Despite owning and directing most major DNA testing companies, Jews themselves are ambivalent about these tests as the results could be used by “antisemites” to identify Jews, round them up, and put them in gas chambers:
Jewish legitimacy in Israel is often based on a claim of Jewish indigeneity; that is, Jews are indigenous to Palestine, and therefore have the right to a nation state there. This argument in turn relies on a claim that ancient Jewish people and the people living in Israel now are one people and share a common ethnicity.
Genetic science has often been enlisted to bolster this assertion of indigeneity. Israel has even been considering using genetic tests to determine whether immigrants are Jewish, and therefore whether they have an automatic right to Israeli residence and citizenship. The Prime Minister’s office announced back in 2013 that people from the former Soviet Union wishing to immigrate to Israel could be subjected to DNA testing to prove their Jewishness.
There are serious problems with using DNA as evidence of Judaism, though. First of all, the tests may be wrong, in the sense that they may fail to capture the actual complicated social, cultural and historical experience of Judaism.
DNA can’t capture Jewish converts, for example, who are likely to be marginalized in a community which prioritizes genetic heritage.
And DNA tests may miss or erase non-traditional Jewish communities with complicated histories. This was illustrated when a Russian teen was told she could not participate in a Birthright trip to Israel without an expensive DNA test that she could not afford.
Using DNA to determine Jewishness is also unsettling because it plays into Nazi arguments that Judaism is a distinct race. Hitler insisted that converts from Judaism were still racially Jewish. If he had had DNA tests, he certainly would have used them to find people with Jewish ancestors and murder them.
As it is, DNA evidence has been used (badly) to argue that Ashkenazi Jews are especially intelligent — a claim that fits neatly into anti-Semitic stereotypes about crafty and conniving Jews.
There are many differences between Native American and Jewish identities, of course. Native American identities are frequently and eagerly adopted by non Native Americans in an effort to cast themselves as authentic and interesting, with the result that the existence, and needs, of Native peoples and Native nations are systematically erased.
Jewish identities are rarely subject to this kind of appropriation. Even Julia Salazar, whose bid for state senate made headlines this summer when her claim to be Jewish was contested, was mostly criticized for having lied, rather than for the dangers of appropriating a Jewish identity which Salazar, as a convert, had a right to claim in any case.
Different marginalized people face different kinds of prejudices, and the danger of DNA tests for Native Americans aren’t precisely the same as the dangers of DNA tests for Jewish people.
Those dangers aren’t entirely different, though. DNA tests take the ability to define a community away from those who belong to it, and hand identity over to a supposedly objective science. Worse, that “science” is linked to a history of racist ideas and preconceptions.
Both Native people and Jewish people have suffered greatly because of scientific beliefs that identity is innate, genetic, and inescapable.
DNA tests have the potential to be a new twist on the old idea that scientists understand marginalized people better than they understand themselves. And when science thinks it owns your identity, the next step, historically, has often been genocide.
Native Americans have seen this danger clearly, and as a result have taken a clear stand against ethno-nationalism. Jewish people, though, have been more conflicted.
But we shouldn’t be. Elizabeth Warren’s use of her DNA test, and the Cherokee response, can serve as a reminder of the dangers of locating Judaism in our genes, rather than in our histories and our communities.
It is strange that people who claim to be descendants of the ancient Israelites don’t even know what they wrote about their own history in the Bible that they supposedly wrote. If they bothered to read the Book of Genesis, they would know that no Israelites are “indigenous” to Palestine. In fact, the Israelites did not enter the Land of Canaan until after the Exodus. And the Bible makes it very clear that there were already non-Israelite people, like the Moabites, living in that land.
If the Jews want to claim to be “indiginous”, then they will have to admit to the world that they are actually Canaanites and Edomites. Many Jews have already admitted this fact, but obviously such as admission leaves Zionists in quite a pickle. To continue to insist that the Jews are descendants of the Tribe of Judah tacitly admits that they aren’t indiginous to Palestine. But to admit that they are “indiginous” is to admit that they aren’t “God’s Chosen” Israelites. Either way, their narrative collapses.
“DNA tests have the potential to be a new twist on the old idea that scientists understand marginalized people better than they understand themselves. And when science thinks it owns your identity, the next step, historically, has often been genocide.”
Scientists already have the right to report that God isn’t real and that for over half a billion years we all evolved from protoplasms, but, God forbid, they have the right to determine the identity of the jews, thereby causing another Holocaust crisis. Redundant, anyone?
Jews want to retain their “jewish” identity, but they don’t want objective proof of it that can–and will–be used against them at a certain point when their perfidy becomes unbearable to their host nation.
“As it is, DNA evidence has been used (badly) to argue that Ashkenazi Jews are especially intelligent — a claim that fits neatly into anti-Semitic stereotypes about crafty and conniving Jews.”
So should the evidence rather display that Ashkenazi jews are especially incompetent? lol
Yes, Jews want it both ways, and neither way at the same time. They are hysterically emotional under their veneer of “rationality”.
A geneticist’s greatest challenge would be trying to sort out jewish DNA, which is a virtually hodge podge of DNA the Jews have picked up from every country they’ve drifted in and out of over the history of the world.
While this article honestly seems to serve as a mechanism for further confusing the distinction of what modern ‘jewishness’ is, what it does do is lay bare the obvious hypocracy about the surface narrative shoved down everyone’s throats. The jews are finally coming to that loggerhead that they themselves have created to cover their lies about their identity, which is the main reason why they have been able to undermine white society. I also ‘love’ how this article tries to parallel the ‘native’ americans with the jew. There is only one reason for it…to equate themselves with another people group notoriously ‘victimized’ by the white man…
Excellent article! This clears up a lot of misunderstanding concerning who or what the Jews really are. This is a fantastic website. Too bad information like this is suppressed by the corporate media. I would encourage anyone who reads this to send a link on Facebook or to their email contacts so that our people will be exposed to information they need.