Talk:Genetic studies of Jews

Inconsistency?

The lead contains the following line:

Behar and colleagues have remarked on an especially close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians.

But source 8 (Science) shows that it was a separate later study led by Martin Richards that concluded there was such a deep connection, and that Behar was actually less convinced by it. So it seems odd to attribute it to "Behar and colleagues". Prinsgezinde (talk) 08:13, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

"Hypotheses" section

Is this whole section just a refutation of the Khazar hypotheses based on genetics? And if so, does it need to be labelled as such? Or is it even needed here? Genetics and the Khazar theory is its own section on the Khazar hypothesis page. If this is just pure duplication on two separate pages, one of the versions (probably here, if this section is as specific to that page and its subject as it seems) should simply summarize the material and link to the main page on the topic. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:48, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

@Bobfrombrockley: You're reshuffling of this alerted me to this query again, so fyi. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:54, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

I think you might be right. It feels like it's spun off from somewhere. BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:38, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

POV tag

I have added a POV tag to this article, having reread it recently on the back of the recent discussions at Zionism, race and genetics. The lede here is heavily unbalanced towards the "modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Israelites" theory and does not appropriately reflect the weight of sources in the article.

The article would also benefit from a health warning along the lines of the conclusion of Steven Weitzman in his work The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age:

What made the question of Jewish origin such an insistent one for many of the scholars we have looked at was its perceived implications for their own identities as Europeans, Christians, Jews, cosmopolitans, Israelis, or Palestinians. These scholars believed that their answers to the question of Jewish origin addressed pressing questions of their times: Is it best to try to integrate Jews into Europe or to exclude them? How to resolve competing claims of indigenousness among Israelis and Palestinians? Present-day research is no different in this regard. Always there seems to be something beyond historical curiosity that motivates the scholarship: insecurity about the ambiguities of one’s identity, the trauma of having been uprooted, a need to recover something that feels like it has been lost, a fear of being dislodged from one’s place by another people, or profound discontent with some other origin account and what it implies about the present. It is to these kinds of considerations—the psychological, sociological, and political motives for scholarship—that we must look if we are to understand what makes the lost origin of the Jews appear as a relevant absence to scholars, why they see a mystery worth solving… The inconvenient truth, however, is that there is no way for scholarship to close the gap. Scholarship has done a good job coming up with new evidence, and it is quite expert at debunking existing origin accounts for the Jews, but it has failed to generate an alternative narrative that can do the kind of work the Book of Genesis does in helping people to comprehend themselves and their places in the world. What we have seen suggests that leaning on scholarship to play the role of creation myth leads to claims that are tendentious at best, and sometimes quite destructive. This is the only honest way I can describe where the scholarly search for the origin of the Jews has led after so many centuries of effort, and yet I do not think it suffices to leave a hole at the beginning of Jewish history.

Onceinawhile (talk) 22:46, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

It seems it may be a bit undue to give the opinion of a non-geneticist that kind of weight in an article such as this (that focuses on genetic studies).Skllagyook (talk) 00:24, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Onceinawhile, could you identify a few bits of content that would need to be added/changed/removed in order to comply with NPOV? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:02, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi FFF, the entirety of paragraphs 2 and 3 of the lede have a very clear, and very unbalanced, POV:

Studies of autosomal DNA, which look at the entire DNA mixture, show that Jewish populations have tended to form relatively closely related groups in independent communities with most in a community sharing significant ancestry. For populations of the Jewish diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations shows significant amounts of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Several Jewish groups also show genetic proximity to Lebanese, Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze in addition to Southern European populations, including Cypriots and Italians.
Jews living in the North African, Italian, and Iberian regions show variable frequencies of admixture with the historical non-Jewish population along the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly southern European. Behar and colleagues have remarked on an especially close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians. Some studies show that the Bene Israeland Cochin Jews of India, and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, while very closely resembling the local populations of their native countries, may have some ancient Jewish descent.

It is written from the point of view of those scholars who have argued for global Jewish unity.

Weitzman's point in my post above above is widely echoed. See for example Robert Pollack:

From any one person to another unrelated person, about one letter in a thousand, more or less, will be different when their three billion-letter DNAs are compared. There is no biological data in support of the notion of being a Jew solely through the inheritance of a single specific DNA sequence, nor will there ever be such evidence. There is no chance of some human genomes being Jewish and others not; biology makes all people truly equal.

Onceinawhile (talk) 05:59, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

The choice of quotes (the only two) in the lead is perhaps the strongest indication of the rather editorialized direction of travel that the summary currently takes. It also notably omits any controversies, including the ongoing academic "Khazar" furore - "Khazar" is mentioned 31 times on the page, but nowhere in the lead as a notable controversy, despite it being perhaps the single-most notable controversy in this subject area. Iskandar323 (talk) 06:26, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

User:Onceinawhile The idea of many groups of Jews sharing a significant partial common ancestry tracing to a certain region of the Near East is not the same as the claim that there are genes that are uniquely/exclusively or diagnostically Jewish. The latter claim, as far as I can tell, is not made in the lede (or elsewhere). It is possible both for Jewish groups to share a significant amount of a certain type of ancestry (along with various non-shared components/mixtures) and for non-Jewish groups with origins in the same region (e.g. non-Jewish groups from the Middle East - the Levant, Mesopotamia, etc.) to possess that type of (and/or) ancestry as well - likely sometimes to a greater extent than many Jews. Nor does the text argue that one is a Jew solely through biology, but rather that there is evidence that many historically Jewish groups tend to have certain ancestral origins/makeup. Skllagyook (talk) 07:06, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this is the type of summary that should be in the lede. Not just the one perspective dominating it at the moment. Onceinawhile (talk) 07:49, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Nothing I said is contradicted by the lede. The lede also mentions non-Jewish groups that share affinities with many Jewish ones because of (partial) shared geographical origins - e.g. Lebanese, Palestinians, and Druze in the Near East - and European and other non-Near Eastern groups that may share some ancestry and/or affinities with various Jewish groups because of admixture. Skllagyook (talk) 07:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

The lede is very clearly giving undue prominence to one theory. Literally two thirds of it are following the interpretation of Behar. Why should an article with 145 citations have a lede focused on just one? This topic is widely debated; we should explain all sides. Onceinawhile (talk) 08:21, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

The real problem is that a large number of genetic papers are cited by summaries from the primary sources. There is now a significant body of secondary literature which cites these primary sources, and it is the secondary sources that should be prioritized, i.e. how they summarize and contextualize each paper. That is the real issue. Cherrypicking based on primary sources. A proper use of these secondary sources is not going to substantially change or overturn the general drift of the page for the Middle East connection. The overall conclusion of genetics affirms quite consistently that this is the case. The point is rather that we select from genetic papers designed to excavate the 'vertical' line, as opposed to the horizonal line, or to use an analogy, the modelling assumes tree-like descent as opposed to 'trellis' approaches, so that 'isolate' continuities are emphasized over admixture. Nishidani (talk) 08:46, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the health warning, we need to address the point that the most presitigous scholars in the field state that it is not possible to prove via genetics either Jewish origins or that there is a “Jewish gene”. We also need to set out the explanation for the incorrect implication that an element of Middle Eastern genetics necessarily suggests Israelite origins. I propose language along the following lines (following the sources in this article and a number of others):

Whether such genetic connections support the claims of some Jews to be descended from ancient Israelites is unknowable, and thus widely debated. Jewish religious communities were known in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the last two millennia, and over the centuries these communities are known to have both mixed with the surrounding non-Jewish populations through conversion and intermarriage, and mixed with each of the other Jewish communities from other geographies. This mixing is what geneticists term “horizontal admixture”, and its being carried out amongst the global Jewish communities ensured that an element of Middle Eastern genetics are present in most Jewish communities worldwide. Descent from ancient peoples such as Israelites is what genetics term “vertical phylogenesis”; genetic science cannot today, and is thought unlikely to ever be able to, differentiate between horizontal admixture and vertical phylogenesis.

Onceinawhile (talk) 02:25, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The assertion that Jews are descended from the ancient Israelites is not "widely debated", at least not among mainstream scholars. The article's lede says that the genetic makeup of major Jewish groups shows significant amounts of shared Middle Eastern ancestry, which has been understood as *potentially* originating from the Israelites and other ancient Near Eastern populations. Simultaneously, the lede already emphasizes that Jews of various backgrounds show variable frequencies of admixture with the historical non-Jewish population. This presentation maintains a balanced approach in accordance with prevailing mainstream perspectives on Jewish genetics. What this article's lede could benefit from is a brief description of the present comprehension of Jewish Y-DNA genetics, distinct from the coverage of autosomal and maternal DNA which is already provided. I'm also open to including the aspect that genetics cannot definitively prove the existence of a singular "Jewish gene." Tombah (talk) 05:54, 23 August 2023 (UTC)