Jewish blood says Jerusalem.

Exile changed Jewish culture, but it did not change Jewish origins.

photo: Sander Crombach/Unsplash

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My family and my husband’s family have both been in America for four or five generations.

When our first two kids did the ancestry project in first grade, we counted nine countries: Romania, Moldova, Poland, the odd corners of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and on down the list. By the time it was my daughter’s turn, I told her to just write Brooklyn.

I wanted to know where we actually came from, so I spit in a tube for 23andMe. It came back 99.9 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. No Romanian, no Moldovan, no Polish, no Hungarian, no Austrian, no German — not one of the nine countries my family had lived in for centuries. As an answer to my question, it was maddening.

Years later, in the middle of cancer treatment, I joined the All of Us research program to put my genome to work for science. They ran a more sensitive test, and it gave me the answer 23andMe never could. My DNA comes from the Levant. All of it.

On paper, my people look like they belong to Eastern Europe.

Yiddish is a German language stuffed with Polish and Ukrainian and Russian words. The dishes you picture on a Jewish table (borscht, herring, rye bread, kasha, pickles, kreplach that are pierogi by another name) are the food of the Slavic kitchens all around them. Klezmer runs on the same scales as the regional folk music. The long black coat you picture on a Chabadnik¹ traces back to the noble dress of Poland and Lithuania.

Everything on the surface says these are Eastern European people. And then the blood says no.

The culture crossed the line. The marriages didn’t. For the entire time Ashkenazi Jews lived in the east, they married within the community, almost without exception, and they did it for two reasons at once.

Our own law forbade marrying out. Under halakha (Jewish law), a union between a Jew and a non-Jew is not a marriage at all unless the non-Jew converts. And the countries we lived in forbade it from the other side. Roman law had already made marriage between a Jew and a Christian a capital offense, punished as adultery, and medieval Christian rulers across Europe kept the ban in force, often on penalty of death.

The wall was built from both sides. The big genome surveys keep landing on the same finding: Each Jewish group is closer to other Jewish groups than to the neighbors it lived beside for centuries, and they specifically rule out a large Slavic contribution to Ashkenazi ancestry.

There is European ancestry in the Ashkenazi genome, a real amount of it, but it is old and mostly southern, picked up while the community was forming around the Mediterranean, not taken from the Poles and Russians my family lived among.

Then it sealed. The population runs through a founder bottleneck of roughly 350 people and reads today as a distinct genetic isolate. A consumer test calls me 99.9 percent Ashkenazi because that cluster is one of the most identifiable on earth, and it is identifiable precisely because we didn’t blend with the neighbors.

Now put my ancestors next to a Jew from Baghdad or Sana’a. In daily life they would have had almost nothing to say to each other — a different spoken language, Yiddish against Judeo-Arabic. Different food, different music, different dress, even a different way of pronouncing Hebrew.

And underneath all of it, the same Torah word for word, the same law, the same calendar, the same holidays on the same days, the same prayers turned toward Jerusalem, the same origin story rooted in the same narrow strip of land, Judea, the ground the world now calls Israel.

The genetics agree with the prayer book.

Study after study finds a shared Middle Eastern core running through Ashkenazi, Iraqi, and Yemenite Jews alike. That core is the thread. It is the blood that makes us a tribe and not only a faith. The Baghdad Jew and I are one people. The Warsaw Catholic and I are not. That is what a people is — not the same dinner, but the same history.

One more thing binds us, and it is not gentle: The reason my ancestors were in Europe at all is that they had been driven out of somewhere else first. Rome destroyed the Temple in the year 70, and after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 it barred Jews from Jerusalem and renamed the province from Judea to Syria Palaestina, a deliberate move to sever the Jews from the land.

That is where the exile starts.

From then on, everywhere Jews landed, we were the confined, taxed, periodically expelled minority, long before Israel, long before Zionism was a word. England threw out every Jew in 1290, the first country in Europe to do it, and kept their homes and debts as the price of leaving.

France expelled its Jews, let them back, and expelled them again. Spain did it in 1492, convert or get out, ending more than a thousand years of Jewish life on the peninsula in four months, gold and silver left behind.

Then the east, with the Pale of Settlement, the residence quotas, the pogroms. And the Muslim lands, where Jews lived as dhimmis (second-class citizens) under a special tax and periodic violence, like the Farhud (pogrom) in Baghdad on June 1 and 2, 1941, two days that left about 180 Jews dead.

The Jews of Iraq had been there roughly 2,600 years, since the Babylonian exile, one of the oldest communities on earth. In 1951, Iraq stripped them of their citizenship and froze their property, and they left too, part of some 850,000 Jews pushed out of Arab lands in a single generation.

Two thousand years, a long roll of countries, one story. The Warsaw Catholic did not share that story with me. The Baghdad Jew did. A people is also the ones who get driven out beside you.

Now run the exact same test on Palestinians, and watch it come out backwards.

The nearest neighbor is Jordan. South Levantine Arabic is effectively one dialect spoken on both banks of the river, so a man from Nablus and a man from Amman sound the same. Same religion, same food (mansaf is the national dish of Jordan and a staple on Palestinian tables), same clans with branches on both sides of the water.

And the blood matches the map.

Palestinians and Jordanians sit in the same tight Levantine cluster, drawing roughly 81 to 87 percent of their ancestry from the Bronze Age peoples of the region, close kin to Lebanese and Syrians. By language, by food, by family, by blood, a Palestinian and a Jordanian are not merely close. They are the same people.

The border between them is not ancient. Winston Churchill drew it in 1921, carving roughly 78 percent of the British Mandate of Palestine into a new country called Transjordan and handing it to Abdullah, a prince from Mecca whose family had no roots in the Levant. Today something close to half of Jordan is of Palestinian origin. These are one people with a line through them.

The differences are worth stating plainly, because they exist. There are East Bank tribes who are not Palestinian. The Jordanian king descends from Arabia, not from the land he rules. And a distinct Palestinian identity did take shape, in the Arabic newspapers of Jaffa (Filastin began publishing in 1911 and called its readers Palestinians) and in the revolt of 1936 to 1939, an identity that formed against Zionism and later against the State of Israel.

That identity is real. It is also recent, political, and its loudest proponents keep it sharp as a tool for arguing that the Jewish state should not exist at all.

Two patterns, side by side. Jews spent a thousand years living among other peoples and never became them, held apart by everything beneath the surface, down to the genome, and bound to each other across oceans by faith and law and a shared history of being driven out. Palestinians and Jordanians are one people that a colonial administrator split with a pen in 1921.

A word about the Levant, because it carries the argument. The Levant is the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and the land just behind it, today’s Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, reaching into southern Turkey and the Sinai.

It is a region, not a country, and it was always larger than any border later drawn inside it. The Jews come from there. So do the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, and the Lebanese. More than one people is indigenous to that ground, and saying the Jews are one of them takes nothing from anyone else who is.

Here is the part I will not soften. The Jews are a Levantine people, not European transplants who wandered into someone else’s country, not settlers shipped in from outside, but a tribe from that exact strip of land, scattered across the earth for two thousand years and carrying the place in our blood the whole time. My own DNA says so. The genome of a Jew from Warsaw and a Jew from Baghdad says so. That is why Jews from everywhere, from Poland and Yemen and Morocco and Brooklyn, belong there. It is the one place all of them trace back to.

So when someone calls the Jews “colonizers” on the land they never stopped praying toward, look hard at what that claim is. It is not history, and as science it is empty. The genome says the reverse, clearly again and again. It is a story built to make an indigenous people sound foreign at home.

That is not an argument. It is bigotry with a footnote.

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1. An adherent or member of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a major branch of Hasidic Judaism known for its outreach, education, and global community centers