles" and the "Return to Zion", on the assumption that modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Jews of the biblical stories.[4] In this absence of this biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people,"[4] whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return".[5] A Jewish "biological self-definition" has become a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers have never doubted that evidence will one day be found, even though so far such facts have "remained forever elusive".[6]
The connection between Zionism and early 20th century race science and, since the 1950s, genetic science, has been widely studied by historians and anthropologists.[7] A recent study by a team of international psychologists showed that such research contributed to the "chronic otherization of Palestinians", encourages less support amongst Israeli Jews for political compromise, and could even inflame political violence.[8]
The topics of race and genetic science are subject to confirmation bias, in "Jewish difference debates, this is nowhere clearer than on the issue of Israel and Zionism", as the leading scientists into Jewish genetic roots, including the "priestly gene", have openly Zionist agendas.[9] Conversely, anti-Zionists use the same debate to support their position,[10] in line with the denial of the connection between contemporary Jews and the ancient Hebrews and Israelites in Palestinian political discourse.[11]
Zionism and the notion of the Jewish people as a race
Since ancient times, Jews have believed that they share a common ancestor, in the person of Jacob/Israel.[12] In the classical period, Jews were viewed by non-Jews as an ethnos, one among many living in the Greco-Roman world, although one with a unique religious tradition.[12][13][14] Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, that perception gradually changed to that of a religious group that also identified as a nation.[14]
As early as the 1870s, contrary to largely cultural perspectives among integrated and assimilated Jewish communities in the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Romanticism, "the Zionists-to-be stressed that Jews were not merely members of a cultural or a religious entity, but were an integral biological entity".[15] This re-conceptualization of Jewishness cast the "volk" of the Jewish community as a nation-race, in contrast to centuries-old conceptions of the Jewish people as a religious socio-cultural grouping.[15] The phenomenon of casting modern Jews as the primary descendants of ancient Israelites is similar to the concept of Phoenicianism within Lebanese nationalism, and sought to underpin the legitimacy of Zionism.[16]
Jewish ethnic unity and connection to ancient Israelites
In contemporary political history, supporters of Jewish nationalism have focused on the search for "Jewish genes" and the identification of the "original Jews", in order to strength the Zionist claim to the Land of Israel. Geneticists such as Harry Ostrer and Nadia Abu El Haj have publicly disagreed on the interpretation of the evidence,[17][18] as there are many genetic mutations restricted to certain groups of modern Jews, but no single gene uniting the majority of Jews worldwide.[19] Harry Ostrer disagreed with criticism of proposed genetic evidence for Jewish unity as "fragmentary and half-truths", and noted that the question "touches on the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel".[20]
It is likely that many modern Jews have at least one ancestral line from Levant.[21]
Bibliography
- Hirsch, Dafna (2009). "Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a 'new Jewish type'". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 15 (3). Wiley: 592–609. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01575.x. ISSN 1359-0987.
- McGonigle, Ian V. (2021). Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East. MIT Press (originally a Harvard PhD Thesis, published March 2018). ISBN 978-0-262-36669-4. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
- Burton, Elise K. (2021). Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-1457-4. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
- Falk, Raphael (2017). Zionism and the Biology of Jews. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-319-57345-8.
- Abu El-Haj, Nadia (2012). The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-20142-9. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
- Kaplan, Steven (2003). "If There Are No Races, How Can Jews Be a "Race"?". Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 2 (1). Informa UK Limited: 79–96. doi:10.1080/14725880305901. ISSN 1472-5886.
- Spitzer, Leo; Starobinski, Jean (1971). The French Review. 44 (5). American Association of Teachers of French: 995–996. ISSN 0016-111X. JSTOR 386385 http://www.jstor.org/stable/386385. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
{{cite journal}}
: Missing or empty|title=
(help) - Avraham, Doron (2017). "RECONSTRUCTING A COLLECTIVE: ZIONISM AND RACE BETWEEN NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND JEWISH RENEWAL". The Historical Journal. 60 (2). Cambridge University Press: 471–492. ISSN 0018-246X. JSTOR 26343366. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
See also
References
- ^ Hirsch 2009, pp. 592–609 "The work of Jewish race scientists has been the subject of several recent studies (Efron 1994; R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000; Kiefer 1991; Lipphardt 2007; Y. Weiss 2002; see also Doron 1980). As these studies suggest, among Jewish physicians, anthropologists, and other 'men of science' in Central Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent (Doron 1980: 404; Y. Weiss 2002: 155). At the same time, many of these proponents agreed that the Jews were suffering a process of 'degeneration, and so their writings advanced the national project as a means of 'regeneration' and 'racial improvement' (R. Falk 2006; Hart 2000: 17)... In the Zionist case, the nation-building project was fused with a cultural project of Westernization. 'Race' was an integral concept in certain versions of nationalist thinking, and in Western identity (Bonnett 2003), albeit in different ways. In the discourse of Zionist men of science, 'race' served different purposes, according to the context in question. In some contexts 'race' was mainly used to establish Jewish unity, while in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jews. The latter use was more common in texts which appeared in Palestine. It resulted from the encounter of European Zionists with Eastern Jews, and from the tension between the projects of nation-building and of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in the East."
- ^ Egorova, Yulia (2009). "The proof is in the genes? Jewish responses to DNA research". Culture and Religion. 10 (2). Informa UK Limited: 159–175. doi:10.1080/14755610903077554. ISSN 1475-5610.
At the same time, the idea that Jews are a people connected to each other on a 'biological' level has been promoted by Zionist ideologues. This racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism was a response to the shift from Christian anti-Semitism to racial anti-Semitism, which occurred in Europe in the late nineteenth century.
- ^ Haddad, Hassan S. [in Arabic] (1974). "The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism". Journal of Palestine Studies. 3 (4). [University of California Press, Institute for Palestine Studies]: 98–99. ISSN 0377-919X. JSTOR 2535451.
The Zionist moveinent remains firmly anchored on the basic principle of the exclusive right of the Jews to Palestine that is found in the Torah and in other Jewish religious literature. Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations… We can summarize these beliefs, based on the Bible, as follows. 1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews. The purity of the Jewishness of the land is derived from a divine command and is thus a sacred mission. Accordingly, settling in Palestine, in addition to its economic and political motivations, acquires a romantic and mythical character. That the Bible is at the root of Zionism is recognized by religious, secular, non-observant, and agnostic Zionists… The Bible, which has been generally considered as a holy book whose basic tenets and whose historical contents are not commonly challenged by Christians and Jews, is usually referred to as the Jewish national record. As a "sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine," it has caused a fossilization of history in Zionist thinking… Modern Jews, accordingly, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites, hence the only possible citizens of the Land of Palestine.
- ^ a b McGonigle 2021, p. 36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD): "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."
- ^ McGonigle 2021, p. (c.f. p.218-219 of PhD): "The [Israeli national] biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."
- ^ Abu El-Haj 2012, p. 18 "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to “see,” especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive… Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."
- ^ Burton 2021, p. 11: "Historians and anthropologists have critically examined how the structuring assumptions of Jewish race science in early-twentieth-century Europe and North America, and their relationship to Zionist nationalism, reverberate within the genetic studies of Jewish populations by Israeli scientists from the 1950s to the present."
- ^ Burton 2021, p. 246: "For example, a team of American, European, and Israeli psychologists turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to investigate how genetic discourses might contribute to the resolution or exacerbation of ethnic- nationalist tensions. Following a series of studies conducted mainly on Jewish subjects, the psychologists found that Jewish Israelis who read a simulated news article emphasizing the genetic differences between Jews and Arabs “showed less support for political compromise and [. . .] more support for collective punishment toward Palestinians and more support for the political exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The psychologists concluded that the rising publicity of research that conflates ethnicity with genetic difference could foreshadow or inflame political violence. Furthermore, this study reaffirmed the co-constitutive roles of Zionist politics and genetic science in the construction of a Jewish biological category and the chronic otherization of Palestinians."
- ^ Schaffer, Gavin (2010). "Dilemmas of Jewish Difference: Reflections on Contemporary Research into Jewish Origins and Types from an Anglo-Jewish Historical Perspective". Jewish Culture and History. 12 (1–2). Informa UK Limited: 86–88. doi:10.1080/1462169x.2010.10512145. ISSN 1462-169X.
However, the historical record suggests that, on the subject of race, scientists do not deal in clear-cut truths but do 'spin' and do 'whitewash', albeit often subconsciously, presenting findings that are in line with personal beliefs and ideology, not set apart from social racial discourse in any clear sense. In Jewish difference debates, this is nowhere clearer than on the issue of Israel and Zionism. In his latest book on race, David Theo Goldberg has highlighted a link between racial research into ancient origins and contemporary land disputes: "Those whose racial origins' are considered geographically somehow to coincide with national territory (or its colonial extension) are deemed to belong to the nation; those whose geo-phenotypes obviously place them originally (from) elsewhere are all too often considered to pollute or potentially to terrorize the national space, with debilitating and even deadly effect." In this way, potential links between theories of an ancient Jewish past in Israel and contemporary conflict in the Middle East become important. In the face of a generally hostile international media, which often constructs Jews in Israel as colonisers and occupiers, scientific proofs of Jewish indigeneity in Israel confer legitimacy on Zionists and their sympathisers. This being the case, it is equally unsettling and significant, to the author at least, that the leading investigators of Jewish genetic roots frequently seem to be largely uncritical supporters of Israel. In Abraham's Children, Entine has noted that the pioneering scholar of the Priestly gene, Karl Skorecki, was 'motivated as much by his commitment to Israel as by scientific curiosity'. Similarly, David Goldstein states clearly and openly his attachment to Israel in Jacob's Legacy… the seekers of the priestly gene have an openly Zionist agenda...
- ^ Rich, Dave (2017-01-02). "Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 11 (1): 101–104. doi:10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682. ISSN 2373-9770.
- ^ Litvak, Meir (1994). "A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction". History and Memory. 6 (2): 24–56. ISSN 0935-560X.
- ^ a b Van Maaren, John (2022-05-23), "The Ethnic Boundary Making Model: Preliminary Marks", The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE, De Gruyter, p. 5
- ^ Goldenberg, Robert (2006), Katz, Steven T. (ed.), "The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple: its meaning and its consequences", The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 202–203, doi:10.1017/chol9780521772488.009, ISBN 978-0-521-77248-8, retrieved 2023-03-31
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
:1
was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b Falk, R. (2014). "Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent". Frontiers in Genetics. 5 (462): 462. doi:10.3389/fgene.2014.00462. PMC 4301023. PMID 25653666.
- ^ Burton 2021, p. 24: "In the Levantine mandates, anthropometric reconstructions of “ancient races” like the Phoenicians and Israelites fed into political discourses about Lebanese identity and the legitimacy of Zionism."
- ^ Ostrer, Harry. A Genetic History of the Jewish People. Oxford University Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-3-319-57345-8.
thus, it is common today among Ashkenazim and other Jews—Syrian, Kurdish, Djerban, and Yemenite Jews. It demonstrates that these Jews are the descendants of people who once lived in the Middle East
- ^ Abu El-Haj 2012, pp. 48–49 "Junk DNA is natural-cultural artifact that carries a genealogical message bearing witness to one’s geographic origins and cultural past. It functions as evidence of what one might call cultural fidelity—of the fact that contemporary, self-designated Jews really do descend from a single ancient population, from a common history and long tradition of cultural distinc- tion that is visible on the Y-chromosome only because their (male) ances- tors remained true to their faith. Y-chromosome markers are “signatures” of ancient origins (Thomas 1998, 139). Such markers are not, by way of contrast, evidence of the “biological unity” of the Jews, a concept central to racial theories of Jewishness that dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought."
- ^ Falk 2017, pp. 208–210 "There are no 'Jewish genes,' even though there are plenty of mutations that are pretty much restricted to a certain group of Jews. It follows that there can be no clinching biological answer to the question of identifying the original Jews, nor to any question about the shared heritage of all Jews qua Jews… Smocha argues for the emancipation of the Jewish nation from inherited notions of alleged biological unity. Shouldn't genetic research likewise shake itself loose of the effort to anchor Zionism in the supposedly shared biological origins of the Jews?"
- ^ Ostrer, Harry (2012). Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. OUP USA. p. 220. ISBN 978-0-19-537961-7.
Are recent discoveries fragmentary and half-truths? I think not, because the molecular genetic studies of which Sand is critical have set the bar higher for discovery, reporting, and acceptance than the race science of a century ago—less stand-alone observation with more replication and more rigorous statistical testing. The stakes in genetic analysis are high. It is more than an issue of who belongs in the family and can partake in Jewish life and Israeli citizenship. It touches on the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel. One can imagine future disputes about exactly how large the shared Middle Eastern ancestry of Jewish groups has to be to justify Zionist claims.
- ^ Susan Martha Kahn (2013). "Commentary: Who Are the Jews? New Formulations of an Age‐Old Question". Human Biology. 85 (6). Project MUSE: 919. doi:10.13110/humanbiology.85.6.0919. ISSN 0018-7143.
What it means is that a certain number of people who currently identify themselves as Jews have certain genetic variants that indicate a high likelihood that they are descended from populations that likely inhabited the Levant some 2,000 years ago. These variants are not necessarily exclusive to people who identify as Jews, nor are they present in all people who currently identify themselves as Jews. Even Jews who do have these variants likely have ancestors from other parts of the globe. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to assert that, based on current genetic testing technologies and theories of genetic variation, there is a high likelihood that many contemporary Jews have at least one ancestral lineage that leads back to the Levant. In fact, contemporary genetic studies, including recent studies of the whole genome that extend beyond the Y-chromosome and mtDNA studies discussed by Abu El-Haj, agree on a much greater level of genetic sharing and continuity among Jewish populations than would be evident from only a single shared lineage. This does not make Jews a race any more than shared ancestry makes Italians or Basques or Finns a race. It makes them, like all humans, a product of complex and diverse ancestral lineages that ultimately all converge together back in Africa some 100,000–200,000 years ago. The persistent and intractable question of who are the Jews remains unresolved despite Ostrer's and Abu El-Haj's careful analyses, passionate arguments, and differently extreme conclusions. These contrasting scholarly efforts represent only the latest chapter in a long and complex history of discourse involving biological determinism, prevailing notions of peoplehood, and very real social and political agendas. Perhaps any scientific data that suggest a biological component to Jewish identity will be the subject of heated and multivocal debate. New techniques in genetic ancestry tracing may have the potential to create more consensus than discord about the nature of Jewish peoplehood, but all interpretations of this research must be fully contextualized in order to recognize what is at stake and for whom. Only then can we hope to find some kind of shared understanding about "who are the Jews."