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This is a guest essay written by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In a 1899 letter sent to the Chief Rabbi of France, Jerusalem mayor Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi wrote:
“I really do regard [Jews] as relatives of us Arabs; for us they are cousins; we really do have the same father, Abraham, from whom we are also descended. … Who can dispute the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”
Yet he went on to note that “Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by people other than only Israelites. This reality, these acquired facts, this brutal force of circumstances leaves Zionism, geographically, no hope of realization.”
Obviously, al-Khalidi was wrong that Zionism had “no hope of realization,” though he was right to point out that the “acquired fact” of other people in the land would cause issues. But what strikes a modern observer is that a Palestinian would so readily acknowledge that, yes, Jews have ancestral roots in the Holy Land and are related to Arabs.
This was indeed widely acknowledged until well into the 20th century, with 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant calling Jews “Palestinians living among us” and 19th-century British-Jewish statesman Benjamin Disraeli referring to Arabs as “Jews on horseback.”
Al-Khalidi rejected Zionism in favor of territorialism: “By God, the earth is vast enough; there are still uninhabited lands where millions of poor Israelites could be settled, where they might find happiness and one day form a nation.” But here, at least, was an argument based on reality. Today, the denial that Jews have any connection to their historic homeland and are European (or Khazar) impostors is embedded in the Palestinian and broader anti-Zionist narrative.
In the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict, “Semite denialism” goes back at least to the 1947 debate surrounding the partition of British Mandate Palestine.
As historian Derek Penslar recounted, the Syrian statesman Faris Bey el-Khouri told the United Nations General Assembly that Jews had no right to Palestine because Eastern European Jews descended from Slavs, Germans, Franks, and Khazars. In his memoirs, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (later Pakistan’s first foreign minister) wrote of the debate over partition that:
“…the [Arab Muslim] speakers spent most of their time in a vain effort to prove that the Jews coming to settle in Palestine were not the descendants of Abraham, and belonged to a Russian tribe named Khazar whose forefathers in a distant past had converted to Judaism. The Arab cause in all its aspects was so strong and just that to support it with such irrelevant arguments amounted to weakening it.”
But such “irrelevant arguments” would go on to shape Arab and Muslim views of Israel. The 1968 Palestinian National Charter says that “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history.”
In 2000, in the midst of peace negotiations with Israel, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat denied the existence of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In 2001, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that “a number of non-Jewish hooligans and ruffians from Eastern Europe who were introduced as Jews were moved to Palestine.” In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that “European Jews are not Semites” but rather descend from Khazars.
Other Khazar theorists include Syria’s blue-eyed ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad and former Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh. Among Left-wing anti-Zionists, Israelis are commonly called white European colonizers. As proof, they’ll cite false reports that Israel has unusually high melanoma rates, or the existence of Israelis with red hair — though there are plenty of ginger Syrians. These claims also permeate the conspiracist Right.
Actually, there have been plenty of genetic studies on Jewish origins. They’ve revealed that most Jewish groups share substantial common Middle Eastern ancestry, alongside varying degrees of admixture from other populations. Notable likely exceptions are Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews, who largely descend from converts.
In the case of Ashkenazi Jews (the proverbial “white Jews”), researchers trace their origins primarily to admixture between Levantine men (presumably Judeans) and Southern European women (probably Italians) in the Early Middle Ages, with later, smaller Slavic contributions. While most Ashkenazi Jews once lived in Eastern Europe, that’s a reflection of migratory patterns — particularly the welcoming policy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was succeeded by the less-than-welcoming Russian Empire — not their primary ancestral origins.
Sephardic Jews also combine Levantine and Southern European ancestry, but without the Slavic element. Following their 1492 expulsion from Spain, many Sephardic Jews migrated to the Ottoman Empire and ultimately blended with existing Middle Eastern Jewish communities. There are two distinct but connected main Jewish genetic clusters: Western Jews (e.g., Ashkenazi and Sephardic-related Jews), who were dispersed in Europe, and Mizrahi Jews (e.g., Iraqi and Persian Jews), who were dispersed in the Middle East or the broader Iranosphere.
However, Jews with multiple diaspora backgrounds are increasingly common in Israel, which is functionally the Jewish melting pot. Ashkenazi Jews are only around 32 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, while some 50 percent of Israeli Jews belong to ethnically mixed families. There is no evidence of a significant Khazar basis to Jewish genetics.
So, yes, many Jews are more European than their Middle Eastern ancestors. But on the other hand, Muslim Arabs are more African than their Middle Eastern ancestors, due to genetic contributions from female black slaves.
It’s ironic for leftists to side with the Palestinians because some of them have “darker” skin, as if that’s a sign of being oppressed, when it’s just as much a signal of historical oppression. There’s also a long history of Muslim migration to the Holy Land, including Bedouin peregrinations from Arabia, Kurdish settlement dating from Crusader times, and Egyptian and Algerian immigration in the late Ottoman period. The most unambiguously “indigenous” people in the Holy Land are the 900-strong Samaritans, who descend from the Israelites (albeit with ancient admixture from other Levantines) and didn’t go into exile, intermarry, keep enslaved concubines, or accept converts.
According to turn-of-the-20th-century physical anthropologists, back when such studies were conducted, six percent of Samaritans had red hair, while the “general type of physiognomy of the Samaritans is distinctly Jewish, the nose markedly so.”1
We don’t have to guess what Jews have looked like through the ages; there’s a historical record. For example, it’s clear that to the Romans, the Jews weren’t seen as racially distinct. In Roman author Petronius’ novel “Satyricon,” written in the late 1st-century CE, a member of a group of runaways suggests applying ink to disguise themselves as Ethiopians, with another replying that this would be just as useful as applying chalk to resemble Gauls or circumcising themselves “so we will be taken for Jews.”
By implication, while Northern Europeans were pale and Africans were black, the Jews were intermediate: physically like the Romans but without foreskins. Just as present-day Jews and Italians often look alike, so did their ancestors. Likewise, the Mishnah (the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah, compiled around 200 CE) records that the Israelites, by contrast with Germans and Ethiopians, are “like boxwood, neither black nor white, but in the middle.”
The murals depicting Jews in Syria’s Dura-Europos synagogue (around 244 CE) confirm that impression. Ancient Jews were a Levantine Mediterranean population, some of whom mixed with European Mediterranean groups to form what became European Jewry.
Notably, racial antisemitism first emerged in Northern Europe, where Jews physically (and culturally) stood out more from their Gentile neighbors. Long before German politician Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, the 13th-century German-Jewish apologetic Sefer Nizzahon Yashan records that, “The heretics [i.e., Christians] ask: ‘Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?’” Diverse Ashkenazi phenotypes only fed into later slanders of Jews as conspiratorial shapeshifters.
The argument that Jews “aren’t real Jews” because their ancestors include converts raises an important follow-up question: Who do you think converted those ancestors? The answer: “real,” “biblical” Jews.
Presumably, back when Judean eligible bachelors married Italian bella donnas, their wives assumed a Jewish identity and passed it down to the children. Otherwise, how would Ashkenazi Jews have ended up practicing Judaism? And how else would they have no cultural memory of their Italian ancestry?
If a “full-blooded Semite” considered his “half-Semitic” son to be Jewish, as did the Jewish community and religious leadership, then isn’t that a sufficient seal of approval? Clearly, the ancient Israelites weren’t intent on maintaining racial purity, or else they wouldn’t have allowed conversions in the first place.
Indeed, King David, the model Israelite ruler, was a descendant of the convert Ruth, who says in the Hebrew Bible: “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” A mixed genealogy doesn’t mean, per the Palestinian National Charter, that “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.”
Certainly, diaspora Jews weren’t an “independent” nationality, but they saw each other, and were seen by neighbors, as a distinct people, as described by Ruth. During the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre declared that, “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” As Israeli biographer Hillel Halkin noted, that refusal wouldn’t have been necessary unless the Jews were already seen as a nation.
Semite denialism is based on a narrowly racial definition of nationhood that doesn’t accord with the historical reality of how nations form and evolve. John Stuart Mill, the liberal philosopher, provided a much more accurate and expansive view:
“A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.”
“This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.”
Following Mill’s definition, the Jews possess a national history and a community of recollections, which coalesced in the Land of Israel. Jews also share a community of language (historically, multiple languages like Yiddish and Ladino, though Hebrew was the common sacred tongue) and religion. As for descent, most Jews do share a common lineage that traces back to the Levant, but even those who don’t are considered children of Abraham and Sarah by virtue of conversion.
Most importantly for the context of Zionism, many Jews shared a “desire to be under the same government” based on their “common sympathies” and in response to the deprivations of statelessness.
Arguments that Jews “aren’t real Semites” are no longer just weakening the Arab cause in front of UN diplomats; they are reframing a political dispute between two national movements into a zero-sum jihad against “settler-colonialists,” which the Palestinians — by fundamentally misunderstanding their opponents — are bound to lose.
Fabulous and informative. Thank you!
So good. All of us blue-eyed Jews with tons of gingers in the family thank you!