The Gene Wars

By Diana Muir Appelbaum, Paul S. Appelbaum

What can science teach us about the validity of nationalist claims?

With this basic understanding of genetics in mind, we can now turn to the use—or misuse—of genetic findings in the battle of territorial claims. The Macedonians, the Sami of northern Scandinavia, and the Palestinians are three groups that have seized upon deeply problematic interpretations of new genetic evidence to bolster claims to sovereignty. While each case is unique, they all share a common effort to “prove” direct descent from the most ancient of the nations who occupied a given piece of land.

Most of today’s Macedonians are in fact citizens of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, carved out of the remains of Yugoslavia in 1991, with many others living in northern Greece. They speak a Slavic language, part of a family of tongues brought to the Balkans by Slavic tribes in the sixth and seventh centuries, and first began to develop a unique national identity at the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁸Nonetheless, as the title of a recent book explains, some of these citizens believe that they are in fact the descendants of Alexander the Great of Macedon, and as such “are not Slavs, but have a direct descent from the ancient Macedonians.”¹⁹ Consequently, they claim territorial rights to Greece’s northern province, also called Macedonia and part of the site of the ancient Macedon kingdom.

The study much ballyhooed by Macedonian nationalists for this purpose looked at the differences in DNA in a cell surface marker gene in thirty-one different populations from the Mediterranean basin, the Near East, and Africa.²⁰ The frequency of variant DNA sequences, or alleles, in the Macedonian sample most closely resembled that found in a sample from Crete, and was similar to what was seen in almost all of the other Mediterranean groups. On the other hand, the frequencies in the three Greek samples were grouped with samples from sub-Saharan Africa, quite different from that seen in the other Mediterranean populations. To undermine Macedonian claims to northern Greece, Greeks prefer to portray them as Slavs, who are relatively late arrivals in the Balkans and therefore, they believe, without any entitlement to Greek land.²¹ Yet the genetic data on cell surface markers have been used by Macedonians to turn the tables on the Greeks. As the authors of the study themselves wrote, “Our results show that Macedonians are related to other Mediterraneans and do not show a close relationship with Greeks; however, they do with Cretans…. This supports the theory that Macedonians are one of the most ancient peoples existing in the Balkan Peninsula, probably long before the arrival of the Mycaenian Greeks in about 2000 B.C.E.”²² According to these findings, then, it is the modern Greeks whose legitimacy in the region is suspect.

The Sami (also called Laplander) have lived in northern Scandinavia since before recorded history. They speak ten distinct languages, and historically, the disparate Sami peoples had distinctive customs, religious traditions, and legends.²³ All Sami languages are in the Finno-Ugric group, a linguistic family that reached Europe later and by a different route than the Indo-European languages ancestral to Norwegian and Swedish. The overwhelming majority of Sami today speak a Scandinavian language, live in modern homes, and have jobs in the modern economy. Like other Scandinavians, most Sami are lapsed Lutherans. Sami national consciousness arose only in the last decades of the twentieth century; today, some Sami have begun to speak of a “Sami nation,” and to promote a quest for self-determination. Moreover, as minorities in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and, to a lesser extent, the neighboring areas of Russia, they seek access to traditional herding and fishing territories, and the maintenance of their languages and culture.²⁴ They have indeed made some strides: Sami parliaments exist in all three Scandinavian countries, though they lack the full apparatus of self-rule. Moreover, their cause has gained popularity among some non-Sami, who work with Sami activists in “helping the Sami people assert their unique identity.” They have now identified a thirteenth-century “Sami homeland… called Sampi or Samiland, which once occupied most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland,” and assert that Sami “are the indigenous people who live in northern [Scandinavia]….”²⁵

Genetic claims on behalf of the Sami are somewhat more complex than those of the Macedonians, since no one denies that Sami (or proto-Sami) have been in Scandinavia for thousands of years. Studies of mitochondrial DNA have been of greatest use to the Sami; most show distinctive haplotypes found only at much lower frequencies in other European populations, and advocates for the Sami claim that these data indicate that the Sami were the earliest settlers of northern Scandinavia. As the website of the Swedish Sami Parliament puts it, “There has never been any reason to doubt that the Sami people have always been here.”²⁶

The Palestinians are another example of a national identity that emerged in the twentieth century and has now turned to genetics to support its territorial claims. Culturally, religiously, and linguistically, they are part of the Arab people that arrived in the Levant as conquerors in the seventh century. Yet it remains unclear to what extent today’s Palestinians, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, descend from the conquered Christian population, some of whom are known to have converted to the religion of their Islamic rulers, or from the conquering Arabs or other Muslims who came to the region to take advantage of economic opportunities at various periods from the seventh century to the present.²⁷ The historical record shows that an Arab army conquered the area, some local people converted, and some Muslims arrived later as immigrants; it does not show the proportion of the population accounted for by these events.

Because Palestinian Arabs are part of an ethnic group historically proud of having arrived as conquerors, the question of how to claim historical primacy has been the source of some perplexity among Palestinian nationalists. After all, the lack of evidence for Arab primacy jumbles the logic of their arguments. Various claims have been articulated; one holds that, “The Arabian desert and the area around it gave birth to a number of tribes and civilizations: Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Hebrews, Canaanites, Nabateans, etc. These tribes continuously drifted out of the desert into the fertile areas of the Levant,” which, since all of its inhabitants throughout history were Arabs from Arabia, was always Arab.²⁸ A separate style of argument simply states that the Palestinians are the original and eternal people of Palestine. “Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists… but essentially (especially in villages) the population remained constant—and is now still Palestinian.”²⁹

Another tactic has been to negate the Jewish claim to primacy by denying that Jews are in fact the descendants of the ancient Hebrews: “The claim made by the Zionists… that late nineteenth-century European Jews are direct descendants of ancient Palestinian Hebrews is what is preposterous here…. That they somehow descend from first-century Hebrews, despite the fact that they look like other Europeans, that they speak European languages is what is absurd.”³⁰ Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe is widely cited as proving “that most Ashkenazim are the descendants of convert Khazars [a Central Asian Turkic people that embraced Judaism to some extent in the eighth or ninth century, but disappeared from history not long thereafter] with closer ties to the Slavic people than to Semitic people.”³¹ They are, then, according to this view, mere interlopers in the Middle East with no historic claim to Israel.

The advent of genetic science has debunked the claim that Jews are descended from the Khazars, but it has bolstered other arguments that seek to sever the connection between ancient Hebrews and modern Jews. Palestinian nationalists have seized upon new genetic data to prove that, as Columbia University professor Joseph Massad says, “many can claim easily that the Palestinians of today are the descendants of the ancient Hebrews.”³² According to this narrative, some of the ancient Hebrews became Christians at the time of Jesus, and some became Arabic-speaking Muslims after the Arab conquest. Arguing by turns that they are the descendants of ancient Canaanites or ancient Jews who converted but never left the land, Palestinian nationalists claim a genetically based right to inherit the ancient Hebrew homeland.

Studies of Y chromosome haplotypes showed very similar patterns in Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, who were less closely, but still clearly, related to other Middle Eastern populations.³³ Along the same lines, the research team that claimed to have established the Macedonians’ Mediterranean heritage also examined Palestinian-Jewish similarities in alleles for the same cell surface marker. Their conclusion was that “Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool… that support[s] a common ancient Canaanite origin.”³⁴Thus, some Palestinian advocates now claim that Jews and Palestinians descended from common ancestors, with the Palestinians having remained on the land after most Jews were exiled, sequentially accepting conversion to Christianity under the Byzantines and Islam under the Arabs.³⁵ Hence, Palestinians and Jews have at least equal claims to the land, with the Palestinians claiming a stronger position by virtue of what is taken to be their continuous settlement.

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