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As early as the late 19th century, a discourse emerged in Zionist thinking seeking to reframe conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and race science. Since then, every generation has witnessed efforts to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity, so that the theme of 'blood logic'/'race' has been recently described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief. In modern times, genetic science generally and Jewish population genetics in particular have been used in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including claims of Jewish ethnic unity and descent linked to the biblical Land of Israel.

Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race since, according to Dr. Dafna Hirsch of the Open University of Israel, they believed it "offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent". The question of Jewish biological unity assumed particular importance during early nation building in Israel, given the ethnic diversity of incoming Jewish populations.

Many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of Jewish identity were long forgotten, overlooked, made invisible or deliberately suppressed until recent decades. (Avraham 2017, pp. 172–173) With the development of human population genetics from the 1950s onwards, these same themes have reverberated in genetic studies on Jews in relation to studies on the genealogical origins of modern Jews.

History

Background

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. Many acculturated Jewish communities integrated into Germanic society, came to consider their Jewishness in terms of their cultural and/or religious heritage. Coinciding with the emergence of Darwinism as a biological science of man and the rise of scientific racism more broadly, the Emancipation period's incremental lowering of traditional socio-cultural discrimination against, and persecution of, Jews faced new challenges. Though there was no intrinsic connection between Darwin’s theories and antisemitism, the latter half of the 19th century witnessed the rise of a racial antisemitism (Wilhelm Marr 1873, 1879; Eugen Dühring 1881, for example) which often had scientific pretensions.

In the German cultural world in particular, this returning 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 theory of evolution as a struggle between species. Jewish scholars and scientists were therefore forced to confront the new race science: "Some disputed the stability and per manence of racial traits and the existence of pure races. Others internalized racial thinking and then unconsciously reworked and subverted its premises. Still others accepted the idea of racial differences but turned conventional stereotypes on their head."

Early Zionism

As the older Christian antisemitic prejudices underwent reformulation in terms of the newer antagonism of racialised thinking, groups of Jews, disappointed with what they perceived to be the failures of full emancipation, began to be drawn to Theodor Herzl’s proposed Zionist solution to the quandary. Herzl's Zionism arose in reaction to these renewed antisemitic trends, as an ideology that aimed to reconstruct a distinct Jewish identity along ethnic/volkisch lines.. In doing so, Herzl and his followers challenged the centuries’ old tradition among Jews that they constituted a religious and socio-cultural group by reframing Jewishness in terms of the concept of a nation-race, with Jews conceived of as an "integral biological entity" in what has been called a "racialization of Jewish identity".

In the early years of the Zionist movement, notable proponents of the idea of a Jewish nation-race 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 wrote that "The acute eye of the street loafer is sufficient proof that the Jews are a race, or at least a variety, or, if you please, a sub-variety of mankind".

Burton suggests that the phenomenon of reconstructing modern Jews as the primary descendants of ancient Israelites sought to underpin the legitimacy of Zionism, much as the controversial concept of Phoenicianism which developed around the same time within Lebanese nationalism sought to ground an emerging Lebanese nationalism. According to the Israeli geneticist and historian, Raphael Falk, in his study of three scientists who were early followers of Herzl - Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, Shneor Zalman Bychowski and Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer - scientific biology was also used by Zionist thinkers as evidence for any number of social, economic, or political notions. (Historian Todd Endelman notes that Salaman became a Zionist some time after reaching the conclusion that Jews formed a distinct race, suggesting this belief was one of the factors leading to the adoption of the ideology.

These discussions were not widely disseminated in the Jewish population before the 1930s. Not all Zionists using concepts such as "race" at this time agreed on its biological dimension, and some Zionists – for example Robert Weltsch and Israel Zangwill - did not embrace the racial idea. At times, other Zionists harshly criticised race science, preferring a conception of Jewish religious heritage to one of descent. On the other hand, even some non-Zionist Jews began to understand Jews in racial terms in this period.

Although Ashkenazi, many (especially central European) Jewish race Zionists, like many of their assimilationist contemporaries, saw Sephardim as purer and superior Jews - the Urjude, as Endelman puts it; others, such as Salaman, took the opposite position, seeing the Serphardim as mixed with Arabs and Spaniards.

Later 20th century

In contemporary political history, some 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 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.

Israeli human population genetics began during the 1950s and early 1960s. This work focused on sociological and historical aspects of the genetic research and, according to Nurit Kirsh, was used "among other things, as a vehicle for establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative." According to Nadia Abu El-Haj, 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".

In a 2015 Oxford Bibliographies review of literature on Jewish genetics, Noah Tamarkin wrote that:

...contemporary geneticists and their critics often consider similar questions and controversies such as those raised in pre-1980s studies based on blood groups, and even earlier biometric studies undertaken by 19th- and early-20th-century eugenicists and their critics. Zionist and anti-Zionist politics significantly inform historical and contemporary Jewish genetics literatures, at times explicitly and more often implicitly in the questions that scholars ask, such as the extent to which Jews constitute a biological community, and the extent to which Jews throughout the world can trace their ancestry to the Middle East.

21st century

Geneticists Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk and anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj have publicly disagreed on the interpretation of the evidence about Jewish genetics, with Ostrer arguing there is such as thing as a Jewish race or people and Abu El-Haj contesting it, and Falk arguing there are many genetic mutations restricted to certain groups of modern Jews but no single gene uniting the majority of Jews worldwide.

In relation to Zionism, 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" while Abu El-Haj, "an established critic of the modern Zionist project" criticised the thesis biological unity as a strategy for "casting doubt on the foundational assumption on which the Zionist enterprise is predicated".

Research into the connection

Several scholars have studied the early connection between Zionism and race science, including Joachim Doron, Annegret Kiefer, John Efron, Mitchell Hart, Todd Endelman, Raphael Falk, and Veronika Lipphardt. According to Doron Avraham of Bar-Ilan University, these publications have "exposed the 'scientific' racial aspects embedded in the emerging Jewish national ideology." Falk and other scholars have shown how, since the 1950s, these "structuring assumptions" of Jewish race science "reverberate" in modern Jewish genetic science. Cynthia Baker, wrote of this connection between race science and genetic science in her 2017 book, Jew’’, under the heading Zionism's New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew:

Like Zionism’s new Jew that emerged from nineteenth-century European race science, the genomic Jew, a product of “population genetics,” springs from the same milieu… Human population genetics... has been called “the most widely misused area of human genetics” largely because findings are readily appropriated into preexisting cultural narratives... where they may be presented as “proof” in support of a variety of sociopolitical agendas. In addition, determination of what constitutes a “population” and what constitute “discrete and comparable populations,” critical decisions for the purposes of designing or interpreting genetic studies, can also be deeply entwined with popular concepts of race and other essentialist notions of identity. Given these issues and the veritable explosion in genomic research and its applications in recent decades, some scholars have expressed concerns that we have entered an era of the “molecularization of race.”

Recourse to biological arguments about Jews, amongst both Zionists and anti-Zionists, is subject to confirmation bias. Gavin Schaffer maintains that this emerges clearly 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.

Impact

Politics

According to Michael Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at Brown University, "while some on the margins have used to make ideological claims...it has not had an impact on religious law (or the Israeli Law of Return) and remains something of a novelty item in general discourse." According to Professor Hassan S. Haddad, then Chairman of the Department of History at Saint Xavier University, the Zionist application of the Jewish concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the Promised Land 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" that underpins the modern-day Law of Return.

Historians and anthropologists have studied how the assumptions of Jewish Race Science in the early twentieth century have affected Israeli Genetic Studies of Jewish populations from the 1950s to the modern day. The topic is considered of significant importance within Zionism and Israeli nationalism, as in the absence of biblical primacy, according to Assistant Professor Ian McGonigle of Nanyang Technological University's School of Social Sciences: "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".

A recent study by a team of international psychologists concluded that research conflating ethnicity with genetic differences could inflame political violence, while highlighting genetic similarities could help reduce conflict.

See also

• Race and genetics
• Politics of archaeology in Israel and Palestine

Notes

1. ‘In every generation there are still Zionists as well as non-Zionists who are not satisfied with the mental and social notions which bind Jews together, and who seek to find the link between the national and the biological aspects of being Jews.'(Falk 2017, p. 16)
2. ”throughout all of the de-racializing stages of twentieth-century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity.” . .“race” is a significant component not only of scholarly or academic modern Jewish thought, but also of popular or everyday Jewish thought. It is one of the building blocks of contemporary Jewish identity construction, even if there are many who would dispute the applicability of biological or racial categories to Jews.'(Hart 2011, pp. xxxiv-=xxxv)
3. 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
4. ' 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)
5. 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)
6. 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.
7. 'Christian anti-Semites generally accorded Jews a limited amount of toleration, usually their goal was conversion, which wouòld give Jews the same special and legal status as Christians. Many scholars have noted the late nineteenth century shift from traditional forms of Christian anti-Semitism to secular racial anti-Semitism. Although the new racial anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century retained many of the long-standing Jewish stereotypes . . it closed the door to assimilation, since Jews could not discard their immoral character, which was now grounded in their biological essence.'(Weikart 2008, p. 95)
8. Nevertheless, the idea that different Jewish groups around the world are not only culturally similar, but also "genealogically" connected, is still prominent in the public imagination both within and outside Jewish communities. The notion that Jews are a people almost "biologically" related to each other was promoted by early Zionist ideologues.(Egorova 2015, p. 354)
9. Apart from a handful of references to the topic in the Jewish press, the notion of the racial nature of Judaism did not filter down to the bulk of Jewish society, which in any case was not equipped with the scholarly apparatus to engage with the discussion."
10. "scientific racism lacked conceptual clarity allowed for multiple interpretations: the terms Rasse, Volk, Stamm (tribe), and Nation were fuzzy, implying racial-biological meanings but anthropological, sociological, and cultural ones, too. Moreover, the early Zionists' racial discourse - which in itself was not adopted by all Zionists - did not envision a struggle between Jews and other races; as demonstrated by John Efron, it was free of chauvinistic argumentation. Nevertheless, by turning ideas of blood relations, inbreeding, racial gifts, and historical selection and evolution into categories that differentiated the Jews from other peoples, these Zionists could not entirely evade biological determinism, even if couched in humanistic concepts of transnational alliance."
11. '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)
12. '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)
13. '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

Citations

1. Doron 1980, pp. 170–171. sfn error: no target: CITEREFDoron1980 (help)
2. Morris-Reich 2006, pp. 4–5.
3. Gelber 2000, p. 133.
4. Hart 2011, p. xxxiv.
5. Falk 2017, pp. 100–101.
6. ^ 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."
7. ^ Falk 2014, p. 3.
8. Weikart 2008, p. 94.
9. Endelman 2004, p. 52.
10. ^ Avraham 2017, pp. 472–473.
11. ^ Baker 2017, p. 100-102.
12. Bloom 2011, p. 5.
13. ^ Fishberg 1911, p. 474: "Meanwhile, it is important to inquire in detail into the fundamental problems of Zionism. The question of race has already been discussed, and we arrived at the conclusion that the alleged purity of the Jewish race is visionary and not substantiated by scientific observation. "
14. 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."
15. Endelman 2004.
16. ^ Avraham 2017, p. 478.
17. Hart 2011, p. xxviii-xxix: "Zionism, in fact, was proposed as the only viable solution to the threat to Jewish collective survival. And race was seen as a necessary component of this national revival. Not all Zionist thinkers embraced such racialist notions, as the selection in this volume by Robert Weltsch testifies. Nonetheless, racial ideas and images proved quite attractive to many Jewish nationalists, offering them a language with which to define Jewishness as an objective fact, a matter of biology and history as well as subjective will. Moreover, the fact that racial thinking was closely aligned with science, that it drew much of its content—as well as whatever claim it had to mainstream legitimacy—from the natural and social sciences, was also attractive to Zionism, a movement that portrayed itself as scientific."
18. Avraham 2017, p. 478"this racial reading of Judaism received harsh criticism from other Zionist, Orthodox, and assimilationist Jews. The first of these lamented the rejection of religious heritage in favour of the 'dark urgings of the blood'.
19. Endelman 2004, p. 53: "Even liberal integrationist opponents of the nascent Zionist movement were not averse to referring to the Jewish people as a race. In a letter to Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) in 1903, Lucien Wolf (1857 1930), for example, admitted there was "a Jewish race" as well as "a Jewish religion" while denying there had been "a Jewish nationality" since the destruction of the Second Temple."
20. Endelman 2004, p. 72-73: "His contact with Sephardim confirmed his belief, first expressed in 1911, that they were inferior to the Ashkenazim, a reversal of conventional Jewish wisdom (both Zionist and assimilationist) at the time. The Sephardim, he believed, were "a fearfully mixed lot," having absorbed Arab and Spanish blood, while the Ashkenazim were true blue bloods, having drawn a racial cordon around themselves since the Second Temple. "The real Jew," he wrote to Nina, "is the European Ashkenazi, and I back him against all-comers." This overturned, in particular, the Western Zionist belief that the Sephardi was the Urjude, "the Jew who could be authentically linked to both an ancient and glorious past, and by extension, could serve as a model for a future rejuvenated Jewry." Why Salaman reversed the hoary myth is not clear. The Hebrew University geneticist Raphael Falk claims that Salaman wanted to enhance the image of the much-maligned East European immigrant community in Britain. The weakness in this explanation is that by the 1920s the immigration question was no longer the issue that it had been two decades earlier, before passage of the Aliens Act. Still, the trope of the "alien" Jew, almost always an Ashkenazi Jew, was still alive and perhaps there is some truth in Falk's explanation. Another possibility is that Salaman simply saw the myth of Sephardi superiority, which held wide sway in Anglo-Jewry, for the nonsense that it was."
21. ^ 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?"
22. Ostrer 2012, p. 33.
23. Kirsh 2003, p. 631: "This essay describes the effects of Zionist ideology on research into human population genetics carried out in Israel during the 1950s and early 1960s... The comparison reveals that during this period the Israeli human geneticists and physicians emphasized the sociological and historical aspects of their research and used their work, among other things, as a vehicle for establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative."
24. 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."
25. Tamarkin 2015, p. 1.
26. Kahn 2013.
27. 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).
28. Abu El-Haj 2012, pp. 48–49 According to Falk "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 distinction that is visible on the Y-chromosome only because their (male) ancestors 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."
29. 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."
30. Kahn 2013, p. 922: "This strategy of “casting doubt” on the founding myths and narratives of the Other is an established part of the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict. Arguments like Abu El-Haj’s play directly into this discursive do-si-do."
31. Avraham 2017, p. 473.
32. 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."
33. Baker 2017, p. 105.
34. 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...
35. 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.
36. Litvak, Meir (1994). "A Palestinian Past: National Construction and Reconstruction". History and Memory. 6 (2): 24–56. ISSN 0935-560X. JSTOR 25618669.
37. Satlow, Michael L. (2018-07-31). "Discussion by Michael L. Satlow". Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Retrieved 2023-07-15.
38. McGonigle 2021.
39. 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."
40. 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."
41. 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."
42. Kimel, Sasha Y.; Huesmann, Rowell; Kunst, Jonas R.; Halperin, Eran (2016-03-30). "Living in a Genetic World". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 42 (5). SAGE Publications: 688–700. doi:10.1177/0146167216642196. ISSN 0146-1672. Using Arabs and Jews from diverse samples and contexts, we demonstrated that those who learn that their ethnic group is genetically related to an enemy group showed more constructive intergroup attitudes, interindividual behaviors, and support for peaceful policies than those who learn about the genetic differences. Specifically, in our three studies conducted in the United States, we found that heightening perceptions of interethnic genetic similarities versus differences altered Jews' and Arabs' negative attitudes, and even the real physical aggression of Jews toward an alleged Arab individual. In fact, it led to more support for conciliatory policies among Jews—in this case related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—and, compared with a plain control condition, provided some evidence that emphasizing genetic similarities may be one way to help attenuate intergroup conflict.

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• Jewish genetics
• Zionism