An Initial Reply to JR's Reply

My TAB co-blogger JR has been kind enough to engage in a thoughtful discussion of the points I raised here in response to his reflections on the prospects for survival of the Jewish people here and here.

In brief, and I trust I do not distort his argument very much, he finds that the survival of the Jews is very much in doubt, and contrasts what he sees as the very poor survival of the Jews to date with what he finds comparatively more successful in the floraison of the Christians in general and of the English in particular. In my reply to his first comparison, I argued that it was inappropriate to contrast the surviving numbers (10 to 15 million) of a small, ancient nation, with the numbers of adherents of a worldwide proselytizing religion.

This difference of opinion appears to be a major stumbling block, for JR, who continues to claim that the "biological success" of the Jews should be measured against the "biological success" of Christendom. He insists on defining Jews as adherents of a religion, and does not accept my definition of the Jews as a nation. He states his objections this way:

Christians are members of a religion and Jews are not? What is Judaism then? Judging by the frequency of blue eyes among Askenazi Jews, Jews often are clearly not geneticaly connected to the Middle East. As far as I am aware, in fact, no member of the Ashkenazim can trace their ancestry to the Middle East. And I gather that it would be a rare Jew who identifies Jews as a race. That would make Jewish pride racist and the number of Jews who would wish to wear that label must be vanishingly small. What makes Jews Jews is their religious heritage, even if most Jews are not these days religious. What irreligious Jews trace back to as the source of their Jewishness is not a place but a forebear who identified himself or herself as a follower of the Jewish religion. So I see no invalidity at all in my comparison between Jews and Christians. Lots of Christians are pretty nominal too. My father never went to church but he would always put himself down on forms as "Church of England".

I would contend, however, that the historical definition of the Jewish people is in fact unique in the world, or nearly unique in the world, and that the notion of "the Jews" transcends several categories. Defining "the Jews" as a nation, however, makes the most sense.

Before undertaking to explain how the Jewish national identity differs from the Christian religious identity, let me pause to examine one of JR's more remarkable assertions. He put it this way:

As far as I am aware, in fact, no member of the Ashkenazim can trace their ancestry to the Middle East.

I must admit that I am astonished at this assertion. I had thought JR far more interested in population genetics than that statement appears to reveal, at least as related to I.Q. And of course the subject of Jewish I.Q. values and Jewish genetics is not exactly esoteric.

In so far as "tracing their ancestry" is concerned, all of the Ashkenazic Jews of course trace their ancestry to the Middle East, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and in the case of the Levites, to Levi, and in the case of the Kohanim, or hereditary priests, to Aaron.

And the population genetic support for that traditional folk-geneaology has certainly been produced in a number of investigations. As noted in the Wikipedia, for example:

A study of haplotypes of the Y chromosome, published in 2000, addressed the paternal origins of Ashkenazi Jews. Hammer et al^[15] found that the Y chromosome of some Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews contained mutations that are also common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population. This suggested that the male ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East. The proportion of male genetic admixture in Ashkenazi Jews amounts to less than 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, with "relatively minor contribution of European Y chromosomes to the Ashkenazim," and a total admixture estimate "very similar to Motulsky's average estimate of 12.5%." This supported the finding that "Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors."

Until recently, geneticists had largely attributed the genesis of most of the world's Jewish populations, including the Ashkenazim of Northern and Central Europe, to a founding act by the males who migrated from the Middle East and "by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism". David Goldstein, now of Duke University, reported in 2002 that the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world did not seem to be Middle Eastern, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. But in some cases the mitochondrial DNA was closely related to that of the host community. But new studies suggest that in addition to the male founders, significant female founder ancestry may also derive from the Middle East.^[16]

Recent research indicates that a significant portion of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is also likely of Middle Eastern origin. A 2006 study by Behar et al^[1], based on haplotype analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), suggested that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women, or "founder lineages", that were "likely from a Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool" originating in the Near East in the first and second centuries CE. According to the authors, "the observed global pattern of distribution renders very unlikely the possibility that the four aforementioned founder lineages entered the Ashkenazi mtDNA pool via gene flow from a European host population."

In addition, Behar et al have suggested that the rest of Ashkenazi mtDNA is originated from ~150 women, most of those were probably of Middle Eastern origin.

Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only four women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium.^[1][17]

More, different studies have suggested that some high frequency disease alleles in the Ashkenazi population originated before the separation of Jewish communities in the Near East.^[18]

For the purposes of this general discussion, I hope that the Wikipedia's quick summary will suffice to demonstrate that JR has been overly confident in his assertion of the absence of genealogical or genetic evidence linking today's Jews to their Biblical ancestors.

But of course he is right that genetics and lineage are not the sole defining features of Jewish identity. The Prophets of the Bible themselves were not shy about reminding the Jews of their times, that the Jewish people were not an autochthonous lineage, but an amalgam of different ancestries, and the Bible is quite evidently clear that Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, was a citizen of Ur in Chaldea. That is to say, the origins of Jewish nationality and cultural identity come out of the historical experience of a unique individual who had been grounded in a previously thriving and fully developed urban civilization.

But at the same time, the Jews define themselves as the descendants of Abraham, and in that sense do define themselves as a biological, genetically linked community, if not a "race" in the modern, scientific sense, then perhaps a "breed" or a "strain." Proselytes, incidentally, are given the patronymic "son of Abraham" or "daughter of Abraham," and ultra-orthodox Jewish authorities accept that cognomen as more than symbolic, and revere sincere proselytes as having a direct connection to Abraham that is many hundreds of generations removed for the majority of Jews today.

The Jews are indeed not a race in the modern scientific sense of the term. But they are not merely adherents of a religion in the same way that Christians are adherents of Christianity. In fact, many orthodox Jewish thinkers would deny that there is such a religion as Judaism at all, and would argue that the Jewish way of life is not a religion in the same way that Christianity and Islam are religions. The Bible of course never refers to the Jews as adherents of a religion, but to the Jewish people and the Jewish nation, the same categories that are used for the "seventy nations" of the world.

In contrast to Pauline Christianity and to Islam, he Jews have not sought the conversion of the entire world. To be sure, the Prophets did envision a messianic era in which all nations would worship and acknowledge God, but they did not foresee that those nations would become Jews; rather they would worship God according to their own traditions.

JR is right in noting that worship of God is an integral part of Jewish nationhood. That is not a surprising phenomenon. In the ancient world, each city-state had its own God and its own ritual or religious exercises, in which it was assumed that all citizens of the city-state would participate. The Jews were no different from the other peoples of the Middle East, each of which was guided and protected by its tutelary deity. Many of these city-states recorded revelations from their deities, and understood themselves to be following the rules laid down by their deities. Where there is a difference, is that the Jews recognized that the God they worshiped was the Creator of all, the One true God of the universe.

And in the West, the recognition by Christians and Muslims that the Jews do indeed worship the Creator of the universe, Whom they also worship, and that the Creator vouchsafed a particular (and peculiar) relationship to the Jewish people, is precisely what contributes so importantly to the unique role of the Jews in Western history, with all of the glory and suffering that role has entailed.

I will comment on JR's contrast between the Jews and the English in another post.