23andMe has backpedalled from broadcasting the discredited theory that a portion of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from an obscure tribe from the Caucasus. But that hasn’t stopped members of the “alt-right” from jumping on the news that the giant Silicon Valley genomics company had given credibility to the so-called Khazar theory, which undermines Jews’ perception…
The genomics company 23andMe has retracted a statement made on the profiles of some users with Ashkenazi heritage that they may be descended from an extinct tribe from the Caucasus known as the Khazars, inadvertently wading into a political-genetic debate with far-reaching implications for Jewish identity and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The company said in a…
(JTA) — Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey. Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and…
How I Stopped Being a Jew By Shlomo Sand Verso, 112 pages, $16.95 ‘How I Stopped Being a Jew” is the strangest book that I have ever reviewed. I used to grant that distinction to the memoir by the psychic who claimed that aliens healed her anal cyst. But this one is even stranger. At…
Two recently posted articles in the Jewish Internet magazine Tablet provide an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the fascinating and problem-fraught field of Yiddish historical linguistics. One, by Cherie Woodworth, a scholar of Eastern European history who died last year, at the sadly young age of 46, first appeared in the journal Kritika in…
(Haaretz) — The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian. The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that…
The persistent debate over the “racial” origins of the Jewish people makes a mockery of scholarship, trivializes history and perpetuates conceptions of identity that have been misused to justify everything from violent repression to affirmative action. It is hardly surprising that Johns Hopkins’s Eran Elhaik “stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy,” as the Forward…
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