The Invention of The Jewish People - DNA Analysis

DNA Analysis

In June 2010, an article in Newsweek titled "The DNA Of Abraham's Children" addresses through genetic analysis the centuries-old assertion, which the article claims has been revived by the book, that modern European Jews are descended from Khazars, a Turkic group, and not from the Middle East: "The DNA has spoken: no." A New York Times article on the same studies notes they "refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book The Invention of the Jewish People that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times." Michael Balter, reviewing the study in the journal Science, says the following:

… Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University in Israel argues in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, translated into English last year, that most modern Jews do not descend from the ancient Land of Israel but from groups that took on Jewish identities long afterward. Such notions, however, clash with several recent studies suggesting that Jewishness, including the Ashkenazi version, has deep genetic roots. In what its authors claim is the most comprehensive study thus far, a team led by geneticist Harry Ostrer of the New York University School of Medicine concludes today that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genomewide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations.

Ostrer said, "I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest." However, geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that although the study "does not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, it "doesn't entirely eliminate it either."

Shlomo Sand has contested the claim that his book has been contradicted by recent genetic research published in Nature journal and the American Journal of Human Genetics. In a new afterword for the paperback edition of The Invention of the Jewish People, Sand writes:

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.

In 'The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses' published in the journal, Genome Biology and Evolution, by Oxford University Press, Dr. Eran Elhaik, claims to present a complete analysis of the comprehensive genetic data published in preceding studies. He states that "My research refutes 40 years of genetic studies, all of which have assumed that the Jews constitute a group that is genetically isolated from other nations". According to his study’s findings, European Jews genome is both European and Middle Eastern/Mesopotamian. " primarily of Western European origin, which is rooted in the Roman Empire, and Middle Eastern origin, whose source is probably Mesopotamia, although it is possible that part of that component can be attributed to Israeli Jews,” he told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz by phone from Maryland.

On the publication of Elhaik's study, Haaretz approached historians and geneticists for comment, but only received a reply from Sand, who was highly critical of 'geneticists looking for Jewish genes.' The discipline, he stated, seems 'crowned with a halo - as a precise science that deals with quantitative findings and whose conclusions are irrefutable,' and yet he regards geneticists as deficient in anything more than a high-school level of history, just like his knowledge of their discipline. Geneticists, he claims adapt their scholarly findings to the received historical narrative that that there is one Jewish nation. To search for a common gene to define a people or nation, as the Germans once did to argue for their ethnic blood ties, is dangerous. It is an irony of history that whereas in the past those who defined the Jews as a race were vilified as antisemitic, now assertions to the contrary are taken as antisemitic. As in historical research so in genetics, he argues: 'It is very easy to showcase certain findings while marginalizing others and to present your study as scholarly research.'