The New Republic has published a review of the book The Invention of the Jewish People. There is a genetic aspect to the story:
But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand's book are those in which he displays an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of Tel Aviv University, Karl Skorecki of the Haifa Technion, and Doron Behar of the Rappaport Institute, for "internalizing the Zionist myth" and "seeking at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity" in order to create a "new discipline" designed to confirm "the Zionist idea of the Jewish nation-race." Having myself worked for many years on a research project with Skorecki and Behar, I can testify that this impugning of their scientific integrity is libelous.
The irony is that the genetic studies that Sand dismisses lend him a measure of support. Overall, they show that while there is a high Y-chromosome correlation with an eastern Mediterranean profile among Jewish men from most parts of the world, indicating that many of them do have common Palestinian ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA correlation of Jewish women is much lower. Or, in less technical terms: while male gentiles have on the average entered Diaspora Jewish communities in only small percentages per generation over time, female gentiles --presumably because they were local inhabitants taken for wives by Jewish men in places like Yemen or North Africa--have done so more significantly.
I've had a few people ask me about Shlomo Sand's work of scholarship. Like many interpretations of history a little bit of shading can go a long way, and even without genetic science Sand's assertions seem highly tendentious without some extremely flexible semantic gymnastics (i.e., how one defines nation and people can probably be twisted sufficiently so as to allow one to not dismiss Sand's thesis on prima facie grounds).
But it is interesting to see how people interpret the findings of natural science. My previous posts on Ashkenazi Jewish genetics have been used as evidence by both those wishing to assert that Jews are white and non-white for either anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic reasons.
Just as terms such as "nation" are not always clear and distinct, the implications from statistical sciences whose categories only roughly correspond to social ones can be fuzzy. The filter with which we view the world can quickly generate a wide range of conclusions from the same exact data. Through the glass darkly indeed....
Note: As one of the world's many who are outside of the two sets of those who consider themselves Zionist and anti-Zionist, the political implications are of academic interest only.
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What a lot of effort to expend in pursuit of self-respect through attempts to convince others of one's connection to an arbitrary subset of ancestors...
Me, I am a mutt, a member of the human race, enough said. I place far more value on my own personal achievements and on my relatedness to every member of humanity, warts and all.
My admittedly limited understanding of human history includes many tragic chronicles of needless alienation on this basis -- am I the only one who finds "neener neener" tribalism rather boring, now that we're all living in 2010?
David Bernstein suggested Sand is just taking the communist line.
melior:
"What a lot of effort to expend in pursuit of self-respect through attempts to convince others of one's connection to an arbitrary subset of ancestors..."
... or maybe it's a whole lot of effort in finding out how human populations have interacted and evolved over time, and how that interaction relates to the historic record. Of course you may not be interested in such things, in which case I suspect you're reading the wrong blog.
Don't you love it when Jews argue with Jews over Jews.
I don't care for Skorecki or Behan or Hammer or any other person who uses science to pursue their agenda. The agenda is that Jews, the Ashkenazim of course, forget the Indian, Ethiopian, Yemeni, Georgian, Chinese or any other heinz variety Jew,are the direct descendants of Israelites, Hebrews, those Bible folk, Judaeans. That is of course totally unprovable by any method known to science. Cohen Jews have J1e. Wow, I am impressed. So do Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Germans, English, Ethiopians, Arabians, Egyptians, Tunisians...it is a long list. I guess they are all Israelites and descended from Aaron, King of the Priests. Those men using science in that way are just blowing hot air from their rear ends. The Jews, a composite people everywhere, could have easily got their J1e, or their E1b1b or J2 or mtDNA K or any other haplogroups from Italians or the people who whom they have sojourned. It is a religion, the humans who follow it are not saints and like most people are tempted by the pleasures of the flesh. Of course they intermarried right from the beginning, mostly with non Jewish women but the women took on non Jewish men quite readily also. Why have a matrilinear form of bestowing Jewishness? I have seen lots of genetic studies. It is hard to separate non Jewish Mediterranean people from Jewish people based on SNPs. Italians and other Europeans regularly cluster with Middle Easterners. Frankly I think that all those European who end up clustering with Jews would exceed mathematically the possible number of Jewish men needed to seed them.