DNA Wars: What Gene Gives Jews the Right to Palestinian Land?
What is a Jew? What is a Palestinian? Zionists keep changing their answer
Call it Canaan, Palestine, Israel, or the Holy Land if you wish, but its best name is the Promised Land—its conquerors usually justify taking it by saying God promised it to them. Nina Paley illustrated that brilliantly:
When the Persian Empire took Judea, Jewish priests said Cyrus the Great was a messiah, even though his religion was Zoroastrianism. When the Maccabees seized the land, they insisted God wanted them to rule. When the Crusaders set out again and again, they played the God card every time.
But when European Zionists launched the ninth crusade at the end of the 19th century, the God excuse could not unite them. Most devout Jews believed they should not build a new Israel until the Messiah came, and many Zionists, like the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, were atheists.
Since those early Zionists lived in the age of scientific racism, nationalism, and imperialism, they took the obvious justification for conquest: They insisted Jews are a race first and a religious group second, and therefore they need a country of their own. If you accept that logic, the implication is obvious: The land that the Jewish race should have is Palestine, the birthplace of Judaism.
Their argument required palming a card: Palestine is the birthplace of the Jewish religion, just as it is the birthplace of Christianity, but assuming it is also the birthplace of a Jewish race is no more logical than assuming it is the birthplace of a Christian race.
Zionists reinforced their racial argument by pointing to the Jewish tradition that a Jew is someone whose mother is a Jew. That required ignoring what students of Roman history knew: millions of members of the Roman empire were Jewish converts. The tradition that Jewishness is established by matrilinear descent did not start until the fourth century, when Jews stopped seeking new members.
Since Zionists argued that race gives people a right to land, they had to explain why European Jews should replace the Middle Easterners who already lived in Palestine. First they tried a slogan that pretended there were few natives to care about, saying Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land.
But when the Palestinians became impossible to ignore, Zionists shifted to a claim that followed from their premise: If Jews are descended from Judeans, Palestinians must be descended from foreigners who came after Judea fell, and therefore they had no right to the land of their ancestors.
This racist argument did not convince all Jews, of course. Isaac Asimov said, “I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors were living there.”
While scientists, archeologists, and historians found flaws in the Zionist argument, two mysteries remained. Everyone agreed the Jews in the Roman Empire’s western half became Sephardic Jews—their name literally means Hispanic, and they spoke Ladino, a Romance language—but no one knew what percentage of them were European converts. An even greater mystery persisted about the Ashkenazim, the Jews of central and eastern Europe. Their name literally means Germanic, and they spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language. They first show up in Germany’s Rhineland at the end of the first millennium. Where did they come from?
Two theories tried to explain the Ashkenazis’ origin. The Rhineland Hypothesis, which Zionists support, argues that a tiny group of Sephardim moved east and multiplied rapidly. The Khazar Hypothesis, which Zionists hate, argues that Ashkenazim come west after the fall of Khazaria, an eastern European empire whose rulers converted to Judaism around the eighth century.
In the 21st century, DNA testing confirmed what archeologists had known all along: Palestinians are descended from Israelites who never left their homeland, and Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews are genetically European with some Middle Eastern influence.
The DNA evidence is especially embarrassing for anyone in a cultural group that defines itself by matrilineal descent. If a Jew is someone whose mother was a Jew, very few Ashkenazim or Sephardim are real Jews:
The paternal lineage shows strong European influence too:
Sephardic Jews are heavily European too:
Sephardim are a bit more Middle Eastern than Askenazim because many of them went east after they were expelled from Spain in 1492 and, naturally enough, married the local people. But the only Jews who have a great deal of Israelite DNA today are the Arab Jews who never left Palestine. Their genetic connection to the region is about the same as that of Palestine’s Christians, Muslims, and Samaritans:
…studies since 2017[24][25] have found that Palestinians, and other Levantine people, are primarily descended from ancient Levantines present in what is today Israel and Palestine, dating back at least 3700 years.[26] According to Marc Heber et al, all modern Levantine Arabs descend from Canaanite-like ancestors, whereas later migrations impact on their population ancestry was slight.[27]
However, it should be noted that genetic studies have not discredited the Khazar Hypothesis. Interpreting DNA is not simple. In Ashkenazic Jews’ mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA, Eran Elhaik argues,
For a more scientific take on the Jewish origin debate, recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews — a Jewish ethnic group — revealed that their maternal line is European. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) — namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from — according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews’ most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere.
…the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews can be traced to “Ancient Ashkenaz” — an intersection of trade routes in eastern Turkey.
As DNA testing evolves, we may learn whether European Jews are about half Israelite or only 3%. What matters today is no one who argues that race defines who should live in Palestine can deny that native Palestinians of all religions have the strongest claim. Their genes show the children of Canaan simply changed with the times. The majority became Hebrew-speaking Jews, then Aramaic-speaking Christians, then Arab-speaking Muslims.
“This attempt to justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics of Europeans. As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! And it is all the more repulsive that this kind of research should be conducted in a state that has waged for years a declared policy of “Judaization of the country” in which even today a Jew is not allowed to marry a non-Jew.” — Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People
