In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, some of the founders of Zionism (such as Max Nordau) sought to reformulate conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and the "race science" of the time. They believed that this concept would allow them to build a new framework for collective Jewish identity, and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel. Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people who needed to be segregated or expelled, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories,: "If anything, the first decades of Zionism bear out an affinity with some of the more unsavoury 'regenerative' discourses of the late nineteenth century, particularly Social Darwinism, eugenics, nationalism, and colonialism, precisely because Zionism – partly as a project of self-legitimacy – was both a Jewish response to and extension of these very same discourses." to argue that only a Jewish national home could enable the physical regeneration of the Jewish people and a renaissance of pride in their ancient cultural traditions.
The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the Orthodox and liberal establishments, for different reasons, often rejected this idea. Subsequently, Zionist and non-Zionist Jews vigorously debated aspects of this proposition in terms of the merits or otherwise of diaspora life. While Zionism embarked on its project of social engineering in Mandatory Palestine, ethnonationalist politics on the European continent strengthened and, by the 1930s, some German Jews, acting defensively, asserted Jewish collective rights by redefining Jews as a race after Nazism rose to power. The advent of World War II led to the implementation of the Holocaust's policies of genocidal ethnic cleansing, which, by war's end, had utterly discredited race as the lethal product of pseudoscience.
With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the "ingathering of the exiles", and the Law of Return, the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief.: "throughout all of the de-racializing stages of twentieth-century social thought, Jews have continued to invoke blood logic as a way of defining and maintaining group identity...'race' is a significant component not only of scholarly or academic modern Jewish thought, but also of popular or everyday Jewish thought. It is one of the building blocks of contemporary Jewish identity construction, even if there are many who would dispute the applicability of biological or racial categories to Jews." Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in Jewish history and culture.: "To be sure, 'Jewish genetics' is only one of many examples for the search of origins of today's population groups with the help of DNA analysis. Whether it is 'the origin of modern Japanese populations' ... the "genetics of ancient Romans"... or an analysis of the genomes from 'Bronze Age Bulgaria' ... to give only a few examples, ancient forefathers and -mothers are a fascinating topic for scientists as well as for the general public. In the case of "Jewish genetics, however, scientific work can get easily politicized... But rather than dealing with politicians and their use of scientific papers for populistic ends, this essay highlights, delineates, and contextualizes the ongoing debate between various geneticists and social scientists on two main points. One is whether or how narratives impact the work of the researchers. In our case, it is the association of modern Jews as the (biological) descendants of the biblical Hebrews or today's Cohanim as descendants of the biblical priestly caste. As the debate on the Khazars exemplifies, genetic research can be politically loaded. Scientific theories or research results about the origin of Ashkenazi Jews are used for political purposes – but interest in the topic also places the researchers into a context of ideology and identity politics, which is closely linked to real or perceived national interests... The other point is the discussion about the danger that genetic studies on population groups reify race. Neither of these questions applies only to genetic research on Jews, but for Jews they have a special meaning that is rooted in Jewish history and culture." Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an essentialist approach to biology: "The extent to which today's human population genetics are compared to past theories of race varies greatly, and thus the emphasis on an inherent danger of racism. In the Jewish context, the genetic studies on collective Jewish ancestry are mainly criticized as being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative', as essentializing biology, or both" in a similar manner to criticism of the interpretation of archaeological science in the region.: "A second critique of genetics research is one that has been made about archaeological evidence as well. Here too the evidence does not speak for itself: it has to be interpreted; and geneticists do not realize the extent to which their interpretations read into the evidence more than is really there." According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism.: "The biological dimension of Judaism, namely the debate about whether Judaism is 'only' a religion, or Jews are a 'people', a 'nation' or a 'race', has become central to both how Jews were thought of and to the ways in which they thought about themselves during modern times, as modern genetics was expected to both establish the determinants of "Jewishness" and to find out whether particular individuals or groups fit into this category... As has been argued elsewhere (Prainsack 2007; Falk 2006; Kirsh 2003), the interpretation of the data on different Jewish "ethnic" groups and their relatedness to one another as well as to non-Jewish neighbouring/hosting populations has always been influenced by political ideologies. While many Zionists favour a view of Jews as a distinct, non-European "ethnicity" which has remained relatively homogenous throughout history (see, for example, Cochran et al. 2006), during the 1950s and early 1960s Israeli geneticists found many genetic differences between the diverse Jewish groups gathering in Israel. Yet Kirsh (2003) argues that an unconscious internalisation of Zionist ideology by the Israeli geneticists of the time led them to emphasise points of similarity rather than points of difference between the studied groups, thereby in turn reinforcing Zionist convictions." Falk wrote that every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity.: "In every generation there are still Zionists as well as non-Zionists who are not satisfied with the mental and social notions which bind Jews together, and who seek to find the link between the national and the biological aspects of being Jews." Footnote: An interesting aspect is that of orthodox-religious circles that seek support of the "biological" argument for the Jewishness (or for membership in the Ten Lost Tribes) of tribes and congregations all over the world. Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail, the founder of the "Amishav" (Hebrew for "My People Return") organization and the author of the book Israel's Tribes, followed on his journeys "the footprints of forgotten Jewish communities, who lost their contact with the Jewish world... at the same time he also located tribes that have no biological relationship to the people of Israel but who want very much to join them" (Yair Sheleg, "All want to be Jewish", Haaretz, 17 September 1999, p. 27). In recent years, Rabbi Avichail "discovered" the tribe of Menasheh among the Koki, Mizo and Chin in the Manipur mountains at the border between India and Burma. In a TV program on "the search after the lost tribes", Hillel Halkin, a demographer of cultures, claimed that whereas the Jews of Ethiopia converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages and are not of ancient Jewish stock, the Koki, Mizo and Chin people are direct progeny of the Biblical tribe of Menasheh".
Literature review Though the question is undecided, some trace the start of a biological interpretation of Jewish origins back as far as the Spanish Inquisition. A tradition of thought and ethnography premised on a hierarchy of racial distinctions, though in retrospect known to be a pseudoscience, was deeply entrenched, indeed ubiquitous, among Western scholars by the early twentieth century. It saturated thinking in medicine and anthropology, but assumed particular prominence in the Germanic sphere as opposed to England where, John Efron writes, "Jews as Jews simply failed to arouse British scientific curiosity". As participants in modernity, Jewish thinkers and scientists formed an integral part of the scientific world underwriting these theories. The Nazi Holocaust totally discredited concepts of race and, from 1945 onwards, considerable efforts were made to disabuse the world of the prejudicial notion that Jews constituted a race. At the same time, the broader thrust and impact of this discredited world-view long remained insufficiently analysed.
Ethnic origins have figured as an indispensable basis for determining what groups belong to the Jewish collective. Admixture by conversion tended to be underplayed in traditional Jewish historiography in contrast to speculations about descendant communities from the biblical Ten Lost Tribes who in theory would belong to the Jewish "blood community". When Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) propounded the thesis that the origins of the Ashkenazi might be found in the dispersion of the Turkic Khazars, the book encountered a mixed reception within the Jewish American community, which was increasingly adopting Zionism narratives during this time period, and a hostile reception from American Zionists, who condemned the work as "a product of Jewish self-hatred". Though the book's genetic implications are not regarded as tenable, this severity of critical dismissal, according to Elise Burton, reflected an inability or unwillingness to take cognisance of a tradition of a racializing logic in Zionist discussions of a putative Jewish biology. Though as early as 1967 George Mosse had alluded to the striking similarities between Zionist discourse on race and those made by their völkisch German ethnonationalist antagonists, the academic mainstream tended to treat it as a taboo.