Are Jews a “nation” or a “people”? The Hebrew term am means both. Both terms,
moreover, have been subjected to disapprobation in our time – although not
nearly to the extent of “race,” a term that Jews themselves stopped using nearly
a century ago. How, then, are we to think about the mounting genetic
evidence that points to Jewish biological continuity over time?
The field of
genetics has been offering up sensational new observations about the historical
record of Jewish origins, exile, and migrations. On the men’s side of the
aisle, one of the most dramatic discoveries is that both Ashkenazi and
non-Ashkenazi kohanim – traditionally, descendants of the biblical high priest
Aaron – share an extended haplotype or DNA sequence variation that does indeed
distinguish them from other Jews (as well as non-Jews).
The divergence is
estimated to have taken place about 3,200 years ago (plus or minus a thousand
years): that is, well before the dispersion of the Jewish people into
communities around the Middle East and Europe. Although it remains difficult to
say whether the lineage traces to Aaron himself, scientific research does
support the self-identification of many or most kohanim today.
In the
women’s section, the results are equally profound. Analysis of mitochondrial
DNA, which is passed down only by mothers, indicates that four lineages – that
is, four specific women in the Middle Ages – were the originators of 40 percent
of the entire Ashkenazi population. Somewhere before the 12th century,
these four founders, whose own genetic ancestors hailed from the Near East,
appeared in Europe, probably in the Rhine Valley, to become the matriarchs of
much of the Ashkenazi world. There may then have followed a long period of
“bottleneck,” without significant population growth, in which mutations may have
manifested themselves in the form of genetic disorders. Such characteristically
Ashkenazi diseases as Tay-Sachs may have been one byproduct of such group
cohesion and slow growth.
Similar founder events appear in other regions.
Jews of Mumbai can trace their descent back to five women, while Jewish
communities in Dagestan and Georgia trace three-fifths of their genetic
variations to one woman in each region. Forty-three percent of Iraqi Jews descend
from five women; among Iranian Jews, 41 percent descend from another
six.
And now science is extending and expanding our view still farther
back in time. A paper published earlier this year in the American Journal of
Human Genetics sampled seven Jewish communities (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian,
Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi). Provocatively titled “Abraham’s
Children in the Genome Era,” it shows how groups sharing a common ancestry
formed independent clusters over time. Thus, Ashkenazi Jews bear the closest
similarity to Europeans, while Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian Jews are closer to
Druze, Bedouins, and Palestinians. The split between Middle Eastern and European
Jews (the oldest group in the latter category being Italian Jewry) is estimated
to have occurred between 100 and 150 generations ago, that is, between roughly
500 B.C.E. and the first century of the Common Era. In all cases, the farther
away the group is in distance and time from Near Eastern origins, the greater
its similarity to the local populations.
SEVERAL THINGS stand out. First
and foremost, the origins of the vast majority of today’s Jews, when plotted,
overwhelmingly cluster in the Levant, between Europeans to the north and Middle
Easterners to the south. Second, the challenge of maintaining the cohesion of
Jewish communities in the Diaspora, though obviously a matter of religious and
cultural mandate, was also biological, met through fundamentally intimate
choices about marriage and reproduction (and complicated by incidences of rape
and intermarriage). Reflected in the highly sophisticated science and dizzying
statistics are innumerable individual decisions concerning what we would now
call Jewish identity.
Even as the scientific data lend a poignant human
dimension to the already well-known history of Jewish dispersal and survival,
they also provide factual validation of that history. In doing so, they
simultaneously make a hash of certain counter-narratives – most recently and
notoriously, Shlomo Sand’s imagined creation tale of Eastern European Jewry by
means of the mass conversion of the Khazars, a notion cribbed from Arthur
Koestler’s
The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) and reworked by Sand in his The Invention
of the Jewish People.
Most research into Jewish genetics is undertaken
for a purpose: namely, to address heritable diseases. Historical observations
are a secondary byproduct. Learning more about breast cancer and Tay-Sachs is
vastly more critical than locating the Ten Lost Tribes. The point is an
important one, rebutting invidious assertions that Jews are primarily concerned
with understanding and preserving their “bloodlines.”
In any case,
similar genetic research goes on around the world, from Lebanon to Korea.
Finally, the results of the research say nothing about questions of
“intelligence” or about Jewish “genius.”
But what about “nation,”
“people,” and “race”? Social scientists view “race” as a toxic concept, one that
will inevitably be used to promote inequality and rationalize
domination. Some are therefore also suspicious of genetic research, which
they see as a means of re-inscribing race as a social category and covertly
legitimizing inequality. Among scientists themselves, no reputable researcher
would use the term “race.”
At the same time, however, geneticists and
medical scientists do not shy away from acknowledging the reality of human
biological groupings.
As for “nation” and “people,” Jews are indeed a
nation in a loose biological and historical sense. Peoplehood, a modern term, is
in a somewhat different category: ultimately, it signifies a voluntary
condition, entered into with God and as a personal choice to share a group fate
or destiny. With the continuing reality of geographical movement and
intermarriage, the decision to perpetuate or to join a people on a journey that
has already lasted for millennia has become more profoundly consequential than
ever – more consequential, one might venture, than its biological ramifications
alone.
The writer is a research scholar with the Institute for Jewish and
Community Research. This article was first published by www.jewishideasdaily.com
and is reprinted with permission.