Abstract
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups.
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Notes
For a contemporary account of the debates surrounding calculations of genetic distance and their underlying assumptions, see Harpending (1974).
The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system was originally studied for its relevance to surgical medicine due to the role of these antigens in rejecting transplanted organs. By the 1970s, HLA research diversified beyond immunology to include anthropological and forensic applications, thanks to the special genetic features of the HLA system: its codominant alleles are highly polymorphic and demonstrate very low levels of chromosomal recombination. Due to these features, evolutionary geneticists came to regard HLA data as particularly reliable and informative for determining population relationships, as well as for reconstructing of the haplotypes of common ancestors. See, for example, Shankarkumar (2004) and Bodmer (1978).
On Karlin’s pro-Israel sentiments, see Karlin’s letter to Walter Bodmer, January 10, 1969, written from Israel. In response to media coverage of the French government’s embargo on shipping arms and military spare parts to Israel, Karlin complained: “The world wants the terrorists to be free as birds and the Israelis should submit quietly to death. If they strike back then its [sic] evil. Every day, terrorists kill or wound but this doesn’t count. You can see that I’m quite partisan. If Jews don’t stand by Israel then no one will.” MS. Bodmer 53, fol. 4. Archive of Sir Walter Bodmer and Lady Julia Bodmer, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University, Oxford, England; hereafter MS. Bodmer, with box and folio numbers.
Draft letter from Batsheva Bonné-Tamir to Ephraim Gazit, undated [summer 1976], MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
See letters from Sarah Nevo to Julia and Walter Bodmer on June 27, 1973 regarding Sephardim and Persian Jews; February 28, 1974 regarding Hungarian-Romanian Jews; June 2, 1975 on Turkish Jews; and Nevo to Batsheva Bonné on June 7, 1976, regarding Bulgarian Jews. MS. Bodmer 28, fol. 3.
Historian Nurit Kirsh has enumerated the reasons, both logistical and ideological, that Ashkenazi Israeli geneticists tended to focus their research on Mizrahi and Sephardi communities (Kirsh 2007).
Nevo to Walter Bodmer, June 1, 1971. MS. Bodmer 28, fol. 3.
A similar example of how transnational networks of Jewish scientists raised funds for Israeli research from American sources is discussed in Passariello (2021).
Walter Bodmer to Karlin, December 12, 1973. MS. Bodmer 53, fol. 4.
Karlin to Walter Bodmer, December 3, 1973. MS. Bodmer 53, fol. 4.
Karlin to Walter Bodmer, February 7, 1974. MS. Bodmer 53, fol. 4.
Karlin to Walter Bodmer, October 16, 1973 and December 3, 1973. MS. Bodmer 53, fol. 4.
Bonné to Walter Bodmer, March 14, 1974, MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1; Nevo to Walter Bodmer, June 2, 1975, MS. Bodmer 28, fol. 3.
Bonné to Julia and Walter Bodmer, June 10, 1974, MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Bonné to Walter Bodmer, November 22, 1974. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Sarah Nevo to Walter Bodmer, June 21, 1977. MS. Bodmer 28, fol. 2.
Bonné to Walter Bodmer, June 30, 1977. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Begin’s militant reputation was borne out by his actions in office, particularly his authorization of the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 (see Shilon 2012). Furthermore, although he signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, which involved relinquishing the Sinai Peninsula, Likud’s policy toward the remainder of the occupied territories—namely, that they belonged irrevocably to Israel—exacerbated the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This policy included unequivocal and expanded support for the settlement of Jewish Israelis in occupied territories, which had begun under the previous Labor Party administrations (Abu Ayyash 1981).
See letters from Nevo to Walter and Julia Bodmer on April 28, 1977 indicating that she had just started fieldwork with Turkish Jews after the HLA project’s publications were already submitted; and on June 13, 1978 indicating that she had not been able to complete lab testing on Turkish and Bulgarian Jewish samples due to lack of funding for reagents. MS. Bodmer 28, fol. 2.
The 1947 “minority addendum” to the report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, authored by Indian representative Sir Abdur Rahman, referred to the Ashkenazim as Khazars and even “Aryans;” see UN General Assembly Official Records, UNSCOP Report Addendum 1, September 9, 1947, A/364 Add.1, United Nations Digital Library. For the debates on the 1947 partition vote, in which Syrian representative Amir Arslan cited the Jewish Encyclopedia as evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from “Russian Khazars,” see UN General Assembly Official Records, 125th Plenary Meeting, November 26, 1947, A/PV.125, United Nations Digital Library. For the 1975 UN resolution, see UN General Assembly Official Records, 30th Session, 2400th Plenary Meeting, November 10, 1975, A/PV.2400, United Nations Digital Library.
See the Joshua Lederberg Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.
For a biography of Peretz, see Esber et al. (2017).
Bonné-Tamir to Julia Bodmer, February 1, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
See Ephraim Gazit to the Bodmers, August 26, 1976; and Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, June 8, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, December 6, 1976. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, December 13, 1976. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
For Bonné-Tamir’s handwritten draft and the typescript draft with Walter and Julia Bodmer’s handwritten corrections, see MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1. Both drafts are undated; however, based on surrounding correspondence, both were likely written between September 6 and October 10, 1976.
Julia Bodmer to Walter Bodmer, June 9, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
See Cavalli-Sforza to Walter Bodmer, August 5, 1976. MS. Bodmer 107, fol. 3.
See Cavalli-Sforza to Mourant, September 25, 1974, and ensuing correspondence from Mourant to Cavalli-Sforza. Arthur E. Mourant Papers, PP/AEM/K.122, Box 33, Wellcome Library, London.
Cavalli-Sforza to Walter Bodmer, October 22, 1975. MS. Bodmer 107, fol. 3. Bodmer’s handwritten “copy to Batsheva” suggests that Bonné-Tamir likely saw this letter and was aware of Carmelli and Cavalli-Sforza’s plans.
Cavalli-Sforza to Walter Bodmer, August 5, 1976. MS. Bodmer 107, fol. 3.
Carmelli to Walter Bodmer, June 20, 1977. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, June 8, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1; Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, August 4, 1977. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, [received September 3], 1977. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1. See also Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, May 19, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
See Walter Bodmer to Cavalli-Sforza, September 30, 1977. MS. Bodmer 107, fol. 3.
Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, December 6, 1976; Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, December 13, 1976. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1. See also Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, May 19, 1977 and Walter Bodmer to Bonné-Tamir, June 8, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
Bonné-Tamir to Walter Bodmer, October 13, 1977. MS. Bodmer 1895, fol. 1.
Neel to Patai, December 19, 1977. Box 61, James V. Neel Papers, Mss.Ms.Coll.96, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia, PA.
Notably, this “strong evidence”—the distribution pattern of genetic variation upon which Szeinberg’s argument relied—only appears in seven out of the 15 genetic marker systems he considered (Szeinberg 1979).
The “little boy” is probably Bonné-Tamir’s son Eldad, who would have been seven years old in 1977. Typescript of talk on “Genetic markers; benign and normal traits of the Ashkenazi population in Israel,” filing date December 27, 1977. MS. Bodmer 94, fol. 1.
Masatoshi Nei (1931-), an eminent evolutionary geneticist, worked at Brown University and later the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston (alongside Ranajit Chakraborty) during the 1970s. In addition to proposing new measures for genetic distance, he developed a number of statistical models for speciation and population differentiation. In the early 1970s, with his Houston colleague A. K. Roychoudhury, Nei used his distance measure to estimate the level of genetic variation between the three “major” human races (European, Asian, and African; see Nei and Roychoudhury 1974).
Bonné-Tamir’s autobiography (2010), likewise, omits any reference to alternative statistical models or interpretations.
The morphological traits analyzed in their publications included over two dozen body measurements and ratios taken from torso, arms, and legs (notably avoiding any measurements of the head and face) to observe physical differences between first- and second-generation immigrants from Europe to Israel. Additionally, Micle and Kobyliansky conducted extensive research on dermatoglyphics (fingerprint and palm ridge patterns), involving both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jewish communities.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Editors and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of the History of Biology for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Archival research for this article was supported by a Research Fellowship at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.
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Burton, E.K. Ashkenazi Anxieties: A Transnational Social History of Jewish Genetic Admixture Modeling, 1971–1986. J Hist Biol 55, 411–442 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09693-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09693-6