Zionism and the Biology of Jews
Abstract
This book offers a unique perspective on Zionism. The author, a geneticist by training, focuses on science, rather than history. He looks at the claims that Jews constitute a people with common biological roots. An argument that helps provide justification for the aspirations of this political movement dedicated to the return of the Jewish people to their homeland.
His study explores two issues. The first considers the assertion that there is a biology of the Jews. The second deals with attempts to integrate this idea into a consistent history. Both issues unfolded against the background of a romantic national culture of Western Europe in the 19th century: Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe, began to believe these notions and soon they took the lead in the re-formulation of Jewish and Zionist existence.
The author does not intend to present a comprehensive picture of the biological literature of the origins of a people and the blood relations between them. He also recognizes that the subject is emotionally-loaded. The book does, however, present a profound mediation on three overlapping questions: What is special or unique to the Jews? Who were the genuine Jews? And how can one identify Jews?
This volume is a revised and edited English version of Tzionut Vehabiologia shel Hayehudim, published in 2006.
Chapters (9)
Finally, allow me, Ladies and Gentlemen, to mention one other disease, not mentioned so far, which is yet, very important. This is the ancient suffering that the composer Heinrich Heine called “The Jews’ Disease.” In his famous verse at the occasion of the inauguration of the Jewish hospital in Hamburg he wrote:Ein Hospital für arme kranke JudenFür Menchenkinder, welche dreifach elendBehaftet mit den bösen drei GebrestenMit Armut, Körperschmertz und Judentume.And I ask: Is Judaism a disease? Judaism by itself is not a disease! The disease of the Jews is nothing but the reflex of the world’s morality. – If, however, disease is suffering, then indeed there exists a Jews’ disease, a very severe one. (Zondak 1940)
Groups commonly evaluate their characteristics in comparison with others. Racism falsely claims that there is a scientific basis for arranging groups hierarchically in terms of psychological and cultural characteristics that are immutable and innate. In this way it seeks to make existing differences appear inviolable as a means of permanently maintaining current relations between groups. (UNESCO Statement on race and racial prejudice, Paris, September, 1967)Similarities and differences between parents and their progeny have always intrigued humans. Already in the fifth chapter of the Book of Genesis it is written: “And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth” (Genesis 5:3). Primarily, however, the concept of inheritance did not refer to similarity of features between parents and their progeny, but rather to the transfer of property: “And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir” (Genesis, 15: 3); “And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, […]. And Naboth said to Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee” (1 Kings 21: 2–3). Only later was the concept of inheritance applied to the properties of living creatures, man included, to indicate the constancy of the patterns of family relations against the background of the variability of properties, and especially those of populations with sequential generations.
The use of the term “nation” among the founders of Jewish secular nationalism […] was almost always in the ethnic-biological context, and not the cultural-territorial.
If there are no races, how can Jews be a “race”? (Kaplan 2003)In his book, The Jews: A Study of Race and Society, published in 1911, the Jewish anthropologist and demographer Maurice Fishberg (1872–1934) rejected the claim that Jews had a common biological denominator. The fact is that the variability of the Jews’ physical characteristics parallels the variability of the people in their countries of origin. Fishberg claimed that what were characteristic-Jewish in their facial features were not the physical properties in the narrow sense of the word, but rather an expression of a Jewish soul. To support his argument rejecting a common Jewish biological denominator, he quoted the impressions of the Jewish British author, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), who described the facial features of the attendants of the First Zionist Congress in Basel:A strange phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones; a blonde Hungarian, with a flaxen mustache; a brown hatchet-faced Roumanian; a fresh-coloured Frenchman with eye-glasses; a dark Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian, tugging at [his] own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped, curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, first fighter in the University, with a coloured band across his shirt-front; a dandy, smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary caftan Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah. (Fishberg 1911, p. 99)
From the differentiation between Ashkenazi “idealist workers” and Yemenite “natural laborers” during the Second Aliya, through Prof. S. N. Eisenstadt’s discernment between Ashkenazi “olim” and Oriental “immigrants” during the 1940s, and up to the branding of “outstanding” Ashkenazi and “deprived” Orientals in the 1960s – the casting out of Orientals to the social margins of Israeli life has always been justified by the presumption that the Ashkenazim were considered to be culturally superior in two ways: they were more modern and more ideologically committed to Zionism. (Peled 1999, p. 325. TRF).
Many who in the past died young because they were unable to withstand the struggle for existence, did not manage to leave children; who knows if the survival of weaklings might not bring about the degeneration of the whole human species. (Jacob Talmon [1916–1980], professor of History, HUJI. “The idea of the Hebrew University in the past and present.” Haaretz, 28 September, 1966. TRF)Zionism aspired to produce a new Jew according to the national conceptions of the fin de siècle and the beginning of twentieth century Europe. At the Zionist Congresses, in art, in professional photography, as well as in social discussions, the image of the new Jew as conceived in the eyes of Central Europeans of the era was presented as a sun-burned farmer, tilling his land with his bare hands, against the background of an idyllic Mediterranean landscape. This Jew, or perhaps better call him, this Hebrew pioneer (Almog 1993), was a figure that was expected to construct a new world of mental and physical activity, a figure in which fantasies and reality intermingled (Fig. 7.1).
[…] For Jews were not an accident of race, but simply man’s condition carried to its extreme […]. Made homeless in space, they had to expand into new dimensions, as the blind develop hearing and touch. The loss of the spatial dimension transformed this branch of the species as it would have transformed any other nation on earth, […] It turned their vision inwards. It made them cunning and grew them claws to cling on with as they were swept by the wind through countries that were not theirs. […] Reduced to drift-sand, they had to glitter if they wanted to avoid being trodden on. Living in bondage, cringing became second nature to their pride. Their natural selector was the whip: it whipped the life out of the feeble and whipped the spam of ambition into the fit. In all fields of living, to get an equal chance they had to start with a plus. Condemned to live in extremes, they were in every respect like other people, only more so. (Koestler 1946, pp. 355–356).
MK Zeev Boim: “What is there in Islam at all? What is there in the Palestinians specifically? Is this a cultural deprivation? Is this a genetic defect?”
Israel is a semi-Western country […] but, it would be difficult to transform Israel into a Western country as long as Zionism as an ethnic ideology dictates the order of life in the country (Smocha 1999, p. 253).For me Zionism died (Ruth Dayan, the ninety-seven year old divorced widow of Moshe Dayan, on an Israeli TV program, December 24, 2014).Although Israel is the realization of political-Zionist longing and is considered a modern Western country, its demographic future is notably directed by far-reaching, traditional, conservative policies. Childbirth, which has been encouraged since early on by its leaders and is reinforced by various state regulations, reflects the strong impact of the traditional, religious, even orthodox Jewish lifestyle on the heterodox, humanist-liberal notions of the early Western Zionists. As noted by Susan Martha Kahn, there were many justifications for Israelis to desire large families in addition to honoring the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis I: 28). For Israeli Jews, the imperative to reproduce has deep political and historical roots. Some feel they must have children to counterbalance what they believe to be a demographic threat represented by Palestinian and Arab birthrates. Others believe they must produce soldiers to defend the fledgling state. Some feel pressure to have children in order to ‘replace’ the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Many Jews simply have traditional notions of family life that are very child-centered (Kahn 2000, p. 3).
... Other scholars came to the same conclusion, as both historians of genetics Kirsh (2003) and Falk (2017) claimed that genetic studies did not influence political leaders and decision makers on matters of deciding who is a Jew, nor did they influence who is entitled to Israeli citizenship. Are these descriptions and claims still the case, or is change on its way? ...
... Concurrently, human population genetics during the post-war period developed in such a manner that it afforded geneticists and physicians in the nascent State of Israel novel scientific tools to search for common genetic identity among Jews. The questions posed by researchers about the origins of Jewish ethnic communities (edot) and their commitment to discover similarities between the different communities resembled those of the physical anthropologists who preceded them (Falk 2017). ...
Until recently, in rabbinic discourse as well as Israeli state policy, Jewish identity was not reckoned via genetics. While academic studies looked for genetic similarities among Jewish communities, these similarities did not determine Jewishness or state policy. This article is the first study spotlighting the novel use of mtDNA testing in order to determine the Jewishness of Israeli citizens who immigrated to Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) 1990 onward. These tests offered by the Israeli State Rabbinate are accompanied by heated political and religious wrangles, in particular between leaders of the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and the political party claiming to represent immigrants from the FSU. We aim to understand this current debate on determining Jewishness by mtDNA. We examine the reciprocal relationship between science, religion, communal identity and state policy, and question the possible social implications. In contrast to claims that the change in Jewish’ definition is guided by science and technology, we argue that this change is dictated primarily by specific historical and socio-political circumstances. Furthermore, enthusiasm or rejection of the use of mtDNA for Jewish recognition depends on inclusive or exclusive ideologies, not on the indecisive content of science or religion themselves.
... Chakraborty's positioning of Jewish genetic admixture as a recent controversy may seem odd to the many historians who have analyzed racial, medical, and genetic studies of the Jewish people dating back to the nineteenth century. Especially in the years prior to World War II, such studies were often preoccupied with the question of how much (if any) ancestry Jews shared with non-Jews, along with whether Jews constituted a single race or ethnicity and whether their present genetic traits represented those of the biblical Israelites (see, for example, Efron 1994;Hart 1999;Steinweis 2006;Hirsch 2009;Falk 2017). However, in the early postwar period (from the 1950s to the 1970s), both in Israel and abroad, human geneticists had predominantly adopted the assumption that Jewish communities were isolated populations with little non-Jewish admixture. ...
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups.
... In Israel, sport and health might have a totally different social resonance. Since before the establishment of the Israeli state, central-left political parties promoted health and specifically fitness to distinguish themselves from the "exiled Jew" (Falk 2017). Netanyahu's avoidance from portraying healthy habits might derive from his heading the central-right political party "Likud" that opposes the central-left's ideology. ...
In recent years, scholars have increasingly revealed the importance of celebrities in society, among them celebrity politicians. These celebrities not only influence political attitudes but also serve as role models for many individuals. Yet, little is known regarding what types of role models' politicians serve as in the context of health. To fill this gap, we examined three influential contemporary political leaders: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and the type of mediated role models each possibly comprise in the context of healthy living. By conducting a qualitative content analysis, we analyzed 90 articles from 2018 to 2019 from two leading newspapers in each of the three politician's countries, namely Russia, the USA, and Israel as well as the respective politician's Facebook pages. Our findings point to three types of potential role models' as political leaders: a health-promoting model (Putin), a hybrid model (Trump), and a model of non-existence (Netanyahu), as the literature points to mediated role models influencing individuals' beliefs and behaviors. This study contributes to the understanding of mediated types of role models' politicians potentially serve as in the context of health vital to people's personal health.
Argument
In this article we examine how a leading Israeli hospital gradually became a large biomedical research facility, resembling a huge laboratory. For Chaim Sheba (1908-1971), the founder and first director of Tel-Hashomer Hospital, the massive immigration to Israel in the 1950s was a unique opportunity for research of diverse human populations, especially Jews who had arrived to Israel from Asia and Africa. The paper focuses on the way research and medical practices were integrated and their boundaries blurred, and studies the conditions under which an entire hospital became a research field. Using the case of one of Israel’s prominent medical institutes, we explore and expand upon the idea of “the hospital as a laboratory,” arguing that, for Sheba, it was not only the hospital but the entire country that functioned as a great research site—a vast laboratory that “had no walls.”
الحركة الصهيونية، عبر دراسة بنيتها » نزع السحر « ملخص: يسعى هذا البحث إلى
الأيديولوجية، معتمدًا على تطوير إمكانية دراسة البنية الأيديولوجية الصهيونية من خارجها،
وذلك بتطوير نقاط ارتكاز استشرافية متعددة الروافد المعرفية. ويتوسل البحث ثلاث نقاط
ارتكازية أساسية هي: المادة، والفضاء، والزمن، ويقوم بتطبيق هذه المحاور التحليلية
على البنية الأيديولوجية الصهيونية ليردها إلى إحداثياتها الأساسية، ومن ثم إعادة تركيبها
لاستخلاص مبدئها الناظم، وتصوير عملها ككل واحد. ويخلص إلى أن الأيديولوجيا
باعتبارها المادّة التي تُبنى منها الجماعة الصهيونيّة المتخيَّلة، » الدم « الصهيونيّة تعتمد علاقة
كزمن هذه » المقدّس « كفضاء هذه الجماعة، والزمن » غيتو متخيل « ودولة – القوميّة بهيئة
الجماعة. المداخلة الرئيسة هي أن هذه المحاور البنيوية الثلاثة تتفاعل لتبني الصهيونية كحالة
حدود ية، ليس فقط جيوسياسيًا، بل إن بنيتها العميقة هي مبدأ ناظم يقوم على عمل الحد.
يطرح البحث تفسيرات عدة لديناميكيات عمل الحد، منها النفسي – الاجتماعي، والوعي
الجمعيّ، والبيئة الثقافية الفكرية التي مكّنت تشكل عمل الحد بهذه الصيغة. تحيل هذه
التفسيرات المختلفة إلى جانب مفصليّ في انبناء المشروع الحداثيّ/ الرأسمالي، وامتداداته
التوسعية، هو مبدأ التشكيل بحسب منطق خطيّ. إن عمل الحد بصيغته الصهيونية هو اشتقاق
من مبدأ التشكيل الخطيّ الحداثي/ الرأسمالي.
This paper argues that interreligious dialogue through study and friendships across the religious divide makes participants less susceptible to religious and cultural misinformation that is often used to maintain social bubbles, in which members draw clear boundaries between “us” and “them”. Differences between social groups can culminate in a struggle between good and evil that can escalate into tension and violence. Preventing tensions and conflicts requires respect for differences, willingness to engage in dialogue, and a sound understanding of what religion is and the historical processes that have determined its development, distinguishing between empirical facts and images to which believers adhere. Because the author is a Dutch sociologist turned journalist from a conservative Christian family involved in interreligious dialogue in the Netherlands, Israel, and Egypt, the literature review presents contemporary religious developments in all three countries. The literature review is flanked by the author’s personal narrative on the events that changed his views on truth and spirituality, making him more aware of the commonalities between peoples of different beliefs and leading him to a lifelong commitment to interreligious and intercultural dialogue.
This is a review essay of two books published in 2021 on the history of human heredity-genetics/genomics investigations—in the Middle East. Both books are structured comparatively.
Both books grapple with the many uses of biology in nationalizing projects in the Middle East and the unavoidable tension between these particularizing projects and the scientific claim of biology to universality. Furthermore, both grapple with issues of classifications of humans and their uses in biology: the presumably biological human classifications of race, ethnos, and ancestry, and the properly sociocultural ones, such as historical-traditional, by language, by religion. Combined, the two books offer a keen gaze on the complex entwinement of genetics and nationalism in the Middle East from WWI to the present.
Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This article examines how racialized concepts of the labouring body shaped the division of labour in British-ruled Palestine’s construction industry between 1918–1948. In contending with Palestine’s “labour question”, Zionist Jews, British authorities and Palestinian Arabs engaged in competing and overlapping racial and anti-racist projects embedded in global and imperial racial thought and politics. Israel/Palestine’s racial division of labour and the land’s twentieth-century social structures were an expression of the continuous evolution of the encounter between such racial projects and between changing material, political and social conditions. Narrating this encounter allows us to move beyond treatments of race and racial politics as abstractions, demonstrating how they marked and classified bodies, and shaped experiences, lives and landscapes.
This dissertation is a history of construction work and the construction industry in twentieth-century Palestine/Israel, from British rule after World War I, through the first twenty-five years of Israeli statehood and Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba (catastrophe). It is primarily a study of the relationship between the history of construction work and the construction industry in the literal sense, and between social and cultural processes frequently understood through construction as metaphor: nation- and state-building, and the construction of social difference. The dissertation examines these histories of construction in Israel/Palestine through multiple lenses, combining histories of labor, the body and the senses, race, political economy, and material culture. It analyzes the shifts from Zionist-Palestinian competition over work, resources and production under the British Mandate; through the transformation of the construction industry’s workforce into one based on marginalized and racialized Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Muslim lands), and Palestinian citizens in Israel in the decades following Israel’s establishment and the Nakba in 1948. I trace these shifts and their implications using sources from archives in Israel/Palestine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, newspapers, literature, film, workers’ songs, trade publications, and oral history interviews. The dissertation argues that political economy, ecology, and culture alike made cement factories, quarries, construction sites, and workers’ bodies into sites of Zionist and Palestinian nation-building, conflict, domination, and resistance. Meanwhile, workers’ and their communities’ use and understanding of these sites often defied and challenged an increasingly racialized and nationalist social order. Construction work and the construction industry thus played a pivotal role in the formation of racialized social hierarchies within Palestine/Israel.
Proto-sociological studies, which related to the nascent Jewish Israeli society, were produced since the late nineteenth century. Three genres of early social science were practiced by in the period 1882–1948: social analysis produced by organic intellectuals, or ideologues, of the Jewish-Zionist political movements; research conducted by experts on colonization, as assigned by institutional agencies; and the academic conceptual and historical work of migrant Jewish scholars affiliated with HUJI (founded in 1925).
The unique Israeli nation-wide programme of voluntary, free-of-charge programme of “population genetic screening for reproductive purposes” screens for “frequent and severe” genetic diseases. It is grounded in the observation that specific groups in Israeli population carry “founder mutations”: changes in DNA appearing with a high frequency in a given population. The Israeli enthusiasm for genetic testing and screening was linked with the Zionist ideology, traditional Jewish valorization of the family, a shared understanding of difficulties of life in Israel, fear of disastrous consequences of a pregnancy and, for some, also a lingering influence of eugenic ideas. This article proposes a somewhat different view. It argues that the development of state-sponsored genetic screening in Israel was to an important extent a result of a partly contingent encounter between a national ideology, a traditional Jewish respect for science – or for some the absence of a critical view of science – the development of new biomedical technologies, and the multilevel professional interests of physicians and geneticists: from curiosity and a wish to help mutation carriers – Jewish and non-Jewish – to have healthy children, to financial interests in the development of genetic testing and a widespread apprehension of juridical pursuits.
Israel is known as a pronatalist country. Whether due to the Biblical commandment to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ or the traumas of the Holocaust and perennial wars, reproduction is a central life goal for most Israelis. Israeli women bear substantially more children than their counterparts in industrialized countries and view child-rearing as a key life accomplishment. These personal world-view and real-life individual quests take place in a context of equally pronatalist state policies and religious openness to assisted reproductive technologies. In this paper, I outline 35 years of assisted reproductive technologies in Israel by tracing a principal axis in the development of three major technologies of assisted reproduction: the proliferation of IVF-ICSI; the globalization of gamete donation; and the privatization of surrogacy. The paper is based on a policy analysis as well as various studies of assisted reproductive technologies, conducted in Israel over this period.
abstract:
The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews has fascinated a growing number of geneticists in recent decades. Using genetic markers to answer questions of history is an approach that is at once tempting and precarious. Both genetics and history are highly specialized fields, and with an interdisciplinary approach, difficulties abound. This article briefly discusses this complex issue based on two studies, written by geneticists, which aimed at contributing to the research on the history of Ashkenazi Jewry. To date, geneticists who have tried to tackle historical questions by means of genetics and statistics have had difficulties with the dialectic methods of historiography, while historians have often misinterpreted the validity of the research results of the so-called “exact sciences.” Only when both sides study and understand the other side’s methodology can cooperation lead to usable and meaningful results.
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