Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism
Use of racial theories for and against Zionism / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the late 19th century, amid attempts to apply science to notions of race, some advocates of Zionism sought to reformulate conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and the "race science" of the time. They believed that this concept would allow them to build a new framework for collective Jewish identity,[1] and thought that biology might provide "proof" for the "ethnonational myth of common descent" from the biblical land of Israel.[2][3] Countering antisemitic claims that Jews were both aliens and a racially inferior people who needed to be segregated or expelled, these Zionists drew on and appropriated elements from various race theories,[4][5][lower-alpha 1] to argue that only a Jewish national home could enable the physical regeneration of the Jewish people and a renaissance of pride in their ancient cultural traditions.[6]
The contrasting assimilationist viewpoint was that Jewishness consisted in an attachment to Judaism as a religion and culture. Both the orthodox and liberal establishments, for different reasons, often rejected this innovative idea.[7][8][9] Subsequently, Zionist and non-Zionist Jews vigorously debated aspects of this proposition in terms of the merits or otherwise of diaspora life. While Zionism embarked on its project of social engineering in Mandatory Palestine, ethnonationalist politics on the European continent strengthened and, by the 1930s, some German Jews, acting defensively, asserted Jewish collective rights by redefining Jews as a race after Nazism rose to power.[10] The advent of World War II led to the implementation of the Holocaust's policies of genocidal ethnic cleansing, which, by war's end, had utterly discredited race as the lethal product of pseudoscience.
With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the "ingathering of the exiles", and the Law of Return, the question of Jewish origins and biological unity came to assume particular importance during early nation building. Conscious of this, Israeli medical researchers and geneticists were careful to avoid any language that might resonate with racial ideas. Themes of "blood logic" or "race" have nevertheless been described as a recurrent feature of modern Jewish thought in both scholarship and popular belief.[lower-alpha 2] Despite this, many aspects of the role of race in the formation of Zionist concepts of a Jewish identity were rarely addressed until recently.[11]
Questions of how political narratives impact the work of population genetics, and its connection to race, have a particular significance in Jewish history and culture.[lower-alpha 3] Genetic studies on the origins of modern Jews have been criticized as "being designed or interpreted in the framework of a 'Zionist narrative'" and as an essentialist approach to biology[lower-alpha 4] in a similar manner to criticism of the interpretation of archaeological science in the region.[lower-alpha 5] According to Israeli historian of science Nurit Kirsh and Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk, the interpretation of the genetic data has been unconsciously influenced by Zionism and anti-Zionism.[lower-alpha 6] Falk wrote that every generation has witnessed efforts by both Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to seek a link between national and biological aspects of Jewish identity.[lower-alpha 7]