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![]() | This article contains a translation of Études génétiques sur les Juifs from fr.wikipedia. |
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)
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.
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.
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)
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)
"Competing Interests: Part of the lab work presented in this study was conducted in Gene by Gene (Family Tree DNA) in which Doron M. Behar, Elliott Greenspan and Concetta Bormans declare stock ownership and Luisa Fernanda Sanchez is an employee. The other authors claim no competing financial interests associated with this paper.( the requisite declaration in Nature) Iskandar323 ( talk) 09:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
these things, which particular things? I'm lost where you are in the discussion. Thanks. Bondegezou ( talk) 10:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
"These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant."So the key terms in that statement are most, meaning not all and we really cannot generalize, and Levant region (which is a broad region, not a specific ancient population group). The lead should not go beyond what the most optimistic sources claim in their summaries. Iskandar323 ( talk) 10:57, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
finds all of the proposed theories wanting, either because of the insufficiency of data or, more commonly, because of methodological imprecision. Many of the proposed explanations tell us more about the beliefs and perspectives of the storytellers than about the alleged origins of the Jews... . Genetic science has not yet given us a firm basis on which to build our notions of Jewish origins.[1] Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:38, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
As research progresses, it demonstrates that relationships between members of Jewish communities and their connections with the non-Jews among whom they lived were always a complex two-way (horizontal) exchange, rather than an ordered sequence of (vertically) splitting branches from a common root. It was rather the social and cultural relationships between Jewish communities and ethnic groups that shaped the gene pool(s) of the Jews of today. Since Jews were a separate socio-cultural entity, biological-genetic relationships were established between the isolates, irrespective of possible common biological roots.
@ Skllagyook: regarding the re-addition of Behar's quote to the lede, please see the diagram on the right, which is a visualization of what Falk explains in his book (see quote above). Falk is basically saying that Behar is only giving one side of the story, and modern genetics cannot tell with any certainty between the horizontal and vertical models. Onceinawhile ( talk) 22:42, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
However, in both models (horizontal and vertical), the Jewish groups in question would descend (in significant part)…I agree with you except for the words “in significant part”. It is that quantification which is the heart of the scholarly dispute – everyone agrees that the geographical Jewish isolates have some “local” genes and some “MidEast / Levantine” genes, but there are widely differing views among scholars on the significance of each. Frankly, the only difference between the horizontal and vertical models is the weight of gene flow from each pathway. Onceinawhile ( talk) 00:48, 29 August 2023 (UTC)
Participants in this discussion: ( Onceinawhile— Skllagyook— Firefangledfeathers— Iskandar323— Nishidani). Is there still a neutrality dispute at this article? VR talk 07:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Rather than adding the article-wide tag back, I have tagged a problematic sentence and copied it here for discussion:
Genetic analysis reveals a major genetic descent of Jewish groups from the [[Levant]] or [[Near East]], accompanied by [[Genetic admixture|admixture]] and [[introgression]] with non-Jewish host populations, varying among different Jewish communities.<ref name="Behar2010" /><ref name=Falk/>{{efn|This pattern is consistent with a major, but variable component of shared Near East ancestry, together with variable degrees of admixture and introgression from the corresponding host Diaspora populations.<ref name=pmid23052947/>}}
As discussed in the thread above, geneticists are clear that it is not possible to tell which is horizontal (admixture / introgression) and which is vertical (“descent”). The way this sentence is worded erases that nuance.
The wording “major genetic descent of Jewish groups… varying among different Jewish communities” is also very confusing. What are we trying to say here?
Onceinawhile (
talk)
06:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
With regards to a previous interrupted discussion one aspect which we still need to discuss is whether it is really correct to suggest that our lead should not presuppose Jewish "expulsions and exoduses". I also don't like "ethnogenesis". Shouldn't it be something like "the ancestry of Jewish populations"?" Comments please. Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 20:52, 7 May 2024 (UTC) NOTE. This post has been rewritten after objections were raised. (Introductory discussion of recent context has been made deliberately vague. Main point is the same.)-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 11:28, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Population genetics research has been conducted on the ancestry of the Jewish people. We could keep the wikilink to the exoduses and expulsions in the lede, as one of the topics of research. Alaexis ¿question? 07:26, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Elgv18483 has been disrupting various Wikipedia pages and has done so here. Please reverse what he did. As you can see at https://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1745-6150-5-57 Zoossmann-Diskin's 2010 study examined "Six Jewish populations: EEJ, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews. Iranian Jews, Yemenite Jews and Ethiopian Jews". What Elgv18483 did was replace the word "Iraq" with "Persia" in the sentence describing populations he studied. "from Iran, Iraq and Yemen" transformed into "Iran, Persia and Yemen" even though Persia is equivalent to Iran. This is not an improvement. He also arbitrarily added Germany to the list of 6 populations studied in Rosenberg's 2001 study, making it 7, but Poland was the only country of origin in that region that they studied. Observe the countries that are and aren't listed under "MeSH terms" in https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11158561/ 172.56.28.205 ( talk) 11:10, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Genetic studies of Jews article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10Auto-archiving period: 45 days
![]() |
![]() | This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article contains a translation of Études génétiques sur les Juifs from fr.wikipedia. |
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)
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.
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.
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)
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)
"Competing Interests: Part of the lab work presented in this study was conducted in Gene by Gene (Family Tree DNA) in which Doron M. Behar, Elliott Greenspan and Concetta Bormans declare stock ownership and Luisa Fernanda Sanchez is an employee. The other authors claim no competing financial interests associated with this paper.( the requisite declaration in Nature) Iskandar323 ( talk) 09:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
these things, which particular things? I'm lost where you are in the discussion. Thanks. Bondegezou ( talk) 10:41, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
"These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant."So the key terms in that statement are most, meaning not all and we really cannot generalize, and Levant region (which is a broad region, not a specific ancient population group). The lead should not go beyond what the most optimistic sources claim in their summaries. Iskandar323 ( talk) 10:57, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
finds all of the proposed theories wanting, either because of the insufficiency of data or, more commonly, because of methodological imprecision. Many of the proposed explanations tell us more about the beliefs and perspectives of the storytellers than about the alleged origins of the Jews... . Genetic science has not yet given us a firm basis on which to build our notions of Jewish origins.[1] Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:38, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
As research progresses, it demonstrates that relationships between members of Jewish communities and their connections with the non-Jews among whom they lived were always a complex two-way (horizontal) exchange, rather than an ordered sequence of (vertically) splitting branches from a common root. It was rather the social and cultural relationships between Jewish communities and ethnic groups that shaped the gene pool(s) of the Jews of today. Since Jews were a separate socio-cultural entity, biological-genetic relationships were established between the isolates, irrespective of possible common biological roots.
@ Skllagyook: regarding the re-addition of Behar's quote to the lede, please see the diagram on the right, which is a visualization of what Falk explains in his book (see quote above). Falk is basically saying that Behar is only giving one side of the story, and modern genetics cannot tell with any certainty between the horizontal and vertical models. Onceinawhile ( talk) 22:42, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
However, in both models (horizontal and vertical), the Jewish groups in question would descend (in significant part)…I agree with you except for the words “in significant part”. It is that quantification which is the heart of the scholarly dispute – everyone agrees that the geographical Jewish isolates have some “local” genes and some “MidEast / Levantine” genes, but there are widely differing views among scholars on the significance of each. Frankly, the only difference between the horizontal and vertical models is the weight of gene flow from each pathway. Onceinawhile ( talk) 00:48, 29 August 2023 (UTC)
Participants in this discussion: ( Onceinawhile— Skllagyook— Firefangledfeathers— Iskandar323— Nishidani). Is there still a neutrality dispute at this article? VR talk 07:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
Rather than adding the article-wide tag back, I have tagged a problematic sentence and copied it here for discussion:
Genetic analysis reveals a major genetic descent of Jewish groups from the [[Levant]] or [[Near East]], accompanied by [[Genetic admixture|admixture]] and [[introgression]] with non-Jewish host populations, varying among different Jewish communities.<ref name="Behar2010" /><ref name=Falk/>{{efn|This pattern is consistent with a major, but variable component of shared Near East ancestry, together with variable degrees of admixture and introgression from the corresponding host Diaspora populations.<ref name=pmid23052947/>}}
As discussed in the thread above, geneticists are clear that it is not possible to tell which is horizontal (admixture / introgression) and which is vertical (“descent”). The way this sentence is worded erases that nuance.
The wording “major genetic descent of Jewish groups… varying among different Jewish communities” is also very confusing. What are we trying to say here?
Onceinawhile (
talk)
06:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
With regards to a previous interrupted discussion one aspect which we still need to discuss is whether it is really correct to suggest that our lead should not presuppose Jewish "expulsions and exoduses". I also don't like "ethnogenesis". Shouldn't it be something like "the ancestry of Jewish populations"?" Comments please. Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 20:52, 7 May 2024 (UTC) NOTE. This post has been rewritten after objections were raised. (Introductory discussion of recent context has been made deliberately vague. Main point is the same.)-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 11:28, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Population genetics research has been conducted on the ancestry of the Jewish people. We could keep the wikilink to the exoduses and expulsions in the lede, as one of the topics of research. Alaexis ¿question? 07:26, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Elgv18483 has been disrupting various Wikipedia pages and has done so here. Please reverse what he did. As you can see at https://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1745-6150-5-57 Zoossmann-Diskin's 2010 study examined "Six Jewish populations: EEJ, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews. Iranian Jews, Yemenite Jews and Ethiopian Jews". What Elgv18483 did was replace the word "Iraq" with "Persia" in the sentence describing populations he studied. "from Iran, Iraq and Yemen" transformed into "Iran, Persia and Yemen" even though Persia is equivalent to Iran. This is not an improvement. He also arbitrarily added Germany to the list of 6 populations studied in Rosenberg's 2001 study, making it 7, but Poland was the only country of origin in that region that they studied. Observe the countries that are and aren't listed under "MeSH terms" in https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11158561/ 172.56.28.205 ( talk) 11:10, 31 May 2024 (UTC)