All of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish.
And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.
Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.
I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.
I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.
DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).
But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.
No that's not what I said. I said that DNA, though inherited, is irrelevant for determining cultural identity.
If I discover tomorrow that I carry YDNA haplotype J1, that doesn't make me Jewish, either culturally or ancestrally. Nobody could claim me as ancestrally Jewish based on that either.
Having a documented lineage stretching back many generations, however, would possibly do both, should I choose to embrace it.
Then substitute it with haplotype G or E1b, or include all of them. Or swap out both the haplotype and the cultural group for different ones, i.e Y Haplogroup R1b among people from Iceland.
The particular haplotype is irrelevant to the argument, which is that genes don't define cultural identity, and at best are trailing and largely low resolution indicators of historical social patterns.
30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.
Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
That's my point. By "common ancestor" I meant, common ancestor common to them only. That's what I find to be unlikely.
And yes, you are right about this. There is plenty of vids on YT that explain the math
If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.
This case is much closer to the latter than the former.
Of course people have DNA in common with their ancestors as a group, hell we share a lot in common with fish. But it's because these genes are common that they enter and re-enter your family tree at multiple points.
And your mitochondrial DNA definitely doesn't descend from Abraham, a male incapable of passing on mitochondrial DNA, so there's a reason I gloss over female line descent.
Good sign of someone arguing dishonestly is that when you call out their lies, they tell you that the truth doesn’t matter.
Being born into it is the most common and ‘supported’ way.
Judaism is actually one of the major world religions, though it's much smaller in terms of population compared to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism [1]. Despite its smaller numbers, it has had a significant influence on Western culture, ethics, and religious thought, particularly as the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.
Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process.
Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as you don’t believe you are something else, you are Hindu. Notably, caste can be tricky. There might also be a form you should fill out.[https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/407/is-it-true-...]
Buddhism, you join the Sangha (show up), or follow teachings. There is no test or anything. Many Buddhists don’t directly do those things, and I’ve never heard anything say they ‘weren’t Buddhist’. Maybe a terrible Buddhist, but what else is new?
By those standards, is not Judaism the toughest and most difficult? Personally, I’d take it as a point of pride.
> Generally not an arduous process.
Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.
Having in mind that we share a majority of our genes with other mammals, and almost all with chimps, so the range of allowed variation among people is in itself small.
To start, this genes aren't exclusive from the group. And it is not a monofiletic group anymore, because is a religious one and anybody can join it. So from a "taxonomic" point of view is not what we would call a "natural group", speaking genetically.
Is not different than claiming that there is a "Christian DNA". Biologically it does not have any sense.
It’s as if you said my family didn’t share DNA with me because an adoption or two had occurred over the centuries. It’s a bizarre argument that keeps coming up here, I don’t know what the real underlying root of it is.
https://www.genome.gov/dna-day/15-ways/human-genomic-variati...
I’ll let him speak for himself.
I'm not against the use of taxa below species level for humans; Its use is widespread on life sciences, but we need to apply it wisely. Race was a poorly defined biological term kidnapped to justify doing evil things against other people. The term may be a lost cause at this moment.
If we take a look to a Wolof from Senegal near an Aboriginal from Camberra we can always say who is who. If we take a look to somebody from Israel and somebody from Palestine, we can't. At the naked eye, both are indistinguishable. At a physiological level, both breath air and work exactly in the same way. Genetic differences between both are smaller than current genetic variability among Jewish.
If Jewish are some kind of taxon below species level, we would have to include Palestinians (and a lot of other Middle East people) on that taxon. This is how Taxonomy works.
If the reason is because they were a closed group for some time; applying the same reasoning, the European monarchies should be also a race. Is also a reproductive closed group, showing high frequencies of some rare diseases and even developed an unique look as consequence (See a portrait of Charles II from Spain).
Anthropology books should talk about Africans, Caucasians, Asians, Jewish... and Kings.
Why stop here? Should Mormons be also their own human race? Are Amish a race? Are rednecks a new race of humans?
The obvious answer is not. Maybe in 65000 years, but not now.
That would introduce a lot of noise in Anthropology, just for fulfilling a wish of "but I feel special", and should be avoided. We all feel special.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034383/
Couldn't find a page on the government website, but I remember reading about it there in the not too distant past.
A DNA test can be used to obtain Israeli citizenship, but this is reserved to prove that a person is the child of an Israeli citizen. According to Israeli law, if a child is born to an Israeli mother or father abroad, they can be granted Israeli citizenship. The DNA test is used to authorize this, proving this familial link. We discuss more about obtaining a paternity test in Israel in another article.
In some very rare cases, a DNA test can be used to prove their relation to a Jewish parent, sibling or grandparent, even though the applicant doesn’t have documents proving this relationship, but said person has to have documents verifying that they are Jewish.
By what measure? And how is "race" defined?
Also, a comedian spinning his experience into material.