NOT LONG AGO Dale and I were invited by friends to attend an evening event at the Chilton Club, one of Boston’s most exclusive social clubs. Originally a women’s club, it was named after Mary Chilton, said to be the first woman to step ashore from the Mayflower. Like the Somerset Club and the Country Club, the Chilton has long been a bastion of Boston’s WASP elite. I had visited the elegant clubhouse several times as both a dinner guest and featured speaker, but it’s the kind of place that makes me wonder: Does this club have any Jewish members?
On this particular evening Susan Butler, a freelance journalist, gave a talk about her new book, Roosevelt and Stalin: A Portrait in Partnership. The talk focused primarily on the complex relationships among Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill and their meetings in Tehran and Yalta during World War II. I remember that Butler worshiped Roosevelt, admired Stalin, and loathed Winston Churchill, who is one of my heroes.
But what I remember most is that, during the course of her talk, she offhandedly used the phrase “Jewish race”—not once but several times. My reaction was visceral. Her use of this term, particularly at this club, hit me like a punch in the gut.
How is it possible, I asked myself, that in this day and age, an otherwise educated person would think there was a Jewish race? Didn’t Butler know that this idea had been thoroughly discredited, especially after the Holocaust?
For the rest of the talk I mused about whether to say something to her. Her use of the phrase may well have been innocent. But I experienced it as what my students would call a micro-aggression—a casual remark that a member of a minority would experience as an indirect and perhaps unintentional insult. I thought she would want to know that she was causing offense. I certainly would if I were in her shoes as a speaker.
After the talk I approached Butler and said, in what I hope was not an accusatory tone, “I’m sure you meant no offense, but American Jews today associate the idea that Jews are a distinct race with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. I’d urge you to avoid the phrase in your next presentation.” Her response was noncommittal, neither defensive nor welcoming. When I saw that she was not inclined to engage, I yielded my spot to others waiting to talk to her. I had at least spoken up. But it wasn’t a satisfying conversation.
Now that I have studied the matter, I wouldn’t be quite so sanctimonious if I were to have a longer conversation with Susan Butler today. Indeed, this chapter represents what I would hope to say in any long discussion, with anyone, about the Jewish race. I would begin by acknowledging that the story is much more complex than I imagined just a few years ago.
First, I would admit that “race” is a fuzzy term: people define it in different ways. My definition refers to heritable physical differences between groups, and that’s the focus of this chapter. To me the term Jewish race stands for the proposition that Jews inherit distinctive physical or biological characteristics that are fixed, like skin color or your genes. Butler may have had in mind a broader definition that includes group differences that are cultural or ethnic and relate to a sense of a shared history. These, too, may be passed down from generation to generation. I exclude them from my definition of race because they are not biological or physical—they must be taught. These “learned” elements of group identity, in my view, are better captured by the notion that Jews are a “people,” a “nation,” a “tribe,” or an ethnic group, a cluster of ideas I explore in Chapters 5 and 6.
Second, I would acknowledge that the idea of Jews as a distinct race has deep roots and was never the exclusive province of anti-Semites. To the contrary, both Jews and gentiles often used to employ the term—in a biological as well as cultural sense—to describe Jewish group identity.
Third, although the idea of a Jewish race is no longer politically correct, biology is now being invoked to suggest that there are distinctive Jewish bloodlines. Scientists have done pathbreaking work to identify and prevent diseases (such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, and Canavan) that are most prevalent among Jews. More importantly, the new field of “population genetics” and the use of modern DNA testing have led to a profusion of hyperbolic marketing claims by companies purporting to identify one’s Jewish ancestry on the basis of genetic markers.
All of this is to say that the idea of Jewish blood deserves attention and is more interesting than I had originally thought. But don’t get the wrong idea. As you will see, neither race nor genetics provides a useful basis for identifying who should count as Jewish.
It’s not crazy to think of Jewishness in terms of bloodlines. The idea of race is closely connected with the notion of descent, which is central to Jewish identity. The Old Testament describes Israelites as being descended from Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob, whose descendants were the progenitors of the twelve tribes that developed into the Jewish people. The matrilineal principle is explicitly ancestral: it defines being Jewish as a birthright inherited by anyone with a Jewish mother.1
Throughout the ages both Jews and gentiles have used the term “Jewish race” in a benign or even positive way. In Roman times the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, the author of the first-century The Jewish War, identified himself as “I—Josephus, Son of Matthias, a Hebrew by race.”2 In the nineteenth century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, a born Jew whose father baptized him as a Christian, repeatedly championed his “Hebrew race.”3 George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, took a sympathetic view of its Jewish characters and is laced with references to Jews as a race.4
What may be more surprising to some readers is that, in the late nineteenth century, many American Jews openly and proudly described themselves as a race. This trend began in the 1870s as acculturated Jews were becoming more socially integrated with non-Jews. As historian Eric Goldstein suggests, Jews viewed this increased social mixing with both enthusiasm and anxiety.5 “Much of this anxiety stemmed from the tension between Jews’ impulse for integration and their desire to maintain a distinctive Jewish identity,” he writes.6 The closer Jews came to acceptance by gentiles, the more pressure they felt to articulate their specialness as a group, and for a time they expressed this bond in racial terms. “Their conception of Jewish distinctiveness,” Goldstein emphasizes, “was one rooted not only in cultural particularity but in biology, shared ancestry and blood.”7
The language of race served at least two purposes. The most important was that it reinforced endogamy—the notion that Jews should only marry other Jews. Although marriage between Jews and gentiles was still rare in the late nineteenth century, it had increased enough to spark alarm,8 and some Jewish leaders responded with rhetoric that may seem jarring to modern sensibilities. “No people on the face of the globe can lay claim with so much right to purity… and unity of blood,” declared Leo Levi, a leader of B’nai B’rith, arguing that Jewish survival depended on preserving Jews as a race.9 Some rabbis spoke of the importance of racial purity for Jews to carry out their mission,10 and paeans to blood purity appeared in popular novels by Jewish authors and in editorials in Jewish newspapers.11 As long as Jews protected their bloodlines through endogamy, the argument went, it was safe to mix socially with gentiles. Even hard-liners like Levi agreed, saying that Jews who were “proud of their lineage” and determined to “bequeath an unmixed strain of Jewish blood” to their children would come to no harm by socializing with gentiles.12
A second purpose of this rhetoric was to reinforce the notion that Jewish group identity was indelible. “The great appeal of racial language,” Goldstein writes, “was its unique ability to capture the strong attachment of Jews to Jewish peoplehood, a feeling heightened during a time when many markers of Jewishness were receding.”13 It was an ingenious “rhetorical strategy”14 that affirmed Jewish identity while not interfering with assimilation.15 Indeed, many Jews of this period “found in race a comforting means of self-understanding, one that provided a sense of security as they continued toward their goal of greater social integration.”16
Although anti-Semitism in America was on the rise from the 1880s until the end of World War II, some Jews continued to affirm their identity as a race well into the twentieth century, according to Goldstein. They didn’t see this as inconsistent with being American—or with being “white.” American society was organized on a framework in which the “crucial [racial] distinction was between whites and non-whites,” and Jews were seen as securely lodged in the white category.17 But after the turn of the century, as anti-Semitism took on an increasingly racial tone, most Jews found it problematic and even dangerous to describe themselves as a race and gradually abandoned the practice.18
Over the centuries anti-Semitism has taken many different forms, but the most pernicious of these is racial anti-Semitism. It rests on the premise that Jews are a distinctive and inferior race whose insidious traits are handed down from generation to generation.
The first clear-cut example of racial anti-Semitism arose in mid-fifteenth-century Spain with the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, or “blood purity.” According to author and historian James Carroll, the Catholic Church played a critical role in developing this doctrine, which had far-reaching consequences.
From its very early days the Church held as an explicit goal—even an “obsession”—the conversion of the Jews.19 Beginning in the Middle Ages a variety of coercive measures sought to force Jews to convert to Catholicism. In the late fourteenth century, violent attacks on Jews in parts of Spain led thousands of Spanish Jews to convert. Many more were pressured into conversion when, in 1492 and 1502, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued decrees expelling all Jews and Muslims unless they converted. Jews who converted to avoid expulsion were called conversos, or “new Christians,” and were not readily accepted. Because they had converted under duress—in some cases under threat of death—their sincerity was always questioned. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were set up to root out “false converts” among these Jews, who were suspected of secretly practicing some elements of Judaism.
At about the same time, some in Spain also became obsessed with the idea that Jews were an inferior race that threatened Christian society and that only “pure Christians” were qualified to hold public office or positions of authority in the church. According to Carroll, “This embrace of the blood-purity standard marked the epoch-shaping move from religious anti-Judaism to racial anti-Semitism.”20 Applicants for the priesthood, for example, had to prove that their family had no Jewish blood—mala sangre, or “bad blood”—dating back to their grandparents or even further.21 As the ideology spread, statutes were passed barring conversos and their descendants from professions, universities, guilds, and the military.22 (This practice was not outlawed in Spain until 1870.) The doctrine even spread beyond Spain: in the early seventeenth century the Jesuits enacted rules that went back five generations: “No one will hereafter be admitted to this Society who is descended of Hebrew or Saracen [Muslim] stock… to the fifth degree of family lineage.”23
As we will see, the Nazis’ Nuremburg Laws can be interpreted as descendants of limpieza de sangre.24
In the nineteenth century, first in Europe and later in America, anti-Semites began to buttress their racial attacks on Jews with appeals to modern science, a practice that became known as scientific racism. As nationalism rose in both Germany and France, various “scientific” theories were used to justify discrimination against Jews as members of an alien, inferior race.
Although the details of these “scientific” claims varied, the core ideas were that (1) human beings could be sorted into groups based on racial differences, (2) racial differences drove human behavior, and (3) the “races” could be ranked hierarchically. Scholars measured different physical characteristics, attached different labels to their groupings, and identified different numbers of races. But the results were similar: white Europeans always ranked higher than Asians or Africans, and among whites, the northern European “Nordic” or “Aryan” races were at the very top, while Jews were ranked near the bottom.
Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), a French anthropologist, published a theory of races that illustrates these ideas. In his 1899 book, The Aryan: His Social Role, he offered a scheme of racial classifications based primarily on head measurements. At the top he put the “Aryan white race,” which he claimed were “dolichocephalic” (long headed). At the bottom he put the “brachycephalic,” or short-headed races, best represented by the Jew. Between these extremes he identified three other groups. In the same year an American academic, William Zebina Ripley (1867–1941), published a similar theory based on head measurements, stature, and eye and skin color. In his book The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, Ripley classified Europeans into three races: Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean.
In America the best-known, most influential, and today most infamous proponent of scientific racism was Madison Grant. In 1916 he published The Passing of the Great Race, which became a national best-seller. Grant initially divided human beings into three broad races based primarily on skin color: Caucasoids (based in Europe), Negroids (based in Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Asia). He then subdivided the European white races and ranked them much as Ripley had done. At the top was the “Nordic” race, based in Scandinavia. Below the Nordics were the Alpines, who lived near the Alps, and the Mediterraneans, who inhabited southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Jews were presumably in this third category.25 Hitler would later refer to this book as his “bible.”26
Closely related to scientific racism was the eugenics movement, which made similar claims to science and drew on notions of Darwinian evolution. The core ideas were that both positive and negative human traits were hereditary; that their prevalence could be influenced by breeding, just as with plants or livestock; and that humans should use this knowledge to improve the hardiness of their genetic stock. Proponents, including academics and scientists, urged that people with undesirable traits not be allowed to reproduce. The movement also provided fodder for American “nativist” claims that racial mixing was harmful because it degraded “native stock.”
In early twentieth-century America these two powerful movements fed a growing political backlash against immigrants. Between 1880 and the 1920s the United States experienced immigration on an unprecedented scale. Our country’s population in 1880 was only fifty million; during the next fifty years over twenty-five million immigrants would pour into America.27 Unlike their English, Scottish, German, and Scandinavian predecessors, the so-called New Immigrants came mostly from southern and Eastern Europe. “These newcomers were often described by what they were not: not Protestant, not English-speaking, not skilled, not educated, and not liked,” in the words of author and PBS host Ben Wattenberg.28 Indeed, as the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamented in 1901: “It is obvious that the replacement of the German and English immigration by southern Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews and Slovaks is a loss to the social organism of the United States. The congestion of foreigners and localities in our great cities, the increase of crime and pauperism are attributable to the poorer elements.”29 To members of the Protestant elite who were alarmed by this influx, scientific racism supported the view that these immigrants were inferior, and eugenics stoked fears that the newcomers would outbreed those of native stock or, perhaps worse, mate with them.30
In America a growing number of academics—many of them Jewish—mounted fierce opposition to scientific racism. A pioneer in this effort was Franz Boas (1858–1942), an assimilated German Jew, now credited as the founder of cultural anthropology, who carried out “a life-long assault… on race.”31 From his command post at Columbia University, he set about debunking the idea of race as a determinant of behavior or intelligence, instead emphasizing the importance of culture in explaining differences among groups.32
Although Boas’s work would eventually influence the entire field of anthropology, it had no impact on American public policy in the early twentieth century. Scientific racism and the eugenics movement, however, had enormous impact, contributing to the passage of restrictive immigration policies. The Immigration Act of 1917 explicitly banned from entering the United States a long list of undesirables, including alcoholics, anarchists, feeble-minded persons, idiots, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.33 The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed stringent country quotas aimed at substantially limiting immigration of southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Italians and Jews.34 The most direct impact of the eugenics movement was the passage of state laws permitting compulsory sterilization of people seen as mentally disabled.35
In Europe the most profound impact of these movements was in Germany.
The Nazis’ racial ideology was a kind of feverish amalgam of limpieza de sangre, scientific racism, and eugenics. Like the sixteenth-century Spaniards, the Nazis were consumed with blood purity and viewed Jews as a degenerate race. But the Nazis went much further, carrying scientific racism and eugenics to their ultimate conclusion: genocide.
The Nazi racial program was based on the belief that Germans belonged to the Aryan “master race,” which was superior to all others. According to Hitler’s ideology, the Jews were the Aryans’ greatest enemy, threatening to weaken and perhaps destroy the Aryans through racial contamination.
The Nazis’ initial goal was to maintain the purity of their racial stock by isolating the Jews and driving them out of Germany. To implement these policies, the Nazis had to decide who counted as a Jew. Like any legal system that differentiates on the basis of race, the Nazi regime faced the challenge of developing standards, a task that is most difficult when dealing with people of mixed blood.
In 1933 the Nazi government passed a law aiming to dismiss all “non-Aryans” from government positions, including educators and those practicing medicine in state hospitals. The definition of a non-Aryan was a simple ancestry test: anyone who could not prove they had four Aryan grandparents was a non-Aryan. This meant, of course, that a person who had at least one Jewish parent or grandparent was non-Aryan.
In 1935 the so-called Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with anyone of “German or related blood.”36 These laws required a more elaborate racial scheme, which was the result of considerable debate within the Nazi leadership as they struggled to align various policy goals. Within Germany the scheme included three racial categories: Jews, Germans, and those of “mixed race” (Mischlinge).
Most of the Mischlinge were Protestant or Catholic: the descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity, intermarried with gentiles, and assimilated into Christian society.37 For Nazis determined to prevent further racial contamination, this population had to be identified and regulated.
Under the Nuremberg Laws, a “Jew” was defined as a person with at least three Jewish grandparents. Where the scheme got complicated was in classifying people who had only two Jewish grandparents—and there were many who fit this description. The test for such people involved additional factors such as affiliation with a synagogue, whether the person’s spouse was Jewish, and the like. If one of these “extra” Jewish factors applied, the person was categorized as a Jew. If not, he or she was a Mischling of the first degree, which was not much better. Those who had only one Jewish grandparent were Mischlinge of the second degree. (Those who were one-eighth Jewish or less were classified as belonging to the German race.)38
As a practical matter, first-degree Mischlinge suffered some of the same educational and marriage restrictions as Jews, but second-degree Mischlinge had more freedom. This led to a brisk business in reclassification, often accomplished by bribery, as Jews or first-degree Mischlinge sought documentation showing that they were second-degree Mischlinge or German.39
In 1941 the Nazis secretly decided to implement the Final Solution—the program of herding Jews into ghettos and camps and murdering them. Within Germany the Nazis applied the Nuremberg racial scheme: German Jews would be deported and killed; Mischlinge merely risked sterilization. Outside Germany, however, the Nazis offered no such leniency to those of mixed blood; they regularly sent to the death camps anyone who had one Jewish grandparent.
Is it any wonder that, like most American Jews today, I recoil at any mention of the Jewish race? Under the Nazis it led to the death of six million Jews.
Even as late as World War II Ashley Montagu, a Jewish cultural anthropologist (whose birth name was Israel Ehrenberg), bemoaned the fact that “Jews are nearly always referred to in popular parlance as a ‘race.’ This is done not only by the so-called ‘man in the street’ but also by many scientists, medical men, philosophers, politicians, historians, and members of many other professions.”40
This is no longer true. Virtually no one thinks of American Jews today as having a racial identity: race is associated primarily with skin color, and most Jews in America are considered white. More generally, race itself is no longer considered a meaningful scientific basis for categorization. How and why did this shift occur?
The critical turning point was the discovery of the Holocaust. The racial atrocities of World War II sparked such revulsion that the term race became almost taboo, especially as applied to Jews and sometimes more generally.41
In 1950, in recognition of the Nazi horrors, the UN Economic and Social Council (UNESCO) convened a distinguished group of social scientists, headed by Montagu, to summarize where modern scientists stood on race. The result was a ringing declaration, called “The Statement on Race,” that came close to discounting the idea of race altogether. In the universalist spirit of the times, it began: “Scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo Sapiens.”42 It went on to outline scientific views on race that have endured to this day: that humans are more genetically alike than different, that biology is not a predictor of behavior, that pure races don’t exist, that no race is biologically superior or inferior to another, that racial mixing does not produce biologically disadvantageous results, and that ethnic groups are not races.43
But in their zeal to combat race prejudice, the authors arguably went a bit too far, stating, “For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”44 They concluded, “Lastly, biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood.”45
This aspect of the 1950 statement was widely criticized as a political manifesto rather than an accurate summary of scientific consensus. Especially indignant were the physical anthropologists and geneticists whose disciplines had not been represented on the original panel.46 UNESCO promptly convened a second group, composed largely of physical anthropologists and geneticists.
The result was a more nuanced statement in 1951 that affirmed most of the first group’s scientific conclusions but conspicuously omitted any mention of “universal brotherhood”—and insisted that races did exist. As the authors of the 1951 statement observed rather tartly: “The physical anthropologists and the man in the street both know that races exist;… the latter from the immediate evidence of his senses when he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an American Indian together.”47 The authors went on to suggest, “In its anthropological sense, the word ‘race’ should be reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed and primarily heritable physical differences from other groups.”48
So the idea of race has not disappeared. Many application forms ask people to identify their race. Americans often speak of race in everyday conversation, especially in relationship to claims of discrimination. As of 2010 the US Census collected demographic data in five racial categories, all relating primarily to skin color: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. Separately, the 2010 survey included a box to check for “Hispanic origins,” which the government characterized as an ethnicity.49 The census survey has never included a question asking Jews to identify themselves in any way, either as a race or an ethnicity.
But as in earlier periods, there is still no consensus on how to define race. One researcher surveyed the field and found a broad range: “As few as three and as many as 37 races have been described.”50 This scholar concluded that “just what constitutes a race is a hard question to answer, because one’s classification usually depends on the purpose of the classification, and various approaches to taxonomy often have a built-in bias.”51
Nor has the idea of a “Jewish race” completely disappeared in America. The Ku Klux Klan still claims that Jews are not white but rather a separate race.52 The Nationalist Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group active in the 1970s, stated among its “fundamental principles” that “the Jew is the Ultimate Enemy.” The party’s newspaper read,
The single serious enemy facing the White man is the Jew. The Jews are not a religion, they are [a]… race, locked in mortal conflict with Aryan man which has lasted for millennia, and which will continue until one of the two combat peoples is extinct.53
In fact, it was neo-Nazi activity that led to an unusual US Supreme Court ruling in the 1980s, holding that Jews can state a claim of racial discrimination—even though virtually no one still thinks of them as a race. The case began in 1982 after eight young neo-Nazis painted anti-Semitic symbols and slogans on the walls of a synagogue in Silver Spring, Maryland. The congregation filed suit, claiming that the vandals had violated a civil rights statute prohibiting racial discrimination. The lower federal court threw the case out, ruling that “discrimination against Jews is not racial discrimination” because Jews today are not considered “a racially distinct group.”54
A unanimous Supreme Court reversed the decision, reasoning that at the time the law was passed in 1866, race was defined differently from how it is today. “The question before us,” the Court wrote, “is not whether Jews are considered to be a separate race by today’s standards, but whether, at the time [the statute] was adopted, Jews constituted a group of people that Congress intended to protect.”55 The legislative history of the statute made clear that “Jews and Arabs were among the peoples then considered to be distinct races, and hence within the protection of the statute,” the Court wrote.56 The case marked a rare time in human history when the notion that Jews are a separate race was used not to justify discrimination but to shield them from it.
In recent times the idea of “Jewish blood” has resurfaced in the context of genetic testing, which suggests that people of Jewish heritage are biologically identifiable on the basis of their genes. There are more than half a dozen companies that claim to assess your “Jewish DNA,” some for as little as $100.
“Are you Jewish?” asks the website iGENEA, then explains,
A DNA test from iGenea provides you with clear evidence of whether you have Jewish roots. Based on your specific genetic characteristics, we can identify whether you are of Jewish descent, which line the Jewish descent is from (paternal, maternal or both lines) and even what percentage you are Jewish.
As I’ll later show, this is nonsense. There is no genetic test that can accurately identify whether a person is Jewish. There is no “Jewish gene.” But the field of so-called Jewish genetics has given new life to the idea that Jews as a group are united by biological ties.
For my birthday about four years ago my daughters gave me a subscription to 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service. After receiving my “home-based saliva collection kit” in the mail, I took a swab of spit, put it in a test tube, and sent it off to the lab as instructed. About six weeks later I was notified that my report was ready: I could go online and find out my ancestry, any health risks and inherited conditions I might face, and who my DNA “relatives” are.
Companies like 23andMe compare sections of your DNA to that of various “populations” defined by ethnicity and geographic location. The basic notion is that if you look at various genetic markers, there are some that vary systematically between populations. These markers are used to create a reference set for each population. Your DNA is then compared to the various reference sets to analyze statistically the number of matches.
One key question is the one that biologists Richard Lewontin, Mary-Claire King, and Marcus Feldman posed in the scientific journal Nature: “Is it possible to find DNA sequences that differ sufficiently between populations to allow correct assignment of major geographical origin with high probability?” Their answer to this question is yes.57
A second question is: How strong is the evidence that people who identify themselves as Jewish share genetic markers? Here, too, the answer is clear. Ashkenazi Jews share long stretches of DNA.
According to my DNA report from 23andMe, am I ever Jewish! My ancestry report indicates that I am 99.8 percent European and that 96.3 percent of my genes match a single subgroup, Ashkenazi.58 (The remaining 3.5 percent was labeled “broadly European.”)59
The website offered me a “Chromosome View” of the data where I could see, for each of my twenty-three chromosomes, the extent to which my DNA sample matched the reference set for “Ashkenazi Jewish.” To illustrate how all this works, let me dig a little deeper into what I learned.
One set of tests relates to the Y chromosome, which is only found in men. The Y chromosome is passed down largely unchanged from father to son, making it relatively easy to study. The research often focuses on something called a haplogroup, a set of genes that share a common ancestor.
My paternal Y chromosome line is a haplogroup known as E1b1b1c1a. According to 23andMe, although this cluster is “common throughout the Near East, reaching levels of 5 percent among populations such as the Bedouin, Omanis and Druze, it appears particularly elevated in Jewish populations” now living around the globe. “Given the clearly elevated frequency in all Jewish populations, E1b1b1c1a was very likely present in the ancestral Jewish population from the Levant that dispersed throughout the Old World about two thousand years ago.”
According to a major study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, there is a strong scientific consensus to “support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.”60
The evidence on maternal lineage is more complex and suggests a good deal of intermarriage between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. This is consistent with the biblical tradition in which Israelite men took foreign wives. It also suggests that after the Diaspora, some Jewish men may have traveled alone throughout Europe and taken gentile wives from local communities.61 For example, a 2013 study estimates that 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe.62 The evidence also supports the hypothesis that these male pioneers did not simply blend into gentile society but instead established Jewish communities that, once settled, accepted few additional converts.63
The key to the genetic similarities among Jews is endogamy. Jews are not unique in this regard. Many other populations share genetic characteristics, including Finns, American Indians, Icelanders, and certain West African tribes.64 To the extent that a population is isolated and does not intermarry with other groups, it tends to preserve the genetic makeup of its “founders.” What’s remarkable about Jews is that they retained these common genetic markers despite being scattered all over the world.
In sum, the genetic research implies that if I meet another Jew today—even one whose ancestors came to America from a very different place in the Diaspora—our common roots may go back centuries to the ancient Middle East. In fact, in his book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, Dr. Harry Ostrer claims that the major Jewish groups do share a common Middle Eastern origin. For example, Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews are somewhat similar genetically, even though they were geographically separated many centuries ago.65 As Stanford geneticist Russ Altzman puts it, “The shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City.”66 I must caution, though, that comments like these are easily misunderstood. Altzman is not saying that all Jews are fourth or fifth cousins, merely that the data suggests a distant family relationship similar to that of fourth or fifth cousins.
Geneticists are wary of taking these conclusions too far, even when the evidence is astounding. One of the most attention-grabbing studies of Jewish genetics focused on the Cohanim—those Jews named Cohen, Kahn, or some variant. By oral tradition the Cohanim are descendants of a priestly caste said to be linked by paternal descent from Aaron, the first biblical priest. In ancient times the Cohanim played an important and exclusive role in religious rituals. Membership in the priesthood was hereditary, and strict rules governed who the Cohanim could marry. Since the destruction of the Temple, these “priests” don’t have much of a role to play and enjoy few special privileges, but many people of Cohen lineage are immensely proud of it. (Among Orthodox Jews, Cohanim are still the first called to the reading of the Torah.) There is no written proof of Cohen lineage; Cohen status is passed down orally through the family.
Because the Y chromosome is passed down only to males, the Cohanim seemed tailor-made for study. Could their lineage be traced all the way back to Aaron? Genetic researchers conducted their first study in 1995 with an ingenious strategy for collecting saliva samples: they went to Jerusalem during High Holy Days, set up a table at the Western Wall, waited for Jewish men to finish praying, and persuaded as many as possible to spit into test tubes. The scientists ended up with the DNA of about two hundred Jewish men: half Ashkenazim, half Sephardim, and about a third claiming to be Cohanim. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found to their astonishment that 98.5 percent of the self-described Cohanim had the same genetic marker, no matter where in the world they had come from. The same marker was found in only 3 percent of the Jews who did not identify themselves as Cohanim.67
These findings, which seemed to lend support to the biblical story of Aaron and the priesthood, were first published in Nature and drew wide—at times, hyperbolic—coverage in the mass media. The researchers were promptly inundated with requests from Jewish men who wanted to be tested for proof of priestly lineage.68
For a second study the researchers collected DNA samples from some three hundred Jewish men, about one-third of whom claimed to be Cohanim. Again, the results created quite a stir. The Jews who did not claim to be Cohanim turned out to be genetically diverse, but more than half of those who self-identified as Cohanim shared a cluster of six identical markers. The researchers named this cluster the “Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH).”69
The chance of such a precise match occurring at random was estimated to be less than one in ten thousand.70 Moreover, the researchers were able to estimate the existence of this cluster back to a time during the biblical period.71 Later studies found the CMH marker in less than 10 percent of Jewish men generally. The CMH was also found in some non-Jewish populations, including Iraqi Kurds, Armenians, southern and central Italians, Hungarians, and Palestinian Arabs.72
It is easy to exaggerate what these DNA findings demonstrate. Jon Entine, a journalist whose enthusiasm for population genetics often seems to exceed that of the scientists whose findings he uses, acknowledges that the Cohen studies “cannot definitively prove the existence of a single founding father for the Jewish priesthood, let alone confirm that the marker originated with Aaron.”73 Genetic researchers Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas, who led the Cohanim studies, are even more emphatic about the broader issue: “There is no Jewish haplotype and genetics cannot ‘prove’ whether someone is a Jew.… Nor can genetics decide whether a particular community is or is not Jewish.”74
Because of these discoveries, and the suggestion that many Jews share some genetic markers, is it now appropriate to characterize Jews as a race? I think not. What these discoveries show is that many Jews share a common ancestry or geographic origins.
Nicholas Wade, the New York Times science journalist, expressed his resentment over the use of the term ancestry rather than race to describe genetic findings, asserting that “race is a perfectly good English word.”75 Harvard professor of genetics David Reich strongly disagrees:
But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which is mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.76
The most promising use of “Jewish genetics” lies in the prevention and treatment of so-called Jewish diseases. It is now scientifically accepted that the incidence of certain inherited genetic disorders is much higher among Jews.
The best-known Jewish disease is Tay-Sachs, a fatal neuro-degenerative disorder that typically strikes infants. The disease is caused by a defective gene and is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern. This means that if both parents are carriers, a child has a one-in-four chance of inheriting the disease.
The defective gene is most commonly found among Ashkenazi Jews. According to the Center for Jewish Genetics, approximately one in thirty people in the American Ashkenazi Jewish population is a Tay-Sachs carrier.77
Effective screening for Tay-Sachs carriers was one of the first great successes of genetic testing. It began in 1983 within the Orthodox Jewish community, when a rabbi developed a program called Dor Yeshorim to encourage unmarried couples to engage in confidential genetic testing to determine whether they were “compatible”—that is, whether their offspring would be free of the disease. If the couple were both carriers of the disease, they were informed that they were not compatible and were offered genetic counseling. Today the organization Dor Yeshorim, based in Brooklyn, New York, screens twenty-five thousand young people a year around the world for a range of “Jewish genetic diseases.”78
Thanks to this genetic screening, Tay-Sachs has been virtually eliminated among Jews in North America and Israel. As the New York Times reported in 2003, “The disease is now so rare that most doctors have never seen a case.”79
Tay-Sachs is just one of many Jewish genetic disorders. In fact, the Center for Jewish Genetics claims that one in four Jews is a carrier for one of nineteen disorders.80 None of these conditions appear only in Jews; rather, their incidence among Jews is much more common—from twenty to one hundred times more common—than in the general population.
Genetic defects have also led to greater susceptibility to common diseases such as cancer. Jewish women are twenty times more likely than other women to have the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic mutations, putting them at high risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.81
Science owes these findings to a geneticist named Mary-Claire King, who, with others, carried out the seminal research on BRCA1 and BRCA2 in 1996. King is in a unique position to assess the intersection of genetics and identity. Until she was in college, she believed she was a WASP with Pilgrim roots extending back to the Mayflower. She also believed her mother’s maiden name was Clarice Gates—that’s what her mother had told her. But one Christmas, while home from college, Mary-Claire found on a bookshelf an old dictionary with the name “Clarice Cohen” written on the inside cover, unmistakably in her mother’s handwriting, Mary-Claire carried the book into the kitchen, where her mother was washing dishes, and asked who Clarice Cohen was. An emotional scene unfolded as Clarice, so shaken with fear that she dropped a glass, admitted that her father had originally been named Cohen. As it turned out, Clarice’s mother had been a Gates (and a Mayflower descendant) but had married Louis Cohen, a Jew. Clarice had been raised as a Christian, but her father’s Jewish name had led to threats of Klan violence against the family in the 1920s and to Clarice’s rejection from Ivy League colleges in the thirties due to Jewish quotas. After those and other bruising experiences of anti-Semitism, Clarice as a young adult had legally changed both her and her father’s name to Gates. The trauma was still evident years later as she told her daughter the truth. “You mustn’t ever tell,” she told Mary-Claire. “It’s really not safe.”82
King’s discovery of her mother’s story was life changing, according to journalist Jon Entine. She switched her college focus from statistics to genetics and went on to conduct ground-breaking work in Jewish genetics. She has also worked with Israeli and Palestinian colleagues to explore congenital deafness among Jewish and Arab children. When asked how her research and family history had influenced her own identity, she sounded as confused as anyone else about what to make of the genetic part:83
If somebody asks me, literally, ‘Are you Jewish?’ I say, ‘It depends on what you mean.’ By Jewish law, I am not Jewish. My name, King, is not Jewish. I do not culturally identify as Jewish.… I’ve thought from time to time, if I were not a secular person, would Judaism be closer to my belief set? ‘Probably,’ is the answer. As a geneticist, I think about that question in the same way that I think about the question of race. We define identity culturally and genetically. Most of us define our identity culturally in qualitative ways like language, religion, and nationality. The qualities have boundaries around them. But when we define our ancestry genetically, there are no boundaries, and it’s a lot more complicated.… It makes me wonder. Where do you start with a story of history?84
The notion that Jews have heritable traits and tendencies rooted in physical or biological characteristics has deep historical roots. But can we define being Jewish solely on the basis of bloodlines? The answer is no. Like the matrilineal rule, no other ancestry test or genetic test can map the Jewish community accurately: either type of standard would be both over- and underinclusive.
It’s easy to imagine a racial test based on ancestry. History suggests any number of ways to set racial standards, as has been done for African Americans and Native Americans as well as for Jews.85 But what kind of Jewish ancestry would be required? How many generations back would count? No matter which standard you chose, you’d end up including people like Madeleine Albright, who has the ancestry but not the life history or desire to belong, and you’d exclude converts. Depending on the standard, some descendants of converts might be excluded too.
A test based solely on genetic evidence would have similar drawbacks. Population genetics rests only on correlations. Any test based on DNA sequences might well include some Kurds, Armenians, Italians, and Arabs—that is, people with no Jewish ancestry. It would exclude converts to Judaism. As molecular biologist Robert Pollack succinctly put it, “There are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew.”86
I must say I’m very glad about this. At the beginning of the chapter I noted my strong visceral aversion to the notion of a Jewish race. Having studied the matter, I am even more persuaded that it would be wrong to base being Jewish solely on bloodlines.
Holocaust echoes aside, bloodlines don’t measure the extent to which people identify as Jews or live their lives as Jews. Descent is an element of Jewish identity, but there are more pieces to the puzzle. What is our felt sense of kinship and connection based on? We aren’t born knowing what it means to be Jewish. “The central ideas and actions of a Jew have always had to be taught and learned, never inherited,” says Pollack.87
In the next chapter we’ll explore the complex and ever-changing idea of the Jewish “people,” focusing on ethnic aspects of Jewish identity that must be learned. What does it mean to be part of the Jewish people, and can “peoplehood” help us define who is a Jew?