What does it mean to be genetically Jewish? | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean to be genetically Jewish?

theguardian.com

19 pointsjajag30 comments

Why on earth has this submission been flagged? It's a thoughtful article, by a Jew, of the rights and wrongs of using genetic testing, in Israel, to define Jewishness, and raises a number of interesting questions. What is there to object to?

As a sepharadic jew i wonder what would the test look like, i am guessing the people from the south were less secular (a lot of our last names are arabic/spanish or portuguese)

Perhaps I’m not understanding this correctly, but why does genetics matter (I’m not Jewish, so I have very little knowledge of how this works)? Is it not enough for someone to call themselves Jewish to “be” Jewish? Are there some sort of religious or legal consequences to doing so?

You are correct in your questions. It should be enough, and there should not be legal consequences.

The problem is that Israel is a very peculiar theocracy, and one kind of prejudiced against large segments of its population.

There are legal consequences of being "officially" Jewish in Israel (just like there were consequences of being officially Jewish in the USSR).

For one, "official" Jews are entitled to Israeli citizenship.

Then, the marriage in Israel is a can of worms of its own, as there is only religious marriage. See the article.

Your Jewishness (or lack thereof) dictates where you will be buried, too.

That should be enough to get you started.

"Jewish" refers both to ethnic groups and religion.

First, an old Soviet joke:

-Isaac, we need to get outta here fast, they're beating up the Jews over here

-But in my passport, the nationality is listed as "Russian"!

-Isaac, you don't get it. They aren't gonna beat up your passport, they're gonna beat up your face!

--------------

The question of what it means to be Jewish is complex: it's a mixture of ethnicity (nationality in Soviet passports, which confused people for a long time), religion, and culture.

For the most part it's easy, though. I joked with a friend of mine: we don't need to remember being Jewish, others will remember it for us.

To that extent, I use the following reductio ad Hitlerum test of whether someone should be considered Jewish: Would the Nazis have rounded that person up for being a Jew?.

That makes a lot of these questions simple.

Follows Judaism? A Jew.

Jewish mother? Clearly.

Jewish father? Still a Jew.

Self-identifies as a Jew? Clearly a Jew.

Looks very Jewish? Better be safe than sorry, a Jew again.

So what these Israelis are doing is ridiculous. Someone would be accepted as a Jew in the eyes of anti-semites, but be denied being Jewish at home.

It is very sad that Israelis are using DNA testing to do this ridiculous gatekeeping -- and at that, against the part of the population that has done so much for that country (there would be no Israel without Jews from the Russian Empire and USSR to begin with, as simple as that).

No prophet in his hometown, I guess.

The history of Jews and Christianity is also a fascinating study. It's not appropriate to go into religious issues here, but to anyone with an interest in theology, please consider giving it a look.

It means you're a Jew. It's the chosen people, not the chosen random punk who "identifies" as a Jew.

The crux for me was this paragraph:

“I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’.”

There really shouldn't be a debate that there are genetic differences amongst 'races'. It shouldn't be something that is "taboo" to discuss or talk about, since it is a factually correct statement to make.

"Race" is typically defined by phenotype, and it incredibly messy to try and pin down genetically. Sure, I've no doubt you could create genetic averages and fit most people your targeting into race groups based on a selected phenotype or group of phenotypes. But the genetic variation between those people for non-selected phenotypes would tend to be just as large as between any individual in the "race" as outside of it. So, switch your looked at phenotypes and the race lines with shift with them.

So, the question becomes not whether you can formally define a set of races if you wish, but for what purpose exactly are you trying to genetically formalize these social constructs?

There's no rigorous scientific definition of "race", so there can't really be scientific facts about genetic differences between races.

Some "racial" groups happen to have a higher incidence of particular genes. But when you look at specific examples, it's absurd to connect this to any kind of racial theory. For example, Latinos apparently have a higher incidence of Alzheimers than the general US population, and this could possibly have some generic component (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874398/). But no-one would suggest that "Latino" is a bona fide racial category.

how about “a phenotypically and statistically relevant portion of one’s DNA can be traced back to X region over the range of Y years ago”?

nobody is saying anything about “racial theory” in society at large. more so that certain particular phenotypes are strongly correlated together - like your example about Alzheimer’s.

I don't really see what you're getting out. Yes, there are correlations between genes and other things. So what?

there's not much of a "so what" aside from the fact that that's true and people have typically labelled some of those clumpy groupings, "races". it may be haphazard, socially problematic and not extremely useful, but those correlations and average differences between groups are present.

The place where it becomes useless, in my view, and one of many ways in which it does not ground racism is that differences _within_ these fuzzily-defined groups is vast.

a poster further up said "There really shouldn't be a debate that there are genetic differences amongst 'races'" and your comment seemed to, in tone, disagree while at the same time granting that its true. All I'm getting at is that this can both be 'true' and 'limited in usefulness' and if you agree then we're not arguing. ..but I sense that you don't agree and I'd be happy to hear more about the disagreement.

>people have typically labelled some of those clumpy groupings, "races".

Well no, not really. Racial labels aren't determined by DNA.

What else could it possibly be determined by? Perhaps we're talking about different definitions of the word "race".

Are you saying that the phenotypic differences between an Inuit and an African Pygmy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies#Genetics) are not determined by those individuals' DNA?

>What else could it possibly be determined by?

Appearance and cultural characteristics (e.g. language, community, location). The connection to genetics is very loose. In the USA for example, someone who's considered "black" might have just as much "white" ancestry as "black" ancestry.

we are not talking about the same meaning of “race” then. you’re talking almost entirely about socio-cultural elements (here. not earlier about Latinos, you should notice).

see my above comment about Inuits and Pygmies and notice how your tangent here doesn’t relate to it. of course DNA explains that difference - nothing else can.

your divergence into culture is a bit disingenuous - especially since you were talking about Alzheimer’s and Latinos earlier, a disease which has nothing to do with culture...

Erm, the point about Latinos is that they're a group almost entirely defined by socio-cultural elements. Latinos are not a random sample of the entire population, so there is no reason to expect them to have the same distribution of genes as the entire population. But obviously, there is no genetic criterion for being Latino. There are, e.g. Latinos with white European ancestry and Latinos with Mayan ancestry. Brazil is a massively diverse country, and yet pretty much all Brazilians are (by US standards) "Latino".

There is no respectable scientific or genetic definition of "race". Race is a socio-cultural construct. Naturally, there are rough correlations between genes and "race" in some instances. Lots of characteristics are roughly correlated. But by that loose standard, ”sofware engineer" would be a genetically defined category too.

you say “obviously” there is no genetic criterion for being Latino... there’s nothing obvious about that at all. you say here yourself they aren’t a random sample of the population - then what are they? and whatever it is that ties these individuals together, I’d wager there’s a genetic history overlapping in those tying elements. Or else you’d find much more ancestral diversity within “Latinos” (or “Asians”, or “Blacks” or “Italians”. there’s a reason these partially-cultural-mostly-ancestral groups _tend_ to have similar ancestry. tend.)

just one example of the genetic angle of Latino-ness: https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/latino-ancestry/

if you go far enough back, we’re all african, and if you go far enough forward, we’re all exactly X% everything after enough gene-mingling. but we’re not at that X% mix and we’re also not all african. we’re in an in-between stage where the cultural groups that are typically called “races” in this in-between moment on average tend to share ancestry and as a result, on average tend to be genetically similar. why are you making this sound like it’s a wild claim?

I think of it as similar to taxonomy of species - there’s no line during evolution where something stops being one species and starts being another. just like there’s no hard line between races. but a sparrow is clearly not a giraffe. that’s a useful comment about their genetic differences that may or may not give you information related to the correlations of those differences.

> “Naturally there are rough correlations between genes and ‘race’ in some instances”

you don’t seem comfortable letting this fact lie without caveating the hell out of it, which makes your position seem ideologically motivated - which makes me question how much truth you’re willing to accept without obfuscating.

A Latino could have entirely white European ancestry or entirely indigenous ancestry (and those are far from the only possibilities). I think you just don't know what a Latino is (?) The blog post you link to might help you out here:

"Latinos — people who trace their ancestry to the ethnically diverse regions of Latin America."

"So for example, on average, people of Mexico have about 4 percent African ancestry, while for the average Puerto Rican the percentage is much higher."

Comparing racial differences in humans to species differences is wildly inaccurate biologically, and a racist trope. I think it's clear who has the agenda here.

i think you’re misunderstanding the important parts of the analogy (and as a result calling me a racist, which is ridiculous). i’m saying all people are on a continuum of genetic difference and that some groups are clumped together along the spectrum relative to some phenotypes and other groups are clumped together elsewhere on the spectrum relative to the same phenotypes - and that it’s easier to see differences between those groups relative to these phenotypes (an easier line to draw. say, average hair color between Pygmies and Swedes) and harder to see differences within those groups relative to the same phenotypes (harder line to draw. say, average hair color distribution within Pygmies).

tell me what is racist about that observation. at no point did i claim that certain of these clumps of phenotypic groupings are correlated with being stupid or inferior or better or worse (nor would I make that claim).

Obviously you can group people according to generic similarity. That could only be false if there were no generic variation.

The point is that there is no independently motivated means of grouping people according to their genes that will make, e.g., the racial classifications of current US society fall out as a result. You will get clumps, but you won't get one clump corresponding to African Americans, one group corresponding to Latinos, one group corresponding to Asian Americans, etc. etc.

People who are obsessed with linking these non-genetically-defined classifications to genes are, almost invariably, racists. What other motivation could there be?

off the top of my head i can think of a few non-racist, potentially useful motivations. here’s a random one: say you’re an EMT responding to a medical emergency and you have limited time to check for the top few health emergencies likely in the presented situation. you know that, based on the “perceived race” of the patient, condition X is more likely given this ancestry than condition Y. this is the only visible information that would influence your decision. your time is limited - it’s only rational and responsible to check for the statistically more likely condition X before you check for condition Y. does that make this EMT a racist? or “obsessed with linking [...]”?

in the same way biological sexes might have medical correlations (color blindness, for instance), the things we’re loosing calling races may also. why not use this potentially useful information in order to save resources and improve lives?

i can’t help feel like you’re descending into ad hominem - you’re mostly agreeing with the facts of what i’m saying, yet claiming that looking at these facts at all makes one a racist. that’s a non-starter. the facts are the facts and what you choose to do with them is what potentially makes you a racist; not merely their acknowledgement.

> you’re mostly agreeing with the facts of what i’m saying,

No, not really. For example, you claimed above that "Latino" was a genetically identifiable subgroup.

As to the motivations you suggest, go back and look at my original comment in this thread. There's nothing in it that anyone with those motivations would object to. In fact, that very comment made reference to the medical significance of differences in the distribution of genes between different "races".

>There really shouldn't be a debate that there are genetic differences amongst 'races'. It shouldn't be something that is "taboo" to discuss or talk about, since it is a factually correct statement to make.

I disagree. Who defines what a "race" is?

Divide a population into two groups arbitrarily, and you'll find statistical differences.

Pick any metric, and you'll get clusters.

There are so many data scientists here on HN - so I hope many do understand how sensitive clustering is to the metric, algorithm, and other parameters!

And for everyone else: race is like colors in a rainbow. Yes, the rainbow is not monochromatic. And yet there is no division in the continuous spectrum in nature.

> Divide a population into two groups arbitrarily, and you'll find statistical differences.

False. If you select individuals for each group through random sampling, you likely won't find significant statistical differences.

Also your allegory is fallacious. There is no difference in the adjacent colors in the rainbow, but there is definitely a large and noticeable difference between purple and yellow.

>Also your allegory is fallacious. There is no difference in the adjacent colors in the rainbow, but there is definitely a large and noticeable difference between purple and yellow.

This is exactly what the allegory is saying.

Well, races are artificially created by inbreeding and culling. I don't know if it have ever been done for humans, but this might be the wrong word.

And i won't trust any geneticist who don't know that given that a geneticist taught me that.

Isn't the factually correct statement to make that there are genetic differences amongst 'people'?

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