Land, People, and Palestine: Lessons From Jewish Genetics
In this moment when more than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli military forces, I am struggling to make sense of these horrific numbers of devastated lives, of condensed destruction on a massive scale in a very small place. Entire families have been totally wiped out. Palestinians who have managed to survive have been displaced multiple times over and denied food and water, leaving them on the cusp of the kind of famine familiar from earlier colonial histories. Hospitals, schools, and those who work in them have been targeted and destroyed. South Africa, where my ethnographic research on the politics and uses of genetics is based, has asked the world to make sense of this as an instance of genocide that can and must be stopped before it goes any further. The United Nations International Court of Justice, to whom South Africa made their case, did not disagree: they ruled that this is a plausible case of genocide that warrants further investigation, and that Israel must take action to prevent it.
But there is a counter-narrative that circulates widely, one that links the kinds of deep histories that genetic ancestry research seeks to investigate with blood-and-soil ethnonationalism. There are variations, but the common theme is that Israel is only doing what is necessary to survive, and survive it must: the world must stand behind its actions because to do otherwise would result in the destruction of Israel, and therefore the destruction of the Jews. Some iterations of this Zionist narrative go a step further: they argue that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, so their rights to that land are unassailable, while Palestinians have no such rights. Following these arguments, an increasingly loud and powerful narrative holds that supporting Palestinians or proclaiming anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitism. In these narratives, Israel and Jews are interchangeable, a naturalized link between land and people that the existence of Palestinians threatens to disrupt.
For many months now I have followed these arguments across social media feeds. One that I’ve seen invokes past empires (from British to Babylonian) to demonstrate that there has never been an independent Palestinian state, but in contrast, there were once kingdoms of Israel and Judea and thus precedent for the contemporary state of Israel as a Jewish state. Another, seeking to negate the argument that Israel is a settler colonial state, contrasts the lack of ancient European texts found by Europeans who went to America (because they were colonisers) with the ancient Hebrew manuscripts found in Israel (because they’re indigenous). At stake in these arguments is whether Jews or Palestinians are the true indigenous people and therefore the ones on the right side of history.
There is a lot to unpack in each of these assertions beyond their crude anti-historicism in service of a difficult-to-defend political position. To do so, I turn to my research on indigeneity and Jewish genetics, two technologies of belonging that in my work have primarily been linked by the genetic knowledge produced by Lemba South Africans.
In short, Lemba people are Black South Africans who long held that they are Jews by descent; genetic studies published in the 1990s and early 2000s set out to determine whether this could be genetically substantiated. Those studies found evidence of Y-chromosome Lemba links to other Jews (Spurdle and Jenkins 1996; Thomas et al. 2000). Lemba leaders then defied the expectations of those who assumed they would attempt to use the results to appeal to the Israeli state for recognition and emigration by instead interpreting these studies as proof not only of their distinct ethnic existence in South Africa—significant because apartheid policies had not recognized them as such—but also as proof that Jews are African and that Lemba people were therefore indigenous African Jews (Tamarkin 2020).
Crucially, Lemba leaders’ understandings of indigeneity dismissed ideas of a single origin in favor of a dynamic process of becoming indigenous through centuries of movement and links to land that have shaped who they now are. In this rendering, one can be indigenous to more than one place, and more than one people can be indigenous to a single place. This understanding of indigenous stands in stark contrast to the social media posts that position Jewish indigeneity in Israel as both singular and original, thus negating Palestinian links to the land and justifying their dispossession.
Because Lemba leaders’ understanding of indigeneity leaves open the possibility of legitimate, relational claims among different peoples, one might then imagine space for both Palestinian and Jewish indigeneity in Palestine/Israel. But it’s important to consider that Lemba leaders’ understandings of capacious indigeneity in South Africa stop short of including white descendants of colonial settlers as indigenous peoples, though they have also established links to South African land. This is because the relationality that foundationally defines indigeneity is that between colonizers and the people whose land they occupied: indigeneity emerged as a political concept and a group identity in the twentieth century in response to hundreds of years of colonial oppression (de la Cadena and Starn 2007; TallBear 2013).
Therefore, I take two lessons from Lemba leaders’ understandings of Jewish indigeneity. The first is to decenter Israel as the primary Jewish ancestral place. This might mean centering Africa instead as they do, or it might mean, following Daniel Boyarin (2023), decentering both Israel and Jewish indigeneity in favor of diaspora as the constitutive past and the future for Jews everywhere. The second lesson is to take seriously that an understanding of indigeneity as a colonial relation renders it impossible to locate Jewish indigeneity in a Zionist project because although today we can see that Zionism includes many Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern Jews, it emerged as a movement among European Jews who enacted it as a settler colonial project (Pappé 2008, see also Weitzman 2017). Zionism as a settler colonial project unmistakably reverberates in the destruction of Gaza that the world has been witnessing and in the illegal settlements in Palestinian territories that contemporary Israeli settlers have continued to advance.
Following from Lemba leaders’ links between indigeneity and genetics, it’s instructive to consider Jewish genetic ancestry research alongside these analyses of indigeneity and settler colonialism. Lemba interpretations of their genetic studies have been consequential for them and for understandings of African indigeneity, but they haven’t been consequential for subsequent Jewish genetic research. Studies that have aimed to characterize Jewish genetic diversity and to map Jewish origins haven’t included Lemba DNA among their Jewish comparative samples (see for example Ostrer and Skorecki 2013). I point this out because genetic ancestry research is not only shaped by the questions researchers pose and the statistical methodologies through which they investigate their hypotheses; it is also just as profoundly shaped by how the so-called populations it seeks to account for are defined and named (Fullwiley 2008; Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011). Lemba genetics has not reshaped Jewish genetics because the starting point for Jewish genetic ancestry research is continually an a priori definition of who is, without question, a Jew to whom others (like the Lemba) might be compared (Abu El Haj 2012). This, alongside locating Jewishness in biology, racializes Jews.
The primacy of linking land and people becomes clear when considering that a major focus of large scale Jewish genetic studies has been to understand the origins of Ashkenazi Jews and their genetic relationships to various others: other Jews, and others understood as non-Jews whose relative genetic similarity to or difference from Ashkenazi and other Jews is considered to be an important tool through which to define and place Jews in the present and the past. In these studies, Ashkenazi Jews are at once paradigmatic Jews and potentially the group that would interrupt the naturalized links between Jewish people and the land of Israel if they are found to be too European and not Middle Eastern enough. These studies have been contentious among geneticists precisely because of disagreements among their authors about what the data says about where Ashkenazi origins primarily lie. But their debates ultimately miss the point that genetic definitions of peoplehood naturalize racialized colonial logics.
Debates among geneticists about how to interpret Jewish genetic studies can attune us to the high stakes for naturalized links between land and people. We would also do well to remember that any appeal to genetic understandings of peoplehood is a racializing move. Defining Jews as a race has already led to one genocide. I fear that current appeals to Jewish indigeneity are now being mobilized in service of another.
Another version of this essay was later published here in: The Conversation.
Citations
Abu el-Haj, Nadia. 2012. The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyarin, Daniel. 2023. The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
de la Cadena, Marisol and Orin Starn. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. London: Berg.
Fullwiley, Duana. 2008. The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine. Social Studies of Science 38(5): 695-735.
Fujimura, Joan and Ramya Rajagopalan. 2011. Different Differences: The use of ‘Genetic Ancestry’ Versus Race in Biomedical Human Genetic Research. Social Studies of Science 41(1): 5-30.
Ostrer, Harry and Karl Skorecki. 2013. The Population Genetics of the Jewish People. Human Genetics 132(2): 119-27.
Pappé, Ilan. 2008. Zionism as Colonialism: A Comparative View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa. South Atlantic Quarterly 107(4): 611-633.
Spurdle, Amanda and Trefor Jenkins. 1996. The Origins of the Lemba ‘Black Jews’ of Southern Africa: Evidence from p12F2 and Other Y-Chromosome Markers. American Journal of Human Genetics 59(5): 1126-33.
TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tamarkin, Noah. 2020. Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Thomas, Mark G. et al. 2000. Y Chromosomes Traveling South: The Cohen Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba—the ‘Black Jews of Southern Africa’. American Journal of Human Genetics 66(2): 674-86.
Weitzman, Steven. 2017. The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
