Judaism: The Genetic Religion

For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told in print that “Hitler would certainly have been very pleased” by your work can’t be pleasant. But that’s what happened in 2010 to Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, when he and his colleagues published a study showing that Jews in three different geographical areas had certain collections of genes that made them more biologically similar to one another than they were to non-Jews in the same regions. The work also showed that Jews around the world could trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago; that meant, however, that certain genetic signatures could be used to identify Jews, indicating that Jews share a common biological identity beyond their religious affiliation—which is what inspired the Hitler crack.

Jews, the work of Ostrer’s group and another team found, are as closely related genetically as would be expected for typical fourth or fifth cousins. “I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest,” Ostrer told Sciencemagazine at the time.