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A recent study by a team of international psychologists showed that such research contributed to the "chronic otherization of Palestinians", encourages less support amongst Israeli Jews for political compromise, and could even inflame political violence.{{sfn|Burton|2021|p=246|ps=: "For example, a team of American, European, and Israeli psychologists turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to investigate how genetic discourses might contribute to the resolution or exacerbation of ethnic-nationalist tensions. Following a series of studies conducted mainly on Jewish subjects, the psychologists found that Jewish Israelis who read a simulated news article emphasizing the genetic differences between Jews and Arabs “showed less support for political compromise and more support for collective punishment toward Palestinians and more support for the political exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The psychologists concluded that the rising publicity of research that conflates ethnicity with genetic difference could foreshadow or inflame political violence. Furthermore, this study reaffirmed the co-constitutive roles of Zionist politics and genetic science in the construction of a Jewish biological category and the chronic otherization of Palestinians."}} | A recent study by a team of international psychologists showed that such research contributed to the "chronic otherization of Palestinians", encourages less support amongst Israeli Jews for political compromise, and could even inflame political violence.{{sfn|Burton|2021|p=246|ps=: "For example, a team of American, European, and Israeli psychologists turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to investigate how genetic discourses might contribute to the resolution or exacerbation of ethnic-nationalist tensions. Following a series of studies conducted mainly on Jewish subjects, the psychologists found that Jewish Israelis who read a simulated news article emphasizing the genetic differences between Jews and Arabs “showed less support for political compromise and more support for collective punishment toward Palestinians and more support for the political exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The psychologists concluded that the rising publicity of research that conflates ethnicity with genetic difference could foreshadow or inflame political violence. Furthermore, this study reaffirmed the co-constitutive roles of Zionist politics and genetic science in the construction of a Jewish biological category and the chronic otherization of Palestinians."}} | ||
==Overview== | |||
Traditional Christian ] was tempered under the impact of the ] as a succeeding ] in ] took root in the 19th century. Coinciding with the emergence of ] as a biological science of man, this incremental lowering of traditional socio-cultural discrimination against, and persecution of, Jews began to suffer a reverse. Though there was no intrinsic connection between Darwin’s theories and anti-Semitism,{{sfn|Weikart|2008|p=94}} the latter half of the 19th. century witnessed the rise of a renewed current of hostility towards Jews,(] 1873, 1879) only this time with scientific pretensions.{{efn|Marr coined the term 'antisemitism, which 'became popular specifically among writers and scholars, not only because of its scientific pretensions but also because it cast a ckloak of uncertaiinty over the intent of hatred of the Jews (which people were still careful not to mention specifically).'{{harv|Zimmermann|1987|p=94}}}} In ] in particular, this retuning of nationalist ] thought{{efn|The tradition founded by ] originally thought of Jews simply as a distinct national community. The proto-Zionist ], for one, in his very influential ], argued that the Jewish nation was constituted by a 'race', which deserved ] like any other.{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=3}}}} drew strength from the ‘biologization’ of human differences, in the form of ] by seeking an ostensible scientific support in ]’s view of evolution as a ]. {{sfn| Falk|2014|p=3}} | |||
==Zionism and the notion of the Jewish people as a race== | ==Zionism and the notion of the Jewish people as a race== |
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Zionism, race and genetics is the use of racial theories and genetic studies on Jews in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including Jewish ethnic unity and the descent-based claim to the biblical Land of Israel. Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it "offered scientific 'proof' of the 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 anti-semitism. The idea assumed particular importance during early nation building in Israel, given the ethnic diversity of incoming Jewish populations and the fact that the original founding fathers of the Zionist movement were Ashkenazi Jews whose origins remain "highly debated".
The application of the Biblical concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the Promised Land in Zionism requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Israelites, and as such, inheritors of the Land of Israel bequeathed by God. This is considered important to the State of Israel because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "Gathering of the exiles" and the "Return to Zion", building on the notion that modern Jews in the diaspora are the ethnic descendants of the Israelites mentioned in the Bible, thus being made eligible for automatic citizenship under the Law of Return.
The connection between Zionism and early 20th century race science and, since the 1950s, genetic science, has been widely studied by historians and anthropologists. According to the Israeli geneticist and historian, Raphael Falk, in his study of three early Zionist scientists - Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, Shneor Zalman Bychowski and Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer - scientific biology has been repeatedly used by Zionist thinkers as evidence for any number of social, economic, or political notions. Recourse to biological arguments about Jews, in the hands of both Zionists and anti-Zionists, merely underlines how they are subject to confirmation bias. Gavin Schaffer maintains that this emerges clearly in in "Jewish difference debates" in discussions of Israel and Zionism where the leading scientists into Jewish genetic roots, including the "priestly gene", have openly Zionist agendas. Conversely, anti-Zionists use the same debate to support their position, in line with the denial of any connection between contemporary Jews and the ancient Hebrews and Israelites in Palestinian political discourse.
A recent study by a team of international psychologists showed that such research contributed to the "chronic otherization of Palestinians", encourages less support amongst Israeli Jews for political compromise, and could even inflame political violence.
Overview
Traditional Christian judeophobia was tempered under the impact of the Age of Enlightenment as a succeeding period of Jewish emancipation in Western civil society took root in the 19th century. Coinciding with the emergence of Darwinism as a biological science of man, this incremental lowering of traditional socio-cultural discrimination against, and persecution of, Jews began to suffer a reverse. Though there was no intrinsic connection between Darwin’s theories and anti-Semitism, the latter half of the 19th. century witnessed the rise of a renewed current of hostility towards Jews,(Wilhelm Marr 1873, 1879) only this time with scientific pretensions. In the German cultural world in particular, this retuning of nationalist völkisch thought drew strength from the ‘biologization’ of human differences, in the form of theories of biological racism by seeking an ostensible scientific support in social Darwinism’s view of evolution as a struggle between species.
Zionism and the notion of the Jewish people as a race
As early as the 1870s, contrary to largely cultural perspectives among integrated and acculturated 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. Notable proponents of this included Max Nordau, Herzl's co-founder of the original Zionist Organization, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the prominent architect of early statist Zionism and the founder of what became Israel’s Likud party, and Arthur Ruppin, considered the "father of Israeli sociology". Jabotinsky wrote that Jewish national integrity relies on “racial purity", whereas Nordau asserted the need for an "exact anthropological, biological, economic, and intellectual statistic of the Jewish people".
The phenomenon of casting modern Jews as the primary descendants of ancient Israelites is similar to the controversial concept of Phoenicianism within Lebanese nationalism, and sought to underpin the legitimacy of Zionism. The Jewish race science which developed within early 20th century theories fed into Zionist nationalism and has influenced Israeli population studies since the inception of the state, down to the present day.
Jewish ethnic unity and connection to ancient Israelites
In contemporary political history, supporters of Jewish nationalism have focused on the search for "Jewish genes" and the identification of the "original Jews", in order to strengthen the Zionist claim to the so-called Land of Israel. Geneticist Harry Ostrer explained this in the context of early studies by Maurice Fishberg:
In 1911, the forces of social cohesion were religion, race science, and Zionism. Often, race science and Zionism went hand-in-hand, and the identification of a Jewish race provided justification for an ancestral homeland. This issue was addressed head-on in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the consensus on a Jewish race led to the mandate for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. So the Jewish world of 1911 is the predecessor of the Jewish world of the twenty-first century. Many of the Diaspora communities are gone and, as Fishberg predicted, the center of Jewish life has moved to the United States and to Israel. The issues that preoccupied the Jewish intellectual leaders of 1911 are the same ones that preoccupy the leaders of today. Who are the Jews, a religious group or a genetic isolate? Did they originate from Middle Eastern matriarchs and patriarchs? Fishberg lacked the tools for answering these questions. The genetic methods that would eventually provide answers were starting to develop in Fishberg's New York in the Columbia University laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan. The precision of these genetic tools continued to improve over the course of the twentieth century, and as they did, Fishberg's intellectual heirs sought to apply them to the issues of Jewish origins and identity.
Geneticists such as Ostrer and Nadia Abu El Haj have publicly disagreed on the interpretation of the evidence, as there are many genetic mutations restricted to certain groups of modern Jews, but no single gene uniting the majority of Jews worldwide. Harry Ostrer disagreed with criticism of proposed genetic evidence for Jewish unity as "fragmentary and half-truths", and noted that the question "touches on the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel".
In absence of biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people," whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return". By the mid 20th century, A Jewish "biological self-definition" became a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers never doubted that evidence existed, even though such facts had "remained forever elusive".
See also
Notes
- Europe, proponents of the idea that the Jews were a race were found mainly in the ranks of Zionists, as the idea implied a common biological nature of the otherwise geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided Jewish people, and offered scientific 'proof of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.Hirsch 2009, p. 592
- 'At the same time, the idea that Jews are a people connected to each other on a ‘biological’ level has been promoted by Zionist ideologues. This racialisation of Jewish identity in the rhetoric of the founders of Zionism was a response to the shift from Christian anti-Semitism to racial anti-Semitism, which occurred in Europe in the late nineteenth century.'(Egorova 2009, p. 162)
- 'Here, the ethnic composition of Israel is crucial. Despite the ambiguity in the legal, biological, and social “nature” of “Jewish genes” and their intermittent role in the reproduction of Jewish identity, Israel is a country of extraordinary ethnic diversity. Many Jewish immigrants have arrived from Eastern Europe, North Africa, France, India, Latin America, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, the United States, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the former Soviet Union (FSU), and then there is Israel’s Arab minority of close to two million people. And while Jewishness has often been imagined as a biological race—most notably, and to horrific ends, by the Nazis, but also later by Zionists and early Israelis for state-building purposes— the initial origins of the Ashkenazi Jews who began the Zionist movement in turn-of-the-century Europe remain highly debated.'(McGonigle 2021, p. 35)
- "There is a “problem” regarding the origins of the Ashkenazim, which needs resolution: Ashkenazi Jews, who seem European—phenotypically, that is—are the normative center of world Jewry. No less, they are the political and cultural elite of the newly founded Jewish state. Given their central symbolic and political capital in the Jewish state and given simultaneously the scientific and social persistence of racial logics as ways of categorizing and understanding human groups, it was essential to find other evidence that Israel’s European Jews were not in truth Europeans. The normative Jew had to have his/her origins in ancient Palestine or else the fundamental tenet of Zionism, the entire edifice of Jewish history and nationalist ideology, would come tumbling down. In short, the Ashkenazi Jew is the Jew—the Jew in relation to whose values and cultural practices the oriental Jew in Israel must assimilate. Simultaneously, however, the Ashkenazi Jew is the most dubious Jew, the Jew whose historical and genealogical roots in ancient Palestine are most difficult to see and perhaps thus to believe—in practice, although clearly not by definition."(Abu El-Haj 2012, p. 98)
- 'The Zionist movement remains firmly anchored in the basic principle of the exclusive right of the Jews to Palestine that is found in the Torah and in other Jewish religious literature. Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations… We can summarize these beliefs, based on the Bible, as follows. 1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago. 2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land. 3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews. The purity of the Jewishness of the land is derived from a divine command and is thus a sacred mission. Accordingly, settling in Palestine, in addition to its economic and political motivations, acquires a romantic and mythical character. That the Bible is at the root of Zionism is recognized by religious, secular, non-observant, and agnostic Zionists… The Bible, which has been generally considered as a holy book whose basic tenets and whose historical contents are not commonly challenged by Christians and Jews, is usually referred to as the Jewish national record. As a "sacrosanct title-deed to Palestine," it has caused a fossilization of history in Zionist thinking… Modern Jews, accordingly, are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites, hence the only possible citizens of the Land of Palestine.'(Haddad 1974, pp. 98–99)
- 'Interest in the topic of Jewish origins is hardly universal among the world’s Jews or the communities in which they live. But in Israel, the stakes of the debate over Jewish origins are high, because the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic “return.” If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project can be pejoratively categorized 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 authenticating Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population “returning” to the Levant, the realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel.'McGonigle 2021, pp. 36–37
- 'the history of the relationship of Zionism and scientific biology, which has made an effort to single out Jews from non-Jews on the one hand, and to unite the distinct Jewish communities on the other hand, provides a problematic case of the utilisation of biological arguments as “evidence” for whatever social, economic, or political notion that has been put forward.' (Falk 2007, p. 154)
- Marr coined the term 'antisemitism, which 'became popular specifically among writers and scholars, not only because of its scientific pretensions but also because it cast a ckloak of uncertaiinty over the intent of hatred of the Jews (which people were still careful not to mention specifically).'(Zimmermann 1987, p. 94) harv error: no target: CITEREFZimmermann1987 (help)
- The tradition founded by Herder originally thought of Jews simply as a distinct national community. The proto-Zionist Moses Hess, for one, in his very influential Rome and Jerusalem (1862), argued that the Jewish nation was constituted by a 'race', which deserved national rights like any other.
- ' It is important to remember that both the Zionists and the Nazis referred to them and their various organizations as “assimilationist." However, the great majority of these so-called assimilationist German Jews neither sought to deny their Jewish identity nor stopped believing that one could be both Jewish and German at the same time. Ruth Gay’s distinction between “assimilation," implying the total elimination of all distinctions between Jews and the non Jewish majority, and the more relevant term “acculturation,” implying the adoption of language, culture, and social convention, while retaining a distinct, religious and historical identity, can be helpful here.'(Nicosia 2010, p. 1,n.2)
Citations
- Posner, Menachem. "Who Are the Israelites?". chabad.org.
- "Zionism | ADL". www.adl.org. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
- Kandiyoti, Dalia (2020). The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-1244-0.
Genetic genealogy has added new twists to the controversies around the biologization and consolidation, and returns of identities. Although genetic scientists such as Harry Ostrer, who has asserted that Jews constitute a genetically coherent group, distance themselves from eugenics and spurious "race science," the nationalist conclusions are presented as uncontroversial: Jews are a people because there is some genetic evidence that many have ancient origins in the Levant (Ostrer 2012). As Susan Martha Kahn observes in her critique of Ostrer, genetic evidence is made to coincide with the Jewish oral tradition of common origins in the Middle East (Kahn 2013), with the consequence of biologization of group identity. It is not an accident that the greater visibility of converso descendants in the Jewish and the wider world coincides with the rise of genetic studies that seek to prove that Jews are a people indigenous to the Middle East, with the obvious geopolitical conclusions legitimizing the claims to Israel/Palestine (Abu El Haj 2012; Kahn 2013).
- Refugees, United Nations High Commissioner for. "Refworld | Israel: Law No. 5710-1950, The Law of Return". Refworld. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
- Burton 2021, p. 11: "Historians and anthropologists have critically examined how the structuring assumptions of Jewish race science in early-twentieth-century Europe and North America, and their relationship to Zionist nationalism, reverberate within the genetic studies of Jewish populations by Israeli scientists from the 1950s to the present."
- Schaffer, Gavin (2010). "Dilemmas of Jewish Difference: Reflections on Contemporary Research into Jewish Origins and Types from an Anglo-Jewish Historical Perspective". Jewish Culture and History. 12 (1–2). Informa UK Limited: 86–88. doi:10.1080/1462169x.2010.10512145. ISSN 1462-169X. S2CID 143496144.
However, the historical record suggests that, on the subject of race, scientists do not deal in clear-cut truths but do 'spin' and do 'whitewash', albeit often subconsciously, presenting findings that are in line with personal beliefs and ideology, not set apart from social racial discourse in any clear sense. In Jewish difference debates, this is nowhere clearer than on the issue of Israel and Zionism. In his latest book on race, David Theo Goldberg has highlighted a link between racial research into ancient origins and contemporary land disputes: "Those whose racial origins' are considered geographically somehow to coincide with national territory (or its colonial extension) are deemed to belong to the nation; those whose geo-phenotypes obviously place them originally (from) elsewhere are all too often considered to pollute or potentially to terrorize the national space, with debilitating and even deadly effect." In this way, potential links between theories of an ancient Jewish past in Israel and contemporary conflict in the Middle East become important. In the face of a generally hostile international media, which often constructs Jews in Israel as colonisers and occupiers, scientific proofs of Jewish indigeneity in Israel confer legitimacy on Zionists and their sympathisers. This being the case, it is equally unsettling and significant, to the author at least, that the leading investigators of Jewish genetic roots frequently seem to be largely uncritical supporters of Israel. In Abraham's Children, Entine has noted that the pioneering scholar of the Priestly gene, Karl Skorecki, was 'motivated as much by his commitment to Israel as by scientific curiosity'. Similarly, David Goldstein states clearly and openly his attachment to Israel in Jacob's Legacy… the seekers of the priestly gene have an openly Zionist agenda...
- Rich, Dave (2017-01-02). "Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 11 (1): 101–104. doi:10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682. ISSN 2373-9770. S2CID 152132582.
- Litvak, Meir (1994). "A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction". History and Memory. 6 (2): 24–56. ISSN 0935-560X. JSTOR 25618669.
- Burton 2021, p. 246: "For example, a team of American, European, and Israeli psychologists turned to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to investigate how genetic discourses might contribute to the resolution or exacerbation of ethnic-nationalist tensions. Following a series of studies conducted mainly on Jewish subjects, the psychologists found that Jewish Israelis who read a simulated news article emphasizing the genetic differences between Jews and Arabs “showed less support for political compromise and more support for collective punishment toward Palestinians and more support for the political exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” The psychologists concluded that the rising publicity of research that conflates ethnicity with genetic difference could foreshadow or inflame political violence. Furthermore, this study reaffirmed the co-constitutive roles of Zionist politics and genetic science in the construction of a Jewish biological category and the chronic otherization of Palestinians."
- Weikart 2008, p. 94. sfn error: no target: CITEREFWeikart2008 (help)
- ^ Falk 2014, p. 3.
- ^ Falk 2014.
- ^ Baker 2017, p. 100-102.
- Bloom 2011, p. 5.
- Burton 2021, p. 24: "In the Levantine mandates, anthropometric reconstructions of “ancient races” like the Phoenicians and Israelites fed into political discourses about Lebanese identity and the legitimacy of Zionism."
- Burton 2021, p. 11b: "In contrast to the rest of the region, the history of genetic research on Jews in Israel has been relatively well studied. Historians and anthropologists have critically examined how the structuring assumptions of Jewish race science in early-twentieth-century Europe and North America,. And their relationship to Zionist nationalism, reverberate within the genetic studies of Jewish populations by Israeli scientists from the 1950s to the present."
- Ostrer 2012, p. 33.
- Ostrer 2012, pp. 89: "...thus, it is common today among Ashkenazim and other Jews—Syrian, Kurdish, Djerban, and Yemenite Jews. It demonstrates that these Jews are the descendants of people who once lived in the Middle East
- Abu El-Haj 2012, pp. 48–49 "Junk DNA is natural-cultural artifact that carries a genealogical message bearing witness to one’s geographic origins and cultural past. It functions as evidence of what one might call cultural fidelity—of the fact that contemporary, self-designated Jews really do descend from a single ancient population, from a common history and long tradition of cultural distinc- tion that is visible on the Y-chromosome only because their (male) ances- tors remained true to their faith. Y-chromosome markers are “signatures” of ancient origins (Thomas 1998, 139). Such markers are not, by way of contrast, evidence of the “biological unity” of the Jews, a concept central to racial theories of Jewishness that dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought."
- Falk 2017, pp. 208–210 "There are no 'Jewish genes,' even though there are plenty of mutations that are pretty much restricted to a certain group of Jews. It follows that there can be no clinching biological answer to the question of identifying the original Jews, nor to any question about the shared heritage of all Jews qua Jews… Smocha argues for the emancipation of the Jewish nation from inherited notions of alleged biological unity. Shouldn't genetic research likewise shake itself loose of the effort to anchor Zionism in the supposedly shared biological origins of the Jews?"
- Ostrer 2012, p. 220: "Are recent discoveries fragmentary and half-truths? I think not, because the molecular genetic studies of which Sand is critical have set the bar higher for discovery, reporting, and acceptance than the race science of a century ago—less stand-alone observation with more replication and more rigorous statistical testing. The stakes in genetic analysis are high. It is more than an issue of who belongs in the family and can partake in Jewish life and Israeli citizenship. It touches on the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel. One can imagine future disputes about exactly how large the shared Middle Eastern ancestry of Jewish groups has to be to justify Zionist claims."
- McGonigle 2021, p. 36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD): "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel’s critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."
- McGonigle 2021, p. (c.f. p.218-219 of PhD): "The biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."
- Abu El-Haj 2012, p. 18 "What is evident in the work in Israeli population genetics is a desire to identify biological evidence for the presumption of a common Jewish peoplehood whose truth was hard to “see,” especially in the face of the arrival of oriental Jews whose presumably visible civilizational and phenotypic differences from the Ashkenazi elite strained the nationalist ideology upon which the state was founded. Testament to the legacy of racial thought in giving form to a Zionist vision of Jewish peoplehood by the mid-twentieth century, Israeli population researchers never doubted that biological facts of a shared origin did indeed exist, even as finding those facts remained forever elusive… Looking at the history of Zionism through the lens of work in the biological sciences brings into focus a story long sidelined in histories of the Jewish state: Jewish thinkers and Zionist activists invested in race science as they forged an understanding of the Jewish people and fought to found the Jewish state. By the mid-twentieth century, a biological self-definition—even if not seamlessly a racial one, at least not as race was imagined at the turn of the twentieth century—had become common-sensical for many Jewish nationalists, and, in significant ways, it framed membership and shaped the contours of national belonging in the Jewish state."
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- Hirsch, Dafna (2009). "Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a 'new Jewish type'". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . 15 (3): 592–609. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01575.x. JSTOR 40541701.
- Kahn, Susan Martha (December 2013). "Commentary: Who Are the Jews? New Formulations of an Age‐Old Question". Human Biology. 85 (6): 919–924. doi:10.13110/humanbiology.85.6.0919. JSTOR 10.13110/humanbiology.85.6.0919. PMID 25079125. S2CID 201761565.
- Kandiyoti, Dalia (2020). The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-1244-0.
- Kaplan, Steven (2003). "If There Are No Races, How Can Jews Be a "Race"?". Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 2 (1): 79–96. doi:10.1080/14725880305901. S2CID 143895246.
- McGonigle, Ian V. (2021). Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-36669-4. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
- Morris-Reich, Amos (Fall 2006). "Arthur Ruppin's Concept of Race". Israel Studies. 11 (3): 1–30. doi:10.2979/ISR.2006.11.3.1. JSTOR 30245648. S2CID 144898510.
- Ostrer, Harry (2012). A Genetic History of the Jewish People. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-3-319-57345-8.
- Nicosia, Francis R. (2010). Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-17298-1.
- Penslar, Derek J. (2020). "Theodor Herzl, Race, and Empire". In Maciejko, Paweł; Ury, Scott (eds.). Making History Jewish: The Dialectics of Jewish History in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Studies in Honor of Professor Israel Bartal. Brill. pp. 185–209. ISBN 978-9-004-43196-6.
- Schaffer, Gavin (2010). "Dilemmas of Jewish Difference: Reflections on Contemporary Research into Jewish Origins and Types from an Anglo-Jewish Historical Perspective". Jewish Culture and History. 12 (1–2). Informa UK Limited: 86–88. doi:10.1080/1462169x.2010.10512145. S2CID 143496144.
- Sicher, Efraim (2013). Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about 'Jews' in the Twenty-First Century. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-0-857-45893-3.
- Vogt, Stefan (2014). "Zwischen Humanismus und Nationalismus. Die Rezeption völkisch-nationalen Denkens im deutschsprachigen Zionismus". In Gust, Kerstin; Wilhelm, Karin (eds.). Neue Städte für einen neuen Staat: Die städtebauliche Erfindung des modernen Israel und der Wiederaufbau in der BRD. Eine Annäherung. transcript-Verlag. pp. 228–236. ISBN 978-3-839-42204-5.