The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn’t doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it’s a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in “the homeland”.
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it’s unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it’s always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn’t established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn’t work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There’s a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
I generally don’t think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it’s basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.
Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.
The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.
The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(
Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…
Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.
Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)
well there’s two types of northern European Jews: Ashkenazi and Russian. I say this because Israel’s statistics counted them separately
the Ashkenazi ones definitely have some influence from the Middle East, although they’re extremely mixed with Northern European, to the point they cluster with croatians/serbs rather than actual Mizrahi Jews
the Russian ones idk, it doesn’t seem farfetched that they could be descended from the Khazars
Majority (huge majority i think) of Russian Jews were the same Ashkenazi that were running from pogroms in Germany, they ended up all over Poland, Lithuania, Russia, etc, but there were multitude of other, non- Ashkenazi Jewish groups in Russia too - abovementioned Krymchaks and Karaites plus Sephardi, Romaniotes (Jews from Greece), Juhuro (Jews from Caucasus), Georgian Jews, Bukharan Jews, Armenian Jews etc, so even just looking at sheer diversity of those people cultures and languages the Khazar hypothesis immediately fails.
After so much pogroms and hatred towards them it’s natural for jews to have so much fixation over Israel. I think Tsar also did major pogroms against Jews isn’t? That’s why USSR had great sympathy for their project during 1945-48.
Sure holocaust and creation of Israel did have huge impact on zionism popularity among Jews, but zionism itself is much older movement.
In fact, Russia is place where zionists were multiple time revealed as what they are, bolsheviks and Soviets tried to accomodate and cooperate with them for decades but they always moved their goalposts and wrecked the movement.
Krymchak and Karaites lived in Crimea, that’s why they are prime candidates for real Khazar descendants. Juhuro, no, they were living in Caucasus even before Khazar came. I didn’t mean no Jews are descendants of Khazar, but the theory that ALL of Jews in Russia (or even all Ashkenazi) being descended from Khazar is blatantly ridiculous and don’t hold to even most lax scrutiny.
I just want to know a bit, jews are called children of Israel so Askenazi Jews are those who fled Israel after 70 AD after the 2nd temple destruction by romans? Or they existed before the 2nd temple period and so the period before existence of Torah?
That’s somewhat right, but it was gradual and did not happened in the next few centuries. Jewish diaspora existed even before 70AD, though indeed refugees fleeing from the Roman massacres speed up things. Most of Jews in diaspora lived in the Mediterranean shores, notably Egypt, but also in Italia, Iberia, Narbonensis, Greece, Dalmatia etc. where their presence is confirmed in I-II century already. Ashkenazi are decendant of those diaspora Jews that moved north together with romanisation (for example their first main community in Germany was in Cologne) and organising of states on that areas. Next was a period of opression in the kingdoms of Visigoths and Merovingian France where Jews were forced to convert or exiled, but after Charlemagne build his empire he gave Jews the merchant and financial privileges which stabilised their situation and allowed to develop into the medieval Ashkenazi in the next few centuries.
Judaism and Jews are a fascinating case, I always thought jews are a particular race which had a common origin in the middle East or ancient cannan. It’s also amazing that Jews also lived in Arabia during Muhammed’s period. But they got converted or exiled too.
Iirc there were also many judaistic Arabs in the time of Muhammad and before (even entire kingdoms, most notable of which was the Himyar kingdom in Yemen) and of course even after.
Yeah I don’t know how much it is true but it’s has been noticed that houthi movement has killed jews and exiled them. They were indigenous to Yemen and Arabs
Can you elaborate on you second bullet point a little? I’ve definitely not surveyed all academia on the Khazars but almost all criticism of the hypothesis I’ve been able to find is straight up hasbara talking points that simply treats the idea as a heresy without actually engaging in any sort of objective evidence based response. They even call it the Khazar Heresy even though the Jewish religion is indifferent to the “genetic” origins of Jewish groups across the world. The heresy is a heresy against the Zionist religion in that formulation. And from proponents of the Khazar idea, while I’ve seen them use it, in part, as a cudgel against the idea of a Jewish nation emerging from a specific gene pool in the Levant, arguing that this is actually a concession to Zionism seems like accepting Zionist bad-faith counter-framing (which is done by Zionists in bad faith).
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
I see what you mean. Most of my exposure to the hypothesis (other than the aforementioned Zionist tropes) is from Cold War era non-Zionist Jewish sources, and they really didn’t deal too much with the Yiddish thing. I believe the idea of the constant movement of peoples, in those tellings, explained why they ended up north and west of Khazar land for the same reason the Magyars and others ended ups in similar places. The main up-shot of those sources, at least in my reading, kind of goes to your final point, but in a different way. The idea being that the peoples in the Steppe were always a fluid amalgam of people and there were home-grown Jewish influences there that became a cultural seed that developed in groups in the area that sought to neither ally with the Christian world to the west and what was developing into the Persian/other empires and Muslim world to the east. So that reading of it goes that essentially no one has mythic ancestors in any one place because the version of history during any time period where one would posit a homogenous genetic group stayed “pure” from others is, at least with respect to Eurasian and African history, false. As those writers point out from the genetic (albeit, genetics as they existed a few decades ago) perspective, Jews generally are more genetically similar to the populations they live with than Jews from disparate places have genetic commonality with each other. I definitely agree none of this matters with respect to the current genocide of the Palestinians, but the modern politics overshadow the almost mundane aspect that I am more curious about regarding the movement and interactions of peoples from Eastern Europe to Central Asia prior to and after the Rus came into the picture.
Your point about ‘most generalized’ is unfortunately not accurate. Perhaps in the past, there were for example major issues with the reference human genome which overrepresented people from western eurasia, and only have a handful of ethnic groups from Africa (recall, any two random people chosen from Africa will be more genetically distinct than any two other humans; Papua New Guinea might be an exception and other parts of Micronesia; at least to the best of my knowledge). Since for example there were many people from Amerika also sequenced, it only added to the bias towards western eurasians.
The current reference human genome is very very much improved over the initial attempts. Not perfect of course, however more specific databases and other references which are specific to other regions/groups/etc (really whatever grouping of genomes may be of interest), one which is not really related to ethnicity is the neanderthal genome, the Human Pangenome Reference tries to take care of the issues with any kind of bias by having a collection of genomes. There’s also the African Variation Reference Genome.
What does this mean? The resolution is increasing, note earlier that if only western eurasians and certain ethnic groups from Africa, like Mbuti, Yoruba, etc. if one was not of that population, say a Nuxalk Nation individual, enough would be different that it would be hard to say maybe if they were closer to western eurasian population A or B. Which says nothing of how they relate to the people living in close proximity, say Inuit to the northish and Anishinaabe to the east.
That isn’t the case now. There are single point mutations, groupings of a few bits of DNA, haplotypes (seminal paper here), which one can look at and say with confidence, “This genome belongs to a person who is very likely from this geographic region.” This doesn’t mean people don’t have variation, only, the genome is conserved, i.e. it doesn’t change all that much especially in some areas of the genome which are like super important. Such as the genes related to DNA Replication, making tRNA; stuff where if it wasn’t there the cell couldn’t grow and replicate at a high enough rate for the organism to be viable.
You can imagine there can be a test, like a pH strip, which only checks for one of several characteristic haplotypes or combinations of haplotypes if additional resolution is needed, and the result would be quite accurate. Enough to discriminate at least. Enough to arrest and test more thoroughly, which is only getting cheaper by the day.
You need to accept that this stuff is getting better, and outside of medical use, mapping migratory paths, etc. there need not be any application in a way which is discriminatory. Denying the effectiveness is denying scientific progress, maybe not now, but at least in the future. If we are to be dialectical materialists then it must be considered that a compound with a given causal history may have the ability to inform those who study it of its history, and, that ability will change over time. The incoming nefarious uses can only be countered if they are accurately anticipated. Humans exist and have existed in a specific physical space at specific times, like layers of sediment or the wear on a rockface, it can be analyzed and information of interest can be determined with great accuracy.
Look at this database, this population, Ecuador Cayapa has a 45.8% chance of having the haplotype DPA101:03-DPB104:02. You might say, “The sample size is only 183” and you would be right. What you aren’t including, is the hundreds of thousands sampled (this is only for high quality data which meets the needs of this database, there is much much more; typically the data needs to be de-identified and meet a laundry list of requirements to even be collected, let alone shared) which represent thousands of different populations spread out across the globe. And, though the haplotype I gave had ‘only’ ad 45.8% chance, and if you check it out other populations have it too, you’ll notice on the page there are three haplotypes which have a very high frequency. That makes it very precise. Here is the associated global map, there aren’t very many places where you would find an individual with the given haplotype.
This doesn’t include all the haplotypes which this population likely or very likely does not have. With that it’s rather trivial to determine where an individual is likely from, than to infer the migratory pathways and history.
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to convey that I knew a bit about what I was talking about. Not too much, others who do this for a living or have advanced degrees would know much more.
For some good news, look at this database which has data on which haplotypes are associated with adverse drug reactions.
A note on variation. There is a genome, some areas vary a lot, some don’t as much. There are other 'omes. Omics captures the entirety of the field of this kind of computational biology. Transcriptome is more or less a time-series analysis of the level of RNA transcript of interest at given points in time. Epigenome is the epigenetic stuff, so like, there are molecules/complexes, the usual example is a methylated site. A methyl group is attached at some point along the genome and it changes how a gene is exposed. That changes how often it gets transcribed, how often a gene is expressed. You can’t necessarily look at the genome to determine which sites are methylated. I don’t remember the inheritance, it was sorta complicated and it’s been a while. mtDNA, or mitochondrial DNA can also vary, there are some diseases which lead to a non-viable fetus or a baby which will not survive past a certain age because their body doesn’t like produce enough energy needed.
The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.
The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel’s conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.
The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it’s challenging to tell the difference between “the diaspora started here” vs. “the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued”. From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it’s also difficult to disentangle from scientists’ biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it’s worth.
I made a response above, it is complex, and not that complex if enough subjects and enough data is attained. The more time goes on the more trivial it becomes.
The genetic component need not be the determiner for whether people of a faith, a culture, are discriminated against. Period. One need not react negatively to scientific claims, a good measure is, what if this limitation was overcome? What exactly would that change?
As far as I am concerned, with respect to genetics outside of medical use, or few other areas, nothing.
The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn’t doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it’s a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in “the homeland”.
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
Agreed. There’s no reason whatsoever that Assad would take this line. It sounds like Hasbra message manipulation.
Isn’t the Khazar hypothesis debunked long ago?
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it’s unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it’s always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn’t established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn’t work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There’s a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
I generally don’t think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it’s basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.
Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.
The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.
The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(
Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…
Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.
Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)
well there’s two types of northern European Jews: Ashkenazi and Russian. I say this because Israel’s statistics counted them separately
the Ashkenazi ones definitely have some influence from the Middle East, although they’re extremely mixed with Northern European, to the point they cluster with croatians/serbs rather than actual Mizrahi Jews
the Russian ones idk, it doesn’t seem farfetched that they could be descended from the Khazars
Majority (huge majority i think) of Russian Jews were the same Ashkenazi that were running from pogroms in Germany, they ended up all over Poland, Lithuania, Russia, etc, but there were multitude of other, non- Ashkenazi Jewish groups in Russia too - abovementioned Krymchaks and Karaites plus Sephardi, Romaniotes (Jews from Greece), Juhuro (Jews from Caucasus), Georgian Jews, Bukharan Jews, Armenian Jews etc, so even just looking at sheer diversity of those people cultures and languages the Khazar hypothesis immediately fails.
After so much pogroms and hatred towards them it’s natural for jews to have so much fixation over Israel. I think Tsar also did major pogroms against Jews isn’t? That’s why USSR had great sympathy for their project during 1945-48.
Sure holocaust and creation of Israel did have huge impact on zionism popularity among Jews, but zionism itself is much older movement.
In fact, Russia is place where zionists were multiple time revealed as what they are, bolsheviks and Soviets tried to accomodate and cooperate with them for decades but they always moved their goalposts and wrecked the movement.
But aren’t Krymchak and Karaite Jews, and maybe even Juhuro associated with the general area of the Khazar empire? (aka south Russia)
Krymchak and Karaites lived in Crimea, that’s why they are prime candidates for real Khazar descendants. Juhuro, no, they were living in Caucasus even before Khazar came. I didn’t mean no Jews are descendants of Khazar, but the theory that ALL of Jews in Russia (or even all Ashkenazi) being descended from Khazar is blatantly ridiculous and don’t hold to even most lax scrutiny.
I just want to know a bit, jews are called children of Israel so Askenazi Jews are those who fled Israel after 70 AD after the 2nd temple destruction by romans? Or they existed before the 2nd temple period and so the period before existence of Torah?
That’s somewhat right, but it was gradual and did not happened in the next few centuries. Jewish diaspora existed even before 70AD, though indeed refugees fleeing from the Roman massacres speed up things. Most of Jews in diaspora lived in the Mediterranean shores, notably Egypt, but also in Italia, Iberia, Narbonensis, Greece, Dalmatia etc. where their presence is confirmed in I-II century already. Ashkenazi are decendant of those diaspora Jews that moved north together with romanisation (for example their first main community in Germany was in Cologne) and organising of states on that areas. Next was a period of opression in the kingdoms of Visigoths and Merovingian France where Jews were forced to convert or exiled, but after Charlemagne build his empire he gave Jews the merchant and financial privileges which stabilised their situation and allowed to develop into the medieval Ashkenazi in the next few centuries.
Judaism and Jews are a fascinating case, I always thought jews are a particular race which had a common origin in the middle East or ancient cannan. It’s also amazing that Jews also lived in Arabia during Muhammed’s period. But they got converted or exiled too.
Iirc there were also many judaistic Arabs in the time of Muhammad and before (even entire kingdoms, most notable of which was the Himyar kingdom in Yemen) and of course even after.
Yeah I don’t know how much it is true but it’s has been noticed that houthi movement has killed jews and exiled them. They were indigenous to Yemen and Arabs
By any chance do you have any spource for thus I have not heard it before?
Can you elaborate on you second bullet point a little? I’ve definitely not surveyed all academia on the Khazars but almost all criticism of the hypothesis I’ve been able to find is straight up hasbara talking points that simply treats the idea as a heresy without actually engaging in any sort of objective evidence based response. They even call it the Khazar Heresy even though the Jewish religion is indifferent to the “genetic” origins of Jewish groups across the world. The heresy is a heresy against the Zionist religion in that formulation. And from proponents of the Khazar idea, while I’ve seen them use it, in part, as a cudgel against the idea of a Jewish nation emerging from a specific gene pool in the Levant, arguing that this is actually a concession to Zionism seems like accepting Zionist bad-faith counter-framing (which is done by Zionists in bad faith).
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
I see what you mean. Most of my exposure to the hypothesis (other than the aforementioned Zionist tropes) is from Cold War era non-Zionist Jewish sources, and they really didn’t deal too much with the Yiddish thing. I believe the idea of the constant movement of peoples, in those tellings, explained why they ended up north and west of Khazar land for the same reason the Magyars and others ended ups in similar places. The main up-shot of those sources, at least in my reading, kind of goes to your final point, but in a different way. The idea being that the peoples in the Steppe were always a fluid amalgam of people and there were home-grown Jewish influences there that became a cultural seed that developed in groups in the area that sought to neither ally with the Christian world to the west and what was developing into the Persian/other empires and Muslim world to the east. So that reading of it goes that essentially no one has mythic ancestors in any one place because the version of history during any time period where one would posit a homogenous genetic group stayed “pure” from others is, at least with respect to Eurasian and African history, false. As those writers point out from the genetic (albeit, genetics as they existed a few decades ago) perspective, Jews generally are more genetically similar to the populations they live with than Jews from disparate places have genetic commonality with each other. I definitely agree none of this matters with respect to the current genocide of the Palestinians, but the modern politics overshadow the almost mundane aspect that I am more curious about regarding the movement and interactions of peoples from Eastern Europe to Central Asia prior to and after the Rus came into the picture.
I completely agree with genetics being useless.
Your point about ‘most generalized’ is unfortunately not accurate. Perhaps in the past, there were for example major issues with the reference human genome which overrepresented people from western eurasia, and only have a handful of ethnic groups from Africa (recall, any two random people chosen from Africa will be more genetically distinct than any two other humans; Papua New Guinea might be an exception and other parts of Micronesia; at least to the best of my knowledge). Since for example there were many people from Amerika also sequenced, it only added to the bias towards western eurasians.
The current reference human genome is very very much improved over the initial attempts. Not perfect of course, however more specific databases and other references which are specific to other regions/groups/etc (really whatever grouping of genomes may be of interest), one which is not really related to ethnicity is the neanderthal genome, the Human Pangenome Reference tries to take care of the issues with any kind of bias by having a collection of genomes. There’s also the African Variation Reference Genome.
What does this mean? The resolution is increasing, note earlier that if only western eurasians and certain ethnic groups from Africa, like Mbuti, Yoruba, etc. if one was not of that population, say a Nuxalk Nation individual, enough would be different that it would be hard to say maybe if they were closer to western eurasian population A or B. Which says nothing of how they relate to the people living in close proximity, say Inuit to the northish and Anishinaabe to the east.
That isn’t the case now. There are single point mutations, groupings of a few bits of DNA, haplotypes (seminal paper here), which one can look at and say with confidence, “This genome belongs to a person who is very likely from this geographic region.” This doesn’t mean people don’t have variation, only, the genome is conserved, i.e. it doesn’t change all that much especially in some areas of the genome which are like super important. Such as the genes related to DNA Replication, making tRNA; stuff where if it wasn’t there the cell couldn’t grow and replicate at a high enough rate for the organism to be viable.
You can imagine there can be a test, like a pH strip, which only checks for one of several characteristic haplotypes or combinations of haplotypes if additional resolution is needed, and the result would be quite accurate. Enough to discriminate at least. Enough to arrest and test more thoroughly, which is only getting cheaper by the day.
You need to accept that this stuff is getting better, and outside of medical use, mapping migratory paths, etc. there need not be any application in a way which is discriminatory. Denying the effectiveness is denying scientific progress, maybe not now, but at least in the future. If we are to be dialectical materialists then it must be considered that a compound with a given causal history may have the ability to inform those who study it of its history, and, that ability will change over time. The incoming nefarious uses can only be countered if they are accurately anticipated. Humans exist and have existed in a specific physical space at specific times, like layers of sediment or the wear on a rockface, it can be analyzed and information of interest can be determined with great accuracy.
Look at this database, this population, Ecuador Cayapa has a 45.8% chance of having the haplotype DPA101:03-DPB104:02. You might say, “The sample size is only 183” and you would be right. What you aren’t including, is the hundreds of thousands sampled (this is only for high quality data which meets the needs of this database, there is much much more; typically the data needs to be de-identified and meet a laundry list of requirements to even be collected, let alone shared) which represent thousands of different populations spread out across the globe. And, though the haplotype I gave had ‘only’ ad 45.8% chance, and if you check it out other populations have it too, you’ll notice on the page there are three haplotypes which have a very high frequency. That makes it very precise. Here is the associated global map, there aren’t very many places where you would find an individual with the given haplotype.
This doesn’t include all the haplotypes which this population likely or very likely does not have. With that it’s rather trivial to determine where an individual is likely from, than to infer the migratory pathways and history.
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to convey that I knew a bit about what I was talking about. Not too much, others who do this for a living or have advanced degrees would know much more.
For some good news, look at this database which has data on which haplotypes are associated with adverse drug reactions.
A note on variation. There is a genome, some areas vary a lot, some don’t as much. There are other 'omes. Omics captures the entirety of the field of this kind of computational biology. Transcriptome is more or less a time-series analysis of the level of RNA transcript of interest at given points in time. Epigenome is the epigenetic stuff, so like, there are molecules/complexes, the usual example is a methylated site. A methyl group is attached at some point along the genome and it changes how a gene is exposed. That changes how often it gets transcribed, how often a gene is expressed. You can’t necessarily look at the genome to determine which sites are methylated. I don’t remember the inheritance, it was sorta complicated and it’s been a while. mtDNA, or mitochondrial DNA can also vary, there are some diseases which lead to a non-viable fetus or a baby which will not survive past a certain age because their body doesn’t like produce enough energy needed.
The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.
The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel’s conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.
The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it’s challenging to tell the difference between “the diaspora started here” vs. “the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued”. From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it’s also difficult to disentangle from scientists’ biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it’s worth.
I made a response above, it is complex, and not that complex if enough subjects and enough data is attained. The more time goes on the more trivial it becomes.
The genetic component need not be the determiner for whether people of a faith, a culture, are discriminated against. Period. One need not react negatively to scientific claims, a good measure is, what if this limitation was overcome? What exactly would that change?
As far as I am concerned, with respect to genetics outside of medical use, or few other areas, nothing.