Zionism, race and genetics: Difference between revisions

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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 [[National myth|ethno-nationalist]] myth of common descent".{{efn|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.{{harvnb|Hirsch|2009|p=592}}}} The question of Jewish biological unity assumed particular importance during early nation building in Israel, given the ethnic diversity of incoming Jewish populations. Since then, every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity{{efn|‘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.' Footnote: An interesting aspect is that of orthodox-religious circles that seek support of the “biological” argument for the Jewishness (or for membership in the Ten Lost Tribes) of tribes and congregations all over the world. Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, the founder of the “Amishav” (Hebrew for “My People Return”) organization and the author of the book Israel’s Tribes, followed on his journeys “the footprints of forgotten Jewish communities, who lost their contact with the Jewish world [...] at the same time he also located tribes that have no biological relationship to the people of Israel but who want very much to join them” (Yair Sheleg, “All want to be Jewish”, Haaretz, September, 17, 1999, p. 27). In recent years, Rabbi Avichail “discovered” the tribe of Menasheh among the Koki, Mizo and Chin in the Manipur mountains at the border between India and Burma. In a TV program on “the search after the lost tribes,” Hillel Halkin, a demographer of cultures, claimed that whereas the Jews of Ethiopia converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages and are not of ancient Jewish stock, the Koki, Mizo and Chin people are direct progeny of the Biblical tribe of Menasheh.{{harv|Falk|2017|p=16}}}}. The theme of 'blood logic'/'race' has been described as a recurrent  feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief.{{efn|”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.'{{harv|Hart|2011|pp=xxxiv-=xxxv}}}}   

Many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of Jewish identity were rarely studied or long forgotten, overlooked, made invisible or deliberately suppressed until recent decades.{{sfn|Doron|1980|pp=170-171}}{{sfn| Morris-Reich|2006|pp=4-5}}{{sfn|Gelber|2000|p=133}}{{sfn|Nicosia|2010|pp=1-2}}{{sfn| Hart|2011|p= xxxiv}}{{sfn|Avraham|2017|pp=172-173}}{{sfn|Falk|2017|pp=100-101}}  

Ethnic origins have figured as an indispensable basis for determining what groups belong to the Jewish collective.{{sfn| Parfitt|Egorova| 2005| p=197}} Admixture by  [[Conversion to Judaism| conversion]] tended to be underplayed in traditional Jewish historiography in contrast to speculations about descendant communities from the  biblical  [[Ten Lost Tribes]] who in theory would belong to the Jewish ‘blood community’.{{efn|’Groups that claimed Jewish status through conversion, such as the [[Khazars]]  in the ninth century or the [[Himyarite Kingdom| Himyarites]]  five centuries earlier, fared badly in early Jewish historiography: they were almost totally ignored. But equally remote groups with an imagined bloodline to the Jewish people were of great interest.’{{harv| Parfitt|Egorova| 2005| p=193}}}} When [[Arthur Koestler]]’s [[The Thirteenth Tribe ]] (1976) propounded the thesis that the origins of the [[Ashkenazi]] might be found in the dispersion of the Turkic [[Khazars]], the book encountered an extreme hostility especially among Jewish American critics. Though the book's genetic implications are no longer regarded as tenable, this severity of critical dismissal, according to Elise Burton,  reflected an inability or unwillingness to take cognisance of a  tradition of a racializing logic in Zionist discussions of a putative Jewish biology.{{efn|‘the critical response to their works, particularly within the Israeli genetics community, revealed what the authors themselves were unable or perhaps unwilling to recognize: the significant extent to which Zionism, like any other ethnic nationalism, relies on a racializing logic of biological ancestry.’ {{harv| Burton| 2022| p=422}}}}

In 1983 the historian Joachim Doron (1923-1993) examined the tradition of acerbic attacks Zionists once mounted against [[Jewish diaspora|Jews of the diaspora]], much of which concerned differing ways of interpreting jews as a nation/race.  This literature, he stated, had ‘been forgotten or even deliberately suppressed’. Doron suggested four reasons for this silence. Firstly, these scathing polemical recriminations by Zionists against other Jews, 'the enemy within', overlapped with anti-Semitic arguments about Jews, and recalling them would only play into the hands of modern anti-Semites. Secondly, both Holocaust survivors and veteran settlers had begun to feel nostalgic about the lost world of the [[shtetl]], whose idealization led them to ignore negative characterizations of life in [[Pale of Settlement|the Pale]] in the 19th-20th century Jewish/Zionist tradition. Thirdly, as a young nation forging a new Jewish identity with ramifications for the postwar diaspora, a vision emphasizing whatever was positive came to dominate  Jewish history in Israel. Finally, the country’s growing political isolation encouraged a trend to ignore world opinion,  in [[Ben-Gurion]]’s words,  to disregard ‘what the [[goyim]] say’. Jewish Issues that an earlier Zionist press would have excoriated as ‘scandalous’ came to be dismissed as just expressions of  [[Self-hating Jew|Jewish self-hatred]].{{sfn|Doron|1980|pp=170-171}}

Since Doron's article, this topical neglect has been gradually addressed, beginning with [[:de:John M. Efron|John Efron]]'s landmark study, ''Defenders of the Race'' (1994).{{sfn|Efron|1994}}{{efn|Among others, [[George Mosse]] had earlier touched on the issue a lecture given at the [[Leo Baeck Institute]] in 1967, later revised and reprinted in his 1970 work ''Germans and Jews'' {{sfn|Mosse|2023|pp=54-79}}}} Brief notices emerged occasionally hinting at gaps in the record. [[:de:Mark H. Gelber|Mark Gelber]], in an aside on his chapter on [[Nathan Birnbaum]], whose racialist ideas had a seminal impact on [[Cultural Zionism]], remarked in 2000 that the ‘racialist orientation' of Birnbaum's student [[Martin Buber]] had been 'relativized or sometimes even suppressed in scholarly literature and other commentary about him.’{{sfn|Gelber|2000|p=133}} Between 2004 and 2006, many studies remediating the [[lacuna]] began to be aired. Nurit Kirsh wrote in 2004 that investigations into the biology of the Jews had rarely been explored for two decades after the state’s establishment, and argued that Zionist ideology had been so internalised by scientists that the myths remained as unconscious influences on their approach to the subject of population genetics.{{efn|’ What makes population genetics in Israel in the 1950s an interesting and unique case is the unconscious internalization of an ideology by a group of scientists. Because the Zionist ideas did not require articulation and the researchers were unaware of the influence of such ideas on their scientific work, they were not critically examined. The myths were not shattered; on the contrary, they were reinforced.’{{harv|Kirsh|2003|p=655}}}} The following year a special issue of ''Jewish History'' dedicated several articles to aspects of the topic of Jews and racial classifications,{{sfn|Leff|2005|pp=7-28}}{{sfn|Hoffman|2005|pp=65–78}}{{sfn|Hart|2005|pp=49–63}}{{sfn|Goldstein|2005|pp=79–107}} and [[Tudor Parfitt]] published his study of the interrelation between genetics and Jewish identity among the [[Lemba]] and [[Bene Israel]].{{sfn|Parfitt|Egorova|2005|pp=193–224}}

Traditional Christian [[Anti-Judaism|Judeophobia]] was tempered under the impact of the [[Age of Enlightenment]] as a succeeding  [[Jewish emancipation |period of Jewish emancipation]] in [[Civil society|Western civil society]] took root in the 19th century. Many [[Jewish assimilation|acculturated Jewish communities]] {{efn|' 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.'{{harv|Nicosia|2010|p=1,n.2}}}} integrated into Germanic society, came to consider their [[Jewishness]] in terms of their cultural and/or religious heritage.{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=3}} 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,{{sfn|Weikart|2008|p=94}} 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.{{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 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,{{sfn|Baker|2017|p=100-102}} and [[Arthur Ruppin]], considered the "father of Israeli sociology". {{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=5}} 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".{{sfn|Baker|2017|p=100-102}}<ref name=Fishberg>{{harvnb|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. [Footnote: Max Nordau, an avowed disciple of [[Cesare Lombroso|Lombroso]], knows that anthropological research has dissipated the notion of Jewish racial purity, but he places more confidence in the acute powers of observation of the street loafer who recognizes a Jew by his nose. "To be sure, the street loafer's diagnosis is not infallible, still it fails him only rarely. But then the scientific diagnosis is not always reliable. The acute eye of the street loafer," concludes Nordau, " is sufficient proof that the Jews are a race, or at least a variety, or, if you please, a sub-variety of mankind." (''[[Le Siècle]]'', 1899; ''Zionistische Schriften'', p. 305). Zangwill asks, "Whoever heard of a religion that was limited to people of particular breed? Of divine truth that was only true for men of dark complexion?" (''[[Jewish Chronicle]]'', June 18, 1909).]"</ref>  

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]].{{sfn|Burton|2021|p=24|ps=: "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."}} According to the Israeli geneticist and historian, [[Raphael Falk (geneticist) |Raphael Falk]], in his study of three scientists who were early followers of Herzl - [[Redcliffe N. Salaman| Redcliffe Nathan Salaman]], [[Gustav Bychowski|Shneor Zalman Bychowski]] and [[Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer|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.{{sfn|Endelman|2004}}

Geneticists [[Harry Ostrer]] and [[Raphael Falk (geneticist)|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,{{sfn|Kahn|2013}}<ref>{{cite book | last=Kandiyoti | first= Dalia | title=The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture | publisher=Stanford University Press | series=Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture | year=2020 | isbn=978-1-5036-1244-0 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FvHrDwAAQBAJ | quote=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). Susan Martha Kahn, an anthropologist specializing in aspects of medical practice in Israel, in commenting on Ostrer's views, remarks that in his work 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).}}</ref><ref>{{harvnb|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."</ref> 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.<ref name=Falk1>{{harvnb|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?"</ref>  

According to Michael Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at [[Brown University]], "while some on the margins have used [Jewish population genetics] 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." <ref>{{Cite web |last=Satlow |first=Michael L. |title=Discussion by Michael L. Satlow |url=https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/michael-l-satlow/ |access-date=2023-07-15 |website=Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History |language=en-US}}</ref> 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 [[Yahweh|God]].{{efn|'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.'{{harv|Haddad|1974|pp=98-99}}}} This is considered important to the [[Israel|State of Israel]] because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "[[Gathering of Israel|Gathering of the exiles]]" and the "[[Return to Zion]]"{{efn|'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.'{{harvnb|McGonigle|2021|pp=36-37}}}} that underpins the modern-day [[Law of Return]].{{sfn|McGonigle|2021}}

Historians and anthropologists have studied how the assumptions of Jewish race scientists in the early twentieth century have affected Israeli genetic studies of Jewish populations from the 1950s to the modern day.<ref name=Burton1 /> The topic is considered of significant importance within Zionism and Israeli nationalism, as, according to Assistant Professor Ian McGonigle of [[Nanyang Technological University]]'s School of Social Sciences, in the 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,"<ref name="McG1">{{harvnb|McGonigle|2021|p=36 (c.f. p.54 of PhD)}}: "The stakes in the debate over Jewish origins are high, however, since the founding narrative of the Israeli state is based on exilic ‘return.’ If European Jews have descended from converts, the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people. The politics of ‘Jewish genetics’ is consequently fierce. But irrespective of philosophical questions of the indexical power or validity of genetic tests for Jewishness, and indeed the historical basis of a Jewish population ‘returning’ to the Levant, the Realpolitik of Jewishness as a measurable biological category could also impinge on access to basic rights and citizenship within Israel."</ref> whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return".{{sfn|McGonigle|2021|p=(c.f. p.218-219 of PhD)|ps=: "The [Israeli national] biobank stands for unmarked global modernity and secular technoscientific progress. It is within the other pole of the Israeli cultural spectrum that one finds right-wingers appropriating genetics as a way of imagining the tribal particularity of Jews, as a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return. It is across this political spectrum that the natural facts of genetics research discursively migrate and transform into the mythologized ethnonationalism of the bio-nation. However, Israel has also moved towards a market-based society, and as the majority of the biomedical research is moving to private biotech companies, the Israeli biobank is becoming underused and outmoded. The epistemics of Jewish genetics fall short of its mythic circulatory semiotics. This is the ultimate lesson from my ethnographic work in Israel."}}{{Better source needed}}  

| publisher =[[ Routledge]]

| pages =353-364

| pages =52-92

| publisher=[[University of Chicago Press ]]   

| pages =128-154

* {{cite book | last=Fishberg | first=Maurice |authorlink=Maurice Fishberg|chapter=Assimilation versus Zionism|pp=466-503|title=Jews, Race and Environment | date=1911|publisher=Walter Scott Publishing Co. | isbn=978-1-4128-2695-2 | url=https://archive.org/details/cu31924029872961}}

| pages=125-160

| pages =143-161

| pages = 37-49

| pages =12-26

| pages =    631-655

| publisher=[[ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ]]  

| pages =187-200

| pages =3-11

| pages = 228 - 236

| pages =93-115