
What does it mean to be genetically Jewish? - jajag
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/12/what-does-it-mean-to-be-genetically-jewish
======
jajag
Why on earth has this submission been flagged? It's a thoughtful article, by a
Jew, of the rights and wrongs of using genetic testing, in Israel, to define
Jewishness, and raises a number of interesting questions. What is there to
object to?

------
gajajg
As a sepharadic jew i wonder what would the test look like, i am guessing the
people from the south were less secular (a lot of our last names are
arabic/spanish or portuguese)

------
saagarjha
Perhaps I’m not understanding this correctly, but why does genetics matter
(I’m not Jewish, so I have very little knowledge of how this works)? Is it not
enough for someone to call themselves Jewish to “be” Jewish? Are there some
sort of religious or legal consequences to doing so?

~~~
romwell
You are correct in your questions. It _should_ be enough, and there _should
not_ be legal consequences.

The problem is that Israel is a very peculiar theocracy, and one kind of
prejudiced against large segments of its population.

There _are_ legal consequences of being "officially" Jewish in Israel (just
like there were consequences of being officially Jewish in the USSR).

For one, "official" Jews are entitled to Israeli citizenship.

Then, the marriage in Israel is a can of worms of its own, as there is _only_
religious marriage. See the article.

Your Jewishness (or lack thereof) dictates where you will be buried, too.

That should be enough to get you started.

------
romwell
First, an old Soviet joke:

-Isaac, we need to get outta here fast, they're beating up the Jews over here

-But in my passport, the nationality is listed as "Russian"!

-Isaac, you don't get it. They aren't gonna beat up your passport, they're gonna beat up your face!

\--------------

The question of what it means to be Jewish is complex: it's a mixture of
ethnicity ( _nationality_ in Soviet passports, which confused people for a
long time), religion, and culture.

For the most part it's easy, though. I joked with a friend of mine: we don't
need to remember being Jewish, others will remember it for us.

To that extent, I use the following _reductio ad Hitlerum_ test of whether
someone should be considered Jewish: _Would the Nazis have rounded that person
up for being a Jew?_.

That makes a lot of these questions simple.

Follows Judaism? A Jew.

Jewish mother? Clearly.

Jewish father? Still a Jew.

Self-identifies as a Jew? Clearly a Jew.

Looks very Jewish? Better be safe than sorry, a Jew again.

So what these Israelis are doing is ridiculous. Someone would be accepted as a
Jew in the eyes of anti-semites, but be denied being Jewish at home.

It is very sad that Israelis are using DNA testing to do this ridiculous
gatekeeping -- and at that, against the part of the population that has done
so much for that country (there would be no Israel without Jews from the
Russian Empire and USSR to begin with, as simple as that).

No prophet in his hometown, I guess.

------
RickJWagner
The history of Jews and Christianity is also a fascinating study. It's not
appropriate to go into religious issues here, but to anyone with an interest
in theology, please consider giving it a look.

------
nudq
It means you're a Jew. It's the chosen _people_ , not the chosen random punk
who "identifies" as a Jew.

------
laichzeit0
The crux for me was this paragraph:

“I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be
misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it
is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among
‘races’.”

There really shouldn't be a debate that there are genetic differences amongst
'races'. It shouldn't be something that is "taboo" to discuss or talk about,
since it is a factually correct statement to make.

~~~
foldr
There's no rigorous scientific definition of "race", so there can't really be
scientific facts about genetic differences between races.

Some "racial" groups happen to have a higher incidence of particular genes.
But when you look at specific examples, it's absurd to connect this to any
kind of racial theory. For example, Latinos apparently have a higher incidence
of Alzheimers than the general US population, and this could possibly have
some generic component
([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874398/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874398/)).
But no-one would suggest that "Latino" is a bona fide racial category.

~~~
vcavallo
how about “a phenotypically and statistically relevant portion of one’s DNA
can be traced back to X region over the range of Y years ago”?

nobody is saying anything about “racial theory” in society at large. more so
that certain particular phenotypes are strongly correlated together - like
your example about Alzheimer’s.

~~~
foldr
I don't really see what you're getting out. Yes, there are correlations
between genes and other things. So what?

~~~
vcavallo
there's not much of a "so what" aside from the fact that that's true and
people have typically labelled some of those clumpy groupings, "races". it may
be haphazard, socially problematic and not extremely useful, but those
correlations and average differences between groups are present.

The place where it becomes useless, in my view, and one of many ways in which
it _does not_ ground racism is that differences _within_ these fuzzily-defined
groups is vast.

a poster further up said "There really shouldn't be a debate that there are
genetic differences amongst 'races'" and your comment seemed to, in tone,
disagree while at the same time granting that its true. All I'm getting at is
that this can both be 'true' and 'limited in usefulness' and if you agree then
we're not arguing. ..but I sense that you don't agree and I'd be happy to hear
more about the disagreement.

~~~
foldr
>people have typically labelled some of those clumpy groupings, "races".

Well no, not really. Racial labels aren't determined by DNA.

~~~
vcavallo
What else could it possibly be determined by? Perhaps we're talking about
different definitions of the word "race".

Are you saying that the phenotypic differences between an Inuit and an African
Pygmy
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies#Genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies#Genetics))
are not determined by those individuals' DNA?

~~~
foldr
>What else could it possibly be determined by?

Appearance and cultural characteristics (e.g. language, community, location).
The connection to genetics is very loose. In the USA for example, someone
who's considered "black" might have just as much "white" ancestry as "black"
ancestry.

~~~
vcavallo
we are not talking about the same meaning of “race” then. you’re talking
almost entirely about socio-cultural elements (here. not earlier about
Latinos, you should notice).

see my above comment about Inuits and Pygmies and notice how your tangent here
doesn’t relate to it. of course DNA explains that difference - nothing else
can.

your divergence into culture is a bit disingenuous - especially since you were
talking about Alzheimer’s and Latinos earlier, a disease which has nothing to
do with culture...

~~~
foldr
Erm, the point about Latinos is that they're a group almost entirely defined
by socio-cultural elements. Latinos are not a random sample of the entire
population, so there is no reason to expect them to have the same distribution
of genes as the entire population. But obviously, there is no genetic
criterion for being Latino. There are, e.g. Latinos with white European
ancestry and Latinos with Mayan ancestry. Brazil is a massively diverse
country, and yet pretty much all Brazilians are (by US standards) "Latino".

There is no respectable scientific or genetic definition of "race". Race is a
socio-cultural construct. Naturally, there are rough correlations between
genes and "race" in some instances. Lots of characteristics are roughly
correlated. But by that loose standard, ”sofware engineer" would be a
genetically defined category too.

~~~
vcavallo
you say “obviously” there is no genetic criterion for being Latino... there’s
nothing obvious about that at all. you say here yourself they aren’t a random
sample of the population - then what are they? and whatever it is that ties
these individuals together, I’d wager there’s a genetic history overlapping in
those tying elements. Or else you’d find much more ancestral diversity within
“Latinos” (or “Asians”, or “Blacks” or “Italians”. there’s a reason these
partially-cultural-mostly-ancestral groups _tend_ to have similar ancestry.
tend.)

just one example of the genetic angle of Latino-ness:
[https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/latino-
ancestry/](https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/latino-ancestry/)

if you go far enough back, we’re all african, and if you go far enough
forward, we’re all exactly X% everything after enough gene-mingling. but we’re
not at that X% mix and we’re also not all african. we’re in an in-between
stage where the cultural groups that are typically called “races” in this in-
between moment on average tend to share ancestry and as a result, on average
tend to be genetically similar. why are you making this sound like it’s a wild
claim?

I think of it as similar to taxonomy of species - there’s no line during
evolution where something stops being one species and starts being another.
just like there’s no hard line between races. but a sparrow is clearly not a
giraffe. that’s a useful comment about their genetic differences that may or
may not give you information related to the correlations of those differences.

> “Naturally there are rough correlations between genes and ‘race’ in some
> instances”

you don’t seem comfortable letting this fact lie without caveating the hell
out of it, which makes your position seem ideologically motivated - which
makes me question how much truth you’re willing to accept without obfuscating.

~~~
foldr
A Latino could have entirely white European ancestry or entirely indigenous
ancestry (and those are far from the only possibilities). I think you just
don't know what a Latino is (?) The blog post you link to might help you out
here:

"Latinos — people who trace their ancestry to the ethnically diverse regions
of Latin America."

"So for example, on average, people of Mexico have about 4 percent African
ancestry, while for the average Puerto Rican the percentage is much higher."

Comparing racial differences in humans to species differences is wildly
inaccurate biologically, and a racist trope. I think it's clear who has the
agenda here.

~~~
vcavallo
i think you’re misunderstanding the important parts of the analogy (and as a
result calling me a racist, which is ridiculous). i’m saying all people are on
a continuum of genetic difference and that some groups are clumped together
along the spectrum relative to some phenotypes and other groups are clumped
together elsewhere on the spectrum relative to the same phenotypes - and that
it’s easier to see differences between those groups relative to these
phenotypes (an easier line to draw. say, average hair color between Pygmies
and Swedes) and harder to see differences within those groups relative to the
same phenotypes (harder line to draw. say, average hair color distribution
within Pygmies).

tell me what is racist about that observation. at no point did i claim that
certain of these clumps of phenotypic groupings are correlated with being
stupid or inferior or better or worse (nor would I make that claim).

~~~
foldr
Obviously you can group people according to generic similarity. That could
only be false if there were no generic variation.

The point is that there is no independently motivated means of grouping people
according to their genes that will make, e.g., the racial classifications of
current US society fall out as a result. You will get clumps, but you won't
get one clump corresponding to African Americans, one group corresponding to
Latinos, one group corresponding to Asian Americans, etc. etc.

People who are obsessed with linking these non-genetically-defined
classifications to genes are, almost invariably, racists. What other
motivation could there be?

~~~
vcavallo
off the top of my head i can think of a few non-racist, potentially useful
motivations. here’s a random one: say you’re an EMT responding to a medical
emergency and you have limited time to check for the top few health
emergencies likely in the presented situation. you know that, based on the
“perceived race” of the patient, condition X is more likely given this
ancestry than condition Y. this is the only visible information that would
influence your decision. your time is limited - it’s only rational and
responsible to check for the statistically more likely condition X before you
check for condition Y. does that make this EMT a racist? or “obsessed with
linking [...]”?

in the same way biological sexes might have medical correlations (color
blindness, for instance), the things we’re loosing calling races may also. why
not use this potentially useful information in order to save resources and
improve lives?

i can’t help feel like you’re descending into ad hominem - you’re mostly
agreeing with the facts of what i’m saying, yet claiming that looking at these
facts at all makes one a racist. that’s a non-starter. the facts are the facts
and what you choose to do with them is what potentially makes you a racist;
not merely their acknowledgement.

~~~
foldr
> you’re mostly agreeing with the facts of what i’m saying,

No, not really. For example, you claimed above that "Latino" was a genetically
identifiable subgroup.

As to the motivations you suggest, go back and look at my original comment in
this thread. There's nothing in it that anyone with _those_ motivations would
object to. In fact, that very comment made reference to the medical
significance of differences in the distribution of genes between different
"races".

