In the late 19th century, a discourse emerged in Zionist thinking seeking to reframe conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and race science. In more recent times, genetic science generally and Jewish population genetics in particular have been used in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including claims of Jewish ethnic unity and descent linked to the biblical Land of Israel.

Early Zionists were the primary Jewish supporters of the idea that Jews are a race since, according to Dafna Hirsch of the Open University of Israel, they believed it "offered scientific 'proof' of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent".^[a] The question of Jewish biological unity assumed particular importance during early nation building in Israel, given the ethnic diversity of incoming Jewish populations. Since then, every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity^[b]. The theme of 'blood logic'/'race' has been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief.^[c] Many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of Jewish identity were rarely studied or long forgotten, overlooked, made invisible or deliberately suppressed until recent decades.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}

With the development of human population genetics from the 1950s onwards, these same themes have continued to appear in genetic studies on Jews in relation to studies on the genealogical origins of modern Jews;^[8] such a relationship between the sciences of race and genetics is commonly held by anthropologists.^[9] Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a "Zionist narrative", as essentializing biology, or both."^[10] The interpretation of the genetic data has been influenced by Zionism and Anti-Zionism, both consciously and unconsciously, ^[d] in a similar manner to the interpretation of archaeological science in the region.^[e]

According to Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, these efforts to prove or disprove the "biological belonging" of modern Jews to the historical Land of Israel is unique in global ethnic conflicts.^[11]

Overview and research into the connection

Several scholars have studied the early connection between Zionism and race science, including Joachim Doron, Annegret Kiefer, John Efron, Mitchell Hart, Todd Endelman, Raphael Falk, and Veronika Lipphardt. According to Doron Avraham of Bar-Ilan University, these publications have "exposed the 'scientific' racial aspects embedded in the emerging Jewish national ideology."^[12]

According to Steven Weitzman in his book “The Origin of the Jews”,

Race in the period prior to World War II was not necessarily seen by Zionist thinkers as predeterministic, nor was it necessarily accompanied by the goal of segregating Jews from Palestinians. For some, it offered an argument for coexistence by revealing kinship between Jews and Arabs."

He adds that it is an "open question" as to where to place the beginnings of a biological approach to the question of Judaism's origins, with some tracing the origins as far back as the Spanish Inquisition. The concept of Jews as a race had become widespread in the West by the second half of the 19th century, and although "vestiges of race science continued" after World War II, "postwar genetics worked hard to distance itself from race science for both scientific and ethical reasons". However, Weitzman writes:^[13]

…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.

Weitzman noted that “[t]he connections between race science before World War II and postwar genetics are a much-researched topic.”^[14] Falk and other scholars have shown how, since the 1950s, these "structuring assumptions" of Jewish race science "reverberate" in modern Jewish genetic science.^[15] Religious studies scholar Cynthia Baker has written of this connection between race science and genetic science in her 2017 book, Jew in the chapter "Zionism's New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew":^[16]

At the turn of the twentieth century, the phrase "new Jew" most forcefully served "to denote the growing distinction that Zionists made between the Jew of the Diaspora and the "new Jew"—the native Jew of Palestine," popularly termed "Sabra"....By "genealogics" I mean to signify interconnected ways of formulating, thinking about, and articulating collective identifications and relationships among people(s) using conceptual categories such as "kinship," "legacy," "influence," "blood," and the like.

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

Recourse to biological arguments about Jews, amongst both Zionists and anti-Zionists, is subject to confirmation bias.^[f] Gavin Schaffer maintains that this emerges clearly in "Jewish difference debates" in discussions of Israel and Zionism, where the leading investigators into Jewish genetic roots, "frequently seem to be largely uncritical supporters of Israel."^[17] Conversely, anti-Zionists use the same debate to support their position,^[18] in line with the denial of any connection between contemporary Jews and the ancient Hebrews and Israelites in Palestinian political discourse.^[19]

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. ^[20] It saturated thinking in medicine and anthropology, but assumed particular prominence in the Germanic sphere^[21] as opposed to England where, John Efron writes, 'Jews as Jews simply failed to arouse British scientific curiosity'.^[22][g] 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.^[24] At the same time, the broader thrust and impact of this discredited world-view long remained under-analysed.^[h]

Ethnic origins have figured as an indispensable basis for determining what groups belong to the Jewish collective.^[24] Admixture by 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’.^[i] When Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) propounded the thesis that the origins of the Ashkenazi might be found in the dispersion of the Turkic Khazars, the book encountered an extreme hostility especially among Jewish American critics. Though the book's genetic implications are no longer regarded as tenable, this severity of critical dismissal, according to Elise Burton, reflected an inability or unwillingness to take cognisance of a tradition of a racializing logic in Zionist discussions of a putative Jewish biology.^[j]

In 1983 the historian Joachim Doron (1923-1993) examined the tradition of acerbic attacks Zionists once mounted against Jews of the diaspora, much of which concerned differing ways of interpreting Jews as a nation/race. ^[k] This literature, he stated, had ‘been forgotten or even deliberately suppressed’. Doron suggested four reasons for this silence. Firstly, these scathing polemical recriminations by Zionists against other Jews, 'the enemy within', overlapped with anti-Semitic arguments about Jews, and recalling them would only play into the hands of modern anti-Semites. Secondly, both Holocaust survivors and veteran settlers had begun to feel nostalgic about the lost world of the shtetl, whose idealization led them to ignore negative characterizations of life in 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 Jewish self-hatred.^[1]

Since Doron's article, this topical neglect has been gradually addressed, beginning with John Efron's landmark study, Defenders of the Race (1994).^[25][l] Brief notices emerged occasionally hinting at gaps in the record. 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.’^[3][m] Between 2004 and 2006, many studies remediating the lacuna began to be aired. Nurit Kirsh wrote in 2004 that investigations into the biology of the Jews had rarely been explored for two decades after the state’s establishment, and argued that Zionist ideology had been so internalised by scientists that the myths remained as unconscious influences on their approach to the subject of population genetics.^[n] The following year a special issue of Jewish History dedicated several articles to aspects of the topic of Jews and racial classifications,^{[27][28][29][30]} and Tudor Parfitt published his study of the interrelation between genetics and Jewish identity among the Lemba and Bene Israel.^[31]

In 2007, the Israel geneticist and historian of science Raphael Falk argued that explicit racial and eugenic notions were particularly in evidence among Zionist writers, and that these interests persisted long after the beginnings of ominous trends in Nazi Germany, and have been continually recycled in tacit positions about a putative biology of Jews adopted both by Zionists and their anti-Zionist opponents. He concluded:

These notions have persisted, though in a thinly disguised mode, in post-Second World War Israel. Above all, I suggest that 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.^[32]

History

Background

Traditional Christian Judeophobia was tempered under the impact of the Age of Enlightenment as a succeeding period of Jewish emancipation in Western civil society took root in the 19th century. Many acculturated Jewish communities ^[o] integrated into Germanic society, came to consider their Jewishness in terms of their cultural and/or religious heritage.^[33] 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,^[34] 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.^[p]

In the German cultural world in particular, this retuning of nationalist völkisch thought^[q] drew strength from the ‘biologization’ of human differences in the form of theories of biological racism, by seeking an ostensible scientific support in social Darwinism’s theory of evolution as a struggle between species.^[33] Jewish scholars and scientists were therefore forced to confront the new race science: "Some disputed the stability and per manence of racial traits and the existence of pure races. Others internalized racial thinking and then unconsciously reworked and subverted its premises. Still others accepted the idea of racial differences but turned conventional stereotypes on their head."^[35]

Early Zionism

As the older Christian antisemitic prejudices underwent reformulation in terms of the newer antagonism of racialised thinking,^[r] groups of Jews, disappointed with what they perceived to be the failures of full emancipation,^[36] began to be drawn to Theodor Herzl’s proposed Zionist solution to the quandary. Herzl's Zionism arose in reaction to these renewed antisemitic trends, as an ideology that aimed to reconstruct a distinct Jewish identity along ethnic/volkisch lines.^[36] In doing so, Herzl and his followers challenged the centuries’ old tradition among Jews that they constituted a religious and socio-cultural group by reframing Jewishness in terms of the concept of a nation-race, with Jews conceived of as an "integral biological entity"^[33] in what has been called a "racialization of Jewish identity". ^[s] The debates over race played a notable role in the arguments that broke out between Zionists and assimilating Jews.^[37]

In the early years of the Zionist movement, notable proponents of the idea of a Jewish nation-race included Max Nordau, Herzl's co-founder of the original Zionist Organization, Ze'ev Jabotinsky,^[t] the prominent architect of early statist Zionism and the founder of what became Israel's Likud party,^[38] and Arthur Ruppin, considered the "father of Israeli sociology". ^[39] Jabotinsky wrote that Jewish national integrity relies on “racial purity", whereas Nordau wrote that "The acute eye of the street loafer is sufficient proof that the Jews are a race, or at least a variety, or, if you please, a sub-variety of mankind".^[38][40]

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.^[41] According to the Israeli geneticist and historian, Raphael Falk, in his study of three scientists who were early followers of Herzl - Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, Shneor Zalman Bychowski and Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer - scientific biology was also used by Zionist thinkers as evidence for any number of social, economic, or political notions. (Historian Todd Endelman notes that Salaman became a Zionist some time after reaching the conclusion that Jews formed a distinct race, suggesting this belief was one of the factors leading to the adoption of the ideology.^[42]

These discussions were not widely disseminated in the Jewish population before the 1930s.^[u] Not all Zionists using concepts such as "race" at this time agreed on its biological dimension,^[v] and some Zionists – for example Robert Weltsch and Israel Zangwill - did not embrace the racial idea.^[44][40] At times, other Zionists harshly criticised race science, preferring a conception of Jewish religious heritage to one of descent.^[45] On the other hand, even some non-Zionist Jews began to understand Jews in racial terms in this period.^[46]

Although Ashkenazi, many (especially central European) Zionist race scientists, like many of their assimilationist contemporaries, saw Sephardim as purer and superior Jews - the Urjude, as Endelman puts it; others, such as Salaman, took the opposite position, seeing the Serphardim as mixed with Arabs and Spaniards.^[47]

1948-1960s

The effect of Nazism and its genocidal policies discredited racial science. 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’.^[48] According to the Israeli historian of science, Snait B. Gissis, and emotional barrier caused Israeli geneticists and medical researchers from 1946 to 2003 to take pains to avoid the term 'race' in their scientific publications.^[49]

In the decade after 1948 Israel underwent massive immigration with 70% of Israeli Jews having been born elsewhere. The groups in this influx were classified in terms of edot , ‘communities’, or ethnic subgroups and constituted a very heterogeneous society. ^[50][w] Often striking differences in inherited diseases within these edot emerged as population genetics began to examine this new aliyah wave’s Jewish communities.^[x] A large number of Israeli biologists were excited by the research opportunities afforded by the new demographic situation in this ‘special historical moment.'^[54] 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.^[55][56]

Later 20th century

In contemporary political history, some supporters of Jewish nationalism have focused on the search for "Jewish genes" and the identification of the "original Jews", in order to strengthen the Zionist claim to the Land of Israel.^[57] Geneticist Harry Ostrer explained this in the context of early studies by Maurice Fishberg:

In 1911, the forces of social cohesion were religion, race science, and Zionism. Often, race science and Zionism went hand-in-hand, and the identification of a Jewish race provided justification for an ancestral homeland. This issue was addressed head-on in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the consensus on a Jewish race led to the mandate for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. So the Jewish world of 1911 is the predecessor of the Jewish world of the twenty-first century. Many of the Diaspora communities are gone and, as Fishberg predicted, the center of Jewish life has moved to the United States and to Israel. The issues that preoccupied the Jewish intellectual leaders of 1911 are the same ones that preoccupy the leaders of today. Who are the Jews, a religious group or a genetic isolate? Did they originate from Middle Eastern matriarchs and patriarchs? Fishberg lacked the tools for answering these questions. The genetic methods that would eventually provide answers were starting to develop in Fishberg's New York in the Columbia University laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan. The precision of these genetic tools continued to improve over the course of the twentieth century, and as they did, Fishberg's intellectual heirs sought to apply them to the issues of Jewish origins and identity.^[58]

Israeli human population genetics began during the 1950s and early 1960s. This work focused on sociological and historical aspects of the genetic research and, according to Nurit Kirsh, was used "among other things, as a vehicle for establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative."^[59] According to Nadia Abu El-Haj, by the mid 20th century a Jewish "biological self-definition" became a standard belief for many Jewish nationalists, and most Israeli population researchers never doubted that evidence existed, even though such facts had "remained forever elusive".^[60]

In a 2015 Oxford Bibliographies review of literature on Jewish genetics, Noah Tamarkin wrote that:^[61]

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

21st century

Geneticists Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk and anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj have publicly disagreed on the interpretation of the evidence about Jewish genetics, with Ostrer arguing there is such as thing as a Jewish race or people and Abu El-Haj contesting it,^[62][63][64] and Falk arguing there are many genetic mutations restricted to certain groups of modern Jews but no single gene uniting the majority of Jews worldwide.^[57]

In relation to Zionism, Ostrer disagreed with criticism of proposed genetic evidence for Jewish unity as "fragmentary and half-truths", and noted that the question "touches on the heart of Zionist claims for a Jewish homeland in Israel"^[65] while Abu El-Haj, "an established critic of the modern Zionist project" criticised the thesis biological unity as a strategy for "casting doubt on the foundational assumption on which the Zionist enterprise is predicated".^[66]

Impact

Politics

According to Professor Hassan S. Haddad, then Chairman of the Department of History at Saint Xavier University, the Zionist application of the Jewish concepts of Jews as the chosen people and the Promised Land requires the belief that modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Israelites, and as such, inheritors of the Land of Israel bequeathed by God.^[y] This is considered important to the State of Israel because its founding narrative is based on the biblical concept of "Gathering of the exiles" and the "Return to Zion"^[z] that underpins the modern-day Law of Return.^[67]

Historians and anthropologists have studied how the assumptions of Jewish race scientists in the early twentieth century have affected Israeli genetic studies of Jewish populations from the 1950s to the modern day.^[8] The topic is considered of significant importance within Zionism and Israeli nationalism, as, according to Assistant Professor Ian McGonigle of Nanyang Technological University's School of Social Sciences, in the absence of biblical primacy, "the Zionist project falls prey to the pejorative categorization as ‘settler colonialism’ pursued under false assumptions, playing into the hands of Israel's critics and fueling the indignation of the displaced and stateless Palestinian people,"^[68] whilst right-wing Israelis look for "a way of proving the occupation is legitimate, of authenticating the ethnos as a natural fact, and of defending Zionism as a return".^{[69][better source needed]}

A recent study by a team of international psychologists concluded that research conflating ethnicity with genetic differences could inflame political violence, ^[70] while highlighting genetic similarities could help reduce conflict.^[71]

See also

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

Notes

Citations

Sources