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?
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)
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?
First, an old Soviet joke:<p>-Isaac, we need to get outta here fast, they're beating up the Jews over here<p>-But in my passport, the nationality is listed as "Russian"!<p>-Isaac, you don't get it. They aren't gonna beat up your passport, they're gonna beat up your face!<p>--------------<p>The question of what it means to be Jewish is complex: it's a mixture of ethnicity (<i>nationality</i> in Soviet passports, which confused people for a long time), religion, and culture.<p>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.<p>To that extent, I use the following <i>reductio ad Hitlerum</i> test of whether someone should be considered Jewish: <i>Would the Nazis have rounded that person up for being a Jew?</i>.<p>That makes a lot of these questions simple.<p>Follows Judaism? A Jew.<p>Jewish mother? Clearly.<p>Jewish father? Still a Jew.<p>Self-identifies as a Jew? Clearly a Jew.<p>Looks very Jewish? Better be safe than sorry, a Jew again.<p>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.<p>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).<p>No prophet in his hometown, I guess.
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.
The crux for me was this paragraph:<p>“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’.”<p>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.