Zionism, race and genetics: Difference between revisions

{{POV|date=July 2023}}

 

 

 

With the [[Israeli Declaration of Independence|establishment of Israel]] in 1948, the [[Gathering of Israel|"ingathering of the exiles"]], and the [[Law of Return]], the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless 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}}}} Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.<ref name=suppressed>{{harvnb|Doron|1983|pp=170-171}}; {{harvnb|Morris-Reich|2006|pp=1-2,4-5}}; {{harvnb|Gelber|2000|p=133}}; {{harvnb|Nicosia|2010|pp=1-2,6-8}}; {{harvnb|Hart|2011|p= xxxiv}}; {{harvnb|Avraham|2017|pp=172-173}}; {{harvnb|Avraham|2013|p=356}}; {{harvnb|Abu El-Haj|2012|p=18}}</ref> More generally, in his 2019 book, [[Steven Weitzman (scholar)|Steven Weitzman]] says that critiques made by [[Anthropology|anthropologists]] and [[Social science|social scientists]] have stressed broader lines of continuity between population genetics and race science and in a 2013 paper jointly authored with [[Noah Rosenberg]], he says this criticism is viewed by [[geneticists]] as overstated.{{efn|"From what I have read, this view of genetics and its historical relationship to race science, a perspective that stresses the lines of continuity between the two fields, is common among the anthropologists who write about genetics research, and Abu El-Haj's argument is in line with this broader critique of the field." {{harv|Weitzman|2019|p=309}}}}<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Rosenberg |first=Noah |last2=Weitzman |first2=Steven |date=2013-12-01 |title=From Generation to Generation: The Genetics of Jewish Populations |url=https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol_preprints/39 |journal=Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints |volume=85 |issue=6 |quote=Criticism of human population genetics, especially from scholarly fields that as a premise regard the scientific endeavor with skepticism, has asserted continuity between this earlier race science and present-day genetics research— an argument that in the view of many practicing geneticists dramatically exaggerates the linkages, belies their personal orientations toward their own research programs, underestimates the consideration they devote to challenges and subtleties of issues of race in genetics, and unfairly impugns the anti-racist positions that they may in fact hold with an intensity equal to that of the critics. Especially in the ways that it enters the public dialogue, however, present-day research in Jewish genetics has sometimes been treated as reintroducing a biological conception of Jewish identity that many may have thought permanently discredited by the Holocaust and its catastrophic racialization of Jewish identity.}}</ref> Weitzman says that it is argued by [[Abu El-Haj]] and other anthropologists that the study of [[Genetic studies on Jews|Jewish population genetics]] has retained aspects of earlier Zionist thinking about race.{{efn|"...a study of Jewish and Israeli genetics research into the origin of the Jews that aimed to expose the assumptions and biases implicit in such research and to critique the way it has been used politically and culturally by Zionists in Israel" {{harv|Weitzman|2019|p=308}}}}

 

Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in [[Jewish history]] and [[Jewish culture|culture]].{{efn|"To be sure, "Jewish genetics" is only one of many examples for the search of origins of today’s population groups with the help of DNA analysis. Whether it is "the origin of modern Japanese populations" … the "genetics of ancient Romans"… or an analysis of the genomes from "Bronze Age Bulgaria" … to give only a few examples, ancient forefathers and -mothers are a fascinating topic for scientists as well as for the general public. In the case of "Jewish genetics", however, scientific work can get easily politicized… But rather than dealing with politicians and their use of scientific papers for populistic ends, this essay highlights, delineates, and contextualizes the ongoing debate between various geneticists and social scientists on two main points. One is whether or how narratives impact the work of the researchers. In our case, it is the association of modern Jews as the (biological) descendants of the biblical Hebrews or today’s Cohanim as descendants of the biblical priestly caste. As the debate on the Khazars exemplifies, genetic research can be politically loaded. Scientific theories or research results about the origin of Ashkenazi Jews are used for political purposes – but interest in the topic also places the researchers into a context of ideology and identity politics, which is closely linked to real or perceived national interests… The other point is the discussion about the danger that genetic studies on population groups reify race. Neither of these questions applies only to genetic research on Jews, but for Jews they have a special meaning that is rooted in Jewish history and culture. {{harv|Kohler|2022|p=1-2}}}} Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an [[Essentialism#Racial, cultural and strategic essentialism|essentialist approach]] to biology{{efn|name=Kohler8|"The extent to which today's human population genetics are compared to past theories of race varies greatly, and thus the emphasis on an inherent danger of racism. In the Jewish context, the genetic studies on collective Jewish ancestry are mainly criticized as being designed or interpreted in the framework of a "Zionist narrative", as essentializing biology, or both."{{harv|Kohler|2022|p=8}}}} in a similar manner to criticism of the [[Politics of archaeology in Israel and Palestine|interpretation of  archaeological science in the region]].{{efn|name=Weitz310|"A second critique of genetics research is one that has been made about archaeological evidence as well. Here too the evidence does not speak for itself: it has to be interpreted; and geneticists do not realize the extent to which their interpretations read into the evidence more than is really there."{{harv|Weitzman|2019|p=310}}}} According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist [[Raphael Falk (geneticist)| Raphael Falk]], the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and [[anti-Zionism]].{{efn|name=Prainsack|"The biological dimension of Judaism, namely the debate about whether Judaism is "only" a religion, or Jews are a "people", a "nation" or a "race", has become central to both how Jews were thought of and to the ways in which they thought about themselves during modern times, as modern genetics was expected to both establish the determinants of "Jewishness" and to find out whether particular individuals or groups fit into this category… As has been argued elsewhere (Prainsack 2007; Falk 2006; Kirsh 2003), the interpretation of the data on different Jewish "ethnic" groups and their relatedness to one another as well as to non-Jewish neighbouring/hosting populations has always been influenced by political ideologies. While many Zionists favour a view of Jews as a distinct, non-European "ethnicity" which has remained relatively homogenous throughout history (see, for example, Cochran et al. 2006), during the 1950s and early 1960s Israeli geneticists found many genetic differences between the diverse Jewish groups gathering in Israel. Yet Kirsh (2003) argues that an unconscious internalisation of Zionist ideology by the Israeli geneticists of the time led them to emphasise points of similarity rather than points of difference between the studied groups, thereby in turn reinforcing Zionist convictions."{{harv|Prainsack|Hashiloni-Dolev|2009|p=410}}}} Falk wrote that 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}}}}

 

Though the question is undecided, some trace the start of a biological interpretation of Jewish origins back as far as the [[Spanish Inquisition]].{{sfn|Weitzman|2019|p=280}}  A tradition of thought and ethnography premised on a hierarchy of racial distinctions, though in retrospect known to be a [[pseudoscience]], was deeply entrenched, indeed ubiquitous, among Western scholars by the early twentieth century.{{sfn|Endelman|2004|pp=52-92,50ff.}} It saturated thinking in medicine and anthropology, but assumed particular prominence in the Germanic sphere{{sfn|Efron|1994|pp=15-16}} as opposed to England where, [[:de:John Efron|John Efron]]  writes, 'Jews as Jews simply failed to arouse British scientific curiosity'.{{sfn|Efron|1994|p=33}}{{efn|A notable exception was the work of the eugenicist [[Karl Pearson]].{{sfn|Endelman|2004|p=53}}}}  As participants in modernity, Jewish thinkers and scientists formed an integral part of the scientific world underwriting these theories. The Nazi Holocaust totally discredited concepts of race and, from 1945 onwards, considerable efforts were made to disabuse the world of the prejudicial notion that Jews constituted a race.{{sfn| Parfitt|Egorova| 2005| p=197}} At the same time, the broader thrust and impact of this discredited world-view long remained insufficiently analysed.{{efn|"The history of modern racial thought and the importance of the Jews as one of its objects have received substantial attention, as well as has Jewish engagement with racial thinking. However, the larger significance of this thought both for the history of racial thinking in the West and for modern Jewish history itself is still under-analysed." {{harv|Hart|2005|p=50}}}}

Ethnic origins have figured as an indispensable basis for determining what groups belong to the Jewish collective.{{sfn| Parfitt|Egorova| 2005| p=197}} [[Genetic admixture|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 a [[Khazar hypothesis of_Ashkenazi ancestry#Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe and contemporary views|mixed reception]] within the Jewish American community, which was increasingly adopting Zionism narratives during this time period, and a hostile reception from American Zionists, who condemned the work as "a product of Jewish self-hatred". Though the book's genetic implications are not 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}}}} Though as early as 1967 [[George Mosse]] had alluded to the striking similarities between Zionist discourse on race and those made by their völkisch German ethnonationalist antagonists,{{sfn|Avraham|2017|p=473}}{{efn|”Die Ähnlichkeiten zwischen dem zionistischen Diskurs und demjenigen des völkischen Nationalismus sind in der Tat so frappierend, dass der Historiker George Lachmann Mosse davon sprechen konnte, dass Buber »dieselbe Rolle im jüdischen Kontext des fin-de-siècle spielte wie [[Paul de Lagarde]] im deutschen Kontext.”{{harv|Vogt|2014|p=435-436}}; Mosse first outlined the issue in 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}}}} the academic mainstream tended to treat it as a taboo.{{sfn|Leff|2005|p=7}} 

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. Many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed, sidelined or deliberately suppressed until recent decades.<ref name=suppressed/>{{efn|"Jews often defined by enemies or surrounding majorities but Jews themselves have carried on a rich and sometimes rancorous internal dialogue about how Jewishness should be defined." {{harv|Sokoloff|Glenn|2011|p=3}}}} 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|1983|pp=170-171}}

Beginning in the 1990s this topical neglect has been gradually addressed in detail, beginning with  a German monograph by Annegret Kiefer in 1991,{{sfn|Kiefer|1991}}{{efn|For a more comprehensive bibliography of early studies see Lipphardt 2008b.{{sfn|Lipphardt|2008b|p=191,n.4}}}} and, in English, [[:de:John M. Efron|John Efron]]'s landmark study, ''Defenders of the Race'' (1994).{{sfn|Avraham|2013|p=371, n.7}}{{sfn|Efron|1994}}  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}}{{efn|'It is fair to say that a racialist orientation was fundamental to German Cultural Zionism.'{{harv|Gelber|2000|p=125}}}}{{sfn|Avraham|2013|p=362}} In the same year Mitchell Hart,on the heels of his 1999 essay, explored these themes in terms of social science in a book-length study.{{sfn|Hart|1999}}{{sfn|Hart|2000}}   Many studies began to fill the [[Scientific lacuna|lacuna]], by examining the racial thinking embedded in the national ideology constructed around Jews in its formative period.{{sfn|Avraham|2017|p=473}} by 2013, Doron Avraham noted that a number of studies had explored Jews’ self-“racialization” in relation to the fin-de-siècle period, although later periods remained less researched.{{sfn|Avraham|2013|p=356}}

Some of this scholarship made connections between earlier Zionist understanding of race and more recent genetic debates in Israel. 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 internalized 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 people|Lemba]] and [[Bene Israel]].{{sfn|Parfitt|Egorova|2005|pp=193–224}}

The Israel geneticist and historian of science [[Raphael Falk (geneticist)|Raphael Falk]] argued that explicit racial and eugenic notions linking Jewish nationality and biology were particularly in evidence among Zionist writers, but also among non-Zionists, and have continued, 'though in a thinly disguised mode,' after the defeat of Nazism to resurface in every generation since. For him ‘the utilisation of biological arguments as “evidence” for whatever social, economic, or political notion that has been put forward’ remains problematic.{{sfn|Falk|2007|p=154}}{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=16}} Falk comments that he knows of no other example of an [[ethnic conflict]] where this effort to prove or disprove the biological belonging of modern Jews to the historical [[Land of Israel]] played such a role.{{efn|Footnote: 'In conflicts like those in the Balkans, in Africa, in India, in South-East Asia or in Northern Ireland, and to some extent even in the Israeli-Arab conflict, a starting point is the existence of distinct ethnic or religious entities that struggle for the same piece of land. On the other hand, except for Nazi efforts to diagnose the biological belonging of individuals to national-ethnic entities, there is no other example known to me like the Zionists' of an intensive effort to prove the immanent biological belonging or non-belonging of communities to what is considered to be the Jewish entity." {{harv|Falk|2017|p=6}}}}  

Historian [[Steven Weitzman (scholar)|Steven Weitzman]] writes that postwar genetics worked to distance itself from race science for both scientific and ethical reasons. Weizmann documents the significant and profound differences between genetics and race science, while noting intellectual similarities.{{efn|”To accept the critique of genetics as a revived form of race science, there are a lot of things one has to downplay or ignore. One has to minimize the critical role that geneticists played in discrediting the biological category of race after World War II. One has to disbelieve geneticists today when they distinguish their work from race science; and one has to discount important differences between the two kinds of science, including the differences between the concept of race and the notions of "population" or "cline" that have eclipsed it.” "despite this profound difference from race science, population genetics does carry forward a similar intellectual project… One of the more specific links between race science and genetics, in fact, is the prominent role that Jews play as a subject of research within each field. Even as race science was being discredited after World War II, the Jews were surfacing as a subject of genetic research, and there may be connections between the two kinds of research. Some of the first postwar genetic studies of the Jews during the 1950s and 1960s were undertaken by physicians and geneticists in Israel… It is not clear how conscious early Israeli geneticists were of continuing the kind of research conducted by race scientists just a few decades earlier."{{harv|Weitzman|2019|pp=273,280 et seq.}}}} He concludes that some insecurity about the ambiguities of Jewish identity, inflected by social, psychological and political concerns runs through the centuries’-long scholarly quest for Jewish origins even to the present. The mystery continues to attract attention, but cannot be solved by scholarship, Attempts to do so, to ground an alternative ‘creation myth’ in scholarship, prove to be tendentious or deleterious.{{sfn|Weitzman|2019|pp=.289-290,309-310,324-325}}

According to Elise Burton, “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."{{sfn|Burton|2021|p=11}} Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a "Zionist narrative", as [[Essentialism#Racial essentialism|essentializing biology]], or both"{{efn|name=Kohler8}} in a similar manner to criticism of the [[Politics of archaeology in Israel and Palestine|interpretation of  archaeological science in the region]].{{efn|name=Weitz310}} According to Kirsh and Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and Anti-Zionism.{{efn|name=Prainsack}}  

Noah Tamarkin, assistent professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology studies at [[Cornell University]], in reviewing the literature, writes:

<blockquote>"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."{{sfn|Tamarkin|2015|p=1}}</blockquote>

Traditional Christian [[Anti-Judaism|Judaeophobia]] 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 cloak of uncertainty over the intent of hatred of the Jews (which people were still careful not to mention specifically)." {{harv|Zimmermann|1987|p=94}}}}

 

In [[German Empire|the German cultural world]] in particular, this retuning of nationalist [[Volk|völkisch]] thought{{efn|The tradition founded by [[Johann Gottfried Herder|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: The Last National Question|Rome and Jerusalem (1862)]], argued that the Jewish nation was constituted by a 'race', which deserved [[Self-determination|national rights]] like any other.{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=3}}}} drew strength from the ‘biologization’ of human differences in the form of [[Scientific racism|theories of organic racial typologies]], by seeking an ostensible scientific support in [[social Darwinism]]’s theory of evolution as a [[Survival of the fittest|struggle between species]].{{sfn| Falk|2014|p=3}} Jewish scholars and scientists were therefore forced to confront the new race science and, in the words of [[Todd Endelman]], "[s]ome disputed the stability and permanence 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."{{sfn|Endelman|2004|p=52}}  

Jewish scientists who espoused assimilation and accepted the broad parameters of the racial paradigm tended to rethink race in terms of [[Lamarckism]], which allowed that environmental factors could modify an inherited genetic makeup. Zionist scientists, contrariwise, were often convinced that the supposed defects of the 'Jewish body' were a direct consequence of integration into other societies, {{efn|Some Zionist physicians argued that the putative physical degeneration (''Entartung'') of Jews regarded exclusively the masses of Jews (''Ghettojuden'') in eastern Europe. Others associated an increase in physical and mental disorders among Jews with adaptation to the lifestyle prevailing in Western Europe.{{sfn|Hart|1999|pp=275,277-278}}}}  and were drawn to an [[Essentialism|essentialist]] interpretation of race.  For the former, race was a flexible reality amenable to improvement while the latter thought [[Mendelian inheritance|traits engendered by Mendelian principles]] involved a more rigid scheme of biological determinism.{{sfn|Hart|1999|pp=272-273, 272 notes 9,10}} For instance, when the assimilationist [[Joseph Jacobs]]{{sfn|Efron|1994|pp=58-90}}' [[anthropometry|anthropometric research]] suggested in the 1890s that Jews were [[Brachycephaly|brachycephalic]], the problem arose as to how to reconcile that apparent statistical result with race scientists' belief that Arabs and Sephardim, as Semites, were [[Dolichocephaly|dolichocephalic]], if all Jews descended from a [[Semitic people|Semitic 'race']]? One implication was that Jews were thereby not 'pure' but the product of racial intermixture. The other possibility was that environment factors could modify physical traits.{{sfn|Efron|2013|p=906}}{{sfn|Efron|1994|p=86}}

As the older [[Christian antisemitism|Christian antisemitic]] prejudices underwent reformulation in terms of the newer antagonism of racialised thinking,{{efn|"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." {{harv|Weikart|2008|p=95}}}} groups of Jews, disappointed with what they perceived to be the failures of full emancipation,{{sfn|Avraham|2017| pp=472-473}} began to be drawn to [[Theodor Herzl]]’s proposed Zionist solution to the quandary. Herzl's Zionism arose in reaction to [[European antisemitism|these renewed antisemitic trends]], as an ideology that aimed to reconstruct a distinct Jewish identity along ethnic/volkisch lines.{{sfn|Avraham|2017| pp=472-473}} In doing so, Herzl and his followers challenged the centuries’ old tradition among assimilated 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"{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=3,49-50}} in what has been called a "racialization of Jewish identity". {{efn|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. {{harv|Egorova|2015|p=354}}}} Purity of race became a paramount theme of [[Biological anthropology| Jewish anthropology]].{{sfn|Hart|1999|pp=280,n.30}} Biological considerations shaped Herzl’s own outlook. He likened the Jews of his day to seals,  thrown by circumstance into water but, once back on ground, they would refind their legs, and antisemitism itself, a [[Shock therapy (psychiatry)|shock treatment]], might prove functional in this restoration of Jews to their former selves.{{efn|Gilman cites and comments on the following passage: “’The character of the Jews may benefit from anti-Semitism. Education can be achieved only through shock treatment.  Darwin’s theory of imitation will be validated. The Jews will adapt. They are like seals who have been thrown back into the water by an accident of nature, . . if they return to dry land and manage to stay there for a few generations, their fins will change back to legs.’  How different and yet how similar to the appropriation of today’s racial arguments in genetic terms.”{{harv|Gilman|2010|pp=10-11}}{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=56}}}}

 

Zionist physicians and scientists varied notably in the way they used race to illustrate any number of social, economic, or political notions. According to Dafna Hirsch of the [[Open University of Israel]], writing in 2009, many Zionists  supported the concept of Jews as a race, often believing it "offered scientific 'proof' of the 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}}}} while others used it to emphasise diversity and hierarchy within the Jewish people.{{sfn|Hirsch|2009|p=592}} The variation of Zionist positions on race has been observed by Todd Endelman in a study of [[Redcliffe N. Salaman| Redcliffe Nathan Salaman]], [[Gustav Bychowski|Shneor Zalman Bychowski]] and [[Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer|Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer]] who drew on race.{{sfn|Falk|2007|p=128–154}}{{efn|These ideas were not restricted to the German cultural sphere of central Europe. Aside from Redcliffe Nathan Salaman. Anglo-Jewish physicians like [[Charles Singer]] and [[Charles Seligman]]  were not averse  to adopting the current language of race. By the 1930s, the latter two were at the forefront of scientists challenging Nazi notions of race. Salaman became a Zionist some time after reaching the conclusion that Jews formed a distinct race, and this belief may have been one of the factors that led him to adopt that ideology. He maintained his views until well after the war.{{sfn|Endelman|2004|pp=52-92,69,83}}}} The debates over race swung between the two poles, and covered multiple shadings, of a complex typology that opposed two stereotypical kinds of Jewries, the emancipated, modern ''cravatte'' (assimilated) Jews of the German cultural sphere and the religiously fervent, trading ''caftan'' Jew ([[Ostjuden]]),{{sfn|Aschheim |1982|pp=58-79}}{{efn|Herzl though Zionism melded Western and Eastern Jews into one nationality:"Zionism has already brought about something remarkable and heretofore regarded as impossible: a close alliance between the ultra-modern and the ultra-conservative elements of Jewry." {{harv|Aschheim|1982|p=81}}}} and played a notable role in the arguments that broke out between Zionists and assimilating Jews.{{sfn|Hart|2011|p=xxvii}} Herzl himself dismissed [[Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism|assimilationists who opposed him as 'yids']] who perhaps were not fully Jewish because of some past [[miscegenation]].

 

 

Of the  many experiments in [[Social engineering (political science) |social engineering]]  only the Palestinian-Zionist initiative succeeded in its project, that of radically recasting modern Jewish identity and the ‘Jewish body’.{{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=109}} Ruppin, who used a [[Prussian Settlement Commission|Prussian model in settlement]] planning, {{efn|German settlements were clustered closely together in colonizing areas with Polish majorities, in such a way as to interrupt [[Palestinian enclaves|territorial continguity between the resultant Polish ‘islands’]]. {{harv|Bloom|2011|pp=161-162}}}} played a major role in implementing the plan  in practical terms. Deeply interested in [[racial hygiene|racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene)]],{{sfn|Bloom|2011|pp=47,94ff.,105ff.}} with [[Otto Heinrich Warburg]],  Ruppin controlled most of the financial resources for immigration,{{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=167}} and pressed for the  [[Natural selection|selection]] of only the fittest Ashkenazi  Ostjuden as olim for the “human material” of a “gene pool” of a new Jewish, non-Semitic [[Maccabees|Maccabean]] type.{{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=170,178,326}} He did everything possible to dilute  what he thought of as the deleterious dominance of the Sephardic /Mizrachi communities, who often depended on [[Tzedakah |diaspora charity]] for survival, and restore the “[[germplasm]]” of the pure race of ancient Jews he considered dormant in the Ashkenazi.{{sfn|Bloom|2011|pp=155, 169-176}}  The strict eugenic policies meant that towards the end of the  [[Second Aliyah]] (1912-1914) 80% of aspiring immigrants were rejected{{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=177}} The unfit masses of Eastern European Jewish refugees were deemed people best relocated in the United States.{{sfn|Bloom|2011|p=178}}

In the 1930s, German Jews caught in the exacting tensions between the hammer of exclusionist antisemitic race policies under Nazism, and the anvil of total assimilation, increasingly strove to redefine themselves in terms of the new hegemonic discourse of race, [[Subaltern Studies|appropriating the language of their oppressors in order to subvert its implications of inferiority]]. {{efn| ‘(the process) denotes the acceptance of terms used in the dominant discourse against a stereotyped group by that group itself, while the group changes their own valuations. In the case of racial discourse, the differences between groups are thus admitted but the negative or allegedly inferior element of the hierarchy created is revalued and renamed, and new goals and challenges are set. ‘{{sfn|Avraham|2013|pp=355-356}}}} According to [[Robert Weltsch]] at the time, this new orientation towards race had found an authoritative precursor in Martin Buber's ''Three Addresses on Judaism'' (1911) where Buber spoke of blood determining  thought in the deepest layer of power in the soul  which dictates ''every tone and every colour'' of Jewish existence.{{sfn|Avraham|2013|p=362}}{{sfn|Vogt|2016|p=92}}{{efn|'(a)die Entdeckung, daß die tiefsten Schichten unseres Wesens vom Blute bestimmt daß unser Gedanke und unser Wille zu innerst von ihm gefärbt sind. (b) Und wenn sie dennoch dem Juden eine Wirklichkeit werden kann, so liegt das eben daran, daß die Abstammung nicht bloß Zusammenhang mit dem Vergangenen bedeutet: daß sie etwas in uns gelegt hat, was uns zu keiner Stunde unseres Lebens verläßt, was jeden Ton und jede Farbe in unserem Leben, in dem was wir tun und in dem was uns geschieht, bestimmt: das Blut als die tiefste Machtschicht der Seele.'{{harv|Buber|1920|pp=19,22}}}}

These matters and discussions were not widely disseminated in the Jewish population before the 1930s.{{efn|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."{{sfn|Avraham|2017| p=478}}}} Not all Zionists using concepts such as "race" at this time agreed on its biological dimension,{{efn|"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."{{sfn|Avraham|2017|p=478}}}} and some Zionists – for example [[Robert Weltsch]]{{sfn|Avraham|2013|p=362}} and [[Israel Zangwill]] - did not embrace the racial idea.{{efn|"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." {{harv|Hart|2011|p=xxviii-xxix}}}}{{sfn|Fishberg|1911|p=474}} At times, other Zionists harshly criticised race science, preferring a conception of Jewish religious heritage to one of descent.{{efn|"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'. {{harv|Avraham|2017| p=478}}}}  On the other hand, even some non-Zionist Jews began to understand Jews in racial terms in this period.{{efn|"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]]. {{harv|Endelman|2004|p=53}}}}

The effect of Nazism and its genocidal policies discredited racial science and "postwar genetics worked hard to distance itself from race science for both scientific and ethical reasons".{{sfn|Weitzman|2019|pp=280-281}}  In a four point [[Unesco]] declaration  in 1950, any correlation between national /religious groups and race was denied, and it was affirmed that race itself was ‘less a biological fact than a social myth’.{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|p=634}}{{sfn|Tekiner|1991|pp=40-43}} The use of race still lingered on, nonetheless, in the anthropological literature,{{efn|"By 1975-79, only one-quarter of physical anthropology  textbooks continued to argue for the validity of the race concept. By 1985, only 50 percent of physical anthropologists accepted the idea that there are biological races in the species Homo sapiens, and 42 percent rejected the idea." {{harv|Tekiner|1991|p=40}}}} and highly influential geneticists such as [[L. C. Dunn|Leslie Dunn]] and [[Theodosius Dobzhansky]], who had been critics of race science, persisted in maintaining that races did exist, and substituted 'race' by 'populations'.{{sfn|Lipphardt|2012|p=570}}{{efn|'While the social anthropologists and sociologists that were signatorties to the UNESCO statement were happy enough to stress that race was a 'social myth' more than it was a 'biological phenomenon', biologists and physical anthropologists were generally not in agreement;'{{harv|Schaffer|2010|p=81}}}} According to the Israeli historian of science, Snait B. Gissis, an emotional barrier caused Israeli geneticists and medical researchers from 1946 to 2003 to take pains to avoid the term 'race' in their scientific publications.{{sfn|Kohler|2022|p=3}}

In the decade after 1948 Israel underwent massive immigration with 70% of Israeli Jews having been born elsewhere. The marked heterogeneity of these disparate peoples, according to [[Raphael Patai]]. generated at the time serious interethnic friction among Israeli Jews, while at the same time making the very idea of a 'Jewish race' seem a myth.{{efn|"This "ingathering of the exiles" brought together in Israel numerous Jewish ethnic groups which so obviously and unmistakably belonged to different "races" that their very juxtaposition in one small country seemed to relegate the view that the Jews constitute a single human race to the realm of myth.  At the same time, the very presence in Israel of numerous disparate Jewish ethnic groups has produced serious cultural clashes bearing many of the hallmarks of "racial" friction, or at least perceived as such by those directly involved in them." {{harv|Patai|Patai|1989|p=2}}}} It also shifted, according to Falk, the earlier  emphasis on  healing the ostensible 'degenerative' blemishes, hereditary or environmental, of Jewish bodies and souls which Zionism imputed to life in the diaspora, towards investigating the nature of hereditary diseases found in the incoming communities.{{sfn|Falk|2017|pp=5-6}} The groups in this influx were classified in terms of ''edot '', ‘communities’, or ethnic subgroups and constituted a very heterogeneous society.{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|p=633}}{{efn|’Communities’ is considered an ‘unfortunate’ translation.{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|p=633,n.1}} Of these, the ''edot hamizrach '' (oriental Jewish communities ) alone consisted of 17 distinct ethnic subgroups.{{sfn|Blady|2000|p= xv}}}} Often striking differences in inherited diseases within these ''edot'' emerged as [[population genetics]] began to examine this new aliyah wave’s Jewish communities.{{efn|[[Beta Israel|Ethipian Falasha immigrants]] were excluded from research was excluded as they were not regarded as being Jewish.{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|p=636}}}} Numerous Israeli biologists were excited by the research opportunities afforded by the new demographic situation in this ‘special historical moment.'{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|p=636-637}}{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=413}} One offshoot of this intense focus on the genetics of hereditary disease was to explore also the phylogenetic relations between these ''edot'' and determine their origins, a focus influenced by political interests.{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=6}} In reviewing the literature of this period, Nurit Kirsh concluded that, though working within the framework of international science, the approaches adopted by Israeli geneticists at the time were ‘substantially affected by Zionist ideology’, with its notion that Jews were a non-European race whose purity was conserved despite millennia in diaspora.{{sfn|Kirsh|2003|pp=632,635,651}}{{efn|"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."{{harv|Kirsh|2003|p=631}}}}{{sfn|Kohler|2022|p=3}}{{sfn|Prainsack|Hashiloni-Dolev|2009|p=410}}{{efn|"Israeli geneticists in the 1950s acknowledged, yet downplayed, genetic evidence of historical admixture between Jews and non-Jews." {{harv|Burton|2022|p=414}}}}

A standard approach adopted by Israeli geneticists traditionally was to privilege research on gene frequencies among Mizrachi and [[Sephardi]] groups as opposed to Jewish communities of European background.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=414, 416-417,417,n.1}} According to [[Abu El-Haj]] commenting on research in this early postwar decade, the Ashkenazi were somewhat of an anomaly, in constituting what was considered a difficult case to prove with regard to their putative origins in ancient Palestine.{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=414}}{{efn|"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." {{harv|Abu El-Haj|2012|p=98}}}} The overall  19th century assumption that Jews were a pure isolate, nonetheless, still remained in force,{{efn|The Jews were singled out for such studies because they had both a well documented history and were though to retain their purity by endogamy.{{sfn|Lipphardt|2008b|pp=191-191,193-4}}}} a premise shared by scientists abroad, who also embraced the idea in the decades from 1950 down to the 1970s that Jews had little admixture, and constituted a [[genetic isolate]], a position Israeli scientists promoted among their colleagues abroad.{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=412}}

===1960s–2000===

From the 1950s down to the 1970s, when they gained momentum, two trends emerged in human genetics research. On the one hand, studies of racial admixture intensified, while statistical models grew more sophisticated, particularly as computer programming allowed for  greater complexity in calculations of [[genetic distance]] to establish how close otherwise distinct  communities might be. Such distances, visualized in [[dendrogram]]s, are  based on  variations in [[Allele frequency|gene (allele) frequency]] between groups under comparison.{{efn|Such allele differences can be accounted for by several factors, such as [[natural selection]], [[founder effect]]s, [[inbreeding]] or admixture when contiguous populations interbred.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=412-413}}}} Israeli geneticists, who had been accustomed to consider diasporic admixture an irrelevancy as they strove to reconstruct an ancient Jewish gene pool,{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=414}} worked closely with the prominent [[Stanford University|Stanford]] school headed by [[Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza]], [[Walter Bodmer]] and [[Samuel Karlin]].{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=413}} From the early 1970s, research on [[Human leukocyte antigen|HLA]] gene frequencies among Israel’s ethnic subgroups targeted Mizrachi/Sephardim communities, but also examined blood from non-Jewish Israeli citizens, such as [[Armenians]], [[Druze]] and [[Palestinians]].{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=415-417}}  

In the mid-70s, a growing sense of crisis compounded anxieties among Israel's dominant class  as the [[Mizrahi Jews|Mizrachi]] began to challenge the cultural, social and political ascendency of the Ashkenazi elite, a challenge which was to culminate in the victory of [[Menachem Begin]]'s [[Likud]] party in the [[1977 Israeli legislative election]]. This internal worry was aggravated by the near simultaneous publication of  books by two [[History of the Jews in Hungary|Hungarian Zionists]], [[Raphael Patai|Raphael and Jennifer Patai's]] ''Myth of the Jewish Race'' (1975) and Arthur Koestler's ''The Thirteenth Tribe'' (1976). Both bestsellers showcased arguments for the importance of admixture in the formation of the Jewish people.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=414-415,420-423}} While Patai provided extensive historical details of conversion and Jewish  endogamy, his daughter Jennifer Wing, using a computerized equation by Cavalli-Sforza, concluded that the genetic distance between East European Jews and non-Jews was lower than that between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrachis.{{efn|"According to their interpretation of these genetic distance values . .the Jews could not constitute a race -indeed, nor could virtually any population group. .Wing's discussion of the genetic distance values pointed out that the distance between Ashkenazim and Eastern European and English non-Jews was lower than that between Ashkenazim and any category of Sephardim or Mizrachim." {{harv|Burton|2022|p=421}}}} Though one purpose of these works was to cut the ground from under the feet of antisemites by revealing the fallacies of a 'Jewish race' which underwrote modern hatred of Jews, the two publications increased anxieties among Ashkenazis both abroad and in Israel, who were privately disturbed by Likud's landslide ascendancy.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=419-420}}  Coinciding with these events, Elise Burton argues, geneticists began to scale down their Mizrachi fieldwork's importance{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=420}} and focus increasingly on analyses of [[data sets]]  in an attempt to rebut the Patai/Koestler thesis of admixtures of Jews and non-Jews{{efn|'(The two books) transformed Israeli populatiojn genetics fromj a largely descripètive enbterprise to a vigorous refutation of the two books' assertions about historical levels of admixture between Jews and non-Jews'. {{harv|Burton|2022|p=423}}}} and locate the Ashkenazi within an [[Eastern Mediterranean]] setting.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=414,417}}{{efn|'Even in Israel, the centre of Jewish diversity in colour and cultural norms, whiteness registers as the dominant Israeli self-image, while dark-skinned Jews appear as novel, rather than as a defining norm of Jewish multiculturalism . .One relevant report,. . . not(es) that one reason Ashkenazi Jews are so prominent in gene research is that 'a disproportionate number of Jewish doctors has resulted in an intensive study of their own communities and conditions'. {{harv|Azoulay|2003|p=121}}}}

In responses that challenged Patai’s claims, two analytical teams, one led by Dorit Carmelli and Cavalli-Sforza , the other headed by Bonné-Tamir, [[Walter Bodmer|Bodmer]] and Karlin,  developed two different statistical models to evaluate the genetics of common Jewish origins, dispersion, [[genetic drift|drift]] and admixture.  While they shared similar assumptions about the defect of Patai’s analysis of admixture, their own distinct methods generated different quantitative results and interpretations, laying the seeds for a future controversy about admixture.{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=428}} At a presentation in 1977, the Israeli team outlined their work showing no significant admixture from Europeans in 'Mediterranean' Ashkenazis. Cavalli-Sforza's calculations by contrast suggested little admixture in Mizrachi [[Maghrebi Jews|Maghrebi]], [[History of the Jews in Iraq|Iraqi]] and [[Persian Jews|Iranian]] Jews as opposed to  almost 54% of admixture in the Ashkenazi.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=428-430,430}} However, if  data from HLA gene frequencies was added, Ashkenazi appeared to have no admixture. It followed for Cavallo-Sforza that any attempt to determine admixture from non-Jews in Ashkenazis was premature.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=430}} In 1978 Karlin then developed a new statistical model for genetic distance calculations, which, applied to the data, suggested Ashkenazim were closer to Jewish and other Middle Eastern populations than they were to Europeans. Genetic inflow from non-Jews was deemed miniscule, and until 1984 this became the consensus view of Israeli geneticists,{{efn|The work of two [[Tel Aviv University|TAU]]-based Russian Ashklenazi physical anthropologists in Israel, Sergiu Micle and Eugene D. Kobyliansky, did buttress this conclusion in a number of studies at the time employing four different models for estimating genetic distances.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=435-436}}}} who considered the problem solved, and rarely mentioned the differing results obtained by the Cavalli-Sforzi-Carmelli approach, though in 1980 [[Newton Morton]], detecting serious flaws in Karlin's statistical analysis, had strongly criticized the objectivity of the Israeli consensus verdict. Thereafter, however, Israeli biologists returned to the study of Mizrachi groups, several of whom were acknowledged to have higher admixture.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=432-433}}

Morton's distinctive modelling backed the Patais' admixture theory by yielding an average 1% of gentile admixture per generation, and therefore lent support to Cavalli-Sforza's earlier conclusion. Cavalli-Sforza commented that, depending on the [[genetic marker]]s selected, vast discrepancies in admixture estimates could be generated, and therefore no adequate statistical model was yet available to determine the ratios of admixture.{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=433}} In Burton's interpretation, both approaches were guilty of circular reasoning, with a 'known' version of Jewish history influencing the design of the very statistical formulae ostensibly crafted to ascertain it.{{efn|'This embedded circular reasoning meant that the real controversy was over the different versions of "known history" accepted and perpetuated by, on one side, Koestler, Patai, Wing, Neel, and Morton; on another, Bonné-Tamir, Karlin, [[Arno Motulsky| Motulsky]], and most Israeli geneticists; and finally, the ambivalent positions taken by the Bodmers, Cavalli-Sforza, Carmelli, and (Ron S.) Kenett.' {{harv|Burton|2022|p=434}}}} in 1986 [[Ranajit Chakraborty]], in a lengthy paper on the statistical methods used to determine degrees of [[genetic admixture]] in human groups, cited the genetic literature on the Ashkenazi as one of the three cases in population genetics where researchers produced discordant conclusions, the other two being [[African Americans]] and [[Icelanders]].{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=412}} In 1991, Roselle Tekiner, commenting on Zionism's aim to forge an inclusive Jewish identity from the "ingathering of the exiles",  argued that attempts to create a single identity out of disparate Jewish populations had failed. One 1974 study showed that a significant minority of Israelis lacked a sense of identity with the wider world of diaspora Jews.{{efn|"24 percent of nonreligious, 13 percent of traditional, and 4 percent of religious Israelis [did] not identify with "the Jewish people"."{{sfn|Tekiner|1991|p=44}}}} The growing secular constituency required more than the consensual view, grounded in a theological right to the land, to connect into a generic Jewish identity. Tekiner suggested that  Zionist tacticians and others, nonplussed by this failure, might look for scientific proof to convince secularists in particular that they formed a part of a biologically integral ‘race’ descended from the biblical Hebrews.{{sfn|Tekiner|1991|pp=44-46}}

In Elise Burton's summation, the infra-academic conflict above, which led to divergent  results between the two schools, reflected different foci of interest for the respective research teams. The Israeli school specialized in Jewish and Middle Eastern populations, whereas the primary aim of the group around Cavalli-Sforza directed its project towards a much broader, global problem, that of the genetic history of all migrating human communities. The latter considered that the intricate history of Jewish populations across the diaspora was far too complicated for the purpose of testing admixtures. Depending on how inputs were adjusted for the favoured statistical model, the results for admixture in Ashkenazis could vary from zero to 30%.{{sfn|Burton|2022|pp=435-436}}

===The genome era: 2000 to the present===

By the early 2000s, the deepening awareness created by recent  historical studies of Zionist thinking on race spilled over into  evaluations of trends in contemporary genetic studies on Jewish origins,{{efn|"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."{{harv|Burton|2021|p=11}}}} in what has been described as a veritable 'explosion of research.'{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=76}}  Anchoring Jewish collective identity in DNA correlations was fraught with problems.{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=919}} Such work could be seen as recycling the earlier metaphors of blood and race by repackaging them as differences in biological variation between ethnic populations.{{sfn|Azoulay|2003|p=122}} This has been described as a matter of very high stakes in what is essentially an objective science, given that race is often seen as a socio-cultural, and not a biological construct.{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=9}}  Jewish geneticists themselves were caught between  the demands of professional commitment to objective science and their own personal emotional investments in the topic.{{efn|David B. Goldstein writes:"I suspect that had I no Jewish heritage, this work would likely have never led me into Jewish genetic history."{{harv|Goldstein|2009|p=xii}}}} These tensions over objectivity even resurfaced among Jewish scholars,{{sfn|Abu El-Haj|2012|pp=435}}{{sfn|Burton|2022|p=435}}{{sfn|Schaffer|2010| pp=86–87}} and in Israel the Ashkenazi background of most scientists conducting gene research led to claims that they were predominantly focused on their own communities.{{sfn|Azoulay|2003|p=121}} A further dimension of difficulty arose because the sub-discipline of "Jewish genetics" involved a crossover between traditional historical narratives and pure science, and the entanglement could provoke heated political readings of the results.{{efn|When the findings of a 2019 DNA study of [[Philistine]] bones linked them to Mediterranean peoples, [[Benjamin Netanyahu]]'s Twitter account boasted it was proof that the Palestinians, unlike Jews, had no historic roots in Israel/Palestine.{{sfn|Gannon|2019}}{{sfn|Kohler|2022|p=1}}}}  

[[DNA sequencing]] from the 70s onwards had been slow even as it became a widespread analytical tool for positions in the  debate on Ashkenazi origins.  With the rise of automatic  [[whole genome sequencing]] in the 1990s, research took rapid strides but controversy has remained an ongoing problem. Susan Martha Kahn in an 2005 overview of work on Jewish genetics observed that ‘racial assumptions about Jewish genetic uniqueness’ were still a contemporary issue.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|p=179}} At the end of the decade (2011) Mitchell Hart stated that “race” still remained a notable feature of both scholarly and popular Jewish thought informing the construction of modern Jewish concepts of identity.{{efn|“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.{{sfn|Hart|2011|p= xxxv}}}} In 2012, two important books appeared providing different overviews of results and approaching the subject from seemingly antithetical positions, while drawing on the same data sets: [[Harry Ostrer]]’s  ''A Genetic History of the Jewish People'', and [[Nadia Abu El-Haj]]’s ''The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology.''{{sfn|Kahn|2013|pp=919-924 }}{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=9}}{{sfn|Hellström|2013|p=439|ps=: "Following this initiation in mid-century Israel, research on Jewish populations has been continuous. But technologies and attitudes have changed and Abu El-Haj’s book is mainly concerned with the most recent developments. Since the mid-nineties, geneticists based in Israel, Britain and the U.S. have applied advances in Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis to questions of Jewish biological difference. Apparently studying ‘‘themselves’’, these researchers—who either self-designate as Jewish or work in teams with others who do—have largely evaded the accusations of colonial and racist prejudices that otherwise have haunted human population genetics. But even as the researchers are not anti-Semites and although their technologies and analyses are more refined than were ever those of race science, there exists a particular continuity in research objectives and questions posed: Who are the Jews? Are they a people? Where do they come from? This last question—originally whether the Jews were racially ‘‘Semitic’’ and thus foreign to Europe—has spawned another with direct political implications in the present: Is the Israeli state right to speak of Jewish settlement in Israel and on the Occupied Territories in terms of a ‘‘return’’?"}}

 

Ostrer outlined a trajectory arching over a century of studies on Jews, from [[Maurice Fishberg]]'s ''The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment'' (1911) onwards.{{efn|Fishberg adopted the data of numerous studies in [[physical anthropology]] and subscribed to the notion of a Jewish race, but believed it was highly malleable and susceptible to change under different environmental challenges.{{sfn|Fishberg|1911|pp=v-viii,504-556}}}} The scope of research showed a direct continuity, the difference lying in the great technical strides made since the early 20th century when the seeds were laid for modern genetics by the theory, which Fishberg’s New York contemporary [[Thomas Hunt Morgan]]  was developing, that [[Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory|chromosomal factors]] played a role in inheritance. Heirs to this tradition, Ostrer believed his generation was now in a position to apply sophisticated scientific methods to obtain a genetic answer to the crux of Jewish origins and identity.{{sfn|Ostrer|2012|p=33}} The result is, for Ostrer, that,"Jewishness can be characterized at the genetic level as a tapesty, in which the threads are represented as shared segments of DNA".{{sfn|Ostrer|2012|p=218}}{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=921}}{{efn|Weitzman makes a careful distinction in construing Ostrer's metaphor:'"the Jews can be described at the genetic level as a tapestry, ''with no single genetic thread running through the whole tapestry,'' (editor's italics) but with different Jewish populations woven together by various threads.'{{harv|Weitzman|2019|p=300}}}} In Ostrer's view, contemporary molecular genetics vindicated traditional Jewish narratives, established that there was a biological basis for Jewishness, and supported Zionist claims to Israel as a Jewish homeland. Criticism of such claims were, in this light, 'fragmentary and half-truths'.{{efn|"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."{{harv|Ostrer|2012|p=220}}}}{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=920}}

[[File:Nadia_Abu_El_Haj_(cropped).png|thumb|[[Nadia Abu El Haj]], who has said that attempts to use genetics to confirm a narrative of origins use [[circular logic]]]]

Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist working within the field of social science where this kind of genomic research is suspected of effectively re-instating race as a social category, {{efn|"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.”."{{harv|Baker|2017|p=105}}}}challenged, on [[epistemological]] and [[Scientific method|methodological]] grounds,  the kind of conclusions which Ostrer drew.{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=921}} She considers the whole enterprise of using genetics to confirm a narrative of origins to work by a [[circular logic]], with circumstantial genetic evidence linking modern and ancient Jews assuming a meaning only when framed in terms of the traditional narrative itself. ''Some'' Jews possibly have [[Y chromosome|Y-chromosomal links]]  that point to ancient Palestine at ''roughly'' some time in the distant past, while [[Mitochondrial DNA]] ''may'' link 70% of Ashkenazis from a common Midde Eastern set of four founding mothers, but the other 30% still remain Jewish. Jews for Abu El-Haq are a miscellaneous group of peoples of diverse background, not a biological unity.{{sfn|Kahn|2013|pp=921-922}} She cites the Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk for the view that while [[Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup|Y-chromosome markers]] are 'signatures' indexing ancient origins, they do not constitute evidence of the biological unity of Jews.{{efn|"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." {{harv|Abu El-Haj|2012|pp=48–49}}}}

Her reading constituency, Kahn argues, also includes those [[anti-Zionism|anti-Zionists]] who would call into question a "foundational assumption on which the Zionist enterprise is predicated",{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=922}} and feed into the 'discursive [[do-si-do]]  of opposing narratives that characterize the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict.{{sfn|Kahn|2013|p=922}}

 

In overviews of the subject, both the geneticist Raphael Falk and the historian Steven Weitzman have written of the dangers of [[confirmation bias]]. Falk writes:

<blockquote>"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."{{sfn|Falk|2007|p=154}}</blockquote>

Weitzman recognizes the problem, but argues that notwithstanding the suspicious impression given by many genetic studies that science is being used to endorse a traditional belief, in the Jewish case, there appears to be evidence  that would point towards precisely such an overlap between belief and scientific research:-

<blockquote>For some scholars, it is suspicious that genetic analysis would seem to be reaffirming what many Jews already believe about their origin. Sometimes, what the evidence reveals is that the actual biogenetic ancestry of people can be vbery different from what people think their ancestry is. . .Is it possible that there is bias at work in the genetic study of the Jews, that researchers are predisposed to accept results that confirm what Jews believe about themselves, and to discount results at odds with that self-image? Possibly, but there have also been studies that suggest that in some contexts self-identity and genetically established ancestry can match up fairly well.{{sfn|Weitzman|2019|p=300}}</blockquote>

 

A purely biological determination of Jewish identity, it is generally admitted, cannot be established by genetics. Despite considerably large amounts of common ancestry, there is no single Jewish genotype. Continuities of [[Sequence homology|vertical descent]] are attested, but [[Horizontal gene transfer|gene flow]] between Jewish and gentile communities was also intense.{{efn|"It becomes overwhelmingly clear that although Jews maintained detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship, also intensive horizontal genetic relations were maintained both between Jewish communities and with the gentile surrounding. Thus, in spite of considerable consanguinity, there is no Jewish genotype to identify."{{harv|Falk|2014|p=5}}}} Kohler, commenting on three studies by Behar (2010), Atzmon(2010) and Ostrer (2012), concludes that they are not unique as “since from the 1950s onwards studies show that Jews from different geographic/ethnic backgrounds were somewhat related”.{{sfn|Kohler|2022|pp=4-5}} Falk stated that, '(t)here are no 'Jewish genes,' even though there are plenty of mutations that are pretty much restricted to a certain group of Jews,'{{sfn|Falk|2017|pp=15,208 }} a viewpoint endorsed by [[Robert Pollack (biologist) |Robert Pollack]]. {{efn|"From any one person to another unrelated person, about one letter in a thousand, more or less, will be different when their three billion-letter DNAs are compared. There is no biological data in support of the notion of being a Jew solely through the inheritance of a single specific DNA sequence, nor will there ever be such evidence. There is no chance of some human genomes being Jewish and others not; biology makes all people truly equal."{{harv|Pollack|2013|p=1 }}}} among others.  

 

In recent overviews of the topic, scholars frequently observe that, despite modifications, the questions posed by thinkers on race over a century ago are still essentially the same as those which animate contemporary geneticists.{{sfn|Efron|2013|pp=904-905}}{{sfn|Tamarkin|2015|p=1}} The earlier controversies persist, with the same juxtaposition of antithetical views, between scientific proponents and sceptics of a Jewish race, the core agendas of each side arguably intact.{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=76}} Schaffer illustrates the point by underscoring how the marked differences in the views of two English Jewish physician-scholars and colleagues, [[Charles Singer]] and Redcliffe Salaman,{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=76}} - the former indifferent to Zionism and the latter an ardent supporter of the movement,- form two categories in an 'intellectual schism' dividing Jewish thinkers on race, a schism that remains alive even after the lapse of a century.{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|pp=77-81}} Schaffer concludes his overview of a half-century of strenuous studies, by declaring that an ideological intransigence in all parties to the dispute persists, and that 'discussions of this nature are unlikely to come to synthesis any time soon and instead are destined to remain bogged down in religious dogma and political agendas'.{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=76}}

One major impact of genetic research on Jews has come about as a result of an [[Medical genetics of Jews|impressive set of advances]] which have brought to light the causal factors behind a large number of diseases popularly associated with Jews though the share of genetic diseases among them is no greater than among any other population.{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=82}} Some 20 single [[mutation|gene mutations]] alone have been detected that affect the Ashkenazi,{{sfn|Alpert|2007|p=78}} among them  illnesses such as [[Tay–Sachs disease]], [[Canavan disease]], [[Gaucher's disease]], [[Familial dysautonomia|Riley-Day syndrome]], [[Niemann–Pick disease]] and [[Huntington's disease|Huntington's chorea]] and many other often fatal conditions, some associated particularly with, but not exclusively to, Jews.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|p=180}} Institutions such as [[Dor Yeshorim]] have created a DNA database so that one can check for genetically incompatible matches among prospective couples.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|p=181}}

[[File:Robert_E._Pollack,_1982.jpg|thumb|[[Robert Pollack (biologist) |Robert Pollack]], who noted the [[halakha|halakhic]] indifference to biological Jewishness versus religious practice]]

According to Michael Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies at [[Brown University]], whatever implications might be read into these researches,  Jewish religious law and the [[Law of Return]] have not been affected by Jewish population genetics.{{sfn|Satlow|2018}} 

Genetic research has raised issues that affect the definition of who a Jew is, and contemporary rabbinical discussions do address problems that arise from the impact of genetics and new reproductive technologies.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|pp=179,184-186}} While [[Rebecca Alpert]] cites the [[Tanakh]] for the idea that there is a theological basis for  biology as part of being Jewish,{{efn |”There is no question that the biblical author understood a critical link between biological and cultural sources of Jewish identity.”{{harv|Alpert| 2007 |p=74}}}}  the geneticist [[Robert Pollack (biologist) |Robert Pollack]] has drawn on the authority of [[Maimonides]]  to arrive at the opposite conclusion. In the [[Mishneh Torah]], according to Pollack,  the [[Maimonides |Rambam]] states that ‘when hiring a teacher of [[Torah]]  for yourself or your child, you should give a learned [[mamzer]], (a child from an illicit union), precedence over an ignorant man, even if that ignorant man happens to be the [[High Priest of Israel |Kohen Gadol]] himself.’{{sfn|Pollack| 2013 |p=2}}  The standard [[halakha|halakhic]] definition draws a distinction between a biological transmission of Jewishness (via the mother), and Jewishness as a matter of religious practice, extending to converts,{{sfn|Alpert|2007|p=70}} and limiting the role of genes in Jewishness.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|p=79}} Genetic evidence has been adduced to campaign for the right to [[aliyah]] for people like the [[Bantu peoples|Bantu]] [[Lemba people|Lemba]], after indications turned up that their ''Buba'' priesthood were found to be bearers of the [[Y-chromosomal Aaron]] associated with the [[Kohen|Cohanim]] who are, in Jewish tradition, thought to be direct descendants of the priestly caste that made sacrifices at the [[Second Temple]].{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=83}} 

 

The genetics of Jewish identity have given rise to concerns among historians specializing in Jewish studies who question the selective use of versions of traditional history in interpreting genetic data, and consider cross-disciplinary collaboration proposals confusing.{{efn|(in {{harvnb|Behar|Thomas|Skorecki|Hammer|2003}}) ‘the geneticists enter a debate, historical in nature, in order to contribute to it by genetic research-only to demand a new historical explanation for the unexpected genetic outcome of their study.’{{harv|Kohler| 2014|p=111}}}} The reliance of geneticists in framing their research in the area of Jewish genetics on traditional, indeed theological, stories about the Jewish past – a characteristic also of earlier race theories{{efn| The common notion of the Jews as a pure and unalterable race turned into a presupposition for empirical research’.{{sfn|Lipphardt|2012|p=577}}}}-  is often construed as meaning that old religious narratives underpin the presuppositions informing the science itself. {{efn|’the use of Jewish history to help lay out the scientific propositions being tested still obtains’.{{sfn|Efron|2013|p=912}};’ ’Ultimately, all of this research hinges on the ability of scientists to cast generations backwards into a useable historical past. In frequently presupposes . .that Jewish history occupied certain spaces and times, and extrapolates  scientific possibilities around these narratives.’{{sfn|Schaffer |2010|p=87}}}} Some genetic works have claimed to have solved vexed conundrums in Jewish history like the origins of the Levites and Cohanim, while using core assumptions of Jewish tradition in their interpretations of the statistical data {{efn|It has been customarily assumed that [[Levite]]s, who form roughly 4% of the Ashkenazi population, descend via the male line from the biblical [[Tribe of Levi]]. A paper by Behar et al.,concluded that since the [[Haplogroup R1a|R1a1 modal haplogroup]], is strongly attested in both Ashkenazi and a number of Slavic groups, but of low frequency among Sephardim Levites and very rare in other Jewish groups, the former Levites must have had between 1 and 50 non-Jewish European founders. The authors favoured a single founder by citing a religious principle in Judaism. Levite status depends on patrilineal descent and a rabbinical ban would have had to have been breached many times to account for a higher number.{{sfn|Behar|Thomas|Skorecki|Hammer|2003|pp=769,772-774,776}}{{sfn|Kohler|2014|pp=108-110}}}} With such a trend, Schaffer argues, genetics is usurping  Jewish history, a discipline which is properly the province of historians.{{sfn|Schaffer|2010|p=87}}

 

That genetic arguments for a coherent biological linkage between modern Jews and the Jews of ancient Israel lend themselves to Zionist nationalism  by biologizing Jewish identity has been often noted.{{efn|"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); {{harv|Kandiyoti|2020}};"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?" {{harv|Falk|2017|pp=208–210}};"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." {{harv|Abu El-Haj|2012|p=18}}}} 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]].{{efn|"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."{{sfn|Burton|2021|p=24}}}} The genetic affinity of Jews to Palestinians can be used to bolster claims that Jews originated in Israel.{{sfn|Kahn|2005|p=184}} [[Anti-Zionism|Anti-Zionists]] likewise have used genetics to support their critiques of Israel.{{efn|"Nor is there any value in complaining, as Millière does, that the Palestinians are an artificial people “invented” as a “weapon of war against Israelis and even Jews.”  Anti-Zionists play the same game by claiming that the Jewish people were invented and that few modern Jews have a genetic link to ancient Israel. The only question that arises from this argument is: so what? All nations and peoples are invented to varying degrees and at different points in history, and sometimes they disappear too; but just as Shlomo Sand cannot persuade millions of Jews that they are not really Jews, so Millière will fail to persuade millions of Palestinians that they are not really Palestinians. Trying to argue a self-con scious nation out of existence is at best futile, at worst sinister.."{{harv|Rich|2017|p=103}}}} [[Jarrod Tanny]] sums up the issue by remarking:'If nationalism is based on the premise of “We were here first” and “we Jews” were not here first, then the land is not “ours,” and Zionism is little more than an instance of European colonialism.'{{sfn|Tanny|2013}} Falk noted that while Zionism has achieved its goal, it was in his view tragic that the very [[phenotype |phenotypical]] evidence from genetics used to  underpin its claims to the land suggests that many Palestinians also are related to Jews as equal partners .{{sfn|Falk|2017|p=9}}  

A recent study by a team of international psychologists concluded that research conflating ethnicity with genetic differences could inflame political violence in the [[Israeli–Palestinian conflict]], {{efn|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."{{harv|Burton|2021|p=246}}}} while highlighting genetic similarities could help reduce conflict.{{efn|"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."{{harv| Kimel| Huesmann| Kunst| Halperin |2016|pages=688–700}}}} Arguments over whether the Ashkenazi are primarily of Middle Eastern or European descent, McGonigle argues, fuel fierce controversies in what are the politics of Jewish genetics: were the Ashkenazi to turn out to be descendants of converts of European origin, he continues, critics of Israel could find genetic grounds for contesting Zionism as a [[settler colonialism|settler colonial project]].{{efn|""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.{{harv|McGonigle|2021|p=36}}}}

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| s2cid =162317546 }}

* {{cite journal |title     = Zionism and the Biology of the Jews

|last       = Falk |first     = Raphael

|authorlink = Raphael Falk (geneticist)

|journal    = Science in Context

|date       = Autumn–Winter 1998

|volume     = 11

|issue     = 1–4

|pages     = 587–607

|url       = https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/science-in-context/article/abs/zionism-and-the-biology-of-the-jews/

}}

* {{cite book

|chapter       = Zionism, race and eugenics

|last         = Falk |first         = Raphael

|author-link   = Raphael Falk (geneticist)

|title         = Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism

|editor1-last = Cantor |editor1-first = George

|editor2-last = Swetlitz |editor2-first = Marc

|publisher     = [[University of Chicago Press]]

|year         = 2006

|pages         = 137–162

|isbn          = 978-0-226-09301-7

|archive-url   = https://web.archive.org/web/20230721075001/https://www.google.it/books/edition/Jewish_Tradition_and_the_Challenge_of_Da/VD9bEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Zionism,+race+and+eugenics%2BRaphael+Falk&pg=PA137

|url-status    = live

*{{cite book |chapter       = Three Zionist Men of Science: Between Nature and Nurture

|last         = Falk |first = Raphael |authorlink   = Raphael Falk (geneticist)

|title         = Jews and Sciences in German Contexts: Case Studies from the 19th and 20th Centuries

|editor1-last = Charpa |editor1-first = Ulrich

|editor2-last = Deichmann |editor2-first = Ute

|publisher     = [[Mohr Siebeck]]

|year         = 2007

|pages         = 128–154

|archive-url   = https://web.archive.org/web/20230721074948/https://www.google.it/books/edition/Jews_and_Sciences_in_German_Contexts/00dDXnUck9QC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=race%2BZionism%22confirmation+bias%22&pg=PA154

|url-status    = live

| last=Falk | first=Raphael | authorlink= Raphael Falk (geneticist)

| journal=[[Frontiers in Genetics]]

* {{cite book |title       = Zionism and the Biology of Jews

|last         = Falk

|first       = Raphael

|authorlink   = Raphael Falk (geneticist)

|publisher   = [[Springer International Publishing]]

|series       = History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

|year         = 2017

|url         = https://books.google.com/books?id=s4otDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR7

|isbn         = 978-3-319-57345-8

*{{ cite book| title =Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History

| last =Goldstein| first =David B.

| publisher =[[Yale University Press]]

| url =https://www.google.it/books/edition/Jacob_s_Legacy/qo1_JuRa9zoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Jacob%27s+Legacy&printsec=frontcover  

| isbn =978-0-300-15128-2

*{{cite journal |title       = Contesting the categories: Jews and government racial classification in the United States Jewish History

|last         = Goldstein |first = Eric L

|journal     = Jewish History

|date         = January 2005

|volume       = 19

|issue       = 1

|pages       = 79–107

|url         = https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4359-6

*{{cite journal| title ='Their Blood is Eastern': Shahin Makaryus and Fin de Siècle Arab Pride in the Jewish 'Race'

| last =Gribetz| first =Jonathan Marc

| year =2013

| url =https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2012.759107

*{{cite journal |title   = Jews, race, and capitalism in the German-Jewish context

|last   = Hart |first   = Mitchell B.

|journal = Jewish History

|date    = January 2005

  |volume = 19

|issue   = 1

|pages   = 49–63

|doi = 10.1007/s10835-005-4357-8 |s2cid = 144189435 |url    = https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4357-8

* {{cite book  | title=Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880-1940

| last=Hart | first=Mitchell B.  

| publisher=[[Brandeis University Press]]

| series=Brandeis library of modern Jewish thought

| year=2011

| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q668ALjXZW8C

| isbn=978-1-584-65717-0

| access-date=2023-07-13

| archive-date=2023-07-21

| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230721080005/https://books.google.com/books?id=Q668ALjXZW8C

| url-status=live

* {{cite book |title = Visual Syntax of Race:Arab-Jews in Zionist Visual Culture

| last = Hazan |first = Noa

| year = 2022

| publisher = [[University of Michigan Press]]

|access-date  = 2023-07-18

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230721085951/https://www.google.com/books/edition/Visual_Syntax_of_Race/BWSLEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Zionism%2Brace&printsec=frontcover

| archive-date=2023-07-21

|url-status  = live

* {{cite journal| title=Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a 'new Jewish type'

| last=Hirsch| first=Dafna

| journal=[[Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute]]

| year=2009

| volume=15

| issue=3

| doi=10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01575.x

| jstor=40541701

| url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40541701

* {{cite journal | title=Genetic diaspora, genetic return (reviewing N. A. El-Haj, The genealogical science: The search for Jewish origins and the politics of epistemology)

* {{cite journal |title        = From Pintele Yid to Racenjude: Chaim Zhitlovsky and racial conceptions of Jewishness

|last         = Hoffman |first       = Matthew

|journal     = Jewish History

|date         = January 2005

|volume       = 19

|issue       = 1

|pages       = 65–78

|doi = 10.1007/s10835-005-4358-7 |s2cid = 143976833 |url         = https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4358-7

* {{cite book |chapter     = A Letter on Autonomy

|last         = Jabotinsky  |first       = Ze’ev

|author-link = Ze'ev Jabotinsky

|title       = Nation and Society: Selected Articles

|editor-last = Pedazhur |editor-first = Elazar

|publisher   = Jabotinsky Institute of Israel

|year         = 1961

|pages       = 37–49

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20220531191352/https://www.infocenters.co.il/jabo/jabo_multimedia/Books/Nation%20and%20Society%20%D7%96%20190.pdf

  |url-status  = live

*{{ cite journal | title =The multiple meanings of Jewish genes

| last =Kahn| first =Susan Martha

| publisher = [[Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry]]

| date = June 2005

| volume =29

| issue =2

| pages =179-192

| doi=10.1007/s11013-005-7424-5

*{{cite book |chapter      = ‘Are Genes jewish?' Conceptual Ambiguities in the New Genetic Age

|last         = Kahn |first         = Susan Martha

|title        = Boundaries of Jewish Identity

|editor1-last  = Sokoloff |editor1-first = Naomi B.

|editor2-last  = Glenn |editor2-first = Susan A.

|publisher    = [[University of Washington Press]]

|year          = 2011

|pages         = 12–26

|chapter-url  = https://books.google.com/books?id=54gVCgAAQBAJ&dq=%22Who+and+What+is+Jewish%3F%22&pg=PA3

|isbn          = 978-0-295-80083-7

|access-date  = 2023-07-15

|archive-date  = 2023-07-21

|archive-url   = https://web.archive.org/web/20230721080511/https://www.google.com/books/edition/Boundaries_of_Jewish_Identity/54gVCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Who+and+What+is+Jewish%3F%22&pg=PA3&printsec=frontcove

*{{cite book| title=The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture

| last=Kandiyoti| first=Dalia

| publisher=[[Stanford University Press]]

| series=Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

| year=2020

| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FvHrDwAAQBAJ&dq=Converso%27s+return%2BEliza+Slavet&pg=PT68

| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230721080552/https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Converso_s_Return/FvHrDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Converso%27s+return%2BEliza+Slavet&pg=PT68

| url-status=live

| last=Kaplan | first=Steven

| volume=2

| issue=1

| year=2003

| doi=10.1080/14725880305901

| volume =94

| jstor  =386385  | doi=10.1086/386385  | pmid = 15077535 | s2cid = 42708609 | issn=0021-1753

}}

* {{cite journal | title=What are Jews: interrogating genetic studies and the reification of race

*{{cite journal |title        = Self-definition and self-defense: Jewish racial identity in nineteenth-century France

|last         = Leff |first       = Lisa Moses

|journal     = Jewish History

|date         = January 2005

|volume       = 19

|issue       = 1

|pages       = 7–28

  |doi = 10.1007/s10835-005-4355-x

|url         = https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-005-4355-x

| last= Lipphardt  | first= Veronika

| year= 2008a

| publisher=[[Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht]]

| url= https://books.google.com/books?id=Z9VCcZq2228C&q=vERONIKA+lIPPHARDT