People are people

It’s an odd paradox, but not at all unusual, that people with completely opposite views can end up taking strangely similar positions on certain questions.

One such question is what it is to be a Jew. On that, anti-Semites will give the same answer as many Jews: they are a race. Being a Jew is something that is inherited by children from their parents, summed up in the expression Jewish blood. That’s why Jews feel it’s enough to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew. While it only needed a single Jewish grandparent to make someone a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis.

For others, however, being a Jew merely meant professing a particular religion. After all, you can convert to Judaism, and that makes you a Jew. But since you can’t convert your DNA, that rather suggests that being a Jew is nothing to do with physical inheritance, and instead, ultimately, a matter of choice.

Did I say DNA? Because that’s the central theme of an article from Time that Danielle pointed out to me.

It seems that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania decided, more or less on a whim, to send off for DNA tests. She, Dani Shapiro, felt there was little need for a test, since she knew exactly who she was and where she came from. She was Ashkenazi Jew whose parents had emigrated from Central Europe.

And then the results came back.

It turned out that she was at least half wrong. It seems her parents had been having trouble conceiving. So they’d called on the services of a fertility clinic, which used a curious technique of mixing semen from different donors with that of their client. That meant, of course, that it was a bit of a lottery who the biological father of any successful embryo might be.

Dani Shapiro: perhaps not everyone’s idea of Jewish looks

In her case, it turned out it hadn’t been the man who she’d always regarded as her father. Who was, in fact, her father. Just not biologically.

Now her mother was certainly Jewish, so to the Jews she would certainly have been one of theirs. But the blood of a gentile also ran in her veins – as she established when she tracked down her biological father and discovered how much they strangely had in common.

“When I met him,” she writes, “I understood, for the first time, where aspects of my very personhood had come from.”

Well, since she had been certain that Ashkenazy Judaism was a fundamental part of her personhood, that was quite some discovery.

The reality, of course, is that being an Ashkenazy Jew really is part of her personhood. As it’s part of mine, even though like her, my father was no Jew. As it isn’t part of my sons’, though to Hitler they would have been Jews too.

The reality is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who your parents are. Being a Jew or not being a Jew is neither a religious choice nor a genetic destiny. It is a cultural state that one enters or doesn’t, as one chooses.

But then the same is true for other ethnicities too. There may be a number of personal characteristics that are genetically determined, skin colour being the most obvious. But just as with Jews, most of what makes an ethnic group is a matter of culture: a series of shared notions and traditions which go far beyond genetics or faith (though faith can strengthen them).

Which makes the differences between groups interesting but superficial. A lesson both Jews and anti-Semites ought to learn. Jews aren’t better than anyone else simply by virtue of being Jews. Just as they aren’t any worse.

A race? A faith? Jews are just people. Which is the most important thing they, or anyone else, ever inherits from their parents.

As a DNA test easily proved. Though none ought to be necessary.