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This article was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination: Procedural close, 20 July 2023, see discussion. no consensus, 11 July 2023, see discussion.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Misplaced Pages talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: rejected by reviewer, closed by Narutolovehinata5 (talk) 14:43, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

• Comment or view
• Article history

• ... that the genetic origin of modern Jews is considered important within Zionism, as it seeks to provide a historical basis for the belief that descendants of biblical Jews have "returned"? Source: 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). p. 36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD). ISBN 978-0-262-36669-4. Retrieved 2023-07-08. 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.
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Gracie Graves and the Kids from Room 402

Created by Onceinawhile (talk). Self-nominated at 07:35, 9 July 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Zionism, race and genetics; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

• Article is new enough and long enough. However, it's the subject of a POV flag and there's ongoing debate on the talk page about the article's WP:NPOV. Indeed, the article's (lengthy) lede section largely pulls from 2 journal articles that seem to not represent scholarly consensus to frame the discussion. Hook is interested, but the cited source seems to be one scholar's opinion, rather than a fact. Would suggest waiting to have more editors, especially with more specialized subject matter expertise than I, weigh in on the matter at hand in the article. Longhornsg (talk) 08:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi Longhornsg thanks for your comment. Since you have an interest in the subject of Jewish History (WikiProject), please could you comment on the article talk page and help develop the article there? Your comments above seem intended to cast doubt (“seem to not… seem to be”), which is helpful if you are willing to provide the evidence underpinning your uncertainty. Onceinawhile (talk) 11:43, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Article is a transparent attempt to portray studies on Jewish Genetics as "Zionist" and thereby ideological/untrustworthy, without any source actually describing the studes as such. The article itself is full of Synth and assertions that are not actually in the sources. The article should be deleted, and certainly not featured on a "Did you know". Drsmoo (talk) 13:54, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Note: the above editor has been adding various tags to the article. When challenged to explain the above claims he wrote: Allegations of bias and synth in a wikipedia article are not substantiated by scholarly reliable sources, they are an individual judgement. The observation that an article combines disparate ideas to push an original viewpoint is not something that would be sourced. Onceinawhile (talk) 16:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

After the allegations of bias were substantiated, the above editor and a supporting editor asked me to provide "sources" to prove that the article was biased/Synth. As if it has been subject to a scholarly peer review and JSTOR had articles about this wiki page. Drsmoo (talk) 16:22, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I archived reference to this nomination on the article's (very crowded) talk page as I assumed the conversation was over but that was reverted as it has not been closed. I oppose the nomination for the moment. The article is very unstable and has been under heavy dispute. Although the contention is starting to quieten, the article is nowhere near consensus-approved enough to feature. There has been a conversation for nearly two months over whether it needs to be renamed, for example. BobFromBrockley (talk) 08:51, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

• The article's neutrality has been in dispute for over a month at this point, and the prior reviewer's assessment still seems largely correct. It reads like an essay on a particular aspect of race science, and issues are still being identified (for example, an editor just today was removing close paraphrasing from sources). The talk page still has active disputes regarding the content and presentation of perspectives. All together, I doubt that this article is "reasonably complete and not some sort of work in progress". Not presentable and given the time spent already, I find it unlikely that it will become presentable in a reasonable time frame for DYK. — Wug·a·po·des 21:51, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 3 September 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: There is no consensus for the requested move. Although I opened this RM, I am taking the liberty of closing it on this basis. Should there be some objection please undo this close. Selfstudier (talk) 22:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Zionism, race and genetics → Zionist views on Jewish origins – A #Title discussion arrived at some measure of agreement for the proposed title. Selfstudier (talk) 17:44, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose: as overly vague relative to the current scope. "Jewish origins" seems like an imprecise match for race and genetics. Origins could be talking about 6th century BCE theology on divine covenants. And "Zionist views" is a format that implies to a certain degree that the topic is only about the expressly stated views of ideological adherents, rather than a broader analysis of underlying trends, which is the current direction of the content. Iskandar323 (talk) 18:02, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

  These are compelling concerns Iskandar323. Would a formulation like "Zionist views on the origins of the Jewish people" address them? BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:49, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'm more inclined along the lines of the recombinations attempted below. I'm not keen on "views on"-type titles for the reasons mentioned above, although "thought on" might be ok. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:55, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  "Zionist views" sounds like the article is cherrypicking soundbites, and anyway is wrong per Zero below (…these are not specifically Zionist views but rather traditional Jewish beliefs that Zionis adopted into its ideology.)

  Then addressing Iskandar's point above that Origins could be talking about 6th century BCE theology, Jewish origins would need to say "ancestral origins of modern Jews".

  This would convert Selfstudier's version into "Zionism and the ancestral origins of modern Jews".

  Onceinawhile (talk) 22:22, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support - per the discussion above (the "Title" talk page section). It is "views on Jewish origins", so it is particularly the thought and beliefs about origins rather than the (theological or otherwise) thought of the time of Jewish origin. Also, it is in the nature of titles that they describe a primary topic that does not preclude that there might be secondary topics that could be described by them, and that is not a reason to oppose a clear description of the primary topic. This title clearly, on the face of it, describes modern views (i.e. from the birth of Zionism onwards) on the subject of Jewish Origins. The page subject and content thus falls within that primary topic, and this is a good title. I note that it does not itself preclude the page discussion looking at those views in the round. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 19:46, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support, on the principle of not letting the perfect become the enemy of at least some improvement. Strictly speaking, the choice here is between the current pagename and the proposed new one, not between those two and some unspecified perfect pagename. And I'm supporting the requested move in the interests of consensus, and because it represents what I think is a significant improvement over the status quo. The existing name, pairing race with genetics, does to some extent reflect what the page covers, but it also asserts a hot-button and dubious contention in Misplaced Pages's voice. I'm not wild about "origins", but I'm going along with it as a compromise with other editors on this talk page who pretty much oppose anything that they didn't propose first. Personally, I think the page is more about identity (racial identity or Jewish racial identity) than about origins, but I can live with this compromise. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:35, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

  This wall-of-text RM is about to reach the 7-day possible closing point, and I want to elaborate a bit on my original comment. When I referred to the current pagename asserting a hot-button and dubious contention, what I mean is that it makes it sound like there are genetic differences between races, that races are different from one another, and that there is a genetic basis for that. Of course, that's not what is intended, but some readers and some editors get that impression from the page title. For me, that makes the binary choice between the current pagename and the imperfect new proposal a reason to support the change. It looks to me like editors are divided between those that think the proposed new title is better than the existing one, and those that think the existing one is better than the proposed new one. That's not a consensus that the existing one cannot be improved upon, and shouldn't be framed as such. Going forward, I think Zionist thought on Jewish racial identity is worth looking at next. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Tryptofish, as I explained below on conjunctions, when you write:

  When I referred to the current pagename asserting a hot-button and dubious contention, what I mean is that it makes it sound like there are genetic differences between races, that races are different from one another, and that there is a genetic basis for that. Of course, that's not what is intended, but some readers and some editors get that impression from the page title.

  Which readers and which editors? One must assume that readers and editors are familiar with English. I cannot imagine any native speaker of English making the inference from those three words that 'there are genetic differences between races, that races are different from one another, and that there is a genetic basis for that.' That is simply, grammatically, not possible. of course, someone who hasn't a reasonable command of English might hypothetically conjure up such a fantastic interpretation, but we cannot write articles keeping in mind such wild guessword at meanings English usage excludes.Nishidani (talk) 22:59, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Let's try to avoid a conversation, as I think I heard someone else say. Well, some editors got pretty upset at #Lead: "science provided evidence", above, when some language regrettably (and I really mean regrettably!) implied that more directly. Surely, you remember how there have been numerous attempts to delete the page. It's not an intended meaning of the title, but it's not like the current title cannot possibly be improved upon. But anyway, let's try to avoid a conversation. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:09, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  By training I am a philologist. In clarifying grammar, I am not engaging in a 'conversation'. I am correcting elementary mistakes about grammar which, unfortunately, keep cropping up and causing, because of the looseness in reading, 'conversations' that should never arise in the first place among native speakers of English.Nishidani (talk) 23:30, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Check your qualifications at the door. This is Misplaced Pages. Not everyone is a native speaker. Others might have neuroatypical characteristics, or intellectual disabilities: they are all welcome here, and you must be more indulgent and charitable of this. Be civil, and be tolerant. Andre🚐 23:54, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Good grief. No comment.Nishidani (talk) 00:01, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  You do not need to comment on that, but you must remember that nobody WP:OWNs an article and Selfstudier's proposal for a rename topic is allowed to be discussed, even in ways you might disagree with or have some critique of. You seem to like to imply that a particular misunderstanding of the discussion is beneath you and worthy of some contempt. Let's try to elevate the discussion and approach interlocutors with an open mind and kindness, especially if they are wrong or misled. Innocent mistakes in understanding are widespread. Andre🚐 00:06, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Please desist from making innuendos I am contemptuous of people with neurological or intellectual difficulties, that I exude hauteur, am uncharitable, intolerant and unkind. That is deeply offensive, personalizing and, frankly, intolerable. I was sanctioned for far far less, recently, and you are lucky I refuse to report this rubbish at AE, on principle.Nishidani (talk) 00:30, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  I apologize if I offended you. But you should understand how some of your statements come across. Such as your statements someone who hasn't a reasonable command of English might hypothetically conjure up such a fantastic interpretation. Andre🚐 00:36, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Since all of this, somehow, comes out of my RM comment (good grief), I'll say that I appreciate what Andrevan has said (and I kind of like the characterization of exuding hauteur – and I guess it's only a conversation if someone else started it, but then again, by training, I'm only a fish). I think it's worth noting that there was no intention to express contempt of the neurodivergant, that there was no intent to express racism when writing that science affirmed a hierarchy of races, that there was no intent to express racism when that was changed to genetic differences between races, and that there was no intent to express scientific racism when naming this page "Zionism, race and genetics". No such intention. But people, at least some of them reasonable and fluent in English, nevertheless thought they detected such intent. We should be receptive to correcting language that was written with the best of intentions, to address concerns that were raised by people who were unaware of those intentions. Because we're writing for a general readership, who have no idea what editors were thinking. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:16, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for that, Tryptofish. And to be clear I agree nobody was expressing contempt for the neurodivergent, or expressing racism. And I agree the point is that things are easily misconstrued. I do think that Nishidani's statement I am correcting elementary mistakes about grammar which, unfortunately, keep cropping up and causing, because of the looseness in reading, 'conversations' that should never arise in the first place among native speakers of English could be construed in a problematic way, and such phrasing should be avoided. But I no way feel that Nishidani meant harm by his statement. Andre🚐 01:23, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. Mostly per Iskandar323. Also, these are not specifically Zionist views but rather traditional Jewish beliefs that Zionist adopted into its ideology. The proposed title does not properly represent the content of the article. Zero 01:53, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support per Tryptofish. I'm not a fan of "X and Y"-type articles unless there is a mountain of literature on the conjunction between X and Y. But an article on "X, Y, and Z" –– barring some truly exceptional circumstance, which this does not appear to be –– is just an open invitation for WP:COATRACKing and endless debates over the scope of the article. The proposed title isn't perfect but it's a clear improvement. Generalrelative (talk) 18:13, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, as hopelessly vague, and incompatible with WP:CRITERIA. As it stands, the defined scope of the article under its present name is evidently less than clear, but with the new title it could be almost anything. One could probably write an article on 'Zionist views on Jewish origins' that made no mention of 'race' or genetics at all, if one desired, thereby erasing the existing content, along with all the convoluted discussions, entirely if one desired to do so. Per WP:AGF, I'm going to assume that isn't the intent here, but it could very well be the consequence: deletion by renaming and erasure. I have always been sceptical about the ability of Misplaced Pages to adequately cover this distinctly tricky subject matter, and accordingly advocated deletion at the AfD. If there is another AfD, I might do the same. I do not however consider backdoor deletion (intentional or otherwise) through a complete change of scope to be appropriate. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:28, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
• Comment: Would moving to Jewishness as a racial identity, or something along those lines, be a better alternative? My reading of this discussion is that people don't prefer the current title in its "X, Y, and Z" format (and I agree, it's very poorly defined and coatrack-y), and nobody has really argued for it as much as against the proposed new title. Meanwhile, even the new title's supporters seem to agree with its opponents that "Zionist views on Jewish origins" is also an imperfect fit that doesn't really represent the actual topic (which I would also agree with). I think we might want to consider an Option C, because I don't really see a consensus in favor of either the current title or the proposed one. 3 kids in a trenchcoat (talk) 01:53, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
• Comment An alternative might be to take Falk's title Zionism and the Biology of the Jews together with Weitzman's book section Biological Approaches to the Origin of the Jews (Ch8, p280) and blend the two together, Zionist approaches to the biological origins of the Jews say.Selfstudier (talk) 11:54, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  It would be long-winded, but it would remain precise while putting an end to the X, Y and Z format that has proven so unpopular. Falk's title alone is probably the best formula, but it's taken, so... Iskandar323 (talk) 14:12, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  I would support this as well Drsmoo (talk) 15:01, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  Given that it appears unlikely that this RM proposal will get consensus, and given that I'm willing to compromise a lot in the interests of consensus, I agree that we should start looking at alternatives (and will need a new RM if we can settle on one), and I'm willing to go along with the possibilities above. I'll offer the following observations and suggestions. It might be best to omit anything about "origins", given the generally negative reaction it's gotten here, so that would be an argument against "biological origins of the Jews", although, on the other hand, specifying "biological" might address that concern. Instead of "approaches to", it might be better to say "thought on" or "views about". I agree with the criticism that it would be long-winded, but I'm willing to accept long-windedness if it gets consensus. I'll also repeat some options that got some interest in earlier discussions: Zionist thinking on racial identity, Zionist thinking on Jewish racial identity, Zionist views about racial identity, or Zionist views about Jewish racial identity. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:15, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  The term “race” is anachronistic and discredited. It can be used for old research that used that term, but modern research (very) rarely uses it. The standard terms used nowadays would be “ethnicity” or “ancestry”. Drsmoo (talk) 19:33, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  How about Zionist views about Jewish ethnic identity or Zionist views about Jewish genetic identity? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:47, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  "about genetic identity" has the inverse problem to "about racial identity" - the earlier writers weren't using the concept of genetics just as the later writers don't use the concept of race, so it would exclude any of the classic Zionist writers. We need a term that encompasses both. "about ethnic identity" might do that. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:57, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  or "about the origins and identity of the Jewish people", which avoids any limiting technical terms, but is very wordy. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:58, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  It's never good to use "ethnic" to imply race (or genetics) - this is already much overly abused: ethnicity is as much about culture as anything else. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:59, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  The Oxford definition of ethnicity is “the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.” which applies. Ancestry can be used as well. Drsmoo (talk) 09:09, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Both ethnicity and 'ancestry' are viewed as problematic terms within the field of genetics. See the two papers cited below from Nasem and from Birney, Inouye et al., ('The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like ‘ancestry’, ‘ethnicity’, and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within the various fields of genetics, between different domains of biological sciences and medicine, and between scientists and the general public.'Nishidani (talk) 10:23, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Yes, I linked to the paper you quoted from earlier in this discussion. Here it is again: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.10041.pdf

  From that source:

  ‘Race’ is particularly problematic, and its historical and political connotations, along with the fact that it is not a meaningful descriptor of genetic variation, have led many human geneticists to avoid it altogether. Indeed, in usage outside the United States, ‘race’ is less consistently understood and ‘ethnicity’ is often viewed as a less contentious way of referring collectively to those elements of an individual’s identity and biology that are inherited through ancestry and culture.

  It then notes how ethnicity has a different meaning within the United States:

  By contrast, in the United States, and within anthropological genetics (a subfield of biological anthropology), race and ethnicity have separate and distinct meanings; the former is a socially constructed category that takes into account physical characteristics, and the latter is a explicitly category of cultural self-identification. This usage (which has itself changed considerably over the years since the United States government began collecting census information) reflects a complex history of colonialism, politics and attitudes to race.

  It then advocates for the broader usage of ethnicity due to "race" being "particularly liable to misinterpretation in a genetic context":

  Since we are primarily addressing colleagues in genetics, and because we feel that ‘race’ is particularly liable to misinterpretation in a genetic context, we have leaned towards a broader meaning of ethnicity. But the variable meanings of these words must be considered when communicating genetic research, even when these ideas themselves are not its focus, because they are central to how people interpret differences between human groups and individuals.

  I'm not sure why you responded to a suggestion to use ethnicity instead of race with a source that describes race as "particularly problematic" and "particularly liable to misinterpretation", but completely avoided that section and only posted the criticism of the usage of "ethnicity" and "ancestry".

  https://www.genome.gov/news/news-release/language-used-by-researchers-to-describe-human-populations-has-evolved-over-the-last-70-years

  The study’s results show that the term “race” appeared in 22% of articles between 1949-58, and declined to 5% between 2009-18; however, in recent years, the term shows up more often when used along with “ethnicity.” Conversely, the overall use of “ethnicity” and “ancestry” has increased over time.

  Drsmoo (talk) 17:36, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  I would support that Drsmoo (talk) 09:06, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  That is to confuse 'race' as a descriptor (now discredited), with race as a concept that played an important role historically, not only in Zionism. We don't rewrite history by substituting the actual terms and concepts used by historical actors in the past with politically correct terms. The article is not about Jews, their 'ethnicity' or 'ancestry'. It is about the use of the concept of race in Zionist discourse over several decades and the residual influence of that heritage in modern genetic research. Nishidani (talk) 19:53, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  This seems to be the crux of the dispute to me; namely, that "race," an outmoded pseudoscientific concept, in modern parlance, actually refers to the study of or analysis of pseudogenetic prejudices and separations in human affairs. So when you write a phrase such as "Zionism and race" the question is implied: is it that Zionist attitudes considered Jews a separate race, or that there were several separate races within Judaism? Additionally, you have alluded to the fact that some German-Jewish-eugenicists were among the fathers of Zionism. Then, perhaps, the title of the article should be, Zionism and eugenics? Andre🚐 20:35, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  That is the problem with the article. You are arguing that the article is using race only in a historical sense. That is of course in no way clear from this title. In fact this title essentially gives readers leeway to edit into the title anything that relates to any conception of Zionism, race, or genetics. Drsmoo (talk) 23:52, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  Adding: I agree with Nishidani below, that "race"/"racial" is not an inappropriate word to consider in the pagename. I can sympathize with the idea that present-day thinking can find the term offensive when it is used in a racist manner, but as a neutral description of the various lines of thinking covered by this page, I don't regard it as problematic (cf race relations). --Tryptofish (talk) 21:29, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

  Nishidani claims that "ancestry" and "ethnicity" are imprecise terms. This argument is irrelevant. Misplaced Pages does not have to use to consistent definitions. Misplaced Pages should contextually contrast all the possible meanings of terminology in proportion to their weight and prominence. If most high quality research describes the Jewish genetic heritage that can be followed from various historical viewpoints, we can use any and all of the terms that are used in different context and sense. Nishidani claims that "race" is accurate while "ethnicity" and "ancestry" are imprecise. That is a specious argument. All 3 terms are contextual, and any term may be used as appropriately sourced in the source material - again, we're putting the finger on the scale here in favor of a particular interpretation or non-interpretation. The more contemporary term "ethnicity" may be scientifically imprecise. That doesn't change the fact that it's a term used by many actors such as governments and politicians, or historical thinkers. We cover what the expert analysis is of what they said and what it may have meant, but we shouldn't police language or be prescriptive about language along these lines, namely, that something lacks a precise definition. Except for highly specific terms of art and science, most terms have several definitions of varying precision. To wit: what is the problem with thinking about "ancestry" and "ethnicity" when we charitably interpret what is meant by those terms? Or if you prefer to say "Jewish genetic lineage," the fact remains there is a blurry-lined and multiethnic polity of Jews, and this article isn't purely about only one thing. No article is constrained to such narrow scope as the original thinking of its original author. Andre🚐 20:41, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Andrevan: to address one topic in your points above – "ethnicity" is irrelevant as an option here, because it is a broad / open term which can be defined as just a shared language or religion, and which can be believed into existence by a group. Thus "Zionism and Jewish ethnicity" is a non-topic, because there is no question of whether Jews are an ethnic group. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:10, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  I don't claim things like ' "ancestry" and "ethnicity" are imprecise terms.' That is what the sources cited below, by geneticists, state. Please don't attribute to me views which I paraphrase from sources, personalizing them as though I were the source. As for the rest, 'race' was for several decades the default term, and it is the one privileged by the historical sources the article draws on. Editors are not at liberty to mess with history by euphemizing it.Nishidani (talk) 21:41, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Zionist thought on Jewish racial identity might be ok. Iskandar323 (talk) 17:50, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Selfstudier: Are there any existing pages that you can think of that use an "approaches to"-type formula, or would we be going off-piste with this? Not necessarily an issue but wondering ... Iskandar323 (talk) 11:02, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose - entirely agree with Zero, that is a different topic entirely. nableezy - 15:04, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support per Sirfurboy and Tryptofish, and in agreement with perfect being the enemy of the good. Would also support Selfstudier’s other proposal. Drsmoo (talk) 18:28, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per Iskander and Zero. There is no such thing as a 'Zionist' view of Jewish Origins, so the proposed title is meaningless. It was also claimed simplistically above that 'the term 'race' is anachronistic and discredited,'etc. That is not what dozens of high-quality RS sources have argued in the last decade. The 'term' may be discredited, the concept, per sources, is not. To name but a few:-

Race and Contemporary Medicine is concerned with the reappearance of ‘race’ as a category of scientific analysis within the world of medicine.’ Sander L. Gilman, 'Introduction: race and contemporary medicine,’ in Sander Gilman, ‘Race in Contemporary Medicine,’ ISBN 978-1-136-76455-4 Taylor & Francis 2013 p.viii.

Gilman is the foremost world authority on the '(pseudo-)scientization' of the Jewish body throughout modern history.

Troy Duster, ‘A post-genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine,' British Journal of Sociology Volume 66, Issue 1 March 2015 pp.1-27 18 March 2015 Nishidani (talk) 20:31, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

• Comment There is no such thing as a 'Zionist' view of Jewish Origins This seems to overstate the case, Cynthia Baker's "new Jew" seems exactly about a Zionist view of Jewish origins as well as other things, p91, section Zionism’s Conflicted Claims on Jew, part Zionism’s New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew excerpt p99 "As noted in the discussion of yidn, above, Zionist narratives of ethnic identity and homeland appropriate and derogate Jew by turns, but all in service to building and sustaining a “Jewish nation-state” grounded, geographically and demographically, on claims of ancestral belonging."Selfstudier (talk) 15:41, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  I agree with that. I agreed above with the comment that "race" remains a credible term, but I disagree with the hyperbole that there is no such thing as views on origins. One can credibly make a case that there is less discussion of it in sources, and that sources are more focused on "identity" than on "origins", but to argue that it doesn't even exist is hyperbole. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:46, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  In the normative construal of English grammar, the use of the adjective 'Zionist' in'Zionist views on Jewish origins' means that there is something particular to Zionist thinking, as opposed to Jewish tradition or broader (at the time) contemporary Jewish thinking about Jewish origins, which sets Zionism off from Jewish traditional belief about their historic origins. There is, from your quote, nothing in Baker that makes this distinction. Zionist views on Jewish origins are identical to those maintained by a millenial Jewish tradition, so the adjective, unless proven otherwise, is supererogatory, and the title meaningless. Zionism's projected 'new Jew' has nothing to do with this. Furthermore, this specific item of the 'new Jew' is covered briefly in the article, which however covers a far larger thematic focus, as the sources demand. One cannot invent a title for a complex article by making it represent perhaps 2-3% of the text, while ignoring the overwhelming content of the article.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  But what then is the purpose of all the race and genetic high jinks? One supposes they were/are not doing it just for the fun of it.Selfstudier (talk) 19:53, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  And there is also a difference between "Zionist views" and "the Zionist view". The page is very much about differing views, one group of people taking one position, and another group of people taking issue with it. The existence of multiple views, presented with NPOV and balance, does not in any way imply that there is one particular kind of view. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:59, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  Let's try to avoid a 'conversation'. I asked, as the suggested title demands, what is specifically 'Zionist' about asserting Jews originated in Israel? I asked what are the distinctive Zionist views about Jewish origins? This - because it is an extraordinary claim- requires multiple sourcing, not conversation.Nishidani (talk) 20:16, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  It seems to me that there is a distinction between some number of diaspora Jews pining for Palestine and an organized effort to construct an ethnicity or nationalist narrative, because without the common descent factor, where is the nation/ethnicity/people/nationality, however one chooses to phrase that? I see this in the sources but you apparently see something else, the 96/7% of the article, presumably. If what you are suggesting is that the article be edited to show that, well I expect that can be done. Selfstudier (talk) 21:24, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'm sorry, Self, but that is the kind of assumption that would require an extensive excursus to analyse, and I am only back here to help clarify the confusion over this title. Common descent was a generalized assumption throughout Jewish communities, not Zionist. Zionism's innovation was to assert Jews were a 'race', not a community of believers. The notion of 'nation' did not at that time require a return to Palestine/Israel. See Territorialists and Bundism. Nishidani (talk) 14:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  The race thing is a (more "scientific" as was thought at the time) means of asserting a common descent (ie Jewish origins). As is the genetic hoopla (science again), the aim is the same, establish a common descent -> polity/nation/people/blah. I only mentioned Palestine to highlight the difference between the Zionist approach and the "diaspora" approach, which was what you asked me about. Selfstudier (talk) 14:18, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  My problem is that these notions of the past, caught up in generalizations, if pursued in depth, look simplistic. Doron argued in 1980 that 'race' was seized on as a trump card by Zionism precisely because, while they asserted the Jews were a nation, the claim was counterfactual in the language of that time, since the notion of a nation assumed a common language, territory and state, none of which the Jews had. Since the founding fathers were also secular or atheists, often contemptuous of the putative religious incredulity and superstitiousness of Ostjuden, 'race' was a powerful ersatz for the religious identity of Jews which they repudiated. It is notable that almost none of the Zionist elite for decades ever imagined renouncing their European identities to stake a new life in Palestine. They were as 'diasporic' of their assimilationist adversaries. These concepts were 'instrumental', often a means of resolving, as our article remarks, the pressure of migrating Eastern Jews on Western societies and their Jewish communities. Had I permitted myself a larger rewriting by dwelling on such elements as they emerge in studies on Zionist history (as opposed to the restricted thematics of race and genetics) this would be much clearer. But the remit was to stick to the three themes. One should remember that Zionism was very much a minority voice until way into the thirties, among the Ashkenazi and the Mizrachi. Nishidani (talk) 16:33, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  The term "Zionist views" in the plural does not in any way imply that there is one single "a Zionist view". This objection doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, if Zionist views can't be separated from Jewish views (I'd strongly disagree with that claim) then isn't our current article title (and all other article titles with Zionism in them?) also meaningless? BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  Viewpoints within Zionism are as varied as they are with Judaism. What we do here is not opinionize, but, I insist, act as amanuenses for what reliable scholarship states, and reliable scholarship, it has been shown exhaustively, takes the three themes of 'Zionism, race and genetics' as thematically intertwined. This article analyses in historical review those aspects of Zionism which engaged in first race and then, if implicitly, in genetic developments. We can talk around, over, under or through any number of feelings or thoughts we may entertain about this and that, but such conversational impressions lack textual cogency.Nishidani (talk) 14:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  thematically intertwined I have agreed with this all along, but intertwined in what way, exactly? What is the unifying theme? Selfstudier (talk) 14:21, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  There is no single unifying theme independent of the constituent parts (and to think so is to second guess the article and its sources), anymore than a triangle has a unifying theme that privileges a quartum quid to which the defining properties of three vertices and lines are subordinate. That would be a case of what Gilbert Ryle called a ghost category.Nishidani (talk) 16:33, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  I understand that, but for me, I see a unifying theme and I can see it in sources, it is Zionist (ideological) pursuit of a common descent, as it says at Zionism#Ethnic unity and descent from Biblical Jews (accepting that WP is not a source but it links out to this article as main)

  "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". This "racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism" was originally a reaction to European antisemitism. According to Raphael Falk, 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". 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." Selfstudier (talk) 16:53, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry, I overlooked this, and feel obliged to reply. The problem is, very little of the scholarship on Zionism is present in wiki articles, and the point you raise would open up a different can of worms. There were extensive debates and disagreements among Zionists about 'common descent', i.e which communities were 'pure' and which miscegenated (implying not common descent). Sephardis could be claimed to be 'Bedouin', the Mizrachi 'Arabs' etc.etc.etc. Koestler thought the Ashkenazi were of Khazar origins, lacking common descent from Hebrews/Israelites, and that theory once played a role in Zionist thinking. Neither Falk nor Weitzman are particularly good on this particular aspect. I touched on this in the section on Ruppin. This article is a general overview of the three entangled topics. The theme 'Jewish origins' is far, far more complex among Zionist thinkers for the first half-century at least, and would require a separate article. Even our sources often make generalizations that simplify these complexities. Those who want a different focus of the type you suggest are at complete liberty, if they have the time, to read widely over a few months, and then write such an article. What this article has, is a mass of information interlinking the dominant motifs and changing research models and methodologies, - the assumptions driving different approaches- and can hardly be expected to bear the added burden of another 50 books and articles going into those kinds of (for this text) subsidiary details.Nishidani (talk) 23:48, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

  Several questions - the first, I think, is that the practical question of 50 books or articles needed to do a topic justice isn't a reason to narrow the article scope, necessarily. "Jewish origins" versus "Jewish genetics" is largely a point of semantics I think, since origins is kind of a polite way of saying one's heritage, but is also inclusive of a slightly broader view such as that of history, which we certainly do want to cover in the article. I'm not sure what you mean about the Sephardic being Bedouin, the Mizrahi being Arabs - can you substantiate that (I assume, that is Zionists speaking?) with a more specific cite or source? I am pretty familiar with a different kind of Zionist thinking of a broad tent, type of Jewishness, which would certainly consider the Sephardic Jews to be some very authentically Jewish people indeed, many of whom were forebears of later Ashkenazis Jews as we now know, or Jews in Anatolia and Eastern Europe more generally. If anything, my interpretation is that the known authentic forerunners of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were European Jews, and I don't think this is new scholarship, but information such as someone being descended from Rashi or Judah Halevi, was thought to be the case by the early Zionists, was it not? Not that this article must be about folk genealogy but in terms of Zionists, which Zionists would think that Ashkenazi Jews are the "pure ones" and why? If anything, isn't there just a modern-day Israeli influx of Eastern European Jewish Orthodox sects, quite distinct from the Israeli Old Yishuv which was in large part Sephardic/Ottoman? And wasn't this known to the Zionist writers? And the Khazars again - really? Can't that be left out? Andre🚐 00:33, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  Sorry, but didn't you read the article? I wrote, alluding to this article:

  Sephardis could be claimed to be 'Bedouin', the Mizrachi 'Arabs' etc.etc.etc. Koestler thought the Ashkenazi were of Khazar origins, lacking common descent from Hebrews/Israelites, and that theory once played a role in Zionist thinking. Neither Falk nor Weitzman are particularly good on this particular aspect. I touched on this in the section on Ruppin.

  I.e. the article already states these things, albeit briefly. You reply:

  I'm not sure what you mean about the Sephardic being Bedouin, the Mizrahi being Arabs - can you substantiate that (I assume, that is Zionists speaking?) with a more specific cite or source?

  I.e. you ask me to substantiate what passages in the article, duly sourced, already state, and in my note to Selfstudier I directed sceptics to the specific section (Ruppin) where these points were made. If one fails to check, and simply responds to the talk page, we only get more reiteration. Of course, I can begin to fish out tons of further material to corroborate what I have already sourced. E.g.

  The radical decrease in the number of Sephardim is explained by Ruppin as being the result of certain deficiencies in their biological structure. As the most Semitic component of the Jewish race, they came to represent, in his analysis, a degenerate strain in the Jewish Volk. According to Ruppin, not only had the (Ashkenazi) Jews preserved their racial characteristics, they had also succeeded in improving them through a long process of selection which promoted the fittest among them: rich Jews married their daughters to the most brilliant students, thus ensuring the mental development of the race. The Sephardic- Oriental (Mizrachi) Jews, Ruppin concluded, were lacking this urge for self-selection, a fact that certainly damaged their “vital force.” Another factor which differentiated the Oriental Jews, according to Ruppin’s assertion, was that most of them were actually Arabs and Moslems who had converted over the generations.' Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, 2011 p.98.

  But I am retired also because it is exasperating to keep arguing on talk pages points that anyone can access by simply reading widely in the scholarship. I frequently get the impression editors have not taken much trouble to read the articles as constituted let alone all the given sources, as opposed to reading and responding to personal opinions or general comments in the talk page threads. I am diffident of 'conversation' that suggests the relevant scholarship has not been studied. If one has an argument, it should be astringently backed, even on talk pages, by specific documented evidence. That is the only efficient way to avoid the drift into conversational opinionizing.Nishidani (talk) 07:15, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  I think it's a bit of an overstatement of what they're quoting to Ruppin there. He doesn't say that the Sephardic are Bedouin. In fact in this 1907 text, as I stated earlier, he is aware of the preexistence of Sephardic Jews in Israel. the few thousand Sephardic Jews who were already to be found there a century ago. The Jewish population of Palestine consists of three distinct strata. The first is made up of those Sephardic Jews who have lived in the country for centuries, have become closely assimilated, in mores and in the general mode of life, to the local Arabs and who, side by side with Spaniolo, speak Arabic too. A good picture of the life of these Jews is furnished by the town of Saida (the ancient Sidon) where 2000 Jews -- all of them Sephardic -- may be found. They receive no 'Halukkah, earn a difficult and pitiful living as small merchants and artisans, are poorly educated and of a not particularly high moral standing. The Jews of Morocco, Persia and the Yemen, who have come into Palestine of recent years, may be lumped together with this group. You can say I'm splitting hairs but it's an important distinction. He does indeed have a German-race-science tinged view of Ashkenazi superiority, as you said, but it's an oversimplification to claim he thinks Sephardic Jews are Bedouin or equivalent to Bedouin. Nor does it say that Ruppin believed Sephardic Jews lacked Jewish descent. Andre🚐 17:31, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  So you wish to contest the view Arthur Ruppin endorsed in his Soziologie der Juden (Berlin 1930, vol.1, p.19). I.e. do you really believe that you understand Ruppin better than he himself did or scholarly specialists on his life and writings do?

  I cited a 2011 scholarly biography of Ruppin. It's 400 pages long, and covers Ruppin's writings down to 1941. You cite a primary source reproducing one speech made by Ruppin in 1908 as though that were more authoritative, as you interpret it. Editors must not impose their own interpretations on primary sources, in this case cherrypicked, to oppose what high quality secondary sources write summing up dozens of Ruppin's writings over decades. As I have noted repeatedly, this kind of response is 'conversation', in this case arising from a perusal of a single primary source to draw inferences that serious scholarship dismisses. That is not within our remit as editors.Nishidani (talk) 19:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'm not saying that a single primary source in the author's own words trumps all the scholarship about him. But the source you provided does not say that Ruppin equated Sephardic Jews with Bedouin. Do you have a source for that statement? It's a nuanced point. He clearly, and I am not contesting, had a dim view of Sephardim and believed them to be inferior to Ashkenazi Jews, but he still considered Sephardim Jewish, despite their inferior status. Do you have a source for the contrary? Andre🚐 20:13, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  You appear to be trying to draw me into a 'conversation' when the answer to all of your imprecisions is readily available if you take the trouble to read the sources listed under Ruppin on the article bibliography.

  You completely misconstrue the cite from p.98. It elaborates on what Bloom wrote earlier, for example on pp.88, 96. Ruppin thought Ashkenazis were descended from an original Jewish type of Indo-European origin: they were a Nordic race. A part of this type was debilitated by growing semitic influences which produced the Beduinentypus, the 'semitic Jew' among which he classified the Sephardim. I can't keep coming back here to do your work for you if you refuse to read the core sources. If one wishes to comment on Ruppin, the absolute minimum is to read and master the contents of the secondary literature beforehand. Otherwise, we end up with chat that has no functional value.Nishidani (talk) 21:13, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  What I'm not disputing is that Ruppin believed that the original Jews were European and that the Semitic influence was secondary, which I guess is almost exactly backwards. However, I think this still suggests that "Jewish origins" is a good title for the article. I also don't agree that Falk or Bloom say that Ruppin was saying that Sephardim weren't Jewish. Sephardic Jews were simply made inferior, but he does not say that they lacked a common origin. According to Falk 2017, Bloom (2008, p. 13) insists that Ruppin thought of himself as a culture planner, and as such was a loyal supporter of the theories of the cultural superiority of the nations of Central Europe and of the significance of eugenic measures for the preservation of their achievements. Since the ‘original’ Semitic race was considered akin to the inferior Bedouin type, Ruppin segregated the Ashkenazi Jews from the main Semitic stock. Referring to von Luschan’s analyses of the multiracial origins of the ancient Jews, Ruppin endeavored to distance Semitism from the image of the ‘original jew’ and to bring him closer to the Indo-Germanic races. Bloom contends that Ruppin’s universal humanism was directed at the Ashkenazim, whom Ruppin identified as the definitive Jewish type in modern times. “As far as he was concerned, the original and healthy Jews, who are responsible for the virtues of Jewish culture, belong racially mainly to the Indo-Germanics.” Furthermore, Bloom claims that according to Ruppin “modern race research proved that the Semitic element in the Jewish race is degenerating, and the Zionist process of national resurrection , being eugenic in nature, gradually dismisses the Semites racial and cultural elements” (Bloom 2008, pp. 104–109) .... According to Bloom, the answer may be formulated as follows: The reason for the deterioration of the original Jews (the Urjuden) was the introduction of the racial Semitic element among the Jewish people, primarily the Bedouin or Middle Eastern type. For Ruppin, the original Jews, those who were farmers and lived prior to the destruction of the First Temple, were non-Semitic tribes. Again, this is very wrong and backwards and discredited eugenic thought but it never says that Ruppin said Sephardim weren't Jewish, lacked Jewish origin or weren't legitimate claimants to Jewish heritage or descent. Andre🚐 21:28, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

  I also don't agree that Falk or Bloom say that Ruppin was saying that Sephardim weren't Jewish. Sephardic Jews were simply made inferior, but he does not say that they lacked a common origin

  Sorry, but that's a strawman. Where did I ever state that Bloom and or Falk construe Ruppin as saying the Sephardim weren't Jewish? (In 1918 ben-Gurion stated that in all probability the Palestinians were of Jewish origin). I said Ruppin thought the authentic heirs of the ancient Jews were the Ashkenazi who putatively maintained like their 'nordic' forefathers their Indo-European racial characteristics, as opposed to Bedouin-type Jews who were contaminated by interbreeding with Semitic peoples. Ruppin's race theories played a significant role in blocking further 2nd aliyah Yemenite immigration, as they did in denying Ethiopian Jews, 'niggers' to perform aliyah. Eliding the concept of 'race' from early Zionism and replacing it with some generic quest for Jewish origins (academic speculations with no pragmatic value in that period's Zionism) simply obscures one of the driving forces in population selection operative for decades. Surely Onceinawhile and myself are not the only content editors who are capable of writing an article, with ample access to much wider materials, on Zionist views on Jewish origins. That is not what this article was designed for.Nishidani (talk) 22:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose, the article scope should continue to be "Jewish genetics", or "Issues in Jewish genetics" or "The content which couldn't be added to genetic studies on Jews because that is a scientific article". Should drop 'Zionism' and 'race' from the title rather than 'genetics'. That does not require excluding any of the current content, which is necessary for the reader, but maybe some expansion of the scope. fiveby(zero) 13:59, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

  Given the impasse, perhaps we should review briefly the major staging points in our discussions over the past two months, to try to sort this out. I'd be willing to give my version of this history, if editors think it might help.Nishidani (talk) 14:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

• Support fundamentally a reasonable improvement. Andre🚐 21:30, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose - current title is fine. The scope of the article is the intersection between Zionism, race, and genetics, and the sources for this scope are cited in the article, e.g. Baker, Efrim, Falk, etc. This title is the most concise/precise/consistent/etc (WP:AT) title for that scope that I can think of. The proposed title--like all the proposed titles I've seen on this page--is a title for a different article. "Zionist views on X" would be an article that covers all Zionists' various views of X. That is not the same thing as an article about the intersection of Zionism, race, and genetics -- that's one view held by some Zionists -- a notable view, studied by scholars, but not the full range of views of Zionists on Jewish origins. Someone could write an article about Zionists' various views on Jewish origins, of course, but it'd be a different article about a related but different topic. Levivich (talk) 14:34, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  I think this is a good argument but I think the "and" is ambiguous, in the title. You mention the "interaction" between these 3 things but it is vague. Zionism, race, and genetics aren't all 3 celestial bodies orbiting abstractly around a narrative solar system. Isn't there a better way we can frame those 3 nouns with something descriptive and not just a loose linkage? Andre🚐 20:43, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  Just on this technical issue in grammar. I should have clarified this before because it was raised earlier (and I didn't think it important at the time) 'And' here is just a coordinating conjunction between two substantives, the last two of three, and allows no margin for ambiguity or misunderstanding (cp.fathers and sons, War and Peace, or better still, Bill Miller's recent book, Politics, Economics and Religion: Socialism, Fascism, Capitalism and Religion. (2018). There is no equivocation, or implication of possible semantic confusion, in what is a normal idiomatic listing of distinct elements in a series.Nishidani (talk) 21:28, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  It's not a technical issue, it's a narrative issue. The article is entitled, Zionism, race and genetics. Aside from the entire ambiguity of the lack of Oxford comma, which is not worth discussion. The point is: Zionism, race, and genetics: what about it? That's not a construction that is WP:COMMONNAME of anything I know of. Therefore, may be synthetic, or original. It is indeed vague: how does Zionism, relate to race, and how does it related to genetics, and how do those two relate? Your examples such as War and Peace borrow a construction from the title of a preexisting work. Is there an extant source of the construction relating these 3 topics? Note that I am not making a grammatical argument on the technicalities of usage, or of semantics. I am simply asking if there is an extant, non-Misplaced Pages topic that frames those 3 topics together in that particular way. Andre🚐 23:59, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

  That is essentially the same question I have, I see those three things as related in a certain way in the sources (other people might see the relationship differently) but Nishidani has it that they are related ("thematically intertwined") in some other ill-defined fashion ("There is no single unifying theme independent of the constituent parts"). Selfstudier (talk) 08:28, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  I answered you below. The simple answer is, I like many others, see 3 words in a title, and understand immediately what the article is about, because the title formula used is standard in scholarly books and articles which announce their subject matter in that succinct way. The 'how' of their 'relationship' is what the reader discovers in reading any book or article with a three-word title. Nishidani (talk) 16:58, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  But where is the scholarly book for this case? The nearest I see is Falk's Zionism and the Biology of Jews (or perhaps Baker's Zionism's New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew). Selfstudier (talk) 17:05, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

  in this case? That, dear Self, misses the point. I am not talking about content, but the formal structure of titles. The terms used to fill the sequences of substantives deployed in a X,Y and Z title will vary depending on thematic focus. Love, life and death, Capitalism, communism and fascism, Husbands, wives and children, ad infinitum. All that is required to justify a version like Zionism, race(,) and genetics is that evidence be given that the three are treated extensively as a thematic ensemble in scholarship. There is a huge amount of 'conversation' here that lacks analytical rigour, so one way out is to recast the whole contention in logical form and evidential precedent, which eliminates subjective opinionizing. Nishidani (talk) 10:37, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose but remain open-minded, based on the discussion so far:

1) Noone has argued that the article’s scope or content should be changed. Opposition to the proposed rename has focused on the fact that the new title would meaningfully change the scope, and supporters of a change are yet to fully address this concern.

2) The core argument for a rename appears to be that a triple-conjunction is unusual on Misplaced Pages – I am sympathetic to that. Other related arguments about the term race, or race and genetics, are not convincing to me given the thorough treatment at race and genetics, and the wide sourcing in this article.

3) I wrote above of "Zionism and the ancestral origins of modern Jews”; the rest of the discussion has highlighted the additional core concept of the reformulation of Jewishness in terms of racial and genetic identity. So a title with the same scope would be more along the lines of "Zionism and the racial-genetic origin-based identity of modern Jews".

Onceinawhile (talk) 21:42, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

To me, the article title "Zionism and the racial-genetic origin-based identity of modern Jews" implies there is a racial-genetic origin-based identity of modern Jews, whereas the title "Zionism, race, and genetics" does not imply anything about those three subjects or their intersection (which is a good thing). (Maybe though we can all agree to add the oxford comma.) Levivich (talk) 01:27, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Looking at it cold, I agree. It's like "Israel and the apartheid regime" vs "Israel and apartheid" — I can’t quite explain grammatically why, but the first formulation seems to imply something where the second does not. Onceinawhile (talk) 05:31, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

'the' in 'the apartheid regime' is the culprit. There are apartheid-like regimes, each differing in details from the primary model (South Africa). I.e., the title begs a question (what or which regime?), which 'Israel and apartheid' doesn't, since it simply states that the article will deal with the literature that treats the two as having some links, or similarities or dissimilarities. Substantives in a series tell you nothing of what to expect other than that the article or book will deal with the items together. As in logic, minimalism excludes discursive equivocation. Both Andrevan and Levivich's point on the comma are well-taken. I already looked into that and found both threesome titles with or without the Oxford comma (damned impertinence. Is (the) Cambridge (University Press) to be mocked as linguistically unsubtle?) in relatively equal distribution. So its introduction or absence is not problematical.Nishidani (talk) 10:53, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd also support adding the comma, if nothing else can be agreed to. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:51, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

OK, so a neutral version might be: "Zionism and racial-genetic origin in the identity of modern Jews". Onceinawhile (talk) 10:59, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

That might work, "Zionism and racial-genetic origin(s) in Jewish identity" is sufficient, perhaps. Selfstudier (talk) 11:06, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I could go along with "Zionism and racial-genetic origins in Jewish identity", if that would lead to consensus, although I find it a bit wordy. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:24, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

At this point I'm embarrassed. I've nothing against adjusting titles, I just want to see 'rational' motivations for it, which means a cogent logical reason for opposing what exists. As to this discursive title: I've spend almost 2 decades trying to insist on disentangling 'Jewish/Jews'/Israel/Zionism from some intrinsic implication of identity or interchangeability. Judaism forms one of the great civilizations proven over millennia in hundreds of distinctive traditions drawing inspiration from its foundational beliefs. Zionism is a very recent blip (so far), an extraordinary experiment driven by a teleological vision that it is the logical culmination of Judaism. Whatever the merits, Jews in all of their multifarious communal and individual identities can't be straightjacketed into any political or stereotypical identity: when they are, usually by outsiders, damage has been inflicted on Judaism and Jews and disaster has frequently been in the wings. I have no idea what an 'ethnic identity' is other than political or geographical shorthand, and I just feel viscerally uneasy about, in particular, any language which pins a collectivist 'identity' on Jews, or which strengthens some reflex mental association between being Jewish and genetics or a specific state. Sorry for this foruming but 'Zionism, race and genetics' steps outside of the resonances of always classifying 'Jews' trying to pin them down, like Eliot's Prufock:

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

I can't bring myself to use the word with personal acquaintances for that reason, imagining the sense of fastidium it must tendentially conjure up in a friend. That is my bias, of course.Nishidani (talk) 11:30, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Maybe so but it seems to me that is exactly what Zionism is/has been trying to do and the hell with whoever disagrees, diaspora included. I agree that the issues are a bit of a tangle but a Misplaced Pages title here or there isn't going to make much of a difference. The issue is whether, within the bounds of WP policies, there is editorial consensus on the title and it seems pretty obvious that there isn't yet. That usually means we keep looking. Selfstudier (talk) 11:44, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

There are a lot of Zionists, some of my acquaintance, who are convinced that Zionism's foundation of a state for Jews was an historical necessity and yet who are repelled by racism, within Israel or elsdewhere, precisely because Jews were its prime victims, and they take this as a particular lesson illustrating a universal principle. Whatever Zionism's tragic thrust, we should avoid strengthening the biases already contaminating public discourse. It is part of the hasbara remit of Zionism to insist the two categories imbricate.Nishidani (talk) 12:03, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I read Post-Zionism and some of the other flavors of Zionism and just confused myself. Selfstudier (talk) 12:24, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

have no idea what an 'ethnic identity' is other than political or geographical shorthand, and I just feel viscerally uneasy about, in particular, any language which pins a collectivist 'identity' on Jews thanks for admitting that, but this is problematic. You may feel this way, but we can't insert that feeling into the article. Jews indeed do have a collective identity. Actually, a multitude of identities as you point out, but there are absolutely well-defined community lines, and you can't deny their existence in article mainspace text. The reason why these must exist is that they do in the source material. I do not seek to shame you or sanction you, merely to point out that you are incorrect on this point. There absolutely is, unequivocally, at least several major Jewish identities, and through their analysis we may meaningfully deduce that, yes, there's something shared among the Jewish heritage that manifests itself in all of the major Jewish groups. It's a bit hard to pin down, yes, but it exists - what we mean when we refer to the "ethnic identity" of Jewish people. It's no more real or less real than the national or ethnic identity of any other group. We have a mandate on Misplaced Pages, that it doesn't matter whether you are uncomfortable with the term "ethnic identity." All that matters is what the expert academics mean when they say that. I do not at all believe it is the case that there aren't social scientists and anthropologists and ethnologists and scholars of historical and religious studies that use this term in a rigorous, and not at all a shorthand way. Andre🚐 18:33, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

My own views are totally absent from this article. I would write something completely different were I to interpret the sources, and other primary sources, with the liberty of a scholar. Here I am a wikipedian. In real life, I was a specialist in ethnic ideology, esp. in analysing the flaws in what experts describe as a given identity that is putatively valid for all members of the named ethnic group. Nishidani (talk) 20:46, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

With full respect to your contributions to Misplaced Pages and your much good writing and research, I am guessing that this makes the topic very close to you. As many people do. The important thing is to reflect the scenario that we find playing out in a dispassionate way. Without accusation of any bad faith intent, I find it problematic that you believe it's a well-established and defensible view that "ethnicity" kind of isn't a real thing. It's true that labels are imprecise and that in some cases, there are exceptions that are hard to categorize. But by and large, if you slice a cross-section of say, all of the Jews who emigrated from the Pale of Settlement and the former Russian Empire (or Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, etc) to UK, USA, Canada, Argentina, and whatever other statistically significant locales Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to, you'd find a shared religious heritage, shared cuisine, shared language (Yiddish), songs, expressions, names, and yeah, a ton of shared DNA and yes, physical traits. A melting pot, with plenty of cultural diffusion to be sure. And they're also going to share a lot of things with a Sephardic Jewish converso or crypto-Jew. Does that mean any given person is going to check all the boxes? No. But there are absolutely real ethnic groups. No different than someone from Ghana or Uzbekistan. Frankly, it's slightly surprising that someone in 2023 could be arguing that ethnic groups are essentially arbitrary and there is no such thing as a Jewish national group. Jews all over the world are connected by shared heritage that is indeed a real thing, even though many Jews have different levels of observance or particular interpretations or adherences. Not all Jews are Zionist or Israeli, but "the invention of the Jewish people" is just a book title. We can't make the entirety of Misplaced Pages reflect that perspective because that is not what the literature reflects, as a whole. Andre🚐 22:18, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Read up on identity formation and theory under nationalism. There's a vast literature from at least the 1980s, familiarity with which would show the frailty, or superficialty (I say that in the specific geometrical sense, and no other) of the truisms above.Nishidani (talk) 22:41, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

And in your view, are the Serbs, the Kurds, the Arabs, the Zulu, also brainwashed by the propaganda and imagining their people to have a shared culture? Andre🚐 23:01, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

@Andrevan: I suggest you start by reading popular books like Imagined Communities and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Roughly the world was a spectrum of overlapping and gradually-diffused language sprachbunds, religious and cultural practices. Most people lived in rural or semi-rural areas and had no interest in who ruled some wider area they never saw, they cared only who claimed taxes from them and gave them protection. Mass media changed everything:

• The first mass media were religious books, hence some religious practices became standardized, giving the people reading those books (or listening to them being preached) an imagined connection.
• A millennium or two later, media proliferation from the printing press - particularly once the presses began printing in chosen vernaculars - we saw the standardization of "national" languages. Everyone reading the same newspapers created a new imagined connection.

The successfully self-propagating idea of "nationalism" then backfilled a romantic history for each set of "people", based either on their standardized language, religion, or - occasionally - just their political boundaries. Every "nation" built itself a story.

And here we are today. Andrevan, you and I probably have more of a shared culture than we do with random people we just passed on the street, because we both have a shared interest in building an online encyclopedia. Despite the fact we probably live in different countries, may speak different languages, and may believe different things. Perhaps we should start our own nation. Onceinawhile (talk) 16:59, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of their past and hostility toward their neighbors." — Karl Deutsch (h/t Buidhe) Levivich (talk) 17:07, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Many scholars would argue that all national identities are socially constructed, which is not to say they aren't any less "real" than money, which is also a social construct. (t · c) buidhe 17:13, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes I like that connection a lot; Yuval Noah Harari made the point very well. Money works because people believe in it. So do nations. Money can disappear when people lose belief in it, and so can ethnic identities and nations. They are both real, because people believe they are. This is the beauty of the highly flexible concept of ethnicity - it needs only to be believed to exist.

That is not the case with race and genetics, which require more than belief. Onceinawhile (talk) 17:23, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not averse to a bit of philosophizing, and I may agree with a lot of what you're saying, but this is not a given. National identities are real things and are treated as real things by the source material that the encyclopedia is based on. It really doesn't matter if you "redpilled" me to believe that everything from money to borders are meaningless. The point is that the material treats these things as real and therefore so do we. The fact that it happens to be about Jewish people makes it a bit more controversial and the stakes higher, but still nobody has answered my question in a straight way. Sure, I agree that lots of things are socially constructed. I never said that Judaism was given directly to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Nonetheless, the Jewish culture and the Jewish groups out in the world do exist, and reliable sources comment on and observe them and write about them, so we do as well. This is not the postmodern, progressive encylopedia, it's by its nature somewhat of a conservative work because we are essentially backward looking and writing about things like history. So yeah, in history there's a group of people called the Jewish people and you can follow what is said about the various blurry agglomerations like sprachbunds and all that. Telling me to read a book like Sapiens - a, we cannot put authoritative weight on such a work, which is a popular scientific work that is relatively recent and has been not met with universal acclaim nor acceptance, b, it's avoiding the issue here and skirting around the real issue. The Jewish people existed long before Zionism, and there really shouldn't be a factual dispute on that matter. Andre🚐 17:32, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

You are mixing up what does exist and what did exist. Your last sentence is incongruous with the rest. Onceinawhile (talk) 17:56, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Anything that existed and was significantly covered in reliable sources should be covered here. Can you elaborate on what you mean that I am mixing up? For example, most Jewish people in the US came in to places like NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal, from Eastern Europe and had nothing to do with Israel or Zionism. Israeli culture and Zionism are specific offshoots of a larger umbrella of Jewish movements. But there was an active Jewish diaspora community for hundreds of years before Zionism even a consideration. Andre🚐 18:00, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Yugoslavism is a good thought experiment to help here. Would you say that the Yugoslav people existed long before Yugoslavia? It doesn't sound right does it, because no-one believes in Yugoslavia any more. But if I made the same statement in 1950 it would have felt totally normal.

Your sentence suggests that in medieval times, Yemeni Jews felt an ethnic bond with Polish Jews - there is no evidence for that at all. You should try reading this letter, by the only Jew in the British cabinet at the time of the Balfour Declaration: I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries - through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:06, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Strong disagree. The ethnic groups, not to leave anyone out as I am simply copy-pasting from the article, in the former Yugoslavia are Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes, but also Bulgarians. Each of these groups has many things from a language to a cuisine. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they diverge. You're completely wrong about your comparison, since the Jewish nation indeed did have solidarity despite the quote you offer, which is hardly a summation of all of history. In fact, there is documentary evidence to the contrary. Merchant networks such as the Radhanites operated trade networks across diverse locales such as Italy, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterannean, see the work of Francesca Trivellato. There was correspondence among Jewish kinship groups throughout many religious and other disputes which are well-covered in Misplaced Pages if you do some cursory reading. The immigrant banks in the United States, similar to a landsmanschaft or a benevolent society, such as the Blitzstein Bank and the Rosenbaum Bank, operated systems whereby Russian Jews could obtain passage to the United States and join the exiled communities of expatriates. Many other ethnic groups have similar societies in the United States. I suspect you are hyperfocused on the 1948 time period and are missing the forest for the trees. Andre🚐 18:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

• Each of these groups has many things from a language to a cuisine. => when were the borders between these languages and cuisines created do you think?
• Trivellato wrote about Livorno Jews, a specific subgroup. On the Radhanites, too little is known to make judgements about ethnicity.
• On late 19th century Jewish America, see the Pittsburgh Platform which opposed Zionism: We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

Could we please stop this back and forth until you have had time to read a little more? Onceinawhile (talk) 18:27, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

By the way, your repeated references to the situation is America is a whole new topic - the problems of the Hyphenated American. Irrespective of the entirely absurd suggestion that Jews immigrating to America were untouched by Zionism (the World Zionist Organization knew full well that American Jewish public opinion was the most important element of getting a Jewish homeland in the 1910s), American culture encourages the retention of "old world sub-identities", and Jews in America developed their own identity within that.

You might also be interested to note that America governments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strongly encouraged the formation of nationalisms across the world (most notably Woodrow Wilson), because it aided their wider goal of dismantling the empires they were competing against. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:32, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Most Jews leaving Romania or Ukraine to flee the pogroms were not Zionists, and maybe weren't even aware of Zionism. Sure, many Jewish people, most of them religious, also joined the Old Yishuv, or made pilgrimage to Ottoman Palestine. However, for the most part, a poor, moderately secular Jewish immigrant coming to work in American factories didn't know or care about Zionism. They did definitely know about matzo ball soup and Hine Ma Tov. American Jewish immigrants frequently intermarry, creating endogamy which shows up in DNA. At any rate, your opinions about the United States' relationship to its national pluralism and multiethnic polity especially in the 20th century are out of step with the mainstream. Andre🚐 19:24, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and their Christian neighbours they left behind in Eastern Europe ate Knödel (e.g. Semmelknödel) and sang Psalm 133 to music since at least the 1500s. Noone knows who influenced who. Your suggestion below that there was with Ukrainians, or Lithuanians, who were Christian or Muslim is false and absurd.

Onceinawhile (talk) 21:06, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm afraid you are mistaken. While we may not know who invented dumplings, we do know that only Jewish people eat matzah due to that specific relationship to their custom and tradition. So if it's a matzo ball, it is not the same as a Polish dumpling. We can check that out. We can also observe that Jewish communities don't have pork bones due to kashrut. We also know that yeah, the Psalms, are you seriously claiming that the Christian communities invented the Psalms? 'Cause, I've never actually heard of that one. Andre🚐 21:10, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The Ashkenazi foods were similar to those of their non-Jewish neighbours, with religious modifications.

Neither European Christians, nor European Jews, invented the Psalms. They both inherited and used them for exactly the same period of time, and influenced each other throughout. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:35, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Hebrew-Yiddish speakers sang a Hebrew folk song that they inherited from their ancestors. Separately, Christian Europeans might have sung folk songs that they inherited from their Romanized ancestors. These are not the same. There was no Jewish colonial empire; Jews are a people throughout history that were refugees from place to place, travelling merchants, and a class set apart by the European countries of the time. Generally, the Arab world was kinder to Jews up to a point in the middle ages. Andre🚐 21:57, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The key assumption in here is who-is-whose-ancient-ancestor. An assumption, but no evidence exists. Without it your point falls apart. Anyway, Nishidani is right - we are not progressing the article with this tangent. I am happy to continue in the userspace if you wish to learn more about where you are wrong… Onceinawhile (talk) 22:36, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

It's true that this is a tangent, but when I see two editors disagreeing so diametrically, I feel the need to find a way to reconcile the difference. Perhaps Andrevan is thinking of Jewish peoplehood as deriving from the shared experience of a practice of worship, the way that Jews see themselves as a people who have a unique spiritual experience. And perhaps Onceinawhile is, instead, looking at the multiple cultural practices that Jews have engaged in, in various geographic locations, sometimes sharing those practices with other neighboring people. (And if I'm wrong – never mind!) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

In a historical context, the religious aspect was extremely important. In a modern context, it is of greatly diminished relevance. But there are at least 4 very different religious interpretations of Judaism. Whereas they are all united by being Jewish. See who is a Jew? for more. Andre🚐 23:11, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

What all of that has in common is that it is either a religious experience or a religious interpretation. None of it is based on anything like food or language or other cultural aspects. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:38, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

No, that is not correct. It is not purely religious, and it is not all wrapped up in religious interpretation. That article on several points goes into the cultural, secular, and other aspects. Andre🚐 23:46, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I tried to find common ground between you and Onceinawhile, and I have clearly failed. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:01, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I think it's just a misunderstanding. Judaism is a religion, and there is also a Jewish ethnic group. The two are intertwined, but not equivalent. Andre🚐 21:04, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

That's what I was trying to say, but apparently in the wrong words. I thought you were seeing it in terms of the continuity of the religion, and Onceinawhile was seeing it in terms of the variability of ethnic expression. And if I'm wrong about that, I'm not going to reply to your correction of me. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:11, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

That's fine. I appreciate you trying to be helpful and to shed more light on the scenario. I am not religious, but you can't remove the religion from the story of Jewish history, and the various religious doctrinal conflicts do influence everything from food to music to literature, just like they do in Christian Europe or in Vedic India. Andre🚐 21:17, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

As I said, the borders between languages and cuisines are fluid, not fixed. They move over time, and they do not need to be fixed to be covered in Misplaced Pages. I think you are the one who must read more, perhaps about Jewish history or Misplaced Pages policy and guideline. Contradictions and ambiguities are OK and do not need be ironed out, just described as the sources describe them. Trivellato specifically talks about the Jewish relations across borders. Livorno Jews, are not a subgroup. Livorno was a place that Portuguese and Spanish Jews ended up after the exile. Sephardic Jews also ended up in the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa such as Tunisian Jews. They shared a kinship bond and a correspondence bond across national borders. And the borders kept moving. A Jewish person from Kishinev or Balta, Ukraine or from various locales throughout Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc., was a Jew and had a kinship with other Jews. Not with Ukrainians, or Lithuanians, who were Christian or Muslim. They came to the USA and they joined a Jewish community in the Lower East Side. Which, as you say, was often opposed to Zionism. Andre🚐 18:32, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

You are extrapolating without evidence. Sephardic Jews in Italy and Tunisia had family connections - they are neighboring countries. Same with Poland and Lithuania. But was there really one global "Jewish people"? No evidence exists. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:37, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I've laid some of the evidence out, and indeed, Trivellato writes about their collective identity at length You are simply incorrect, and more importantly, reputable historical experts can substantiate this. I haven't read it, but Salo Baron: Salo Baron: The Past and Future of Jewish Studies in America, could be a good way to describe how the field of Jewish studies has covered the evolving field of Jewish identity over time and in different historical periods or national locations. Let's stick to the sources please, and not original revisionist hypotheses. Andre🚐 19:16, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Surely it is pretty subjective? What Montagu might find imaginary and daft, others might find tangible. As with many things, isn't it rather in the eye of the beholder? Although it is probable that your average Tunisia Jew and Iranian Jew in the 19th century would have struggled to speak/relate to each other just as much as your average Tunisia Muslim and Iranian Muslim might. Familiarity is tricky without shared language. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:33, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

It is not subjective, it is just blurry, and relative. A Tunisian and an Iranian Jew would share the Sh'ma, possibly similar names (because Jews in every country have names like Benjamin and David, just like Muslims from every country might be named Muhammad), while the cuisines have differences, there would probably be some similarities. Depending on their specific journeys, they might share more. What the merchant groups did in the Middle Ages and whatnot is communicated using a lingua franca whether French, Greek, Ladino, Yiddish (which is a Germanic language with Hebrew loanwords that can be spoken in different dialects in many different countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine, etc), etc. But, there are indeed records from the Middle Ages of people like Benjamin of Tudela who explicitly kept track of the Jews in different places he visited. It was also common to dispatch one's offspring to move to another town to help the merchant business. I believe the difference with Muslims is that you have Arab, and non-Arab Muslims. So they might have some commonalities, and some differences, but I think there's a wider gap there due to the Islamic missionary tradition, whereas Judaism did not have much of a missionary tradition and often excluded or kept out outsiders in history (or all the Jews were kicked out of a country), but within Arab Muslims or within Bedouin tribes, I am guessing there are similar kinship lines. Andre🚐 19:41, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

One mistake above is the implication that the concept of an “Arab” is any different. It means someone who speaks Arabic. Is a Somali the same ethnicity as an Iraqi?

An Indonesian muslim shares prayers with a Tatar muslim in Russia. Muslim geographers counted muslims in far flung countries. Does that make them the same ethnicity?

Onceinawhile (talk) 21:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The answer to all of the above question is "it depends." Conventionally if I refer to an Arab Muslim, as our own article reads, They are descended from the early Arab tribes of Levant, Arabian Peninsula and Mesopotamia who embraced Islam in the 7th century. They carry that ethnic identity that bind ethnic, linguistic, cultural, historical and nationalist. If you don't really agree with that, WP:RGW is the direction and maybe we should both take a break. Andre🚐 21:17, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The Arab Muslims article doesn't get much attention. See Talk:Arabs if you want to see the meat of it. Those people who think that a population of almost 500 million descend from the tiny population of the inhospitable Arabian desert could at least try applying logic if they are too lazy to visit a library. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:26, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The bottom line is you are proposing what amounts to a WP:FRINGE view of history. History does not go around saying Arab just means any Arab speaker. There are many Arab speakers who were not Arab Muslims - such as the aforementioned Judeo-Arabic speaking Tunisian Jews. There were also many Muslims such as Iranian Muslims who are not Arab - they didn't speak Arabic, and weren't ethnically Arab. There were also many people absorbed into the ethnic groups of Judaism or (more frequently) Christian or Muslim groups, and we don't exactly know when. But cultural amalgamation doesn't mean there are no ethnic groups in history. It's true that there are multiple lineages, there are exceptions, and errors. Still, there is an Arab world, Arab cuisine, Arab culture, Arab people, etc. You cannot deny their existence because they appear in reliable sources. Jewish people did not start appearing in sources in 1948, and it's an absurd and offensive suggestion that the ethnogenesis of Jews was a fictionalized Zionist propaganda. There are Jews in antiquity throughout the history of the Roman and Byzantine Empire. This is elementary knowledge. Andre🚐 21:46, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

This post suggests you are not yet able to dissociate identity construction from history. You talk about Judeo-Arabic-speaking Jews, but appear unaware of Arab Jews. Are Arab Christians Arabs? Why not Jews? It is ultimately a communal choice. You appear to have a knowledge of “popular history” but little knowledge of the scholarly views. Anyway, per Nishidani, it is time to stop this tangent. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:42, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I prefer to use the term Mizrahi Jews and I think the Arab Jews article notes that it is a loaded term in the Israel-Palestine context. Which once again shows that you are tunnel-vision like focused on the Israel-Palestine aspect and lack greater context on Jewish history. Yes, Arab Christians are Arabs. Are Arab Jews Arab? Sometimes. It depends. History and reality don't have bright lines. That is important to comprehend. Andre🚐 22:45, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry but all this is pointless. The simplest way to show the difficulties of any assertion of a common ethno-cultural unity is, with any population, to contrast people with the same 'ethnicity' but diametrically opposed values. In this case, what is it that constitutes the shared 'Jewishness' of

Margherita Sarfatti and Rosa Luxemburg

Bugsy Siegel and Elena Kagan

Baruch Goldstein and Albert Einstein

Dov Lior and Baruch Spinoza

The answer is, nothing other than Jewish parenthood. In all such examples, each would share more in common with their non-Jewish colleagues than they would with each other. Can we drop this? It is totally irrelevant to the article.Nishidani (talk) 22:22, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Nothing in your examples refutes this the existence of a Jewish people or a Jewish ethnic group. I'm not sure how you would think that there being a diverse group of values or opinions in an ethnic group means that therefore there is no group. Intersectionality isn't the right word, but it's pretty fundamental. Spinoza, as you probably know, was excommunicated and notably cut off from the group by the religious authority at the time, which is a big deal at the time. In the cases of secular Jews, they were still ethnically Jewish when not religiously or culturally Jewish (I don't know, specifically, how many of the secular Jews on your list practiced any Jewish tradition or cultural practice) Einstein had a notable public and complex relationship with Judaism and with Zionism. I do not think Bugsy Siegel had a relationship with Zionism, but he was definitely Jewish. The question of the Zionism, race, and genetics article is touched upon at several points, such as the portion of El Haj, which favors the view that you are espousing here, and others, namely, that ethnicity is a fiction, or some such equivalent perspective. But that is not the majority perspective of scholarship. Andre🚐 22:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Conversation continued at User talk:Onceinawhile#Re: Evidence. Onceinawhile (talk) 08:37, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Responding in minutes to a complex set of counterveiling contrasts that underline the immense difficulties in any slipshod generalization about a putative 'ethnic unity' signals an unwillingness to think through the exposed assumptions, while generating, in reply further misprisions which in turn would elicit other objections ad nauseam. The result is tedious, barroom level chat. You simply haven't grasped the point, and just citing stuff from wiki articles all of which share the same wildly loose premise or doctrinal meme you take to be self-evident (ergo circular reasoning) is meaningless since wikipedia is not a reliable source on this. When Einstein and Sergei Eisenstein attended a private performance of a famed Yemenite traditional singer in 1931, the former felt he detected some distant but common strain of Jewishness in the folk air, while the latter disagreed, stating that this oriental tradition struck him as totally alien to his own sense of Jewish culture. But all this chatter is an abuse of the function of the page. No one is interested in what you or I or Once may privately think about such questions. Please desist.Nishidani (talk) 03:13, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Everything I've written above with references to other Misplaced Pages articles may be sourced easily, and I am happy to do so, you need only challenge the validity of the statement, but nothing I wrote above was circular at all, and that's a WP:FRINGE view and has no place here or anywhere in Misplaced Pages. Andre🚐 03:16, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Recap

• To recap. This article began as a stub, and was immediately subject to 2 deletion proposals.
• The name was, it was argued, a compound of three terms. No literature covered those three terms together, ergo it was a classic example of WP:Synth.
• Three term titles do exist, i.e. Race and ethnicity in the United States, where the locative ‘in the United States’ has the same function as ‘Zionism’ (the ideological area) in our title. In any case, this argument was demolished: an ample literature exists discussing those three terms conjointly. There was no WP:Synth. Or if any examples could be pointed out, they would be eliminated.
• I stepped in, asked for three weeks to redraft the article. Some 90 sources of excellent quality were read, and harvested rigorously to respect the terms of the title. I.e. they dealt with various aspects of the nexus between the concept of race, and genetics in the history of Zionism. Despite the radical revision, the use of not 15 but 90 sources, and the expansion of text by 100,000kbs, discontent expressing the same original diffidence about the stub has persisted, as if nothing had changed.
• The article thus is written strictly to reflect the title we have. A large amount of matter extraneous to these entwined thematics was ignored for that reason.
• From the beginning of redrafting to the present only two aspects of the article were challenged: (a) the title (b) the lead.
• It is objected that (a) ‘Zionism, race and genetics’ gives the misleading impression that race and genetics are interchangeable, notwithstanding the fact that one is a subjective notion in relative desuetude, the result of a pseudoscience, the other predicated on the ideals of a pure science detached from the ideological biases of the earlier idiom of race. This is to (i) misconstrue the title, and (ii) ignore the witness of contemporary scholarship.
• (ib)If one were to write an article:’Democracy, equality and liberty,’ (this has been a fundamental question of political science at least since the 1950s), no one would infer that such a formulation cross-contaminates equality and liberty, which are distinct values, though conceptually connected. Indeed they exist in dramatic and dynamic tension in all discussions of democracy. Likewise, the juxtaposition of race and genetics in no way presupposes the two terms are either interchangeable, or being confused, with one undermining the scientific cogency of the other.

• (iib)Despite repeated denials on the talk page, the literature on race and genetics unequivocally underlines currents of conceptual continuity between the old language of race, and the newer idiom or methods of genetics. I cited Gilman and Duster. Here are two further examples. The first is just published, a joint work sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and written by experts for Nasem

• ’The misconception that human beings can be naturally divided into biologically distinguishable races has been extremely resilient and has become embedded in scientific research, medical practice and technologies, and formal education. Many elements of racial thinking, including essentialism and biological determinism, have influenced modern thinking around human genetics, to the marginalization of some peoples and the benefit of others . . racist concepts of race that are deeply embedded in science and U.S. society more broadly continue to affect scientific thinking and research, Scientists must critically examine the underlying assumptions about race—and human commonalityand difference—that shape their research studies..’‘Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research: A New Framework for an Evolving Field,’ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine/. National Academies Press 2023 pp.1,32.

• Most human geneticists are aware of the problems of imprecise or misused language, but face the difficulty that such language is embedded in many of the methods, tools and data we use. Clinical and anthropological datasets, which can be of enormous utility, often use outdated and scientifically incoherent labels to describe the individuals whose data they include . . the social categories and other groupings that individuals belong to are inescapable components of genetics research. However, within the human genetics community, some aspects of the academic language used to describe groups and subsets of people may foster erroneous beliefs beyond academia about human biology and the nature of these categories. Such descriptions frequently invoke concepts of ancestry and population structure, for reasons we will discuss below. But ancestry itself is often a poorly understood concept, and its relationship to genetic data is not straightforward. There are many implicit assumptions involved in inferring ancestry and population structure, and a similar number of pitfalls when interpreting the output of population genetic clustering analyses and algorithms. For example, the structures found in principal components analysis (PCA) of genetic variation depend strongly on the distribution of genetic ancestry included in the dataset, and is necessarily a sample-specific representation of genetic relationships. Similarly,the clusters identified by widely used methods such as STRUCTURE are often assigned ‘ancestry’ labels based on the present-day populations within the analysis in which cluster membership happens to be maximised, rather than any explicit inference of ancestral demography. The collection and sampling of genetic data - which often follows existing cultural, anthropological, geographical or political categories - also has a substantial impact, to the extent that some aspects of the clustering reflect sampling strategies rather thanany inherent genetic structure.’ ,Ewan Birney, Michael Inouye, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford Aylwyn Scally,’ ‘The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research,’ Biology June 2021.

• The impasse here is that half of the editors on the talk page dislike the title, and attempts have been made to accommodate their desire for a different title. The problem with a different title is that any one alternative will implicitly question virtually the legitimacy of the article as completed, one written with a singular focus on representing the complex aspects of the three terms as covered in very high quality RS, and thus suggesting that it be rewritten comprehensively to reflecf the new title which, unlike the present one, will not reflect or summarize the content we have. As AndytheGrump noted, if that is the purpose, then it should be clearly stated, since a name-change of this kind would constitute by all appearances a kind of AfD by the back door.

Since I've retired and have a lot of work I'm more interested in doing off-line, I hope these points might spur reconsideration of the flat refusal to accept the legitimacy of the original title. Best wishes Nishidani (talk) 16:43, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I think you make a lot of good points, and I'm friendly to the idea that the page has been improved to where it's legitimately a single subject. However, I want to correct one aspect of what you said about why some editors object to the current title. It isn't that it makes it sound like race and genetics are interchangeable. It doesn't make them sound like that, and that isn't a concern. It's that, by pairing them, the title makes it sound like we are saying that "race and genetics" are a "thing" in the way that scientific racism says it, and that's a problem. The fact that you put a lot of work into improving the page, and indeed you did, does not mean that, because you wrote it according to the present title, efforts to come up with a different title will inevitably change the focus and content of the page. And it does not mean that every suggestion of a new title is an underhanded attempt to delete the page. Actually, I think that the seeming intransigence of editors on this talk page to finding any kind of consensus on the page name is a bigger threat to this page continuing to be kept. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:01, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Tryptofish: Re the comment …by pairing them, the title makes it sound like we are saying that "race and genetics" are a "thing", should we infer that you also disagree with the title of the article Race and genetics, or such wording in the various Misplaced Pages articles which include the words "race and genetics" in their prose? For what it's worth, I looked through the archives of that article, and cannot see anyone actively disputing the title – the closest is this RM discussion from 10 years ago which found no support. Onceinawhile (talk) 19:54, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

No, because that's all WP:OTHERSTUFF. A page about race and genetics can address how those two things have sometimes, as in scientific racism, been treated as a "thing", but how that has also been rebutted. Once we make a triple combination of those two along with Zionism, it sounds like we are attributing a scientific racist position to Zionism. The longer this discussion, and the RM discussion, go on, the more convinced I am that something like Zionist thought on Jewish racial identity is a better title, and in no way would go against the current content of the page. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:19, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the title implies a conjunction in this manner or that people would naturally infer this. Whatever other reasons there might be too change the title, I don't think that this is a particularly strong one. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:35, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Obviously, other editors, and not just me, feel that it is a problem, or there wouldn't have been such a history of deletion proposals and rename discussions. I suspect that, as long as some editors steadfastly oppose any kind of change, the probability increases that there will be a new, and possibly successful, attempt to delete the page. I'm trying to find ways to get consensus to fix things so that this doesn't happen, but I may not be able to get such a consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:56, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

some editors steadfastly oppose any kind of change,

Please do not repeat this refrain. Two editors made enormous changes to this article, working for a month for several hours a day, mastering the sources to effect improvements (changes) while extensive and inconclusive arguments on the talk page simply about three words in the title have continued with no semblance of consensus, even among those who propose a change. The support votes, representing just half of the votes above, all admit that one proposed title is not quite satisfactory. it is also not helpful to suggest that unless your advice is taken, a third AfD might succeed. That is not the language of serene and objective deliberation. I)nflexibility in insisting on any change to a mere title, while describing as 'inflexibility' the substantial work invested in transforming this stub into a fully-fledged description of a phase in Zionist thought that has received significant coverage in recent academic sources which to date, have been ignored on wikipedia is, to put it kindly, somewhat curious.Nishidani (talk) 23:03, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

I guess I should have said it was opposition to any kind of change to the changes that they, themselves, have made – although, actually, I definitely wasn't referring specifically to the two editors you have in mind. I'm referring just as much to some editors who constantly disagree with those two editors. I'm not threatening that unless my advice is taken, bad things will happen. But I'm giving advice in good faith, trying to avoid some very possible bad results. That's not a threat, just trying to be constructive. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:40, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry but I have no idea about who these other 'two editors' might be. I was referring to the primary drafters, Onceinawhile and myself, and I therefore haven't a clue who 'some editors who constantly disagree with' myself and Onceinawhile may be. Nishidani (talk) 23:58, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

The "two editors" are the ones you referred to above: "Two editors made enormous changes to this article, working for a month for several hours a day, mastering the sources...". You said "two editors", so I said "two editors" for the same two. And yes, they are you and Onceinawhile, because it was the two of you who did the very large majority of the writing of the page. As for editors who have disagreed with you, I'm sure that you can look over this talk page and find numerous places where you reply to another editor who disagreed with you.

But that's all just noise. What really matters is the need for editors to find WP:CONSENSUS. I'll say this to anyone who reads my comment, and not specifically to you, but a lot of editors in this talk have a single preferred way to treat any given issue, such as the page title, for example, and regard any other way as unacceptable. Some editors want the current title, and nothing else is acceptable to them. Some editors want a title that includes "origins", and don't want to consider any alternative. Some editors consider "origins" absolutely unacceptable, and won't budge on that. A huge number of possible page titles have been suggested in talk, and every single one of them has one or more editors who regard it as absolutely unacceptable – but their preferred title is similarly opposed by some other editors. When I supported the rename proposal that is in process here, I said that I was supporting it despite having some qualms about it, because I wanted to find consensus and I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of some improvement. I'm glad that some editors agreed with that. But we have some editors here who have their own, personal, views of "the perfect", and for them, that's that. But their views of "the perfect" are different than those of other editors who similarly want that perfect, and that's that. That's not how Misplaced Pages works. We're supposed to be willing to compromise, to accept something that's not our first choice, but something that isn't awful and can get support from enough other editors to reach consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:58, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

The article was 99% written by two editors in terms of the title we have, which dictated the content. The two editors are experienced GA/FA quality content specialists. When objections were raised as to the title, they were duly answered. The strange assumption appears to be that the two who wrote the article didn't have a clue as to the nature of the content they were writing up. As far as I can recall, every objection raised to the present title was thoroughly answered. Of course talk page editors can express preference for another title. But at this point, they should also explain why, after such exhaustive replies to the objections regarding the title we have, it still remains in their view inadequate to the article's content. This is particularly important because half of the editors here have not objected to the title as it exists. title change requires cogent reasons which are what consensus is essentially about. If you can list anything I've missed, by all means . . . Nishidani (talk) 23:21, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure from the indenting who you are replying to ("If you can list..."), but I'll assume it's me. "When objections were raised as to the title, they were duly answered". But were there editors who were dissatisfied with those due answers? "But at this point, they should also explain why...". Is it true that editors have not explained why? Maybe not explained in a manner that you agree with, but that doesn't mean that they didn't explain. "The strange assumption appears to be that the two who wrote the article don't have a clue as to the nature of the content that they were writing up." I don't think that, and I've repeatedly said positive things about what you and Onceinawhile have done. And I doubt that other editors think that. But there also shouldn't be an assumption that the two who wrote the article are entitled to say what should or should not be done with the page, and that all other editors should defer to them, because the other editors don't know enough about the subject. That's not how Misplaced Pages works. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:40, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I make no such assumption of ownership. Indeed I have seen quite a few changes to the article I think poorly considered, but reverted nothing. The point is, many arguments for a title change were made months ago while the article underwent radical revision. We have a different textual reality now. Since there is no consensus even among editors desiring a title change, the only sensible way forward is for them is to switch from the exhaustingly inconclusive listing of different possible titles, towards a listing of what outstanding objections remain to the title as it now stands. That is a practical way forward from the impasse you worry about.Nishidani (talk) 23:47, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

"I make no such assumption of ownership." But also "Two editors made enormous changes to this article, working for a month for several hours a day, mastering the sources to effect improvements (changes) while extensive and inconclusive arguments on the talk page simply about three words in the title have continued with no semblance of consensus, even among those who propose a change." And "The two editors are experienced GA/FA quality content specialists." And to repeat: "When objections were raised as to the title, they were duly answered". But were there editors who were dissatisfied with those due answers? "But at this point, they should also explain why...". Is it true that editors have not explained why? Maybe not explained in a manner that you agree with, but that doesn't mean that they didn't explain. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:00, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

I am quite capable of understanding my own prose, no need to make a florilegium. The ruling assumption from the AfD onwards is that there is something intrinsically unacceptable about a title containing three terms. As far as I have managed to grasp in reading threads, conjoining 'Zionism' and 'race'/'race and genetics'/genetics and Zionism, is problematical in some obscure way. Yet the three are analysed together in over 30 high quality academic sources. Nishidani (talk) 08:51, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

I certainly would expect that you would understand what you, yourself, have said. Thank you for introducing me to a new word: florilegium. Of course, I wasn't seeking to create a florilegium, but rather to point out flaws in what you have been saying. But now that you have said that you understand what you have said, I suppose that you understand those flaws, even if you are evading an admission of them. If, in contrast, you don't understand why some editors say that conjoining Zionism, race, and genetics in the pagename is a problem, it's that "race and genetics" is a hot-button term, one that implies that there is a genetic difference between races, which is an offensive product of scientific racism, and something that we should best avoid saying in Misplaced Pages's voice. Of course, all three things are discussed together in 30 plus high quality academic sources, and of course it's reasonable to cover all three on this page. But it's untrue to claim that there is simply no other way to word the page title that would be consistent with those 30 plus sources, and with the content of the page as currently written.

In any case, I regret that I have gotten side-tracked from what I really wanted to say here, by getting into this back-and-forth. I should know better. I started off by saying that I agreed with a lot of the "recap", but I just wanted to correct the statement that editors were concerned that readers would think we were saying that race and genetics were the same thing. My main point after that was, and remains, that I urge editors – all editors and not just one person – to be willing to compromise and be flexible, in order to reach consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:20, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Could you again desist from personalizing this, and making extraordinary inferences about what I supposedly think. When you write:

I wasn't seeking to create a florilegium, but rather to point out flaws in what you have been saying. But now that you have said that you understand what you have said, I suppose that you understand those flaws, even if you are evading an admission of them.

This is another example of the recent tendency to make offensive insinuations in my regard. I generally ignore them as fishing expeditions, but they are now repetitive. Here, you claim that you pointed out flaws, I recognize them, and refuse to come clean about them. That is a blatant WP:NPA/WP:AGF violation, the second from you alone in the last two days.

This is quite an absurd reading of the thread above, and is snarkily provocative. It doesn’t merit a reply, because correcting your misprisions on what I wrote would only lead to a pointless resuscitation of the conversational mode that is so disruptive here.

To @Selfstudier, about his last remark. Several editors (Onceinawhile, Nishidani, Iskander, Nableezy, Zero, Levivich) see nothing problematical in the title, which simply lists the three themes interlinked in current scholarship as a unified topic. I appreciate the fact that you, like Levivich, exercise an autonomy of judgment that refuses to be drawn into those 'sides' which, unfortunately, all too often, are imputed to exist and to determine voting patterns. Still, attempts here to finger me as some lone hold-out are wholly misdirected.

Several editors, yourself included, prefer an exegetic title, one that explains the content, like Designation of workers by collar color. Attempts to find an acceptable alternative falter on a lack of internal consensus among the latter as to a title that they all consider adequate to the very complex array of issues covered by the article.

When two and a half months of intense talk page discussion fails, the only resolutive procedure would be to do what is done in science, logic and chronic conflict studies: return to first principles and examine the assumptions that undergird different perspectives. Many ‘problems’ arise simply because, to quote Auden, people engage in ‘baiting with the wrong request/ the vectors of their interest’. Some should ask themselves, rather than puzzle over this Nishidani oddball, why several other editors of good standing, like him, cannot see the problem others assert exists. Why is it that they cannot see any of the putative troubling implications in the mere listing of three elements as a title, a listing that is commonplace in scores and scores of academic books whose thematizing titles list three intertwined topics unproblematically.

• Mary M. Burke, Race, Politics, and Irish America, Oxford University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-192-85973-0
• Les Back, John Solomos,Race, Politics and Social Change, Routledge ISBN 978-0-415-08578-6 1992
• Henry A. Giroux, Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy, Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 978-1-350-18444-2 2021
• James Jennings (ed), Race, Politics, and Economic Development, Verso Books ISBN 978-0-860-91589-8 1992
• Jean Ait Belkhir and Bernice McNair Barnett, Race, Gender and Class Intersectionality, in Race, Gender & Class, 2001 Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 157-174
• Joshua Bartholomew,Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness, in Critical Black Futures 2021 pp 181–205
• James Boettcher, Race, ideology, and Ideal theory, in Metaphilosophy Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 2009), pp. 237-259
• Alejandro de la Fuente, Race, Ideology, and Culture in Cuba, 2000
• R. E. Nisbett, 'Race, genetics, and IQ,' In C. Jencks & M. Phillips (Eds.), The Black–White test score gap, Brookings Institution Press. (1998 pp. 86–102
• L. N. Borrell et al., • Race and Genetic Ancestry in Medicine,' The New England Journal of Medicine 2021; 384: pp 474-480 (That would yield, analogically ‘Race and Genetic ancestry in Zionism’ as a legitimate alternative title for example. But no one has suggested this obvious compromise. I wonder why?
• Lourdes Beneria, Günseli Berik, Maria Floro,Gender, Development and Globalization, 2015
• Gary Goertz, Amy Mazur Politics, Gender, and Concepts, 2008
• Margaret Brabant, Politics, Gender, And Genre, 2019
• Ronald L. Dotterer, Susan Bowers Politics, Gender, and the Arts, 1992

All objections to this title ignore English grammar and idiom, the irrefutable evidence of google books that such tripartite listings are normative. So, if some wish to continue to assert there is something wrong, they should give an adequate and cogent set of reasons why standard English usage and book titles may not apply to the present article. Why find a problem when the documented evidence that the article title is normative in English can be multiplied by thousands of similar examples, instantly, by googling?Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, that reply is full of black-and-white, absolute, statements of things that are actually much more nuanced than what you say. Editors who see the pagename differently than you do "ignore English grammar and idiom" – which is extremely personalizing and simply untrue. The evidence is "irrefutable" – well that's like telling everyone who disagrees with you that we are ignoring overwhelming evidence and should shut up. And yet – you present a list of 14 sources above, and although they all use multi-term language, 12 of the 14 do not say "race and genetics". Only 2 of them do. One, by Nisbett , makes the case that "the most relevant studies provide no evidence for the genetic superiority of either race". The other, by Borrell et al. , is the single one out of the 14 that addresses "race and genetics" as a significant subject, but in the context of health care delivery, of making sure that specific genetic factors can be used to provide the best personal healthcare – not at all in the context of defining membership in a nation state. A Google Scholar search on "Zionist thought on Jewish racial identity", , shows that this combination of words is also used in various forms in thousands of sources, and a lot of those sources look like those that are used for this page. Oh, but it's "irrefutable", so I should know my place and be quiet. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:41, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I asked Selfstudier to explain why titles of the type:X,Y and Z, standard in English usage, and endemic in books and articles, are not acceptable to a wikipedia article which fits the formula, i.e. 'Zionism, race and genetics'. If you are not interested in addressing the question directly and analytically, you are under no obligation to talk past it. Nishidani (talk) 19:49, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

That's good, because I didn't talk around it. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:53, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

A Google Scholar search on "Zionist thought on Jewish racial identity", , shows that this combination of words is also used in various forms in thousands of sources(Tryptofish)

Compare the correct result, i.e. one bracketing the words with inverted commas which yields zero correspondancesNishidani (talk) 21:14, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Self? Nishidani (talk) 19:56, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Just noting that you originally said "no obligation to talk around it", but then changed it to "past it" after I had replied.

Here's a similar "correct" Google Scholar search for "Zionism, race and genetics": , which gets 0 results. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:18, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Which is totally irrelevant because the title is not vauntedly drawn from google books evidence. It simply alerts the reader to the topic of the page using the three terms that contemporary scholarship deals with conjointly as linked themes, scholarship which has been used to write the article we have.Nishidani (talk) 07:23, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

This discussion keeps getting so, well, toxic, that I really should repeat something I said earlier in this section: In any case, I regret that I have gotten side-tracked from what I really wanted to say here, by getting into this back-and-forth. I should know better. I started off by saying that I agreed with a lot of the "recap", but I just wanted to correct the statement that editors were concerned that readers would think we were saying that race and genetics were the same thing. My main point after that was, and remains, that I urge editors – all editors and not just one person – to be willing to compromise and be flexible, in order to reach consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

There are two proposals asking for consensus (a)That the title be changed because it is full of skewed implications and (b) the title is quite normal, one in conformity with widespread usage. (a) has dominated the talk page (b) has been totally ignored. As soon as I tried to break the impasse by asking the editors supporting (a) to give rational reasons for their dismissal of the present topic title, my request was ignored. To be thorough, I still think the assumption or premise for challenging what is a fact, that X,Y and Z is a normative title format in academic studies and books, be answered. There is nothing 'toxic' about being thorough, and insisting on logic and evidence.Nishidani (talk) 07:23, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

From my perspective, I and other editors actually have given rational reasons for objections, not dismissals, but objections, and those rational reasons are being ignored, and to me that feels toxic. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

:I would do an RFC perhaps to get a sense of what wiki in general thinks of the title. I don’t think this current group of editors is going to come to a consensus unfortunately. Drsmoo (talk) 23:59, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

For example, I am in agreement with selfstudier re both race/genetics or neither, while you have the opposite opinion. It would be good to solicit outside feedback to see how others interpret the scope of the article and what the right title, if anything, should be. Drsmoo (talk) 00:01, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I asked Selfstudier to explain why titles of the type:X,Y and Z, standard in English usage, and endemic in books and articles, are not acceptable to a wikipedia article which fits the formula, Is this the latest distraction? You keep talking about everything except what I am talking about. Let me be clearer, all your objections/answers to the current proposition just seem to lend credence to the coatrack argument put forth elsewhere. I didn't have a problem with the title originally and I still don't but I also don't have a problem with the current proposition and yet you do and it is your explanations in that regard that are giving me pause with regard to the original title. Selfstudier (talk) 11:14, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

No great rewrite is needed, it's principally the same sources that are in the article right now, Falk, McGonigle, Baker, Hirsh, etc, it's only necessary to add some material that is present in these sources. Selfstudier (talk) 18:42, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Honestly, in my humble opinion, even "Zionism and the politics of race" is a much better title than the current one. Andre🚐 15:00, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

There was a lot of discussion about this (and some about the variant that only mentions genetics) and in the end I concluded that it is either both or neither. Selfstudier (talk) 17:06, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

When you say, of race and genetics, that it is either both or neither, is that an absolute line in the sand for you, or something you would be willing to compromise on for the sake of consensus? Obviously, I'm hoping for the latter. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:51, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

In principle, I would oppose a title that only included one element, sorry about that. As you have seen, I am not averse to dispensing with both in favor of some other formulation. Selfstudier (talk) 08:20, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

The problem remains that the people proposing new titles are seeking titles they find less objectionable, regardless of whether that title actually covers the same topic as this article. You cannot propose a substantially new scope of an article under the guise of a rename. If the scope of the article is not notable then try AFD again. If it is then the title needs to accurately encompass that scope, and the proposals above do not do that. nableezy - 12:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I just wanted to note that I don't totally sign up to this recap's representation of what happened. Specifically: From the beginning of redrafting to the present only two aspects of the article were challenged: (a) the title (b) the lead. No, I gave a long list of issues I had with the article above. Some were addressed wholly or partially; others remain. I haven't pushed them, because participation on this talk page has been exhausting. Once again, in summary, my concern all along has been that the conjunction in the title creates a "thing" where there is no "thing", and that this has led to a skewed/non-NPOV article. Being the title of one or two books or articles doesn't make something a "thing" in my view. (We don't have an article for Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness for example.) Clearly, there is a rich literature on Zionist perspectives on race - on how race science and racial antisemitism contributed to a raciological strain within Zionism, that was shared by some non-Zionist Jewish race scholars and contested by others. This literature focuses overwhelmingly on the period of the formation of classical Zionism to the rise of the Nazis. The current article (thanks mainly to Nishidani) does a great job in setting that out (although obviously with some room for improvement still, in ways I suggested above). There is also a literature on post-war Israeli genetic science that might be briefly described in an aftermath section of an article along the lines I've just described, and which might be discussed too in Genetic studies on Jews and more briefly in other related articles (e.g. Who is a Jew?/Jewish identity). But the unhappy conjunction in the title (without assuming any deliberate intent from editors) pushed the article to sources that are more marginal in a truly encyclopedic article on whatever our article is about, which focused the article on the mysterious interconnection between the three title terms, giving the continuity between Zionist race science and Israeli genetic science enormous undue attention. Although not particularly keen on any one alternative title proposed, my instinct at the moment is that a new title would enable us to keep the best of the article, removing the skew. BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:10, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

My apologies for missing what you point out in the recap. As you say, this has been exhausting. Unless mistaken the gravamen of your worries is that

that the conjunction in the title creates a "thing" where there is no "thing",

Conjunctions between terms don't create a "thing": they isolate a thematically plural topic which exists to the degree that reliable sources treat them as an interrelated set of terms. There is nothing 'mysterious' about the relationship. Indeed, as several quotes I have supplied over the last week show, geneticists themselves are now analysing the assumptions of 'race' that both historians of science and cultural or social anthropologists found problematical in the way genetics came to be used, and indeed, its methodologies formed, in the last few decades. This is a pretty exciting field, and my impression is that much more will emerge in the near future (may be wrong). As to the last part, a large part of Israeli genetic science is (like Zionist policy) purely practical: how to address, analyse and cure Israeli citizens who suffer from genetically-related illnesses- People in those labs are not thinking 'Zionistically'. They are scientists pure et simple. But at the same time, the overlap between broader historical genetics and Zionist ideological concerns is patently there - Israel historians document it, and just as, say, American geneticists are now going public by talking among themselves of this historical residue of race assumptions in their technical work, their Israeli colleagues are doing the same. Whatever, the genealogy of ideas is of intrinsic merit. They didn't want any mention of this in Genetic Studies of Jews so it was only natural to create a distinct page where justice could be done to the issues. Nishidani (talk) 16:32, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I should not have used the word "mysterious" for the "intertwining" of the three topics; that wasn't justified. I'll strike that out.

Meanwhile, this hit me: They didn't want any mention of this in Genetic Studies of Jews so it was only natural to create a distinct page where justice could be done to the issues.

In other words, it seems, this entire article (and talk page) was the result of content forking when consensus went against inclusion of the content desired by a minority of editors at another article? On this issue, my view is the same as that in the short essay WP:Should I fork? BobFromBrockley (talk) 07:57, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I should have said that an attempt to mention this article, more or less a stub under development, on that other page was immediately cancelled. That article was, if I remember correctly, on the 'science'. It is nothing of the sort of course. That rejection and the irrationality of the AfD, with its sheer denialism of the weight of sources, spurred the effort to fill out the promise in the stub. No. It's not an essay, unless all wikipedia articles that trace the history of an idea (Democracy) are essays. It's not a fork. It's the sort of thing one has been reading about for over a decade and noting, but with no prompting occasion to actually do this rather than some other article (at least speaking for myself) Nishidani (talk) 17:18, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Is "in" the magic word?

I have been looking at other "tripartite title" articles, of which a surprisingly large number include race. For example:

• Race and ethnicity in Colombia
• Race and ethnicity in Brazil
• Race and ethnicity in Latin America
• Race and ethnicity in the NBA
• Race and ethnicity in the NHL
• Race and ethnicity in censuses
• History of the race and intelligence controversy
• Race and capital punishment in the United States
• Race in the United States criminal justice system
• Race and health in the United States
• Race and crime in the United Kingdom
• Race and maternal health in the United States
• Sociology of race and ethnic relations

This is a wide base. The logical conclusion for our article would be Race and genetics in Zionism. Onceinawhile (talk) 15:53, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd be fine with that as well. Selfstudier (talk) 16:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd have no objection either. I suggested that six weeks ago (The article is about race in Zionism and its subsequent inflection in genetics, and actually thought of precisely this formula at the time, but was more interested in writing the article than engaging in talk page discussions). No one took it up. I alluded to a solution like that a few other times, most recently yesterday with a variant that had of course one word too many, above ('the obvious compromise'). I still prefer the title we have for stylistic reasons. But it's tweedledum or tweedledee conceptually.Nishidani (talk) 20:37, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

You know, you might have hit on something here. I'm going to have to give some thought to this before I can put my finger on why I have a favorable reaction to it, but somehow, it doesn't strike me as being a problem in the way that the current title is. I think it has something to do with the way it treats race and genetics as not being "all of race and genetics", but rather, as only being those aspects of race and those aspects of genetics that have come up in the context of Zionism, because they are the aspects that are "in" Zionism. Thanks for suggesting it. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:03, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree it's a step in the right direction. I also think "Race and ethnicity" is an improvement over "Race and genetics." Even "race and biology" might be better. Andre🚐 22:05, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd prefer keeping it with "genetics", rather than "ethnicity" or "biology", because I think it stays closer to the page scope. But I'll go along with alternatives like that, as a way to get consensus, if that's the way the discussion goes.

I've though about this some more, and I can add a bit to what I said above, about how I think this is not as much of a problem as the current title. If one thinks of a diagram, with one circle representing Zionism, one representing race, and one representing genetics, and the three circles overlap in part, but not entirely, I think most editors here would agree that this page is about the part where all three circles overlap, and not about any part of the diagram where all three are not overlapping. The existing title sort of implies that, and has been intended that way, but can also be construed as the sum of all three circles, not the intersection. "Zionism, race and genetics" can be reasonably misconstrued as being about Zionism+race+genetics, which is clearly wrong from the perspective of the page we are trying to create. Until Onceinawhile proposed this new idea, I hadn't really been able to put my finger on that. In contrast, "Race and genetics in Zionism" is clearer, without losing anything: it's the subset of "race and genetics" that intersects with Zionism, because it's what's "in" Zionism. That way, the pagename doesn't give me the feeling that the page is trying to impose scientific racism upon Zionism. Scientific racism sits outside of the triple intersection. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:08, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Grammatically there is no way one can derive from three substantives 'Zionism, race and genetics' the idea that racism, scientific or not, is being imposed on Zionism. That is pure imagination, not grammar.Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

You know what, I actually agree with that. It's not a matter of grammar, but rather, a matter of human subjectivity. But the public that we write for is human, with all the complexities of human nature. And it's appropriate to write for our audience, in a way that respects their intelligence while also not overlooking the fact that they are real people, not automatons (yeah, I know that ChatGPT and the like are mining us). --Tryptofish (talk) 23:51, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I understand that, but we are part of that very same public. I have always been unhappy with the pseudo-objectivism of that nutter, Ayn Rand, whose scribblings apparently influenced some of the principles of wikipedia. But working here for decades nonetheless tells me that the mini-culture of objectivism curated to elide editorial subjectivism, which includes second-guessing things, say, among ourselves, the psychological profiles we might imagine, of each other and, by extension, the readership, has its functional merits. In sum, we must suspend from our judgment on how a text is to be written all the pressures of the personal, and look exclusively at the authority of relevant sources of high quality (which often I might personally disagree with or be tempted to challenge), construe them with precision by the sharp exercise of grammatical discipline, and get, source by source, the content over. Thanks for prompting this reflection. It is a fundamental consideration.Nishidani (talk) 06:42, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Is there a policy or guideline that advises setting aside what you call "the pressures of the personal"? (I don't mean WP:NOR or WP:NPOV.) My understanding of policies and guidelines is that it is appropriate to consider what readers will think, and my reading of WP:TITLE is that, although page titles must reflect sources, the titles should also be understandable to real people, and not misleading. (In this case, I, as a member of that same public, had that reaction about scientific racism, and I don't consider myself to be unreasonable, so I haven't been attributing this reaction to some imagined other. I'm figuring that if I had that reaction, then other readers will, too.) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:18, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't write or edit plying the worrybeads about what people might think, or get agitated that if I write this or that it may affect some political or ethnic constituency. That opens the door to infinite subjective speculations that derail the simple and yet very complex task of reading precisely what the best scholarship says, on this or that, and construing it correctly. When I wrote "affirm" I found out some very intelligent editors believed it meant something that is alien to what the English Oxford Dictionary says it means, and all sorts of confusions, even a suspension, arose from their misprision. After a huge waste of time, it was recognized that "affirm" meant what the dictionary states, not what people thought it might imply. Too many talk pages are vexed by the paralysis Shakespeare identified in such intensive overthinking, that nothing can ever be decided, in the brilliant passage on 'thinking too precisely on the event'

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor's at the stake.

What we as editors think is of little or no account. All that counts is getting what scholars write correctly paraphrased. Anything that strays from this detracts from article composition.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

You and the Danish Prince both have the right to see things that way, but other editors have the right to edit as we see fits Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:26, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

A lame insult. I co-wrote the Shakespeare Authorship Question to FA standard, meaning I wrote it not as I saw fitting wiki policies and guidelines, but according to the criteria wikipedia's experts on FA writing asked be rigorously applied. Drop it.Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

No insult intended, and my apologies if it came across that way. I'm just saying that I regard your approach as something that you are entitled to, but that it is not binding on other editors. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Since loose construal is endemic here, let me construe your prior remark. I, like Hamlet, have a right to see things in a certain way. Other editors have a right to edit according to ' Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines'. The two by juxtaposed contrast ('but') are mutually exclusive, meaning I do not edit, in your view, according to Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines. This, ironically, in the face of evidence that FA reviewers endorsed my rigorous adherence to policy guidelines. You just happen to think I, unlike yourself, don't follow wiki guidelines and those experts who have judged my work as perfectly policy-compliant, one is left to suppose, are apparently misguided. Drop it.Nishidani (talk) 23:15, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I asked "Is there a policy or guideline that advises setting aside what you call "the pressures of the personal"?" You never provided one. Sigh. Now, I'm dropping it. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:18, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Is there a policy or guideline that advises setting aside what you call "the pressures of the personal"? (I don't mean WP:NOR or WP:NPOV.)

Courtesy required that one not answer a question which explicitly excluded the obvious answer to it. Sigh indeed. I'ìll now join you in dropping this.Nishidani (talk) 07:08, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

This title has the advantage of concision and consistency, and more naturalness than other proposed alternatives. It's probably precise enough. It only really suffers in terms of recognisability, and doesn't fully address the skewing effect I noted in my comment in the "Recap" section above, but that can maybe be addressed in editing once we finally agree a stable title. Overall, I don't object to this change. BobFromBrockley (talk) 08:05, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

You argued there was a skewing effect caused by treating three elements as a 'thing'. I think I answered that. When numerous sources treat the three together, it is not editors here who create such a a thing, but the literature itself. And I might add, 'race' is not something that died off in Zionism with the defeat Nazism,. as you appear to suggest in pursuing the idea of ridding the latter part of 'skewed' material. It persisted, and persists to this day, as we all know. Ethiopian Jews resent being labelled as Cushi, and even within their own ranks, there is a strong race division between 'whites' and 'blacks', etc.etc.etc. Nishidani (talk) 17:33, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I concur with Bob's post in the "recap" section above. Nishidani, I fear you may be perhaps conflating the existence of racism or the continued issue with racial discrimination being in the world at large and in Israel or in other Jewish spaces, with that somehow being germane to a Zionist view as a matter of generalizable or mainstream adherence. I agree with Bob that this article skews toward covering the early 20th century, and skews toward a specific strain of Zionist thought. Whereas plenty of things have happened in the world, such as the aforementioned airlift of the Ethiopian Jews. There is also quite a bit to talk about as pertaining to contemporary Arab-Israeli politics, and the racial politics of contemporary Israel and Palestine. For example, there are quite a few contemporary Israeli politicians who have a pretty blatant right-wing dog whistle. I continue to think the title manages to be both vague and over-broad. There's also quite a bit of weight on the thinking of El Haj, someone with specific views of genetic anthropology and biological determinism. I agree with concerns that this is a POV fork. Andre🚐 23:44, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

This article is not about racism per se, and barely even touches on racial ideas outside of science, i.e. in the sense of engendered prejudice towards any specific group, except with respect to antisemitism. So what is all this off-topic chatter with regards to airlifts and whatnot about? ... and how is this supposed to meaningfully relate to the subject here? Iskandar323 (talk) 02:56, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

You think it's OK to have the portion about the Ethiopian Jews talking about how they were referred to as an offensive epithet and excluded, but not mention that they later were accepted and came in? Andre🚐 03:13, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

A public policy on immigration has no bearing on thematic undercurrents either within society or an ideology. You are conflating a state with the actual subject here. Iskandar323 (talk) 04:02, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Really now, so your position is that the views of the Zionist movement and ideology have no bearing on the activities of the Israeli government? Andre🚐 04:08, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the ideology has bearing there, but that does not mean you can deduce or assume things about the ideology based on the actions of an ideologically involved government. Still, what I'm more confused with here is the overall tangential segue. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:49, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

The Jewish Agency for Israel, which is the operative branch of/a parallel organization to the World Zionist Organization, was heavily involved. Drsmoo (talk) 08:48, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Andrevan. We must avoid the temptation to chat. I made an allusion to the Ethiopian case to illustrate a point (it arose because I accommodated your request that we mention Operations Solomon and Moses). That doesn't mean the page focus must now swerve into major expansions on Ethiopians in Israel, or racism in Israel or every other country in the world.Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I just posted a similar suggestion in a previous section before (consciously) noticing this section. I agree with it though I don't like "in Zionism" much as it makes Zionism sound like a place or organisation as in all of the other examples. I'd prefer "in Zionist ideology", for example. Zero 08:09, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

As Andrevan has pointed out, there is an issue with "race and genetics" which is obviated by the alternatives they suggest, or with just "Race in Zionism". None of the examples provided by Onceinawhile have "race and genetics" and I have argued and Levivich agreed that the phrasing "race and genetics" should be avoided in article titles because of the conflation of race (a social construct) with genetics. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 18:22, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Sirfurboy: I'm not sure I fully understand your last sentence. Per the illustration on the right (from an earlier discussion), the connection between race and genetics – far from being avoided – is standard from a sociological perspective, so should not be avoided in Misplaced Pages articles on sociology topics. This article covers a sociology topic, just as the article race and genetics does. Onceinawhile (talk) 19:35, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm OK with "in Zionism", but I'll also go along with "in Zionist ideology" or "in Zionist thinking" if that gets consensus. As I said above, I don't have a problem with "race and genetics" in this configuration. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:33, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Seconding Tryptofish, I think we now have a decent and commendable promise of putting an end to over two months of argument we must all find exhausting. There's been convergence to the formula 'Race and genetics in Zionism/Zionist ideology', a meeting point for editors who otherwise saw the other options from opposing perspectives. Might we not seize the chance to conclude it by agreeing on how to tweak this? (I might add, I am still strongly in favour of the title as it stands, but am happy to drop that if this last formula is adopted).Nishidani (talk) 17:03, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm in favor. Andre🚐 17:42, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

It sounds to me like a requested move for this version has a very good chance of getting consensus, and I think that it would be good if we could move ahead with it. However, we already have an active RM discussion. But that one looks to me to be stalled, and looks unlikely to get consensus. @Selfstudier: as the editor who started that RM, would you be willing to close it, in order that this new one can proceed? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:39, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Given this is Misplaced Pages I have BOLDly moved it to "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology" and if nobody reverts or is objecting to this, we can close the RM. Andre🚐 21:51, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I oppose the title and the bold move. It should be an RM to get outside opinions. This title makes it sound like race and genetics are one thing (no comma between them), and that race and genetics is an important aspect of Zionist ideology, and that there is one Zionist ideology. Imagine: "race and genetics in Christian ideology" or "race and genetics in nationalist ideology" or "race and genetics in communist ideology," etc. "In" is a preposition best used for location or an organization. All of the other "in" titles have "in" followed by a country or organization. Zionism and Zionist ideology are neither. Levivich (talk) 15:43, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

There was already an active RM above that failed to achieve consensus, which Selfstudier closed per Tryptofish; this proposal seemed to be coming to a good compromise consensus in this thread, but you may certainly open a new RM to solicit a new discussion, though perhaps it would be good to get some kind of alignment on what the proposed new title would be if you have one in mind. Andre🚐 16:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

That's what you should do: open an RM to propose a move rather than boldly moving to a new title. If you don't want to self revert, I can do it for you. Levivich (talk) 17:01, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I have complicated feelings about this, and my highest priority is to minimize drama. Strictly speaking, what I posted above was "It sounds to me like a requested move for this version has a very good chance of getting consensus, and I think that it would be good if we could move ahead with it", and I was asking that the older RM be closed, so that we could have a new RM. I didn't anticipate that, instead of a new RM, we would have a bold edit. I'm also not sure that we have consensus for "in Zionist ideology" versus "in Zionism". On the other hand, it is incredibly difficult to get consensus for anything on this page, and I'm very, very, loathe to undo the recent name change, unless there is a stronger case than I am currently seeing for doing so. It's pretty impressive, under the circumstances, how many editors have supported the name change, and if the few who oppose it are such a small minority that the consensus would end up being the same (or would just descend into a morass), I'd rather just leave things as they are. Only if there are enough editors opposing the new pagename that the consensus would likely change, would I now support a new RM. And, given 1RR, let's not have any reverting. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:54, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Andre, you wrote if nobody reverts or is objecting to this, and somebody is now objecting. Kindly self-revert and open a new RM. You know that is what needs to be done. Our move procedure allows for bold moves if and only if they are uncontroversial, and once somebody, anybody, objects it is no longer uncontroversial. nableezy - 19:10, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I should take this page off my watchlist. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:17, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

that seems like a personal choice not related to the article, which is what comments on this talk page are meant for. nableezy - 19:42, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

No, it was a personal comment about your comment. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:45, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I understand there is an objection, however, while I would say my BOLD move lacks the consensus of a formal closed RM even though a consenus was forming, as a point of technical limitation, I cannot actually revert myself as I lack the page mover permission to move over a redirect. Also, I didn't say "if anyone asks, I'll self-revert," and I'm going to say that someone else should revert it if they feel so inclined, so it doesn't count against my 1RR in the topic area. You can certainly say my BOLD move was BOLD and the revert is proper if someone objects to it, and then a new RM can be opened, but I am not going to open it myself because I do not know what the new RM proposal should be if this one is not amenable. I would also perhaps ask that if 1 or 2 editors don't like this title they still let it stand rather than forcing an RM that will possibly likely lead to this outcome anyway. Andre🚐 19:56, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Let me add that anyone who seriously objects in favor of a different pagename, and thinks that their preferred pagename can get consensus, should feel free to open a new RM. But don't revert. Just open a discussion. Anyone who cannot in good faith be confident that their preferred pagename will be supported by other editors, enough other editors to get consensus, please don't waste everyone's time. And anyone whose only objection is procedural, please find something else to do. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Im sorry, but you simply do not get to decide what the status quo should be for a new request. And you likewise dont get to insist that others not ask people to abide by the correct procedure. I mean you can do it, Im not going to stop you, but Im also not going to pretend like you decide these things. Make a new move request yourself if you please. nableezy - 21:49, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Of course I don't get to decide those things, and I wasn't. But neither do you. And you don't even seem to have an idea for what the pagename should be, just a rigid idea of what The Rules are. As a result, we are going to have another couple of weeks of discussion over something that probably won't result in anything being improved. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:59, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the current name is vastly superior to the proposed, either in Zionism or in Zionist ideology. But my understanding of The Rules is based on those rules, which say: The discussion process is used for potentially controversial moves. A move is potentially controversial if either of the following applies: ... someone could reasonably disagree with the move. Somebody could not just disagree with move, somebody did disagree with it. And that means the status quo ante is returned until there is a consensus to move away from it to a new title. You are free to propose whatever you like. Or not. Doesnt really matter to me tbh. nableezy - 22:06, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

As for "vastly superior", you do know, don't you, that most editors agreed that if the pagename should stay sort-of like this, then there should be a comma, as in Zionism, race, and genetics? I'd fix that myself, but I don't have the page-mover permission. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Dont think you need it, nableezy - 22:35, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

(I assume you mean page mover, not the comma.) I actually tried to make the move, but it didn't go through. Apparently too many things that need to be deleted to make way, or something like that. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:38, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I did it for you. nableezy - 21:46, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Pre-RM discussion

Let's see if we can get something to stick, this time. The purpose of this sub-section is not to say why "in" is a bad idea. The purpose is only to consider what the best option, among the "in" options, would be, to put forward in the next RM. (In other words, let's postpone arguments about why the present pagename is better for the RM itself.) As I see it, there are three "in" variations that have been mentioned:

• Race and genetics in Zionism
• Race and genetics in Zionist ideology
• Race and genetics in Zionist thinking

Personally, I have a preference for Race and genetics in Zionism, because it's the simplest. I've also been doing some looking at other "in" pagenames, based upon talk comments that such titles are only used for places or organizations. And we have plenty of related hot-button pagenames where something is "in" things very akin to Zionism, as opposed to places or organizations. For example: Rape in the Hebrew Bible (sorry, that one came up when I put "race in" in the search box), Racism in sport, Racism in the LGBT community, and Race in horror films. That said, I'm willing to support any of the three above.

I realize that some editors prefer none of the above, but I'm specifically interested in what would be the best choice for a new RM discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:15, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

We already had a preRM discussion, lots of them. In other words, attempts to get preagreement have largely failed. So I think that any editor that feels like taking a shot should put up the RM they think will fly based on all those previous discussions. Selfstudier (talk) 22:20, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Does that mean that you will support any of these three? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:26, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I am reserving my comments for a formal RM discussion.Selfstudier (talk) 22:27, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't see this as "taking a shot" and seeing what "will fly", but as trying to use discussion to get the strongest possible result. Other editors may have other priorities. Anyway, if other editors have any advice, I'd welcome that. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Read what I actually said. Selfstudier (talk) 22:36, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd be fine with that as well. () So I'll take that as support for Race and genetics in Zionism. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:40, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I find all these better than the current title. Andre🚐 22:43, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Although I still think a construct based on "in" might work, I can no longer support these versions, for the reasons given in #Zionism, and which race?, below. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:37, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

The subsequent resolution of the issue in #Zionism, and which race?, below, means that I no longer have the objection that I expressed in the sentence just above. But given that we cannot even get past "no consensus" over a comma, I'm reluctant to start another RM over Race and genetics in Zionism, although I'd support it if someone else does. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:13, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages has its own fun special policies about Oxford comma and the like, and I consider them pedantry and not worthy of consideration. A substantive question in my view is, why is the article still called "Zionism, race and genetics" which is just still a jumbly hodgepodge of a title. How about, "Zionist conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity." Andre🚐 21:36, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Flogging a dead horse. Nishidani (talk) 21:43, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Horse is kickin, and a live WP:NOCON means more discussion. I thought you were retiring, though. Is it that you are retiring from edits, but not editorial oversight? Andre🚐 21:47, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Also: nay. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:53, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) In a sense, it's accurate, but it's awfully verbose. I could maybe see "Zionist conceptions of Jewish racial identity", although other editors have objected strongly to "Jewish racial identity". Or maybe "Racial conceptions of Jewishness in Zionism". Similarly, "Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism"; I actually kind of like that one. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:50, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

I like that one too. Andre🚐 22:09, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

De horse is thoroughly flogged but continues to be beaten regardless. Selfstudier (talk) 23:36, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Well look I mean, clearly you and Nishidani consider the horse dead, but Tryptofish resurrected it and I agree frankly. The title isn't good. That's my humble opinion. Andre🚐 23:52, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

If editors don't want to discuss this on the merits, perhaps they would like to have an extended discussion on why it upsets them to see other editors discuss it on the merits. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:13, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm all for discussion but it needs to be something which hasn't been discussed at length already. The situation hasn't really changed, any RM will need to propose a title that has a chance at gaining a consensus and the discussions to date set boundaries on that. Selfstudier (talk) 16:44, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree that we shouldn't discuss pagenames that have already been discussed and shown to be inadequate, but that doesn't mean that anyone should assume that it's impossible for editors to come up with new and better ideas. And just because there hasn't been consensus for previous ideas about new pagenames, no one should make the logical fallacy of assuming that there is a stable consensus in favor of the existing pagename. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:10, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

For WP:CCC, a new RM will be needed. I tried one with a few editors on board and it went nowhere so that's the problem, any significant pushback will result in nocon and we stay where we are, a consensus by default if you like (or inertia). Selfstudier (talk) 17:22, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

You tried an RM and that happened, and then I tried one and the same thing happened, so I very much understand how you feel. I agree, a new RM is the only way to actually effect a change. But it's reasonable to have some preliminary discussion among interested editors before starting a new RM, and uninterested editors need not participate in that if they don't want to. In a sense, we have what could be called a consensus by inertia, in the sense that there has not been a consensus to change to any particular new title, and that means that no one has consensus to simply move the page unilaterally to a new title. But I want to emphasize that this is not a consensus that the existing pagename is OK. A few other potential titles have been discussed, resulting in no consensus. So there isn't an active consensus that those few potential titles were better than the existing name. But nowhere has there been a consensus that the existing name is really good, and every discussion about that has revealed significant dissatisfaction with it among some editors, even while some other editors support it. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:31, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

So, that said, there's an idea for Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism. I like that it gets rid of "race and genetics". I also think it's useful to re-read the lead paragraph of this page, with that possible title in mind. It seems to me that it matches extremely well with the lead paragraph, and actually matches with it better than the existing pagename does. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:40, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

While I don't know if it will gain consensus, I'd be interested to try. Andre🚐 17:55, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Have done, so alerting this thread to continue the discussion in the new RM i started. Andre🚐 18:40, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much for having done so. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Falk as historian

I've been following the discussions here, and I've in fact have never gotten involved in any page or talk page that relates to Zionism, Israel, Palestine, etc. I have purposely refrained from it all these years, because in my view it's all mostly politics, and a waste of time. But I follow the discussions, and some parts here have gotten a bit deeper and better lately. I also started catching up on the core items in the bibliography, particularly Falk, and I have a comment about that.

Falk may have been a respected geneticist, but I don't think that that fact makes him eminently a good historian too. And reading parts of his book, I got more convinced that he is actually not a very good historian. There are parts of it that for me read like some really shoddy, fringe history. And yet, his history book being one of the central pieces of this whole endeavor here, this is something that I believe should deserve some more serious consideration. Thank you, warshy 20:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I concur! Too much Falk. We should lighten up on it a bit and add better historians. Andre🚐 20:29, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Some geneticists I've spoken to think that Weitzman (2019) does not show to his advantage as an historian. Reading Falk, I came across passages I thought poorly done, and so I can grasp exactly what you are pointing to, Warshy. But I, for one, use both. What I think personally as a reader is irrelevant. They have the relevant qualifications as quality RS, and leave very small margins for that residual 'discretion' which at times leads one not to cite poorly organized material in an otherwise excellent source. Very few scholars manage to wear two hats with surpassing abilities in both (Steven Pinker comes to mind, but it's easy to tear his The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) apart despite his marvellous erudition in several fields. All one need do is redefine violence more broadly. The statistics certainly indicate on one level that infrahuman violence has lessened. But if you define violence as infraspecies aggression, or consider the natural world the object of human violence, then the Anthropocene testifies to the opposite conclusion). I just don't think we have any right, as editors, to challenge excellent sources unless other sources show that a serious mistake has been made in the ones we draw on. Nishidani (talk) 20:51, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I might agree with you about Pinker, and I thought Weitzman was perfectly fine, but I'm sure we can find more to round out the article. I'm not proposing nor is warshy presumably to entirely excise Falk, but our remit is to express proportionate weight to quality and prominence of the sources, and I agree that Falk is not definitive and has some weaknesses that should be reviewed. Andre🚐 20:59, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

If one can find a geneticist who is also an historian, whose published work as an historian is of the same quality as Falk's, then fine. No scholar is definitive. He just happens to be the only one so far who has dual experience in both fields, and his book, so far, appears to be the standard work on Zionism and Jewish biology. I expect this will change in a few years, but until we have a source of similar authority, we make do with it. I say that having repeatedly used as basic sources scholarship I personally don't think worth a rat's arse (in the field of political history). What I think is of zero import, since RS determines what we use.Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Isn’t there a circular argument here? You’ve been arguing that the three-element topic of this article is a topic because there is a book or two about it, then you argue this is the book we need to use because it’s basically the only thing that’s been written about this topic? BobFromBrockley (talk) 04:58, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

All it means is that combined geneticist-historians in this area are rare. It doesn't mean the literature is rare. Iskandar323 (talk) 06:36, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we need to cite someone extensively just because they're the only combined geneticist-historian in the area. This article (especially under the new name) is about the history of ideology, not about the details of genetic science. Lots of historians have written about the history of Zionist ideology, and Falk is not their go-to source. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:06, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

No Bob. I noted that many sources treat as one topic the nexus between three themes(each of which alone could be an independent topic). Over 30 sources, not 'a book or two', approach the matter this way. Several books have been written about the overlapping quilting of Jews, their history and genetics, and by geneticists (Ostrer's book is frankly farcical historically). Only Falk addresses the matter in terms of Zionism, which is precisely what the article is about. Nishidani (talk) 08:16, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Only Falk addresses the matter in terms of Zionism, which is precisely what the article is about but at the same time 30 sources address this topic (Zionism, race and genetics)? This doesn't make sense to me, but I've made my point. BobFromBrockley (talk) 22:50, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Bob, here. This is circular logic. Andre🚐 22:57, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for raising this Warshy as I was thinking the same thing. I was familiar with most of the sources used in this article before, but not this one, and I’ve just dipped into it a few times now, and every time I do I find inaccuracies, generalisations, sloppiness, vagueness and confusing passages. I’ve just been looking for reviews to see how it’s been received by other scholars but not finding much yet. I did note in looking that the publisher’s blurb opens with: “This book offers a unique perspective on Zionism. The author, a geneticist by training, focuses on science, rather than history.” I think it’s weak history and anchors the weakest parts of our article. BobFromBrockley (talk) 04:54, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Weitzman is at times weak on deductions from what he takes to be the implications of genetics (he consulted two who are often criticized). Falk has some problems with certain historical generalizations, though he did some very good and pathbreaking historical work on Jewish geneticists in period context. No one uses this argument against Weitzman (he happens to says 'useful' things for one perspective that, from another seem just arbitrary opinions - some discussions touched on this, where he is out of whack with whatmany equally authoritative sources say). Like any reader, I find myself vigorously arguing (scoring the margins) with almost every book I read, but on wiklpedia in editing content, I believe we are forbidden to allow such reservations to affect what we edit, Cocking a snook at Falk, who is our only major experrt source, and widely quoted as such in the scholarship, while not doing the same with the rest of our sources, lends itself to partisanship , when we must be studiously neutral. I'll put this personally. I find a lot of very attentive verbal tiptoing in most of our sources that are otherwise refreshingly critical of this thematic trend in the Zionist tradition, This is most marked in Efron's 1994 book. One can also see shifts over 15 years in the same author towards an even more critical stance that could arguably allign with a perceived disenchantment with political developments in Israel (Hart etc) But such editorial impressions mustn't interfere with our rigorous application of the guidelines. If the source is of high quality we must accept its authority whatever our private reservations about this or that in it.Nishidani (talk) 08:07, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I think we need to find better historical sources to anchor our storyline and construct an NPOV narrative. As written, this article has a lot of emphasis on one side of the story, namely that Zionists such as Ruppin were advocating the discredited race science of the 1930s. I think we're missing a critical view at how that changed in the latter part of the 20th century as the world, and Israel/Zionists, became modern and more progressive on certain issues. This is why I keep bringing up the Ethiopian Jews. This was considered a major landmark event in the solidarity of non-white Jewish people. Andre🚐 18:04, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Looking forward to the presentation of these better sources, y'all are saying they exist, so let's see some. Selfstudier (talk) 18:30, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Here are a few that look interesting, but I'm still reading, toward the point on race relations with the Ethiopian Jews specifically:

• Salamon, Hagar (2003). "Blackness in Transition: Decoding Racial Constructs through Stories of Ethiopian Jews". Journal of Folklore Research. 40 (1): 3–32. ISSN 0737-7037.
• Magid, Shaul (2012). "The Holocaust and Jewish Identity in America: Memory, the Unique, and the Universal". Jewish Social Studies. 18 (2): 100–135. doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.18.2.100. ISSN 0021-6704.
• Friedmann, Daniel; Santamaria, Ulysses (1990). "Identity and Change: The Example of the Falashas, Between Assimilation in Ethiopia and Integration in Israel". Dialectical Anthropology. 15 (1): 56–73. ISSN 0304-4092.
• Abu, Ofir; Yuval, Fany; Ben-Porat, Guy (2017). "Race, racism, and policing: Responses of Ethiopian Jews in Israel to stigmatization by the police". Ethnicities. 17 (5): 688–706. ISSN 1468-7968.
• Mendelson-Maoz, Adia (2013). "Diaspora and Homeland—Israel and Africa in Beta Israel's Hebrew Literature and Culture". Research in African Literatures. 44 (4): 35–50. doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.44.4.35. ISSN 0034-5210.

Andre🚐 18:37, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

There are several articles on Ethiopian Jews where this has some pertinence. This material does not belong here. We have 80+ sources to 'anchor' the article already. It is not 'our storyline' but what those sources already tell us of the three themes covered by the article. If you want to develop a different article, write it.Nishidani (talk) 19:50, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

On the topic of the controversy of Ostrer there is this review which also mentions the Ethiopian Jews, and yes it is related and they all belong here I think. Other researchers praise the work. It's the largest to date on this question, and using the IBD method to tackle it is "innovative," says geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that "this is clearly showing a genetic common ancestry of all Jewish populations." Nevertheless, says Rosenberg, although the study "does not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, it doesn't entirely eliminate it either. The study does not address the status of groups whose claim to Jewishness has been controversial, such as Ethiopian Jews, the Lemba from southern Africa, and several groups from India and China. But given the findings of a common genetic origin plus a complex history of admixture, geneticist David Goldstein of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that neither of the "extreme models"—those that see Jewishness as entirely cultural or entirely genetic—"are correct." Rather, Goldstein says, "Jewish genetic history is a complicated mixture of both genetic continuity from an ancestral population and extensive admixture." Andre🚐 19:59, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Where is Zionist thought found anywhere in this? Iskandar323 (talk) 09:12, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Where is Zionist thought found in most of the material in that section of the article? BobFromBrockley (talk) 02:37, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm also looking at From Assimilationist Antiracism to Zionist Anti-antisemitism: Georg Simmel, Franz Boas, and Arthur Ruppin (pp. 160-182) Amos Morris-Reich Andre🚐 20:04, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

This talk page cannot become a social media site for discussions on Jews, Israeli progressivism, Ethiopians or whatnot. On that precedent next we'll have the article on slaves or race in the US, where the situation is far worse, being substantially modified by editors defensively try to add sections stating how much better things are now. Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

All of the above discussion is with an aim toward improving the article which needs improvement on the basis of NPOV. Again, as the sources above show, the issue of race relations in Zionism (which is Jewish nationalism and an Israeli social movement), the Ethiopian Jews were a major point and part of that. The above link to Science is a review of Ostrer which mentions this as well. Andre🚐 20:20, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Write an article, Ethnic relationships in Israel. We are just on or over the ideal limit for article length here.Nishidani (talk) 20:36, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

If there are reliable sources that refer to race and genetics in Zionist ideology, then those merit inclusion with due weight, my initial impression subject to seeing some source saying otherwise, is that Ethiopian Jews are not going to carry much weight in this page.Selfstudier (talk) 22:09, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Why does that belong there and here we have discussion in the 1970s section of Mizrahi-Ashkenazi politics? If we make that article, do you agree I should remove that from this page? Andre🚐 22:06, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

No. Cannibalizing any page to make another article is poor practice. One should never copy, or excerpt and paste material from one article to make another. Every article should be written off the sources adduced to write it up, autonomously. Otherwise, one would set a precedent of hacking an existing article to pieces to create a set of related or sister articles, not to develop A new topic, but to damage the narrative integrity of the existing article. That would be creeping deletion by the back door .Nishidani (talk) 22:55, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

That's not what Misplaced Pages guidelines advise. See Misplaced Pages:Splitting. Andre🚐 22:57, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

What wikiguideline approves of making new articles by copying or lifting and pasting material from already existing articles? Read what Andythegrump perceptively wrote some time back in these threads. If your intention from the start was to find a reason for splitting the article, you should have openly said so.Nishidani (talk) 23:04, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

That is not my intention. My intention was to expand this article in the part pertaining to the 1970s-present. Where I think Zionism gained a lot of progressive characteristics, which is why people familiar with the history of contemporary Zionism find the 1930s Ruppin stuff kind of distasteful and unfamiliar. See , Andre🚐 23:08, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

That would be to politicize the article. It would only mean cramming pro and contra material on the issue of Ethiopians into the article, so that some articles not even dealing with 'Zionism, race and genetics' (the criterion for source selection) edged in to render the article more complex than it already is. I.e. we would have the material you selected balanced by articles like Oz Rosenberg's in Jerusalem protest racism against Ethiopian Israelis Haaretz 18 January 2012 etc. With that precedent then we would intrude general articles about the improvement in Yemenite conditions. And then someone would say these policies have have impacted Palestinian israelis, but their situation somewhat improved after the military curfew was lifted, while othe editors would inmtroduce counter-evidence of contoinuing racism. And then others could use that to expand coverage of hafrada as racist, pro and contra. There would be no end to POV battling. We have numerous articles on these aspects (many of them inadequate. but they are there for expansion, i.e. Racism in Israel. The section you allude to contains a sequentially coherent coverage of one specific issue, the interface between Zionism and genetic research- As far as I know:, nothing about that exists elsewhere on wikipedia. To disrupt it with the endemic political narratives of Zionism- good-or-bad which are omniptesent, would, I strongly suggest, displace the intended focus on the problems of science by pros and cons everyo0ne is already exhaustedly familiar with.Nishidani (talk) 08:19, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I am definitely sympathetic to what Nishidani is saying here, that we need to set a limit to what the article is about and not include everything to do with race that happened in Israel. But to my mind this is the inevitable result of the "and" formula in the old and new title. At the moment, the final section is about genetics in Israel, not about "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology". There's no reason it should be about genetics in Israel and not about race in Israel. If we only want material that is about "race and genetics and Zionism, most of the final section already doesn't fit, so I understand why someone would question why this and not all the other stuff about race. (In my view, rather than expand that section per Andrevan it would be better to trim it back to what is actually about the title topic.)

But this discussion has segued quite far from Falk as historian so if we continue on this expansion topic we should either introduce a heading break somewhere in this section or open yet another new section. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:19, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

the final section is about genetics in Israel, not about "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology".

Sorry Bob, but that is incomprehensible to me. What final section, and I'd appreciate you explaining the assumption here that 'race and genetics in Zionist ideology' is totally unrelated to the history of the practice of genetics in Israel, since numerous sources state and document the contrary. Nishidani (talk) 12:37, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry by final section I meant the one headed "The genome era: 2000 to the present", where the "edit warring" this talk section refers to was occurring. Of course the two topics are not "totally unrelated"; they're obviously related. As I read the section, several passages in it are not obviously directly about the topic in the title. Just one example: the sentence on Ranajit Chakraborty in its current form is not about "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology", although possibly Burton talks about him in that regard - and we have a great big picture of Chakraborty as if he's a central character in our story. BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:18, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

There seems to be some radical misunderstanding here. Misplaced Pages simply sums up (ideally) what the best sources on a topic state. Scholars -who produce our documentation, do not puts blinkers on (as we do) by making hairsplitting rules about some topical austerity that must minutely hue to the general wording of their titles. They range widely, view matters from several angles, drawing on all material they find shedding light on the specific issue(s) being addressed. It seems to me that you are judging source relevance by criteria that pertain solely to wikipedia's unique protocols. Scholars can't work like that. If Burton, in analysing the work over decades of geneticists in Israel and elsewhere, finds that Chakravorty's paper cogently marks, and illuminates, a crisis in genetic studies of Ashkenazim and Jews in Israel, then as editors we accept as important her judgment that Chakravorty's paper provides an important insight into part of the discourse of genetics as it was influenced by Zionist perceptions at the time. Take out her point re Chakrovorty and the history of the development of this nexus becoes totally obscure, I'd say, incomprehensible. Burton thinks it important, and, as amanuenses we follow her, whether we like the content or not. In rewriting the first part of Hamas, I consistently found Matthew Levitt's book so politicized it looked problematical (and I could go into numerous details). But, I still put in quite a bit of stuff from him I thought dubious (in terms of what other scholarship wrote). Because it's not my job to question how an RS authority deals with the topic. To the contrary, I am obliged to respect the source, whatever it states.Nishidani (talk) 16:49, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if he's a historian or not because his work in this narrow field is widely cited. I am not aware of any work in this field written after 2017 (when "Biology of Jews" was published) that doesn't cite Falk. Is anyone else aware of such works? If Falk is always cited in this field, then Falk is a leading source in this field. (Although, statements that can be sourced only to Falk should generally be attributed to Falk.) Levivich (talk) 13:53, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Obviously he should be cited, and obviously statements that can only be sourced to him should be attributed (an important caveat). I don't think anyone wants him removed, just less central and not treated as the definitive source of all truth. (Note: Of the 78 citations, the following are about our topic, and it might be worth double checking if we include them all: Burton, Hirsch, Kirsh, McGonigle, Morris-Reich, maybe Novick, maybe Kohler, N Cohen. We have three of four recent texts on our current list of sources in the article that don't cite Falk.) BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:35, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Editwarring/The genome era

I reverted this effective elision made by Andrevan, which rewrote:

(a)Jewish geneticists themselves were caught between the demands of professional commitment to objective science and their own personal emotional investments in the topic.

as

(b)Jewish geneticists were inspired by their own heritage to pursue the topic.

The error is obvious. Andrevan thinks that the generalization in (a) is based on Goldstein, the immediate, illustrative source. It wasn’t. It was based on the three successive citations to Abu-Haj (2012), Burton (2022) and Schaffer (2010) What is worse, Goldstein is a single instance, whereas the generalization in (b) retains the plural (Israeli geneticfists) which can only be justified in terms of Schaffer, Burton and Abu-Haj plus Goldstein. This is incompetent, the result of a lack of mastery of the sources.

Abu El-Haj (2012) poignantly describes how Jewish geneticists constantly navigate tensions between their professional commitments to objectivity and their openly acknowl edged personal attachments to studying Jewish populations. These tensions are par ticularly fraught given that, historically, non-Jewish scientists charged their Jewish counterparts with being too biased and subjective to speak credibly about Jewish biology (Abu El-Haj 2012, pp. 130–135). Burton p.435

Schaffer 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'. 59 Similarly, David Goldstein states clearly and openly his attachment to Israel in jacob's Legacy, describing his romantic ideological connection to the country as a Jew at an Israeli rock concert: Schaffer 2010 pp.86-87

That kind of careless rewriting seriously damages the article. Nishidani (talk) 22:07, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Fine, I'll restore this part, but you reverted several other of my edits, some of which were fine. Andre🚐 22:10, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, no.

“Jewish geneticists themselves were caught between the demands of professional commitment to objective science and their own personal emotional investments in the topic.”

Aside from the strangeness of “ Jewish geneticists themselves were caught” this is alleging in wikivoice that these geneticists were not objective or fully professional. That may be some critics opinions, but it is not a fact and can not be presented as such. Drsmoo (talk) 00:45, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

The only author who describes a conflict between objectivity and research is El-Haj, as described by Burton. The others are describing choice of research. And none of the selections above allege lack of objectivity as strongly as this paraphrase does. Drsmoo (talk) 01:05, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Could someone restore the text to the shape it had which is faithful to all four sources? Nishidani (talk) 22:09, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I have restored that if you had simply explained about Goldstein, I would have done so rather than reverting several other good edits. Andre🚐 22:11, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I know I'm just talking into the wind, but "This is incompetent, the result of a lack of mastery of the sources" and "That kind of careless rewriting seriously damages the article" do not belong on this, or any, talk page. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:45, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Not talking into the wind. Calling an edit incompetent is unacceptable. Drsmoo (talk) 00:52, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

That said, maybe we can remove the POV-section tag? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:49, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Not when the article is calling professional geneticists less than objective by presenting critical viewpoints as facts. Drsmoo (talk) 00:46, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

If that is the only objection, then Tryptofish is right. If several core sources from 'professional scholars', many cowritten by 'professionist geneticists' note that genetics, like any other science, has had problems with pure objectivity (which doesn't exist in any discipline), they must be respected. It Nishidani (talk) 07:42, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

To remind editors of what has already been extensively shown in the threads above, the following two quotes come from papers written by geneticists in the last two years or so.

’The misconception that human beings can be naturally divided into biologically distinguishable races has been extremely resilient and has become embedded in scientific research, medical practice and technologies, and formal education. Many elements of racial thinking, including essentialism and biological determinism, have influenced modern thinking around human genetics, to the marginalization of some peoples and the benefit of others . . racist concepts of race that are deeply embedded in science and U.S. society more broadly continue to affect scientific thinking and research, Scientists must critically examine the underlying assumptions about race—and human commonalityand difference—that shape their research studies..’‘Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research: A New Framework for an Evolving Field,’ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine/. National Academies Press 2023 pp.1,32.

Most human geneticists are aware of the problems of imprecise or misused language, but face the difficulty that such language is embedded in many of the methods, tools and data we use. Clinical and anthropological datasets, which can be of enormous utility, often use outdated and scientifically incoherent labels to describe the individuals whose data they include . . the social categories and other groupings that individuals belong to are inescapable components of genetics research. However, within the human genetics community, some aspects of the academic language used to describe groups and subsets of people may foster erroneous beliefs beyond academia about human biology and the nature of these categories. Such descriptions frequently invoke concepts of ancestry and population structure, for reasons we will discuss below. But ancestry itself is often a poorly understood concept, and its relationship to genetic data is not straightforward. There are many implicit assumptions involved in inferring ancestry and population structure, and a similar number of pitfalls when interpreting the output of population genetic clustering analyses and algorithms. For example, the structures found in principal components analysis (PCA) of genetic variation depend strongly on the distribution of genetic ancestry included in the dataset, and is necessarily a sample-specific representation of genetic relationships. Similarly,the clusters identified by widely used methods such as STRUCTURE are often assigned ‘ancestry’ labels based on the present-day populations within the analysis in which cluster membership happens to be maximised, rather than any explicit inference of ancestral demography. The collection and sampling of genetic data - which often follows existing cultural, anthropological, geographical or political categories - also has a substantial impact, to the extent that some aspects of the clustering reflect sampling strategies rather thanany inherent genetic structure.’ ,Ewan Birney, Michael Inouye, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford Aylwyn Scally,’ ‘The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research,’ Biology June 2021.Nishidani (talk) 07:46, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

IN other words, we cannot keep a POV tag here simply because one doesn't want to offend a vague 'class' of professionals, who themselves openly admit that bias exists (and that they work to eliminate it).Nishidani (talk) 07:49, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

You are incorrect. That is why we have attribution. Misplaced Pages must not “offend” (in this case impugn/disparage) by casting unfalsifiable aspersions at the objectivity and professionalism of ”Jewish Geneticists” as facts. Drsmoo (talk) 11:53, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

OH good grief. Completely invented and a rather serious insinuation, because it suggests that this article's paraphrase of what, mostly, 'Jewish' scholars have written on the history of genetics, race and Zionist, is 'antisemitic'. Where on earth in the tetragrammaton's good name were 'unfalsifiable aspersions thrown at the objectivity and professionalism of "Jewish geneticists"? Strewth!!! Nishidani (talk) 14:35, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

In the article where it said “Jewish geneticists themselves were caught between the demands of professional commitment to objective science and their own personal emotional investments in the topic.”

I have already modified the section. Drsmoo (talk) 15:12, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not going to worry about attribution. But that is misleading itself. It suggests this is the (informed) opoinion of just two experts. It isn't. It reflects the work of Kirsh (2003), which was recognized as a fact 'determined' by her by Falk, and which successfully was endorsed by numerous sources (most recently Mitchell Hart). The text should only make clearer that "Jewish/Israeli geneticists" (contextually, those who work on this specific issue) were, in their bias, not significantly different from population geneticists generally, whose work, as is now increasingly recognized in several studies since 2020, reflected a broader Western bias that confused nations with ethnicities. Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I'll just note that Andrevan, who placed the POV-section tag, removed it yesterday. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:13, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Since according to Drsmoo, that tag was justified when ' the article is calling professional geneticists less than objective by presenting critical viewpoints as facts.' Since Drsmoo himself changed that by attribution, by his own criterion, the POV tag is not longer legitimate.Nishidani (talk) 21:07, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm referring to the POV-section tag that was formerly in the genetics section of the page. The POV tag at the top of the page is a different tag. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

In my view, this section needs quite a bit of work. Seems to be some editorialising here that could do with attribution (E.g. see words “arguably” and “admitted”), I’m not sure the sources for “important” say that, and it’s unclear how a lot of the section relates to Zionism or Zionist ideology. A lot of this material should move out of this article to Genetic studies of Jews imho. BobFromBrockley (talk) 02:35, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Some editors might consider cleaning up for a few months the inept POV article on Genetic studies on Jews before worrying about that gutting proposal. This article uses secondary sources, while that is in large part patched incongruously together by paraphrases of snippets from the primary sources, mainly the abstracts, when the proper protocol should be to describe the the various results, frequently in blatant contradiction over time, only via what secondary sources state.

Words like 'arguably' are not 'editorializing'. That adverb, for example, comes straight from the source, to relieve the reader of the ridiculously repetitive 'according to' formula which many editors appear to love sticking everywhere, as if it subjectivized as an opinion what is fairly a straightfoward consensual viewpoint. I.e.

This article will consider the history of some of these arguments about Jewish ethnic and racial difference over the last century in an attempt to weigh up the potential and/or wisdom of encouraging scholarly interventions into the question of what constitutes, and marks out, Jews as a distinct group. It will argue that for all the scientific innovation and achievement of the last 50 years, much of the core agenda of these debates remains unchanged. It will also argue that the terrain of research has consistently been so clearly demarcated by intransigent ideological positions that discussions of this nature are unlikely to come to synthesis any time soon and instead are destined to remain bogged down in religious dogma and political agendas. Schaffer 2010 p.76.

I.e. 'Arguably' just flags that this has been argued, and the source of the statement tells you by whom. This is called stylistic variation, to avoid making the tedious prose recitation of 'according to' even duller than required.

What happened (in a virtual consensus of recent scholarship,not just El-Haj as claimed above) in Israel and among the overwhelmingly 'Jewish' geneticists engaging with this topic was what happened, as Burton's book and articles show, is exactly what happened with Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian etc., geneticists, all of whom pursued their science, as in the Israeli/Jewish instance we outline here, against a background of nationalist beliefs, and all of whom were affected by this cultural bias. And this national framework in turn reflects a broader set of premises in the subject of population genetics in the West, as the two quotes I cited above indicate. There has been two much editing here that looks at the page in terms of 'ethnic' sensitivities and, I would argue, a protective-defensive sensitivity(which i can well understand but think misplaced) to anything regarding 'Israel'/'Jews') while neglecting the need to master all of the sources. Much of this attributive stuff ignores that the said source is as often as not, stating variation of a point made in several other sources, not mentioned to avoid overcramming the text with footnotes and multiple sourcing that is not needed. Only if one reads and retains in one's memory the content of all of the sources can one exercise a fair critical judgment as to when to attribute and when not to. One attributes only if the particular position is exceptional. Otherwise it is just a nervous formula.Nishidani (talk) 08:34, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@Bobfrombrockley: FYI, this page was in part created because material not identical to but related to this page was ejected from Genetic studies on Jews as being too off-topic and hyper-specific. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:00, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Most teachers and academic editors will tell their students and writers to avoid the word "arguably". Someone writing a journal article should instead boldly state that they are arguing something - as in the Schaffer quote above. And then secondary and tertiary sources (like us) should tell the world that that writer did indeed argue something (e.g. "Burton argues..."). When historians establish a fact (X happened in 1952), we can say that in our voice without attribution. When historians are making an argument about their interpretation, we should attribute the argument. We shouldn't act as if a particular line of interpretation (even if "fairly" consensual) has become a fact.

You may be right that Genetic studies of Jews is inept and POV; I don't know enough about genetics to judge it. But we shouldn't use that article's problems - or not being able to win consensus for our version of that article - to fork off and create a problematic article here. Content about genetics that isn't directly about "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology" (or whatever this article is now called) simply doesn't belong here. BobFromBrockley (talk) 10:01, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Bob, Since it is not about editwarring, please open a separate section about this alleged fork (also mentioned in the preceding section) and we can address it there. Selfstudier (talk) 12:48, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Good point but I think I will amend the title of this section, as most of the preceding section has been about what should go in the "The genome era" section of the article. BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:38, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Well 'most teachers and academic editors'(where?) should read, at least for the quality of the prose, - ignoring the political bullshit - Christopher Hitchens's last book Arguably. He was widely admired for his sensitivity to language and for his prose style. All scholars and historians are 'arguing' a position in their field. There is no such thing as a book or research paper in the humanities that is strictly factual. Were your rule to be applied, every single sentence in an encyclopedia article that cannot reflect an explicit mention of 'consensus' would be qualified by attribution. That's the reductio ad absurdum. 'Arguably', Bob, flags that what follows is not a 'fact' but an informed view that can be rationally defended. To hold that adverb hostage ('most teachers' must refer to some recent fad) while ignoring the stylistic crassness of using 17 times 'according to' when we have a dozen ways of implying attribution ('in one account/version'/ it has been argued/ 'Burton interprets this'/A number of scholars' etc,.etc,etc,

Content about genetics that isn't directly about "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology" (or whatever this article is now called) simply doesn't belong here.

There is no content about genetics in this article that does not bear directly on "Race and genetics in Zionist ideology". It's authoritative sources that determine relevance. It is somewhat of a contradiction to admit you don't know much about genetics regarding the other page, and yet claim that material by geneticists like Burton, who do the history also here, are not relevant to a page on the history of genetics in Zionist ideology. Nishidani (talk) 12:18, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Hitchens is a great writer, if not necessarily a model for either scholarly writing or a neutral encyclopedia. As far as I can see, the book of that title only actually uses the word once in its page. I am not in favour of constantly repeating "according to", and all in favour of using a mix of phrases such as "X argues". Arguably is a weasel word. If someone has argued something, say who; if noone has argued it, it's OR.

Please don't put words in my mouth but read what I've actually said. I don't know a lot about genetics, which is why I've not edited that page. But I am very familiar with the sources on the history of Zionism and history of race. Burton's historical writing is really rigorous and it's very proper her work on things that fall within the topic of this article are cited. As far as I can see, she is cited just once in the "The genome era" section. BobFromBrockley (talk) 14:50, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

The point was about sensitivity to language, for which scholarly articles or encyclopedias are not well-known. I have to grit my teeth to read most wiki articles, and this is true also of this one. Hitchens in that title is summing up what his project is there, to argue for or against something. If you google 'T.S. Eliot+arguably' or 'James Joyce+arguably' or any other great writer, you will find that there are a huge number of ranking specialists in each who use 'arguably' to introduce some aspect of those writers' oeuvre. It is simply wrong to assert as though it were true that 'arguably' is frowned on in good writing.

I drew a logical inference from two related remarks. That is the impression I got, no more nor less. (b) I have a fairly strong knowledge of Zionist history: it is overwhelmingly written by scholars who appear to have a strong commitment to the world Zionism produced. Just as much of Catholic history is written by Catholics, or Japanese history by Japanese scholars. Nothing anomalous, though one cannot write these days histories of anything from within in the fold because all known scholarly fields are no longer ethnic or denominational. If I have any knowledge about a topic that I hazard to suggest is very strongly grounded in familiarity with the ongoing scholarship, and about which I've published, it is on the concept of 'race'. And it is precisely this which has long puzzled me about the relative historical silence of histories of Zionism on that seminal, formative element in the tradition. You only really begin to observe historians tackling it after a full century of prolific scholarship on the movement and its ideas, a scholarship which focused on the political dynamics of a theory which in 1913 hardly any Jews had heard much of (1% according to an estimation I once read somewhere) and yet managed by extraordinary political genius to realize its principles and win the adherence of the majority of Jewish communities the world over. It's an old dictum of historians that the 'past' of a nation only emerges in all of its troublesome undersides when a country achieves full maturation, a certain measure of confidence and security in its achievements. This is particularly true of 'race', where recognizing the problem took centuries in Australia and the U.S., and Israel is no different. When I did those 667 Australian aboriginal articles, I read scores and scores of primary sources down to the 1950s which described as an unfortunate byblow of progress the 'inevitable' disappearance of the original inhabitants of the continent. It was normal for even front-ranking scholars down to the 1970s to consider mentioning 'race' and its lethal impact as a marginal matter, not worth dignifying with the name of scholarship.

So Burton is not mentioned in the genomics section more than once? Well, while writing, I tried to avoid the temptation of using anyone source excessively. Editors always criticize relying on one source too much. She is used where she is decidedly better, and more informed, than even Falk (not to speak of Weitzman): on what the archives now yield up as the personal motives of geneticists, in-house conflicts, disputes over methodologies etc., in genetic approaches to populations/races, where Zionist cultural beliefs inflected or influenced the 'Israeli' school somewhat distinctively. I can't see the problem in doing that.Nishidani (talk) 16:21, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Zionism, and which race?

It occurs to me that, if one is defining the scope of the page based upon the existing pagename, then there is a great deal of source material about Zionism and race that pertains to present-day Zionism in the occupied territories and its relationship to the Palestinian people in terms of their racial differences from Israeli Jews. This page does not cover that. That's obviously because the assumption underlying the existing pagename is that "race and genetics" refers only to how race and genetics might apply to Jewish people, but not to people who make no claim of being Jews. But that's an assumption, not anything that follows logically from the pagename as it is written. That's either a problem with the pagename, or a problem with the page scope. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:15, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Good point. And I think that's why a number of editors in the discussions above proposed titles that had wording like "on the origins of the Jewish people" or "on Jewish identity" in the title. We have a whole article Racism in Israel, which should probably be in the See also section if it isn't, that it would not be a good idea to rewrite here, so

I would argue for narrower scope (and if necessary narrower title) rather than widening. BobFromBrockley (talk) 08:15, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I agree that the scope should be kept narrow. Having an in-depth section on Neo-Zionism would make this page unwieldy. I also agree that the pagename is really going to have to be something that specifies "Jewish" with regard to "race", and, for that reason, I can no longer support a rename to "Race and genetics in Zionism". --Tryptofish (talk) 18:12, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I think this is a good point, and although I do not know what this means for the best article title, I want to express my support for this concept. I think there is an implication that Zionism is concerned with the race and genetics of Jewish people. I think that Zionism is definitely considered with the provenance of Jewish DNA, writ large, which is why genetics is being thrown in there, I think. Race was a pseudogenetic or pseudoscientific proposal of one way to view Jewish ethnicity. Contrary to what some have argued on this page, ethnicity is a description of a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. I would argue that Jews have all of these, and post-Israel there is a specific Israeli Zionist nationalism that we seem particularly concerned with in the context of its rhetoric in the pre-1940s time period. The "ancestry" is perhaps the part that belongs in the article title. Ancestry is not an article that Misplaced Pages recognizes as it redirects to "ancestor," but it seems to be a widely accepted synonym for genetic heritage. Andre🚐 19:26, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not arguing that we should replace the word "race" in the title with a different word, but I am arguing that we cannot simply use the word "race" without specifying that we are talking only about the "Jewish race" (so-called), and not "race" in general. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:37, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm thinking about proposing an RM to Jewish racial identity in Zionism. Any thoughts? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:22, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I think it's better. Andre🚐 23:25, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Definitely prefer it to current title. BobFromBrockley (talk) 12:06, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Doesnt seem to match the topic at all, but feel free to propose whatever you like. nableezy - 16:36, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

"Jewish racial identity in Zionism" is a different, though overlapping, topic than "Zionism, race, and genetics." Anyone can go ahead and start the "Jewish racial identity in Zionism" article, but I don't see the benefit of changing the scope of this article rather than starting a separate article about Jewish racial identity in Zionism.

To respond to the point in the OP, it's true that there is plenty of coverage about Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians, and the Zionism, race, and genetics article could be expanded to include that content. But the fact that the article currently is not complete -- that aspects of the topic aren't fully covered -- is a reason to expand the article, not to re-scope it. An obvious place for expansion is -- hey, you guessed it! -- Falk's 2017 "Zionism and the Biology of Jews," which BTW has a free PDF linked at Google Scholar, who makes a point that has probably been made by others and probably could be covered in the Misplaced Pages article somehow, for example at p. 201:

Even though not a race in a biological sense, political Zionism, after a century of attempts to prove contemporary Jews’ material, biological relationships – not merely their spiritual, cultural ones – to the ancient people of the biblical stories, in spite of widespread interspersing with local communities, finally has succeeded. It is tragic that Zionism, as well as Arab Nationalism, have failed to recognize the Palestinians, many of whom similarly appear to share phylogenetic relations to the historic inhabitants of the country, as equal partners.

Levivich (talk) 16:50, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with the 2nd part. Andre🚐 16:58, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I did suggest myself at one point adding Jew(s)/Jewish somewhere in the title but I also said that I would not support a title that did not match up with the article content. Although anything is possible, it seems doubtful that the proposed title would gain consensus. Selfstudier (talk) 17:22, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

The proposed title is not only inept, but disturbing. The form 'Jewish racial identity in Zionism' assumes that there is such a (ridiculous) 'thing' as a 'Jewish racial identity' ('Jewish racial identity in Rabbinical thought'/Jewish racial identity in Israel' etc.etc.) and that the article will handle it as it was treated in Zionism. 3 months have been wasted on this minority but very vocal disgruntlement with the natural title. One cannot expect that editors return to devote much of their wiki time to rehashing ad infinitum a question which has been framed and reframed at least a dozen times, to no productive purpose. As per Levivich, nothing is stopping editors from developing a sister article for that hypothetical title.Nishidani (talk) 19:09, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I actually agree with the point that Jewish racial identity in Zionism, and Zionism, race and genetics, are two different, though overlapping, topics. I also think that the page, as it is now, is about Jewish racial identity in Zionism, and is only about a subset of Zionism, race and genetics. Let me be very clear about it: the page content as it is now matches very closely with Jewish racial identity in Zionism, and matches very poorly with the existing title – because it completely omits a big chunk of what the existing title is about. Anyone who thinks it does not omit that, or who thinks that the page is not currently about Jewish racial identity as it has been discussed in Zionism, is being, well, inept and disturbing.

So I think the question becomes whether the page should be expanded to match the current title, or whether the title should be changed to match the current scope of the page. One could certainly expand the page, but editors should seriously consider what that would look like. First, if done properly, it would very nearly double the length of the page. Second, it would make the page feel like there are two parts to it: how race and genetics in Zionism have been used to argue about the identity of the Jewish people, and how race (and genetics??) in Zionism have been used to "other" the Palestinians.

I have a very strong feeling that if someone were to expand the page in that way, two things would happen: some editors would want to revert it, and some editors would want to delete the page as being a "coatrack". How would one define what belongs here, and what fits better at other pages about Zionism and the Palestinians (of which there are many)? I would like to see those editors who want to keep the current title and support expanding the page propose more than using the Falk source, and actually describe what the content would consist of. How would it be organized, and how long would it be? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Editors who want to keep the current title and support expanding the page have already proposed more than using the Falk source. Many sources have now been identified and discussed.

We went over this in August, extensively, up above at "#Sources on Zionism, race and genetics," where there is a long list of sources in the refbox at the bottom of the thread, some in bold. That's the thread where I talked about my algorithm, which I wrote on my userpage so I wouldn't have to write it out again.

Then, this month, we discussed what are the sources and what is the content again at "#X,Y(,) and Z as a title format," where I pointed specifically to half a dozen sources.

The sources for the article "Zionism, race, and genetics" include Kirsh 2003, Falk 2006, Hirsch 2009, Abu El-Haj 2012, Baker 2017, and Falk 2017, among many others that are already cited in the article and have been mentioned or discussed on this page.

In my view, the content should be determined by following the algorithm I lay out at User:Levivich#Forward editing article writing algorithm (although that's not policy or consensus, just what I think is best practice). If you want to know exactly what that content is, go read those half-dozen sources and whatever they all talk about is what's WP:DUE for inclusion. For my part, I have not read them all (merely skimmed), so I don't know exactly what's DUE and what's not DUE, and I don't see how anyone could know that until they actually read all the sources.

I trust there will be no further need for anyone to ask again what the scope of the article is or what the sources for the topic are. Levivich (talk) 19:53, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

That doesn't address the elephant in the room, namely that these sources cover Zionism, purported Jewish race, and purported Jewish genetics, and not Palestinians. Andre🚐 19:56, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I literally just quoted a source that covers Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians in the same paragraph. How are you saying "and not Palestinians" when the quote is right here? Have you actually opened any of the sources I just listed to see if they cover Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians? If not, please do so before making any more comments here. Levivich (talk) 20:03, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I obviously read your quote, which does not address the genetics or race of Palestinians as a contemporaneous concern of lack of concern by Zionists to those of Jews, but merely laments that very issue that we are discussing. I do not see where any of the sources provided discuss the genetics or racial issues around Palestinians other than that to say that Zionists, lamentably, have not considered them. I have not read the sources in full, I have skimmed those which have intersected with our discussion, and read others in excerpt. Some I have read most or all of especially shorter journal articles. I am happy to read where the question of Palestinian genetics is addressed either as a historical matter or a current one, for Arab nationalists, other than simply to again, lament the lack of coverage of this topic. Maybe that's a pointer that it's a less significant topic, but I suspect we simply haven't read for example, an article about Nasser, 1967 and Arab nationalist views on race. You can say that's a different article, and you may be right. Still, I think the point stands that the article focuses on the question of Zionist rhetoric on Jewish racial or ethnic composition and its impact on geopolitics. Andre🚐 21:30, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I didn't ask what the scope of the article it, or what the sources are. I was there, in those earlier discussions that you link to. And I'm not seeing any previous discussion about us covering race or genetics being used to "other" the Palestinians. I'm certainly not worried about finding enough sources. But what I did ask about included whether it would make this page too long, and whether it would make this page feel like a coatrack. I trust there will be no further need for me to repeat myself. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:05, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Let's stay away from the "inept" language if we can... I question the logic here. I agree that there is no such thing as a "Jewish race," I thought we agreed that "race" itself was a historical subject of study, and not an actually extant thing other than that it is socially constructed and appears in papers and on census forms. As far as editors devoting their time, you are certainly welcome but not obligated to devote any time to a discussion, but what you should avoid doing is gatekeeping, WP:OWNing, or otherwise engaging in personal attacks or questioning of good faith or of competency (absent a compelling reason to invoke WP:CIR, that is, which I do not see how we can do here, for a content dispute) Andre🚐 19:34, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

About there being "no such thing", I did actually say above "Jewish race (so-called)", so I agree that it's a dubious concept. But it's also a concept that numerous sources tell us has been taken quite seriously, in the history of things that this page is about. (For that matter "race and genetics" is a dubious concept, too.) So it's OK for us to use a pagename that reflects what the sources tell us. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:51, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I agree with that Andre🚐 19:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

As a sort of experiment, I'm going to expand the page in this way, and I think it will be interesting to see whether or not editors feel that it works. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Zionism, race and genetics#Race and non-Jews. Doubtless, it can be improved upon, but it's a start, and I avoided making it overly lengthy. Do editors think this really improves the page? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry but that violates one of the fundamental working rules of experienced content editors - namely, in building a new page, do not copy and paste or closely paraphrase material already existing in other wiki articles. It disobliges editors from actually reading the sources themselves, which has been a perennial problem with this talk page - excessive opinions about opinions by other editors without due attention to actually reading the extensive and high quality sources we have. I have given some reasons below for why this new material is totally out of line with the protocols that so far have governed the composition of the article as we have it, and as is dictated by the title itself.Nishidani (talk) 21:55, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, article reorganization and/or splitting isn't discouraged, but you simply must cite and attribute (see Misplaced Pages:Copying within Misplaced Pages Andre🚐 22:06, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Which I did, via my edit summaries. By the way, I am an experienced content editor, and I know full-well how to write much more carefully, including in FAs. I did this expecting that it would never be a stable version. I wanted to see if other editors would revise it, which has happened to my satisfaction, or whether it would simply be reverted, which I'm pleased hasn't happened so far. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:19, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

copying content from another page within Misplaced Pages requires supplementary attribution to indicate it. At a minimum, this means providing an edit summary at the destination page—that is, the page into which the material is copied—stating that content was copied, together with a link to the source (copied-from) page, e.g. Copied content from ]; see that page's history for attribution. It is good practice, especially if copying is extensive, to make a note in an edit summary on the source page as well. Content reusers should also consider leaving notes on the talk pages of both the source and destination.

That wasn't done. Two, whatever that guideline states, in practice, a lot of damage has been done in the I/P area by copying and pasting material over several pages, which smacks of pushing a POV. We have a link system which dispenses with that. But most importantly, as a practicing content specialist, that guideline appears to be ignorant of what we all know: wikipedia is not a reliable source. Since we all recognize this principle, to copy-and-paste (without known reverification) from one page to another is to assume that the original page is reliable. So there is an internal contradiction in guidelines. Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

There is no contradiction in guidelines; you simply must copy the references, or you should not copy unreferenced material, if copying is called-for/merited, it may/should be reverted or deleted if it is unreferenced. Andre🚐 22:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot of noise in this talk, but everything any editor does is subject to subsequent improvement by others. No big deal. And if one looks at the comment by the administrator who disapproved the #Did you know nomination, he pointed out that "an editor just today was removing close paraphrasing from sources". That editor was me. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:32, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Here are some additional potential sources: , , , . --Tryptofish (talk) 23:10, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

The insertion of extraneous matter

The article deals with the themes of Zionism, race and genetics. The following passages, apart numerous problems, contains almost nothing on race and genetics, and neither do the sources.

Neo-Zionism is a right-wing, nationalistic and religious ideology that appeared in Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967 and the capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Neo-Zionists consider these lands part of Israel and advocate their settlement by Israeli Jews. Some advocate the transfer of Arabs not only from these areas but also from within the Green Line. Neo-Zionists consider "secular Zionism", particularly the labor version, as too weak on nationalism and that it never understood the impossibility of Arabs and Jews living together in peace. Neo-Zionists claim that the Arab attitude to Israel is inherently rooted in anti-Semitism and that it is a Zionist illusion to think living in peace and together with them is possible. They consider Arabs in Israel to be a fifth column and to pose a demographic threat to the Jewish majority in Israel. From their point of view, the only solution for achieving peace is through "deterrence and retaliation" or preferably "transfer by agreement" of the Israeli Arabs and the Palestinian population of the occupied Palestinian Territories to neighboring Arab states.

I.e. an excursus on Neo-Zionism almost totally lifted from the paraphrase of one source, Uri Ram, as he is cited on the wiki Neo-Zionism page. Cross-wiki copy-and- paste stuff, one of the worst editorial vices afflicting this topic area. And relying on one source which nowhere writes of 'Zionism', 'race' and 'genetics. At the least that is a gross violation of WP:Undue in its exposure of a single viewpoint by one scholar for over 180 words, in his papers that do not mention zionism and race/genetics.

(b)According to the 2004 U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government had done "little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country's Arab citizens". The 2005 U.S. Department of State report on Israel wrote: "he government generally respected the human rights of its citizens; however, there were problems in some areas, including ... institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country's Arab citizens." The 2010 U.S. State Department Country Report stated that Israeli law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, and that government effectively enforced these prohibitions. Former Likud MK and Minister of Defense Moshe Arens has criticized the treatment of minorities in Israel, saying that they did not bear the full obligation of Israeli citizenship, nor were they extended the full privileges of citizenship.

i.e. in 2004-2005 the US state department said Israel did little to counteract discrimination against Israeli Palestinians. In 2010 it changed its view and said Israel generally enforces the prohibition against such discrimination.Moshe Arens noted something similar. No scholarly secondary sourcing, no mention of race or genetics or Zionism, unlike Falk who does mention all three.

There is quite a lot of 'stuff' on Zionism as a form of racism, which hasn't been included because the sources used for the page simply do not take this as their focus. In any case, that kind of material on the institutional politics of discrimination can be found in many other wiki articles, whereas this focus on the concept of race as it developed under Zionism, and that formative influence on later genetic studies, a very specific issue. The article could allow expansion on it through Falk (who deals with it en passant and often somewhat weakly) and others, but should not be derailed into a divagations of this highly generic type. By all means discuss this, but for the moment the material must be excluded as replicating another article, introducing matter not related to the topic's focus and essive use of a single source, while aimlessly quoting the variations in US State Department's self-contradictory standpoints. Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

That's certainly one answer to what I asked just above the section break, and I'm not at all averse to undoing it. Alternatively, I think it would be fine to significantly revise it. But here's the thing. If we remove it, then we really are not covering everything about Zionism, race and genetics. So I'm not seeing the logic behind editors who say don't change the pagename but don't add material like this either. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:54, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Articles are written to criteria of minimal adequacy only if their composition begins and ends with the search for, close reading of, and paraphrasing of sources bearing directly on the theme(s) announced in the topic header. One could easily swamp this article by covering 'everything' directly or vaguely reflecting the issues of Zionism's view of other peoples. But familiarity with the topic will tell anyone that it is not customary for other peoples, over the last decades, to be referred to as 'races'. That is why the ground you are probing is best covered by a new article, as several of us here have often said.Nishidani (talk) 22:00, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

As I said, it was certainly appropriate to revise it from what I originally put there. And I'm fine with the changes/deletions that you made. If we leave it at that, or if the section subsequently gets revised further, with additional material on, especially, the genetics, that's fine too. And with that, I'm willing to accept that the page really is about "Zionism, race and genetics", that it doesn't omit an obvious aspect of Zionism and race. So, with that, I'm no longer feeling like it should be renamed to "Jewish racial identity in Zionism" – because, with this change, it's no longer limited to Jewish racial identity (so-called). That was my concern in the opening of the main part of this talk section, and it's been resolved to my satisfaction. But if, hypothetically, the section gets entirely deleted, then I think we will have to revisit the pagename. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:12, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Levivich, as usual, pointed the way to expansion under the present title. Though I am retired, I will be rereading for some months all of the given sources used here and anymore that are forthcoming. Perhaps I, for one, may come up with some useful suggestions in this regard. But we should try to not plunge the page into a political morass. Politics is all over the I/P area and I personally am wearied by the havoc it makes to succinct encyclopedic work. The affliction of wikipedia is often also a matter of haste. Some editors, ask Zero and others as well, take several months, if not years, just to get some difficult material organized. I had noticed this topical nexus for over a decade, but never rushed it despite the fact that there was ample material for it. Patience is one of our guarantees of strong editing towards a reliable text, which is always under revision.Nishidani (talk) 22:24, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I welcome patience. And I paid attention to what Levivich said about it, even to the point of quoting what he had said in talk, with an edit summary that pointed to the diff where he said it – and that's one of the parts that you did not delete. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:27, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 28 September 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

It was proposed in this section that Zionism, race and genetics be renamed and moved to Zionism, race, and genetics. result: Closure requested. See no consensus below to include (or exclude) a serial comma. As is usual with a no-consensus outcome, editors can try again in a few months to garner consensus for this rename. Thanks and kudos to editors for your input; everyone stay healthy! P.I. Ellsworth , ed.  14:45, 8 October 2023 (UTC) Move logs: source title · target title This is template {{subst:Requested move/end}}

Zionism, race and genetics → Zionism, race, and genetics – There have been a lot of discussions here about renames, but this proposal is simply to put a comma after "race", and before "and genetics". This is something that was raised earlier, during the previous requested move, and it appeared to be non-controversial then. Although just a comma, it has the effect of breaking up the phrase "race and genetics". My hope is that it will be acceptable to editors who approve of the existing pagename, while also being at least a small and incremental step for editors who dislike the current title. -- Tryptofish (talk) 20:20, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Sources on triplets using or avoiding the Oxford comma are about even. So there is no problem either way.Nishidani (talk) 21:50, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

• Neutral leaning Oxford. Academic, in my mind. Leaning slightly toward Oxford vs no Oxford, but I do not see it as material or impactful. Andre🚐 22:10, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support adding the Oxford/Harvard comma for better clarity per WP:PRECISE. Rreagan007 (talk) 18:46, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
• Support, the comma clarifies that race and genetics are two things. Levivich (talk) 19:25, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. The Oxford comma is completely unnecessary. It makes perfect sense without. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
• Neutral. I disagree that it changes the meaning and so I don't care either way. Zero 13:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
• Distinction without a difference, both are valid and both mean the same thing. nableezy - 13:37, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:RETAIN/MOS:OXFORD. Scanning the text of the article I found about 6 lists of more than two items outside of quotes. Of those, 5 did not use an Oxford comma, and 1 did. This suggests that, absent a wider consensus to switch to using the Oxford comma throughout the article, we should not change the article title on its own. —siroχo 04:48, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 13 October 2023

The request to rename this article to Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism has been carried out. If the page title has consensus, be sure to close this discussion using {{subst:RM top|'''page moved'''.}} and {{subst:RM bottom}} and remove the {{Requested move/dated|…}} tag, or replace it with the {{subst:Requested move/end|…}} tag.

Zionism, race and genetics → Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism – Better and more descriptive title that matches the article text and the sources more closely, and removes ambiguous and confusing reference to "genetics" which is being used to mean "eugenics" not "molecular genetics" or "Mendelian genetics" given the anachronism of pre-1930s race science. Present title implies an association between "Zionism" and "race and genetics," which can be problematic. Additionally, present title fails to relate the 3 free-floating concepts, whereas the new title exactly relates the racial conceptions of Jewish identity that are being discussed in Zionism as opposed to implying some problematic relation between "Zionism" and "race and genetics" (i.e., discredited race science/eugenics) Andre🚐 17:55, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

• Support. I suggest that editors evaluating this RM read the lead paragraph of this page, with the RM in mind. The proposed new title nails it, in terms of reflecting what the page is about, as reflected, in turn, by the lead paragraph. The proposed rename tracks very closely with the wording of that paragraph – and the existing pagename doesn't. I agree with the nom, that "race and genetics" is a very problematic thing for us to associate with Zionism, without giving more nuance (and the long history of proposals to delete this page reflects, to a considerable extent, discomfort with that awkward language). Anticipating that there may be objections to leaving "genetics" out of the proposed title, I'll point out that, according to this page, genetic analyses were used simply as a more modern tool to examine what was earlier lumped under the term "race", so genetics here are not some sort of separate topic, outside of "racial conceptions", but instead a tool to study race. I recognize that the proposed new title is a bit on the long side. But it takes that many words to capture what the page is about (believe me, there have been endless discussions in this talk, rejecting anything more concise). So if one takes it as given that the page is about what it is about, then this title captures what it's about, as a pagename must. And if one dislikes the complexity of the proposed title, that's really a dislike of having this page, which is an issue for AfD, not RM. In contrast, the deeply flawed existing pagename achieves comparative brevity by way of lumping together, with no real connection, three independent concepts, almost in the manner of a slogan. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:43, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

  Adding to my original comment, it occurs to me that editors who come to this discussion without being familiar with the history of this page may be concerned about comments below, about a supposed few editors who supposedly ignore previous discussions. As should be obvious from the current pagename, this page has had a very contentious history. In fact, there are a few editors who walk a line bordering on WP:OWN, who constantly make that accusation, about others ignoring previous discussions. I want to emphasize what I said in the first sentence above: that editors who want to evaluate this RM should read the lead paragraph of this page. Look at how closely the proposed new title matches with that lead paragraph. Then look at how the existing title matches far less well. And see Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Lead section#Opening paragraph, which says all one needs to know about finding the scope of a page. Decide for yourself which pagename really reflects the page scope. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:09, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

• Support The proposed article name is better, much more in keeping with article subject matter. The current article title contradicts parts of the article which discusses racial identity and historical "race science" which should never be confused with genetics. TarnishedPath 01:05, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Question Is there a particular reason not to use "Jewishness", as is used in the article? (e.g. Racial conceptions of Jewishness in Zionism) ~ F4U (talk • they/it) 04:29, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Simple answer: it's a weirder word, and "Jewish identity" is used more. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:40, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Per Google: "the quality of being Jewish or of having characteristics regarded as typically Jewish". I second Iskandar's comment. TarnishedPath 07:31, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose the proposer's rationale suggests they have not read the earlier talk page discussions, or the core sources on which this article has been built. Their claim that that article’s …reference to "genetics"… is being used to mean "eugenics" not "molecular genetics" or "Mendelian genetics" is clearly incorrect. The 191 instances of genetic* throughout the article evidence this clearly. A title which incorrectly excises this element of the article is inappropriate. Onceinawhile (talk) 22:47, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  I think it's unfair to assert that someone did not read the discussions or sources simply because you disagree with what they say. Andrevan has taken part in those previous discussions, as have I, so it seems pretty likely that we were both aware of what was discussed. And nobody claimed that "genetics" was being used to mean those things; the concern is that the word can be misunderstood that way when paired with "race". And I've refuted the claim that we must include the word "genetics", in my own comment: genetics are treated by all the sources as a modern method to study "racial conceptions", so they are not a standalone concept that must be included in the pagename, but rather something that is a subset of "racial conceptions". --Tryptofish (talk) 22:56, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  The green text in my comment is a direct quote from Andrevan’s post. He used the word mean. Onceinawhile (talk) 23:33, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

  What I meant was that no one is claiming that editors are using it to mean that. We can agree that individuals have historically used it with that meaning. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:32, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  As we discussed at length, which you can find in the archive by Ctrl+F for the discussion of Mendelian genetics, no conception of modern genetics, nor one of Mendelian inheritance, was ever discussed or considered, but race science and eugenic ideas certainly were. Mendelian genetics was mentioned in passing in one of the sources. There is certainly a more modern contemporary discussion, which probably belongs not in this article, but at genetic studies on Jews and appears to be just a split or fork of that article with a different spin. But that has nothing to do with Zionists that are discussed in the article like Ruppin. Andre🚐 23:54, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose I made it plain in preRFC discussion that I would not accept a title that did not address both race and genetics per the sources, so I will repeat that here. Selfstudier (talk) 22:52, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
• Support Better as it indicates a cogent subject. Drsmoo ( talk) 00:13, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose per Onceinawhile. This is the nth attempt by some two or three editors to challenge the no consensus outcome of several different formulations successively and exhaustively discussed. The no consensus reflected consistently a majority of editors' views that there is nothing problematic in the existing title, which has excellent source backing. There must be a natural limit to how many times the same challenge is thrown down (attrition) and the same arguments repeated, most of them ignoring the detailed rebuttals concerning inadequate formulations made in the several threads earlier on. Nishidani (talk) 17:42, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  I said this earlier: . There is no consensus that the existing pagename is good. And just because some editors disagree with those "detailed rebuttals", does not mean that they are ignoring them. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:15, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose - per Onceinawhile, this proposal ignores that genetics is used repeatedly in the sources and makes the OR leap that what they really mean is eugenics. This is another title that would change the scope of the article. nableezy - 20:32, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  What parts of the page would have to be removed? What new content would have to be added? None, so far as I can see. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:42, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  There are sources in the contemporary portion that are referenced in the article, but it's a WP:SYNTH leap that it's the same genetics that pre-1948 Zionists were thinking about. The early portion of the article discusses Ruppin and other Zionists who were possessed of pseudoscientific ideas about humanity, in several ways, and then goes on to touch on contemporary academic views on Jewish genetics that aren't related to that at all, and then makes the synthetic leap to say that Ruppin's eugenics/race science is really the same question as what my 23andme DNA test says, which it isn't. It's confusing, obtuse, and probably creates a bad apprehension in readers as to the veracity of the question "are most Jews today descended from Middle Eastern ancestors." As opposed to the consensus on the other article where that particular content belongs. Andre🚐 22:40, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

  Andrevan, I actually don't agree with you about the SYNTH, because it seems to me that there are secondary sources that discuss the topic as it developed over time (and contrary to rumors, I don't have a secret agenda of getting this page deleted). But that's not an RM discussion. What is relevant to RM is that "Zionism, race and genetics" does not help the reader understand how the page scope evolved over time, whereas "Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism" makes clearer what the continuous thread is. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:49, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

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