On “Real Semites” and “Fake Jews”

Semite Denialism and the Israel–Palestinian Conflict

The average commenter responding to any social media post on Jews or Judaism. Source: It’s Always Sunni in Al-Quds

In a 1899 letter 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 leave 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 Khazar¹) 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 Palestine.² (Outside the Middle East, earlier Semite deniers included American white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, who called Jews an “invented race” with “Negro blood” and “Mongolian eyes,” and who counted Adolf Hitler among his admirers.³) As historian Derek Penslar recounts, the Syrian statesman Faris Bey el-Khouri told the UN 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. (Technically this is Israelite denialism, not Semite denialism as such.) In 2001, 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 (fake Semite!) 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. (The fact that the Haredim still dress like 18th-century Polish nobles probably doesn’t help matters.) These claims also permeate the conspiracist right, with Candace Owens claiming that Ashkenazim aren’t related to “biblical Jews” and Tucker Carlson arguing that Israelis should undergo DNA testing to prove their relation to the ancient Israelites.

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.⁴ In the case of Ashkenazim, 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. Sephardim also combine Levantine and Southern European ancestry, but without the Slavic element. Following their 1492 expulsion from Spain, many Sephardim 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 (eg, Ashkenazi and Sephardic-related Jews), who were dispersed in Europe, and Mizrahi Jews (eg, 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. Ashkenazim are only around 32% of Israel’s Jewish population, while some 50% 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. (Male black slaves generally didn’t leave descendants, since they were separated from women or castrated. Middle Eastern Christians, Druze, and Jews weren’t involved in the Muslim slave trade, so they lack equivalent admixture.) It’s ironic for leftists to side with the Palestinians because they’re “darker,” 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 (hence the surname of Palestinian activist Mohammed el-Kurd), 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.⁵ According to turn-of-the-20th-century physical anthropologists, back when such studies were conducted, 6% of Samaritans had red hair, while the “general type of physiognomy of the Samaritans is distinctly Jewish, the nose markedly so.” Then again, there’s also a distinct “Arab nose,” and antisemitic caricatures end up looking like Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, so maybe Jews and Arabs are related?

Samaritans in full effect. Hershel (back row, third from left, awake) is functionally Ashkenazi. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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 Petronius’ late 1st-century CE novel Satyricon, 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 (compiled ~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 (~244 CE) confirm that impression. So much for Black Hebrew Israelite theory. 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.⁶ Long before German demagogue Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, the 13th-century German-Jewish apologetic Sefer Nizzahon Yashan records that “The heretics [ie, Christians] ask: ‘Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?’”⁷ Obviously, there are plenty of fair-skinned (and handsome!) Jews, but 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 Ashkenazim 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.” Obviously, 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 Hillel Halkin notes, 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, provides 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. So do Palestinians, even though their nationality is of much more recent vintage. But the Palestinians will never achieve statehood by denying the simple truth that al-Khalidi readily acknowledged back in 1899. Arguments that Jews “aren’t real Semites” are no longer just weakening the Arab cause in front of UN diplomats. They’re 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. Scientific studies have proven al-Khalidi right: most Jews and Palestinians are cousins, even if they’ve diverged over their centuries apart. As a 2020 genomic history of the Southern Levant concludes: “both Arabic-speaking and Jewish populations are compatible with having more than 50% Middle-Eastern-related ancestry” consistent with the ancient Canaanites. A recognition of this reality won’t end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but it does provide the starting point for a resolution.

1. The Khazar Khaganate was a Turkic state (c. 7th–10th centuries) located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Its ruling elite adopted Judaism sometime in the 8th or 9th century, possibly for political neutrality between Christian Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate. Khazar descent would explain why Ashkenazi Jews speak a Turkic language, are renowned steppe warriors, and resemble Central Asians. However, since none of these things are true, it’s a decidedly bad theory.

Historically, some Jews embraced the idea of Khazar descent based on the false notion that if Jews weren’t seen as Semites, they wouldn’t be subject to antisemitism. But whether embraced by Jews or their haters, Khazar theory has usually had a political motivation.

2. “Semitic” is a linguistic, not racial, category that includes languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic. However, in the context of anti-Zionist discourse, it’s come to mean ancestrally Middle Eastern.

3. In terms of intellectual genealogy, we could go further back to Christian replacement theology, which holds that the Church is the “true Israel.” However, Christian supersessionism distinguishes “Israel of the spirit” (Christians) from “Israel of the flesh” (Jews). It doesn’t traditionally deny the Jews’ “carnal” ties to their ancestors. How could it, without also absolving Jews for their ancestral crime of killing Christ? Carrie Prejean Boller, unironically a former member of the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, makes the connection between supersessionism and Semite denialism explicit: “The Catholic Church is the True Israel. Christians are the spiritual Semites. We are the new people of God.” (Contra Boller, the Apostle Paul explicitly says of the Jews that “as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable”—a point affirmed by the Catholic Church.)

Semite denialism takes supersessionism to the next level: Jews are neither “Israel of the spirit” nor “Israel of the flesh,” but impostors through and through. In 399 CE, Saint Augustine invoked Psalm 59:11 to defend the place of Jews in Christendom: “Slay them not, but scatter them in your might, lest your people forget your Law.” Jews were to be subjugated, but also protected, because they bore inadvertent witness to the truth of Christian prophecy. As Bernard of Clairvaux put it in the 12th century, Jews were “Scripture’s living words.” From an Augustinian perspective, then, Christians who deny that Jews are “the real Jews” are undercutting their own religion. If Jews are fake, was Jesus an impostor too?

4. Those converts would’ve spoken Arabic (in Yemen) and Amharic (in Ethiopia), both Semitic languages, so they’re “real Semites” regardless.

5. There were also Jews who never left the land of Israel, such as the Peki’in community, but they’re no longer a distinct group.

6. When, in 1938, Benito Mussolini enacted antisemitic laws to appease Hitler, they were widely unpopular among Italians. Perhaps Nazi propaganda that caricatured Jews as speaking with their hands hit a little too close to home.

7. Among the answers offered: “Jews are pure of menstrual blood so that there is no initial redness. Gentiles, however, are not careful about menstruant women and have sexual relations during menstruation; thus, there is redness at the outset, and so the fruit that comes out, ie, the children, are light.” Uh, sure.