Barnard's Nadia Abu El-Haj Fails Genetics Too

The question is...does academic freedom allow professors to make up the facts as they go? That is the question facing the Barnard administration as they decide whether to grant tenure to Nadia Abu El Haj. El-haj's supporters have indicated that the Israel Lobby opposes her tenure she is a Palestinian who has some conversational theories about archeology. Nothing could be further from the truth.

El-Haj can congratulate herself for introducing into the American academic environment the hallucinated claim that Jewish identity is a modern, nationalist, and Zionist-imperialist "construct" rather than a product of thousands of years of recorded history and religious tradition. Much more may be said about Prof. El-Haj's extremist approach to Israel. But she also appears utterly ignorant of the Islamic legacy she would claim to defend. For her, intifada comes before Islam, and not only alphabetically. The Koran, Islam's sacred text, states without ambiguity that God "said to the Israelites: Dwell in this land. When the promise of the Hereafter comes to be fulfilled, we shall assemble you all together." The Koran is not a creation of Zionist-imperialists engaged in "inventing" the Jews, or reinventing them in the manner of El-Haj. Israeli work on the access structure at the Temple Mount is being carried out in a professional and culturally-sensitive manner. Her underlying objective is to deny that Jews as a nation ever existed. Viewed without anti-Israel bias, El-Haj's work appears about as reliable and legitimate as theories that space aliens created Stonehenge.

Now El Haj fancies herself a genetics expert. And based on the facts as laid out by Jonathan Schwartz of Anti-Racist blog...her genetics is as bad as her archeology. She is now going outside of her field so she can invent genetic lies about the Jews. I can't believe Barnard is even considering granting his woman tenure.

Nadia Abu El Haj Only Lies About The Jews by Jonathan Schwartz
Anti-Racist Blog

Nadia Abu El Haj's latest genetics paper is now in print. "The Genetic Reinscription of Race." It is… unoriginal. Since it's a review article on the medical use of genetic data, that is hardly surprising. The purpose of a review article, after all, is to review what is already known. The better review articles synthesize that knowledge, put it in a new perspective, or use the opportunity to bring new ideas to the fore. El Haj's review just… reviews.

But here's the thing. The woman seems to be capable of doing fair-minded if pedestrian work when dealing with topics like medical genetics – even though this is controversial territory because it separates us into black and white– but when writing about the Jews she becomes unhinged, succumbs to fantasies about the genealogy of the Palestinian Arabs, writes an entire book asserting that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are "a tale best understood as the modern nation's 'origin myth'... transported into the realm of history," and publishes false summaries of the genetic data on Jewish ancestry.

Nadia Abu El Haj, the Barnard College professor whose tenure bid is being challenged by professors who maintain that her book on Israeli archaeology is shoddy, is now working on a book on Jewish genetic origins, a book that her colleague and friend Joseph Massad describes as being about the "Zionist movement('s)…desperate contemporary search for Jewish 'genetic markers’."

Zionists are engaged in a “desperate” search for Jewish genetic markers? Who knew?

Zionists like other Jews and, frankly, like most peoples of the world are intrigued by the new data genetics provides about the history of human populations. But “desperate” search undertaken to support an “investment in the racial separateness of the Jews.” I don’t think so.

There may be Jews who believe in “the racial separateness of the Jews,” though it’s hard to understand how. It’s pretty hard to believe in “the racial separateness of the Jews” when Israelis come in more colors than a Benetton commercial.

The person who actually is on a desperate search for Jewish genetic markers seems to be Nadia Abu El Haj. She has been working for the better part of a decade on her projected book about “Genetics, Jewish Origins and Historical Truths,” or, “Bearing the Mark of Israel? Genetics, Genealogy and the Quest for Jewish Origins,” as two of her lecture titles phrase it.

In a recent paper, "Rethinking Genetic Genealogy: A Response to Stephan Palmié," American Ethnologist 2007, 34:2:223-227, Abu El Haj states that one of the “instances in which widely accepted forms of knowledge have been disproved” by genetic research is “the ‘fact’ that the Jewish maternal line originated in ancient Palestine.”

The leading study of the subject actually comes to exactly the opposite conclusion. The authors of “The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event,” conclude that evidence “supports a common Levantine ancestry” for Jewish women. “Close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansions in Europe within the past millennium.”

Abu El Haj appears to be attempting to deconstruct Jewish ancestry in much the way she attempted to deconstruct the archaeology of ancient Israel in Facts on the Ground, and for similar reasons. She is committed to the proposition that Israel has no right to exist because it is a “settler-colonial” state. And she appears to believe that if she can deny that Jews are descended from a Near Eastern ancestral stock, she can delegitimize the Israeli state.

It is worth pausing here to consider this question carefully. There is no doubt that the culture of the Jewish people is continuous from the ancient Judean kingdom through to the modern era. The historical record of a people who worship one God, observe the laws of the Torah, and use Hebrew as their legal and theological language is too continuous and extensive to be in doubt (except by propagandists, anti-Semites, and cranks). Now, suppose for the sake of this argument, that the Torah, the Hebrew language, and the observance of Jewish law have continued uninterrupted since the Judean kingdom in the days before the Babylonian exile (as historical sources establish that they have), but no living Jew is a biological descendant of the ancient Judeans. Suppose, that is, for the sake of the argument, that the Torah was faithfully passed down from generation to generation, welcoming converts and teaching every child to cherish the Torah. But it so chanced to happen that every one of the ancient Judean families failed at some point to produce a new generation, while the biological descendants of the converts, who would have been, after all, indistinguishable from the biological descendants of Judeans after a generation or two, did continue to produce heirs so that by the twenty-first century geneticists could prove that no living Jew was a descendant of the ancient Judeans. (We should pause here to remind ourselves that genetic science is not this precise. We do not have a genotype of the ancient Judean population, and will never be able to prove or disprove descent of a population with this degree of certainty.) But, for the sake of the argument, if someone like Nadia Abu El Haj could in fact prove that no living Jew is a natural descendant of the ancient Judeans, would it negate the right of the Jewish people to nationhood in the ancient homeland of the Jewish nation?

Nadia Abu El Haj obviously thinks so. She seems to believe that it is so important to prove that modern Jews are not descended from ancient Judeans that she is willing to perjure herself to do it. She has published a paper in which she states that it has been proven that the Jewish maternal line did not originate in ancient Palestine.

It is, of course, possible that she is not deliberately lying. It is possible that when she wrote this paper she was unaware of research on the subject of the genetics of the Jewish maternal line that is familiar to every reader of the New York Times. (NY Times, Jan 14, 2006, “New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi Jews,” Nicholas Wade.)

But if that is the case, if Nadia Abu El Haj has spent the past seven years studying the genetics of the Jews and was unaware of this study when she denied that Jewish ancestral lines can be traced to the ancient Near East, she certainly doesn’t merit tenure at Columbia.

We all have our little problems with the truth. Some of us deny that we color our grey hair. Some of us lie about how often we get to the gym. Some of us even tell the dentist that we floss daily. But does Columbia really want a professor who apparently cannot stop herself from publishing falsehoods about the Jews?

At least someone is fighting against this misinformation. The Columbia University chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and LionPAC will bring three of the world’s leading archaeologists of ancient Israel to Columbia this year to lecture on their findings regarding the Bible lands in antiquity.

On September 17, Barnard College Professsor, Alan F. Segal, Professor of Religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies, introduced the series, speaking on: What Biblical Archaeology Tells Us About the First Temple Period. He will also introduce the next three speakers.

This Monday, October 15, at 7:00 pm in 717 Hamilton Hall, Professor William Dever will address the topic: Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel.

William G. Dever is Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He has served as director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, as director of the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. He spent thirty years conducting archaeological excavations in the Near East. He directed the digs at Gezer, Shechem, Jebel Qa’aqir, and Be’er Resisim, and is the author of 27 books and over 350 articles on the archaeology of the Holy Land.

Professor Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University will speak November 19 on: The Archaeology of the Philistines: Findings Relevant to Ancient Israel and the Development of Biblical Text.

Professor Jodi Magness of Duke University will speak February 4 on: Jerusalem in the Time of Herod.

Each talk will be open to the public and followed by an ample question period.