The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus‎. There remains disagreement as to whether the framing of this article comprises WP:SYNTH. In addition to weaker arguments, editors arguing for deletion assert that the cited sources do not provide analyses of all three aspects--Zionism, race and genetics--together, particularly noting genetics as an often-missing element of studies of Zionism and race, or else allude to a WP:PAGEDECIDE situation where relevant information would be better covered as part of Zionism or another related article. Editors supporting keep argue that genetics is particularly important to the framing of many, if not necessarily all, of the studies analyzing race and Zionism, and assert that delete !voters are ignoring scholarly books/articles that do address all three topics in tandem but simply do not include the phrase verbatim in their title/abstract.

There seems to be a higher level of agreement (if not yet a consensus) that the current title is less-than-ideal, and that perhaps Zionism and racism (currently a redirect to a section of Racism in Israel), or some other expression of these topics, would be a more appropriate title. That can be taken up as a move request. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 15:33, 19 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Zionism, race and genetics

Zionism, race and genetics (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log | edits since nomination)

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Oh my, this article is ostensibly on a triply compound topic Zionism, race (human categorization) and genetics. Wow. To be clear, doubly compound topics in Wikipedia have had a history of being interrogated carefully. Only when there are significant and serious treatments which identify a compound topic as significantly addressed as a topic in reliable sources ( Science and technology studies, for example) do we ever have a way for Wikipedia's intentionally conservative and non-innovative reference machinery to document the subject. In this case, the article reads a lot like a original research program that is not indicative of active tripartite treatments combining these three subjects. As such, the article is a textbook example of WP:SYNTH. It is not for Wikipedia. jps ( talk) 18:42, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Judaism, Biology, and Israel. jps ( talk) 18:42, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Ethnic groups-related deletion discussions. Spiderone ^{(Talk to Spider)} 19:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment For WP:SIGCOV see, for example:

Onceinawhile ( talk) 18:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

None of those sources discusses a tripartite project called "Zionism, race, and genetics". None of them. What possesses you to think otherwise? jps ( talk) 18:57, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Why does there have to be a tripartite project? Whatever that is. Anyway

Abu El-Haj, Nadia (2012). The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. University of Chicago Press. ISBN  978-0-226-20142-9. Retrieved 2023-07-08.

Discusses all three elements per quote below:-

Selfstudier ( talk) 19:05, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

There has to be a tripartite project because that is the subject of the article! Wow! What are you doing here? Wikipedia is WP:NOT for novel research projects like this. The quote you include indicates nothing about there being a coherent subject called "Zionism, race, and genetics". In fact, I see instead an analysis that may be relevant to any number of articles we have at Wikipedia that are about genetics, Judaism, Israel, Zionism, etc. But this particular combination of three subjects is absolutely an attempt to shoehorn a thesis that these three subjects are somehow able to combine to form a legitimate research program. The very sources y'all are trying to cite say nothing about that, and this one doesn't either. jps ( talk) 19:10, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Your comment above dismissing the SIGCOV was made within 1 minute of being shown the sources. You are expected to try to read them before commenting on them. Onceinawhile ( talk) 19:29, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

You think I didn't go through the sources at your article already? You think this is the first I'm seeing your list? Please, don't flatter yourself in thinking that because you've looked at timestamps you are somehow clever. I've done my due diligence. You have not. jps ( talk) 19:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Yes, I know you didn't go through the sources, and you are fudging. One fundamental text on this in the bibliography, on its own, runs to 416 pages. It took me 3 days to read that closely, some years ago. So no, you have not read the sources. Nishidani ( talk) 20:16, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

That's not how this works. You can look at the books and the chapters and even do a quick search through those texts that are scanned for relevant sections. If we want to write an entire article on a subject, it should be absolutely apparent at a glance that there is something there. There isn't. You have to strain to come up with a quote that combines all three subjects at once. They just aren't in those books in a serious fashion. If they were, they'd be obvious and easy to point to. jps ( talk) 20:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

@ Nishidani and ජපස: Can you try to talk about the notability of the article rather than whether the other person is "thinking you are somehow clever" or "fudging" or whatever? jp× g 07:47, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Thanks for the reminder. I don't want to personalize this, yes. One thing, it's not really a question of notability to me because the topic is so pregnant that I think one can argue in good faith that lots of scholars are talking about all three in a variety of sources. The real question is whether a distillation in this fashion is something that doesn't run afoul of WP:NOR. If others had done this distillation before, it wouldn't be a question. I guess I just don't think every AfD has to boil down to a question of notability even though I know that this tends to be the way the winds blow these days. jps ( talk) 11:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Form a research programme? Huh? What do you mean? The only aim here is to produce a page on a pre-existing subject covered in numerous sources. That the page title contains three words that you perceive as three separate subjects is incidental. There was already a discussion raised about whether the title was apt; one that you could have participated in. There are several ways on which the article could probably be phrased as just two things, if that is your peccadillo. It could just as equally have been named 'Zionism and race science' or 'Zionism and racial politics'. These would both have been dualistic titles for much the same material already presented. That the title as it stands uses three terms is by-the-by, and if that is your only complaint then it is a naming issue, not a notability one. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

pre-existing subject covered in numerous sources No one has demonstrated that the subject as stated in the title of the article exists! It is bizarre that you think it does. As I stated above, compound topics themselves are fraught. The ones you are describing are somewhat less problematic than the identified synthetic subject of this article, but I have a hard time imagining any of them being legitimate research topics either. BLANK and BLANK typically are not the kind of things Wikipedia hosts because they are necessarily syntheses of two topics. Only when that synthesis is recognized as a synthesis do we host articles on the subject. I see no sources which identify these two topics (e.g. Zionism and " race science" (shudder)) as topics that are studied as a pair. jps ( talk) 19:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I see no sources which identify these two topics (e.g. Zionism and "race science" (shudder)) as topics that are studied as a pair. The third source posted by Onceinawhile above, a 30-year-old book published by Yale University Press, says at page 11: In Chapter 6, I investigate the link between science and the politics of Zionism. Zionist physicians used the language of race science to define the Jewish people.... Levivich ( talk) 20:25, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Yeah, that is there! However, I see no discussion of genetics in the chapter. As I intimated, an article on Zionism and race science is a bit more defensible. This is not this article. jps ( talk) 20:27, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Falk's 2017 book, published by Springer, is the 4th source on Once's list. It says, at page 3, the introduction: Correspondingly, as the conflict of the Zionist State with the Arab world intensified, so did the wish to prove "scientifically," by biological-genetic means, the immanent physical, historic connection of the Jewish people to Zion. Genetics, it was hoped, would uphold not only the historical evidence, but would also provide biological evidence that the dispersed Jewish ethnic groups (eidoth) of today are indeed one people whose roots trace back to Eretz-Israel.) This book from 5 years ago cites and discusses at length the other book I quoted above from 30 years ago.

If you think Zionism and race/genetics is not a topic covered by these books, I don't know what to tell you, other than to ask if you've actually looked at them or not. It's taken me minutes to find these quotes just by searching in Google books for "Zionism", "race science," "genetics", etc. Levivich ( talk) 20:35, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I'm sorry, where is the "race" in that quote? Race/genetics is itself a fraught compound topic. It's not dealt with in a serious fashion in that text that I can see. jps ( talk) 20:39, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

It's at the bottom of the same page, page 3: Jews were considered to be a different "race" -- a socio-cultural invention of a presumed "biological entity" ... If you are arguing that this book does not discuss Zionism, race, and genetics, then you clearly have not read or even searched it for those keywords. FFS, the title of the book is Zionism and the Biology of Jews, and you contend that this book does not discuss Zionism, race, and genetics. Rather unbelievable. Levivich ( talk) 20:50, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I'm arguing that these three large topics are not being connected as a coherent whole. I am arguing that the three topics are arbitrarily chosen as connected to create a WP:SYNTH article even as absolutely none of the scholars cited mention a topic like this. We're not just talking "synonyms" here. We're talking taking specific threads in rather large and considered academic works and then jamming them into what is supposed to be a tertiary source. I'm sure this piece could be a great college paper topic. But as an encyclopedia entry? There is no there there for a subject called "Zionism, race and genetics". C'mon. Content worth rescuing can and should be shunted off to articles that need improving. If one of them gets unwieldy, I'm sure some less triply compound articles can be spun out. jps ( talk) 02:19, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

These topics are connected as a coherent whole on page 3 of the book called Zionism and the Biology of Jews, which I quoted above, where the author says some Zionists hoped genetics would prove that Jews were a race, and in other sources cited on this page. It's pretty ridiculous to accuse Onceinawhile of combining these topics, as if the sources don't discuss them together, especially in the face of quotes from sources directly on the subject, using the exact same verbiage, entire monographs about this. Levivich ( talk) 05:59, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I think you are not understanding my point. But no matter. I'll just say that Zionism and the Biology of Jews looks to be a source that can be used to support many articles, but to me its existence does not demonstrate that there is a broader research project out there looking at Zionism, race and genetics in a distilled fashion. jps ( talk) 11:29, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

There are already articles on Jewish Peoplehood and Genetic Studies on Jews Drsmoo ( talk) 13:05, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

If you want to deal with the racial politics surrounding Zionism, a good place to start would be to work on Anti-Zionism#Allegations_of_racism. You could use the sources here. You could help improve that space. Maybe it would expand greatly. Then you could then spin-out an article from that section. That's not what is going on here. jps ( talk) 20:04, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

How have you got this so turned around that you think the subject has anything to do with anti-Zionism? This is about Zionism and the politics of race. If you think 'race science' is too racey, try: Zionism, race, and eugenics and Zionist eugenics, mixed marriage, and the creation of a ‘new Jewish type’ - also related articles that are sitting out there in plain view, hosted by scholarly publishers. Iskandar323 ( talk) 20:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

If I am turned around here, it's because the only place I see discussion of racism in relation to top-level discussions of Zionism is on the Anti-Zionism page. That's Wikipedia's fault, not mine. If it is more properly commentary on Zionism -- there ought to be a section in that article. jps ( talk) 02:43, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The science or politics of race aren't equivalent to racism; they are topic areas where the theories and the polemics often just treads a very fine line nearby. And a relevant subsection on Zionism linking to this child article had already been created before this AfD. Iskandar323 ( talk) 05:41, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Why isn't the main article of that section Zionist ethnic unity or something of that nature? jps ( talk) 11:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

science or politics of race aren't equivalent to racism this is true in a literal sense, but it is also the case that the science and politics of race essentially only exist because of the observed effects of racism. If racism did not exist, there would be no "science or politics of race". jps ( talk) 12:14, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

This morning I created a list of egregious issues with this article Talk:Zionism, race and genetics/Archive 2#List of Egregious article issues

The article is a collection of cherry picked sources WP:SYNTHd together to push a POV narrative. It disparages the work of prominent researchers by claiming they have a “Zionist agenda”, which appears to be the insinuated thesis of the article. It completely ignores findings of mainstream research and only highlights research that pushes a non-mainstream POV of disputing Jewish genetic studies. Drsmoo ( talk) 19:48, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Like the proposer, Drsmoo is evidently unfamiliar with the topic and the sources, which would take a sedulous reader at least a week of concentrated study to master, and they merely are the iceberg's tip. Any familiarity with the inception of Zionism, its primary and the multitude of secondary sources, will tell anyone that, predictably, since it was embedded in universal Western cultural discourse that classified people by races, Zionism's fundamental proponents from the outset were deeply concerned with race. They were no different in this than liberal thinkers of that period.

At the outset of his Zionist activity, in July of 1895, Herzl met with the celebrated writer Max Nordau, who was to become Herzl’s most stalwart ally. Herzl noted in his diary that the two men agreed that Jewishness had “nothing to do with religion” but that “we are of the same race.” What they meant by race was vague, and could, as was common at the time, have been a way of describing what would later be called ethnicity. The conflation of ethnic and racialist discourse characterizes another diary en try, from 21 November 1895, in which Herzl describes Israel Zangwill as of a “longnosed, Negroid type, with very woolly deep black hair.” Despite this racialized description, Herzl posits that it was Zangwill, not himself, who defined peoples by racial criteria, a view that, Herzl writes, “I cannot accept if I so much look at him and at myself. … We are an historical unit, a nation with anthropological diversities. This also suffices for the Jewish State. No nation has uniformity of race. Derek Penslar, 'Theodor Herzl, Race, and Empire,' 2020 p.196.

So, Zionism and race, since it has been a serious topic esp. in the last 2 decades, is a natural topic for wikipedia. Since genetics, in some hands, now constitutes a relatively new 'scientific' redemption of the theory's assumptions, it is clearly part of the topic. The tripartite rubbish is just that. One could simply elide 'and genetics' and nothing would change, except the title on a legitimate topic covering modern research, would not flag the fact that a major section of the article would paraphrase a large body of genetic papers since the 1990s which aspire to establish a genetic proof for Zionism's central thesis. So the objection is ill-informed about the topic, and disingenuously quibbling over the length of the title. Nishidani ( talk) 20:26, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

As kind of a point number one, the people who write an article have a duty to get the subject right. If you think removing genetics will make the article work, then move the article to the new title, reframe it, and show your work. jps ( talk) 20:33, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

No, I don't think that at all. It was the obvious proposal someone uneasy at the three words could have suggested to overcome your dislike of tripartite titles. This is pointless niggling. Nishidani ( talk) 20:41, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

In this case, I think we're looking at WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST. Which is pretty close to a first for me. jps ( talk) 02:20, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete - per nom.'s thorough analysis, and looking at the page content, it is full of SYNTH. This is textbook SYNTH, and a neutral encyclopaedic article is not going to fly based on this proposed synthesis of subjects. The appropriate place to encyclopaedically discuss this subject would be Zionism, which page does have a short section on ethnic unity. That seems appropriate, but there seems to be no good reason to spin that short section out into a full article, and then to add in race and make genetics part of the head subject. As things stand, SYNTH is baked in, and the only solution is deletion. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 19:53, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  @ Sirfurboy: please confirm which of the sources listed under SIGCOV above you have read? Onceinawhile ( talk) 21:29, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  An odd question, especially one that required a ping. Did you have a question about my rationale above? Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 21:46, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  @ Sirfurboy: The subsection on Zionism was created after this page as a summary of the emerging child. The parent page already has 65kB of readable prose, so to expand that page with derivative topics would simply be to take it into WP:TOOLONG territory. Simply bloating existing articles is not a good way of covering new sub-topics. Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:41, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  The article is already pushing the limits of WP:TOOBIG although not over it even with the additional section, which benefits from being placed within the page context. So the question, per WP:SPINOUT, is what should be spun out. This one clearly does nothing to address the article size, and per WP:HASTE a broader and more considered discussion is needed if the size issue is to be addressed. The reason this spinout is problematic is because it falls foul of WP:AND:

  Titles containing "and" are often red flags that the article has neutrality problems or is engaging in original research: avoid the use of "and" in ways that appear biased.

  Better to keep this subject within the page and context that allows it to be understood, rather than mashing up new WP:SYNTH. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 09:19, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Again, it can't really be synth if reliable sources discuss it in this way. Iskandar323 ( talk) 09:22, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  That you can say that does suggest you may not be listening. You have sources about eugenics, yet this article uses them to talk about genetics. Maybe Zionist eugenics would be a better title. But then, what would you object that we lose? That is where the synth lies. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 09:35, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Those were just a couple of related sources that make clear the overall interrelationship between Zionism and the politics of race. I have said below the title is likely not ideal, but that could have been addressed with an RM, not an AfD belying a clearly extant corpus of subject-matter. The full body of sources is available for anyone to peruse above, on the page, and simply through searching relevant terms. Iskandar323 ( talk) 09:57, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete per nom. And per WP:IAR, as even if it could be shown that this questionable conflation of three different topics is actually 'notable' per Wikipedia notability guidelines, the chances of an actual encyclopaedic article coming out of it seem statistically indistinguishable from zero. The inevitable fate, should this whatever-it-is be kept, is it to become a permanent battleground for POV-pushers of all persuasions. If people want to fight amongst themselves over controversial conflations (I'm sure some do), they should find somewhere else to do it. Save the article-space-as-battleground perpetual bunfights for the topics an actual encyclopaedia might consider worth covering. This isn't. It isn't a single topic. It is an argument over at least three different things - two of which only exist in people's heads - over which there is no possibility of agreement over scope, over legitimate sources, or over what the hell it all means anyway. We are under no obligation to provide an arena for article-warfare, and shouldn't. AndyTheGrump ( talk) 20:02, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Keep - Are you editors actually reading these sources? They all talk about Zionism and race/genetics. I'm not commenting on the title or the content of the article, but the topic is an obviously notable topic that has received significant coverage in academic works, such as those posted by Once and Self above. It's a perfectly valid spinoff of Zionism. Levivich ( talk) 20:28, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Normally spin-offs are done by improving the parent article first. Not always, but I also do not see the relevant work done to summarize the ostensible subject of this article elsewhere in a coherent fashion. I do see some edit wars over links, but that is it. jps ( talk) 20:34, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Is it a spin-off? I've collected very substantial files, articles and books touching on this for a decade, since Bloom's monograph appeared, because is a recurrent theme in my reading in this area. It's not a topic one can jump into after a few arbitrary scraps attracting one's attention when googling with a POV mission to 'hit', say, Israel. That, a natural concern to handle a touchy topic by first of all thoroughly reading up on it sometimes over a decade without intemperate haste, and laziness/so many other interests, are the only reasons why I hadn't yet written an article on this topic wikipedia ignores. But now a sketch of one is up, I commend the main editor and, though it needs considerable thickening and development, am amazed that merely the title itself can stir up deletionist fervour. As Levivich states with great integrity, sources on the intertwining of these three elements are abundant and there is no evidence so far objections reflect a careful reading of the small sample of sources so far noted in the bibliography. Nishidani ( talk) 20:54, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply

How is it a spin-off? A spin-off of what article exactly? :3 F4U ( they /it) 02:06, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I don't think it is a spin-off. Levivich says it is, however. jps ( talk) 02:23, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

From Zionism? nableezy - 13:12, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

That's what I gathered from what is written. There is a {{main}} template in a section of Zionism used that seems to pay at least a courtesy homage to such an idea. But, as I mentioned above, I would have guessed that a different article subject would have been the main article for that section. jps ( talk) 13:31, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Levivich, thanks. But the point being made is not about whether a topic exists, but rather whether this topic is a single topic that can be dealt with encyclopaedically, or whether it is a synthesis of more than one topic - and more to the point, whether this new article, as it is construed, will inevitably continue to be a synthesis unless more carefully envisaged. So looking at the bibliography provided by Onceinawhile above, there are five sources above. Yet these five sources are not on the same thing, and therein lies the problem. Whilst Burton (2021) is talking about human heredity as science, of which Jewish genetics is a part, other sources are looking at different issues. Efron (2021) looks at the historic response to 19th century scientising of anti Jewish prejudice and includes material on the appropriation of race science by Zionists. Focussing on this aspect of that book takes us from science to pseudoscience, and then we have Falk (2017) who looks at the zionist hope, that "regrouping as a nation in their homeland would have profound eugenic consequences, primarily halting the degeneration they fell prey to because of the conditions imposed on them in the past." That work is a discussion of zionist eugenics, as is the discussion in Hirsch (2009), self evidently just from the title. Now it seems to me that yes, there is definitely a subject of Zionist eugenics, of which genetics would merely be a sub-section of the discussion. There is also a subject of Jewish genetics, a scientific subject that is properly treated elsewhere. The problem with this article is that it purports to be both, as demonstrated by the source selection, and by the title. It conflates race (socially constructed) with genetics (a subject of scientific study), along with a strand of zionist thought on eugenics. The result bakes in synthesis. It is for this reason I think this article clearly needs deletion. This view is without prejudice against the creation of properly focussed articles on either the science or the pseudoscience - but not both. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 08:41, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

1. " Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-siècle Europe" by John Efron, professor of Jewish History (1994). "Zionist race science" == "Zionism, race, and genetics", because "race science" == "race and genetics". This book was written 30 years ago, and it has entire chapters about Zionism and race science. This book was reprinted last year (2022), and has been cited almost 500 times. From page 11: In chapter 6, I investigate the link between science and the politics of Zionism. Zionist physicians used the language of race science to define the Jewish people...
2. " Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a 'New Jewish Type'" (2009) in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, first sentence of the abstract: The application of racial categories to the Jews by Zionist physicians and anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century has been the focus of several recent studies. That was 14 years ago. "Zionist eugenics" == "Zionism, race, and genetics" because "eugenics" == "race and genetics".
3. " Zionism and the Biology of Jews" ( Raphael Falk (geneticist), 2017) == "Zionism, race, and genetics". It's written by a geneticist! The whole f'ing book is about Zionism, genetics, and race. The whole book! "Biology of Jews" == "race and genetics"
4. " Zionism's New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew" (2017) (a section in Jew by Cynthia Baker, whose "research explores ideas about gender, race/ethnicity, and nationalism in the formative periods of Judaism") From page 99, the beginning of the "Zionism's New Jew" section: Zionism’s new Jew was formed at the intersection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century race science/eugenics with romanticized, racialized, ethnic nationalisms. "race science/eugenics" = "race and genetics". This entire section is about this. FFS, "The Birth of the Genomic Jew", is in the title. "Genomic Jew" = "race and genetics".

I'll say it again: anyone who claims this topic is not the subject of scholarly study is lying. There isn't a "good faith" explanation. It's not a content dispute. Just concede that this is a topic of scholarly study. If you want to argue some other reason for deletion -- POVFORK, TNT, whatever -- go ahead, but don't misrepresent the sources by suggesting they are not about Zionism, race, and genetics, as a single cohesive topic, discussed by many academic sources, for decades. Levivich ( talk) 15:55, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

And conflates race (socially constructed) with genetics (a subject of scientific study) ... that's what eugenics is, it's a type of race science aka scientific racism. That's why these sources use those terms: Zionist eugenics, Zionist race science, Zionist scientific racism are all possible titles, as is Zionism, race, and genetics. But it's the same topic, it's about the intersection of scientific racism and Zionism, or, as the lead of the article says, various people have tried to use race pseudoscience (which includes genetic pseudoscience) to argue for or against Zionism. Levivich ( talk) 16:02, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

This deserves a longer reply than I can give right now, but I note again that I am not saying there is no topic here, I am saying that the topic that is here is not encapsulated in the framing, which is sloppy and bakes in contentious editing. On the sources, they are not all saying the same thing. (Burton, 2021), which you don't address there, is talking about the use of genetics from the early 20th century to construct national origin myths in the middle east as a whole. It is not talking about zionism in particular, although yes, that is covered. It also goes on to talk about genetics today, both how it is used for nationalistic purposes and more progressively. But the subject there is not just genetics in zionism, and the thesis is not so easily divorced from its context.

What of the other sources? Well if we agree with the equivalence you posit: "Zionist race science" == "Zionism, race, and genetics", and also "Zionist eugenics" == "Zionism, race, and genetics" then we have a==b==z. We have a subject. Equivalence is reflexive, so it follows that "Zionism, race, and genetics"=="Zionist eugenics". That is the subject you believe is covered here. That is also, I think, the primary subject that the page creator wishes to cover, and that is thus the best page title.

My problem with this is that I don't think that the terms are equivalent. You see, Falk (2017) argues that the very concept of the Jewish race is harmful and misleading, and he covers the history of the eugenics to dismiss it, but what he dismisses is still race and still genetics, and so what another editor will find is that Zionism, race and geentics is not neutral because it doesn't cover (makeyuppyname, 2024) whose genetic studies say this, and you get a bunch of primary sources being inserted like here Early European Farmers#Studies#Studies (that one less contentiously). You get calls for balance and understanding of both Falk and what Falk argues against, and, indeed, the latest research that approves or disproves Falk. What you get is synth, because I think "Zionism, race, and genetics" > "Zionist eugenics".

Thus a more careful framing is perfectly good. It is THIS framing that is wrongheaded. If the page were on Zionist eugenics or some other wording that entirely avoids WP:AND then the deletion reason goes away. As others have noted, perhaps an RM would have been better, but we are where we are. If the narrower framing is objected to, that shows where the synth is coming in. Hmm that is a longer reply than I intended. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 07:37, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep - per Levivich. Not liking a notable topic doesnt make it less notable. A number of sources clearly discuss this as a topic, and give this topic significant sustained coveraged, making this a notable topic suitable for a Wikipedia article. nableezy - 20:51, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment: For what it's worth, genetics is a factor when Israeli officials evaluate ethnic groups claiming to be Jewish. There are many of these groups globally, some legitimate and others either misguided or cynically trying to get to a more affluent country. See Category:Groups claiming Israelite descent. ^{( permalink)} As for "race" that's a whole different topic. These different groups hail from multiple so-called "races" and Israel's determination has not been based on "race". -- A. B. ^{( talk • contribs • global count)} 22:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Keep. My gut reaction to the claim that this is not a notable topic was something like "what planet do they live on?" Of course it is a notable topic and there is a very large literature. Does jps think that race and genetics are unrelated concepts? Does jps not know that race was an important theme in Zionist thinking from the beginning, both through origin traditions and fear of miscegenation? Does jps not know that genetics plays some of the same roles in modern Zionist thinking as what race played in the past and that this was a natural progression that is well studied? If the title doesn't fit the article well enough, argue for a change of title. If there is OR in the article, engage with it. A cogent argument for deletion simply has not been presented. Zero ^talk 02:07, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I didn't say it wasn't a notable topic. I said it was a synthetic one. Can you think of a better title? Maybe that would solve it (who am I to say?) But when I read the article it looks like it is doing the kind of rhetorical hoops you are jumping through as the subject. I think this is a misapprehension of how Wikipedia is supposed to operate. We look for big subjects and then narrow down. We don't present unique analyses worthy of term papers. It's a question of genre. jps ( talk) 02:26, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Sorry, this is gobbledygook. The topic can be either notable or synthetic, not both. Notable means already covered in reliable sources; synthetic is the opposite. What are you saying? That the page or its title is synthetic? The page is a work in progress. It was only just begun. The title is a naming issue. And title's are actually allowed to be created out of nowhere by editors if the shoe fits. That's what a descriptive title often is. A subject can be clear, but there can equally be no common name for it out there in the literature. Here, the titular naming is distinctly varied, even where the contents come around to the same subjects. What I personally think might be the most on the mark topic is 'Zionism and the politics of race', since this embraces both the aspect of politicization of race and encompasses the later genetic science that was dragged into the same political arena in the effort to ground the same substance. But again, you're not necessarily going to find existing sources by that title. It's just descriptive. So is that synthetic too? You can find chapters like "Race, Zionism, and the Quest for Jewish Authenticity" in books like Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference, there is Israel, Palestine, and the Politics of Race, and an assessment of Zionism is also present in Michael Banton's The International Politics of Race , but again, there are no dead ringers to be found for such a prospective descriptive title. It just needs to be agreed upon. Iskandar323 ( talk) 06:11, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Friend, we see things differently. "Notability" has become something of a catch-all at Wikipedia in ways that I do not appreciate. I see WP:SYNTH as part of WP:OR. There are original research topics that are notable, but cannot be included in Wikipedia because the sources don't (yet) exist that treat the topic as a coherent subject. What you say is "gobbledygook" I say is a fundamental way to judge article potential. Original research isn't bad. It just isn't for Wikipedia. jps ( talk) 11:17, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Ok, but the sources do. Read just the abstract of Falk's Zionism and the Biology of the Jews. You will find references to all the pertinent terms, "Zionism", "racial" (race) and "gene" (genetics), all there. In just the abstract. The term "biology" in the title is clearly used intentionally as a catch-all for all of the above. Iskandar323 ( talk) 11:30, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I think the problem is that I see a difference between separate terms that are referenced and a coherent combination of terms. I get it. There are books that use three words or their derivatives. But do they argue these three words are connected as a subject? I don't see that. jps ( talk) 11:34, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Undecided The compound topic itself completely meets WP:GNG and I strongly disagree with AndyTheGrump's suggestion that there is no possibility of a good article coming out of this topic. However, as it stands, the lede section is full of WP:SYNTH, parts of the article fly against WP:NOR, and the majority of the article's text is made up of quotations--to the point where I think its a significant copyright concern. Might be a candidate for WP:TNT. :3 F4U ( they /it) 02:21, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Moving to keep as large improvements of the article have been underway. Potentially rename as well to better match the scope of the article. :3 F4U ( they /it) 01:10, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete. This is an shoddily written attack page. More importantly, the topic is SYNTH, as evidenced by the use of and in the title. If this article were to stand, one could bundle together any loosely written topics. We would have Ice cream and sex, and hey I've got a source! And another one! And another! and even this! Would would also have topics like Ski lodges as hookup locations or Olympic athletes and QAnon conspiracies, both of which are trivial to find sources seemingly tying them together. Researcher (Hebrew: חוקרת) ( talk) 05:42, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I mean, you definitely could write a Wikipedia article on ice cream and sex. There is everything to be written about there from people for whom ice cream is a kink to companies selling ice cream specifically for sex to academic commentaries on the sexualization of ice cream advertising. You chose silly examples, but it's a valid topic. That the use of 'and' in a title is a daft assertion, and I think you probably know it. Are you claiming you have never seen an 'and' article before. 'and' in a title is not only allowed; it is policy. WP:AND starts: "Sometimes two or more closely related or complementary concepts are most sensibly covered by a single article." The OP here may wish to note the use of the phrase "or more". Iskandar323 ( talk) 06:24, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  And you may wish to note the use of the phrase "closely related" (examples "yin and yan", "promotion and relegation" etc.) or indeed the rest of WP:AND which states: Titles containing "and" are often red flags that the article has neutrality problems or is engaging in original research: avoid the use of "and" in ways that appear biased. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 06:36, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Yes. "Avoid the use of "and" to combine concepts that are not commonly combined in reliable sources." The concepts used in the title here are all commonly combined in legion reliable sources. And it's "closely related or complementary concepts", and here the complementary nature of the topics is reliably sourced. Iskandar323 ( talk) 07:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep. My impression is that negationist editors (asserting the topic does not exist in reliable sources) are utterly unfamiliar with the sources, indeed with the topic area's scholarship and are reflecting a knee-jerk reaction to the words in the title itself, as if this were some devious attempt to smuggle into wiki the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, 30 years after it had been revoked by the General Assembly. That is the only explanation I can give myself for this extraordinary response. Objectors must be 'reading between the lines' and suspecting some ulterior motives in writing up such a thematic weave. Well, no. It is something Israeli and diaspora scholarship in particular, with its characteristic steady nerves, has explored in some depth over the last decades. Here is one of the sources, which the objectors obviously have not cared to glance at, which alludes to the numerous scholars exploring this nexus in recent scholarship.

Francis Nicosia has argued recently that secular and racial antisemitism generated a national-separatist Jewish response. And while civic emancipation and assimilation sapped Jewish religious identity, a more organic perception of nationhood began to crystallize. It incorporated ethnic and volkisch elements that were widespread in German nationalist circles These romantic elements, as demonstrated by George Mosse, strongly influenced nascent Zionist organizations throughout Germany. Since the early nineteenth century, the German concept of Volk had denoted a metaphys ical and eternal entity which was constituted of all the German people - a people with absolute values. It reflected the natural, wild, and emotional character of the people, while the family was regarded as its biological founda tion. The late nineteenth-century volkisch concepts were of neo-romantic mysticism and foregrounded the irrational forces of nature and genuine essence of the people, in contrast to the present, 'artificial' one. Among rising Jewish national groups this concept included the idea of a 'community of one's blood' as defined by Martin Buber, which helped to forge a Jewish national consciousness. Beyond the examination of the volkisch-cultural nature of early Zionism, several studies have considered the Jewish, and especially Zionist, discussion of race since the late nineteenth century. I might mention here the early research of Joachim Doron, Annegret Kiefer, and John Efron, while among recent studies the most relevant are those of Mitchell Hart, Todd Endelman, Raphael Falk, and Veronika Lipphardt. This work has exposed the 'scientific' racial aspects embedded in the emerging Jewish national ideology. Moreover, it contended that in particular Zionist scientists in Germany, and to some extent also in England, Russia, and the United States, employed the language of science and academic research in the fields of anthropology, biology, medicine and sociology in order to reaffirm the distinctiveness of the Jewish people.' Avraham 2017 p.473.

So the scandalized expostulations are totally misplaced. We don't censor here, we don't get our knickers in a twist over treatments of sensitive issues, screaming 'I don't wanna know!' Since scholars write of the historic nexus between 19-20th concepts of race and Zionist formulations (themselves often arising as a (misplaced) defense against antisemitists who denied Jews were a people), and this again inflects the rise of genetic endorsements of a Jewish identity, it is not only natural, but obligatory to carefully represent this debate on wikipedia. Nishidani ( talk) 08:04, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

So the scandalized expostulations are totally misplaced. We don't censor here, we don't get our knickers in a twist over treatments of sensitive issues, screaming 'I don't wanna know! It would be better if you focussed on the actual arguments rather than the editors. This is not a WP:BATTLEGROUND. Suggest you read that through and strike the straw man and ad hominem lines. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 08:29, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

How many policy flags are being waved here furiously? There is no argument just editors flaunting unfamiliarity with the topic as opposed to reliance on vague winks at a putative policy abuse outlined in guidelines. So we have WP:NOR, WP:SYNTH, WP:RS, WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST, WP:HASTE, WP:AND, WP:TNT and WP:BATTLEGROUND etc. Such links are not arguments and if, Sirfurboy to advise others : 'It would be better if you focussed on the actual arguments' then try for once to do so yourself, rather than walking past things like the quote from Avraham above which contradicts all of the uninformed assertions from the deletionist camp. Nishidani ( talk) 10:30, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The BATTLEGROUND concern is that you characterise the three delete !votes above as "negationist editors... utterly unfamiliar with the sources...knee jerk reaction.... scandalised expostulations... knickers in a twist... screaming 'I don't wanna know!' when in fact none of that describes nor argues with the actual points raised. If anything it makes the point that the subject as formulated here creates "an arena for article-warfare." In engaging in battleground behaviour and transparently personal attacks, it seems to me you have reinforced the argument for this article's deletion, which you don't seem to have noticed is not ignorant of a clear body of literature that there is some subject here, but that the subject that is here is not the subject as formulated in this article.

As for your remarks about policy that has been cited: you may not participate in many deletion discussions but you have participated in enough that you ought to be aware that deletion reasons must be policy based, and that we don't just have a vote based on personal opinions. Thus citing WP:AND, for instance, which says: Titles containing "and" are often red flags that the article has neutrality problems or is engaging in original research: avoid the use of "and" in ways that appear biased. are exceptionally pertinent to the actual discussion. A title that focuses on one thing (e.g. Zionist eugenics) makes sense. A title that allows multiple issues to be conjoined, both scientific and pseudoscientific, is a recipe for... well, BATTLEGROUND behaviour. Don't you think? Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 07:20, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep: The precise formulation of the title aside, this page reflects a topic that clearly exists in reliable sources, with the page being created expressly to reflect those hitherto ignored and unreflected reliable sources. Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:26, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment re title: looks like it is worth having a WP:RM discussion in due course. I was originally going to write an article about “Zionism and genetics”, but it would have needed a large background section about “Zionism and race”, because all the recent sources cover both together. I figured the tripartite title would fit well, following the parent article Race and genetics. The topics can’t be coherently separated, which is presumably why Falk’s book went for "Zionism and biology", which is an option for us here. Onceinawhile ( talk) 10:13, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Thanks for the explanation. This reads a little bit to me like you leapfrogged over what I would consider to be necessary intermediary steps in this. Zionism as settler colonialism exists as an article and the sources seem straightforward. Zionism as racism does not. And yet, accusations that Zionism is racist abound in certain commentary (and, I'm sure, claims it is not racist/racialized are easily discovered as well). jps ( talk) 11:13, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

"Zionism as racism" is about Zionist attitudes towards Palestinians. That has nothing to do with the topic of this article. If that needs making clear, we can add the word Jewish, so it becomes "Zionism and Jewish race and genetics". To my mind that is less elegant, but the title is much less important than the content. Onceinawhile ( talk) 11:36, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

What I think you are talking about are arguments about ethnic markers (incidentally, there is an article that I think should exist [1]) within the context of Zionism that have parallels and antecedents in race science. While this is something that scholars have studied as demonstrated in your sources, I do not think we have strong indications from those sources that this is separate from the racism accusations involving Zionist attitudes towards Palestinians. In fact, it seems many of your sources argue there is a direct connection between these ideas. Why are you separating them? jps ( talk) 11:55, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The only connection with the Palestinians in this topic area is the historical beliefs amongst some early Zionists that Palestinians were also descended from ancient Israelites and thus the two peoples were "cousins", and modern day genetic science on Jewish origins which often compares Jewish genetic connections to those of Palestinians. But to your comments above, none of this has anything to do with "racism", which is primarily about discrimination and thus an entirely separate subject. Onceinawhile ( talk) 19:10, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Racism is the primary if not the only motivation for the social construction of race. jps ( talk) 21:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

@ ජපස: that is not the case here, and it is not what the sources say. Zionism was founded as a positive ideology to lift Jews out of the oppression they faced in 19th century Europe, and the concepts of race (and later genetics) were used to bind them together and justify the ideology of a “return” to another land. It is this latter topic that this article is focused on.

Remember, Jews were not the original constructors of the concept of the Jewish race. The “Jewish race”, and almost all other races constructed in early modern European race science, were constructed with exactly the motivation you describe – racism against Jews and other “non-white” races.

The topic of this article, as the sources go through in detail, is about how Zionism took this theory, turned it on its head, and used it to justify that original wider ideology. Onceinawhile ( talk) 21:22, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Good news - some solid evidence to confirm the above: Mark H. Gelber, p.126 (full cite in article): It is fair to say that a racialist orientation was fundamental to German Cultural Zionism… In this context, it is essential to distinguish carefully between "racialism" and "racism." Invariably, German Cultural Zionism presented a view of racial difference and uniqueness within the framework of the equality of races and the common dignity of all humans to develop their own potentialities within racial groupings. Racialist formulations which tended toward racism and claims of racial superiority of one race over others were avoided as a rule within Cultural Zionism. Onceinawhile ( talk) 00:15, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

And this is why the article is WP:SYNTH, first comes the opinion, and then search for keywords in Google scholar to try to support it (Good news!)(like applying a section about “German Cultural Zionism” to the entire movement) then slop it into the article; rinse, repeat.

After finding your keyword in Google Scholar, loudly accuse those criticizing the article of not having read every word in all the sources. Drsmoo ( talk) 00:37, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Please comment on the content not the contributor. I would be happy to share how I find sources with anyone who asks. The imaginative characterization above is inappropriate (“slop”, “rinse, repeat”, “loudly accuse” etc). Onceinawhile ( talk) 15:33, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep GNG is easily met. The impetus for this article is a discussion at Talk:Zionism#Question that arose following the deletion of material by an editor asserting that the "overwhelming majority of reputable sources" provide proof of what had been stated as just a belief in the removed source: "that modern Jews are the primary descendants of biblical Jews and Israelites." After a lengthy debate about whether such proof exists, we arrive at this article, logically in my view. Its creation was announced during the aforesaid discussion, efforts made to locate sourcing and it transpires that these elements are discussed together in multiple scholarly sources. Accusations of SYNTH have no basis, no conclusions have been drawn by aggregating, linking or otherwise inappropriately conjoining material from otherwise independent sources. The rush to delete this article began almost immediately after creation and appears most unseemly, imo more a case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT rather than any reasoned analysis. Selfstudier ( talk) 11:54, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Oh dear, I don't think that it is a good idea to write articles to try to win talkpage debates. I guess there aren't any rules against it, per se, but it strikes me as a kind of motivation that can lead to less-than-ideal editorial practices. jps ( talk) 12:01, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

That's sort of a glass half full perspective. The alternative description is that a talk page discussion highlighted a topic whose coverage on Wikipedia represented a glaring omission. That's actually how the community is supposed to work. Editors discuss things and expand the encyclopedia to fill gaps. That's productive and constructive. If you had simply joined the page to brainstorm the name and scope, instead of launching this AfD, all of this community time spent on this discussion could have been spent actually making sense of the sources in a meaningful manner. Iskandar323 ( talk) 12:13, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Fair. I don't think we should have a rule against this motivation because, hey, people can get good inspiration from anywhere. But I still think there are major dangers and easy-to-fall-into traps when taking this kind of approach. jps ( talk) 12:16, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep per Levivich. Reflecktor ( talk) 11:57, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Delete per Tombah, the article is a POV-Fork of Genetic Studies on Jews and functions as an attack page unacceptably targeting mainstream researchers by insinuating through synth, and claiming without attribution (in Wikipedia’s voice), that their work is ideological. The scope of this article is an attempt to synth together cherrypicked sources that attack Jewish researchers (the original version of the article SYNTH’d the neologism “Jewish Scientific Racism”, which was not in any source) with 150 year old anachronisms about race that have no relation to contemporary research. There is no subject covered by this article title that is not already covered by Genetic Studies on Jews and Jewish peoplehood. (Contrary to this attack page, Jewish genetic research is not “Zionist”). The article would need to be TNTd and retitled to approach NPOV, and then would simply become a duplication of existing articles. Any neutral article has to actually discuss its subject, ie., it would need to dispassionately discuss studies on Jewish genetics, and the changing conceptions of Jewish peoplehood. Both of which are already covered. Drsmoo ( talk) 13:00, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Oh, good grief. 'cherrypicked sources that attack Jewish researchers.' Have you examined the 'ethnicity' of most of the writers of these sources? Check it out. I have had to, now that you have raised this insidious NPA insinuation.They would appear to be overwhelming of Jewish background and therefore you are saying, Onceinawhile deviously cites Jewish researchers to attack Jewish researchers. Bejaysus. That's a new one. Nishidani ( talk) 13:05, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The religion of the writers is not relevant to me, I’m not sure why it’s relevant to you. To repeat, since you manipulated what I wrote (similar to this article ironically)

“The scope of this article is an attempt to synth together cherrypicked sources that attack Jewish researchers (the original version of the article SYNTH’d the neologism “Jewish Scientific Racism”, which was not in any source)”

For example, taking a quote from an article discussing the Jewish priestly gene, and misrepresenting the source to claim “the leading scientists into Jewish genetic roots, including the "priestly gene", have openly Zionist agendas.” which is not in the source. There is also taking statements explicitly describing studies from 70 years ago as if they were describing the modern field. The entire article is like that: cherry picked sources summarized incorrectly and synthd together to push a POV. Drsmoo ( talk) 13:27, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Look, yall can not like this topic as much as you want to, but since it is manifestly reliably sourced material sourced to the best quality academic sources, its either going to be covered in a child article of Zionism or all of this material is going to be in the parent article. Not liking what the sources say has never been a valid argument for exclusion of content. Sorry. nableezy - 13:13, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Huh? There is barely lick of information about the interaction between genetics and political ideology at Genetic studies on Jews ... what are you reading? Zionism is not mentioned once in the body, only in the notes. Iskandar323 ( talk) 13:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep We have already established that there is a plethora of high quality sources for the subject: a scholarly, scientific and political topic which has developed over the past 120 years.

More broadly, proper coverage of this topic will benefit the integrity of our encyclopedia as a whole, since poor editorial understanding of this specific area continues to undermine important areas across a number of vital articles. See for example the high traffic articles Israelites, Jews and Who is a Jew?, all of which state in Wikipedia's voice that modern Jews are descended from ancient Israelites. That might be true, and it is widely believed in popular consciousness, but it is certainly not the mainstream view amongst scholars and makes our project look crude and unsophisticated. In my experience, the best way to minimize edit wars on contentious topics in the long term is to go a level deeper, to a more specific article topic, and build consensus around the scholarly underpinnings to a subject. A bit of effort from everyone now to build a perfectly neutral and well-sourced assessment of the topic (the article is just four days old), will improve editorial understanding and reduce disagreements much more widely across the project. Anyone who thinks deleting an article on such a foundational subject like this will stop edit wars (per AndyTheGrump’s comment) is holding the wrong end of the stick.

Just to show the consistency of my position on this, when this article was first created, another editor immediately created Origin of the Palestinians as a stated "response”. [2] Whilst tit-for-tat doesn’t make our project look good, I think both articles are important; I was the editor who removed the deletion prod notice on that new article. For exactly the same reason: a well-developed article covering a foundational subject in more detail will bring wider benefits to the topic area. Onceinawhile ( talk) 13:49, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

all of which state in Wikipedia's voice that modern Jews are descended from ancient Israelites. That might be true, and it is widely believed in popular consciousness, but it is certainly not the mainstream view amongst scholars and makes our project look crude and unsophisticated. This reads a bit cryptic to me and, I hope you know, this kind of statement has in the past been something that has fed directly into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories such as British Israelism, for example. Can you perhaps expand or clarify what you mean by this? jps ( talk) 14:28, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I am sorry but I do not understand your comment – please be more specific on what you do not agree with? Perhaps bring this to the article talk page if you want to dive deeper into the content debate – I doubt this line of discussion is going to help resolve the AfD. Onceinawhile ( talk) 18:45, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I'm not sure it has anything at all to do with article content per se. I'm confused if you don't think it will help resolve the AfD why you made the statement in the first place. Here is what I read, and forgive me if you think that's not what you intended, that modern Jews are descended from ancient Israelites... is certainly not the mainstream view amongst scholars. jps ( talk) 20:54, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The way I understood it was, that while it might be commonly assumed that modern Jews do indeed "descend" from the ancient Israelites (or, more precisely, from the Judaeans) due to the obvious cultural and religious similarities of these societies, still there is a lack of enough genetic, geneological (I don't know if anyone has produced an authenticated family tree for example) or documentary (land deeds or other records) evidence that can be used by scholars to prove this connection beyond a reasonable doubt. While the Jews admittedly have a stronger claim than most to be the descendants of the Children of Israel, there are nevertheless other claimants, as you have alluded to. And some of these claimants are surely depending on similar flimsy genetic legacy ties (see the Pashtun theory for example). Havradim leaf a message 21:45, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I wonder at the statement some of these claimants are surely depending on similar flimsy genetic legacy ties. What makes a genetic legacy tie not flimsy? A critique of all genetic legacy ties would require a new definition of "descend" -- in which case, fair. But I'm a little perplexed by use of the term "proof" as though the context of this discussion is a courtroom or something. I guess the question is simple: Are we really to believe that the "mainstream view amongst scholars" that "Jews descended from ancient Israelites" is doubted? Even ideas such as the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry or Shlomo Sand's appear to me to be at most minority views if not completely WP:FRINGE. Also, the existence of other claimants of descent from ancient Israelites are only relevant inasmuch as these claimants have played a zero-sum game with respect to the question (e.g. British Israelism). The Pashtuns may or may not descend from ancient Israelites, but their claim of such is not predicated on Jewish descent being incorrect. The question is not "who are all the people descended from the ancient Israelites?". The question is "are the Jews descended from the ancient Israelites?" jps ( talk) 22:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I think the question who are all the people descended from the ancient Israelites becomes an important one based on the premise of this article, and illustrates well why it should be kept. Because if the Zionist claim is based partly or mostly on genetics, then what is stopping any other group with a similar genetic argument to lay claim to lands they feel a connection with? What prevents an Englishman (or most of Britain?) who professes "Norman heritage" to lay claim to the northwest part of France and claim it for Britain? ... are the Jews descended from the ancient Israelites? The vast majority probably are, as are many of the Palestinians, but the question this article seeks to analyse is, how much of this descent idea was used to justify a Jewish nationalistic movement. Havradim leaf a message 03:15, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

While the focus of your last paragraph may have relevance to bear on article text, my concerns were over specific points made in this discussion. What do the discussants contend is "mainstream view among scholars" over the contention "Jews descended from the ancient Israelites"? You seem to be answering that the "vast majority probably are". But then what am I to make of the line that "it is certainly not the mainstream view amongst scholars"? jps ( talk) 07:30, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The difference is between popular supposition and scholarly writ - the former requiring no substantiation and the latter being held to an altogether higher bar. Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:32, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

No one (and now there are three different users responding to me in this discussion) has yet answered my straightforward question. What do you contend the "mainstream view among scholars" is over the contention "Jews descended from the ancient Israelites"? jps ( talk) 14:28, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

@ ජපස: the mainstream scholarly view is “we do not know”. Regarding the various alternate hypotheses which you rightly mention have not been accepted, they were not accepted because the evidence for them was not strong enough, not because there is another compelling theory of which science is close-to-certain on.

The sources and quotes in the article will show you that. A good example, which I now realize I have not yet added, is Fishberg, 1911, p.474, discussing two of the leading early Zionists - Max Nordau, Herzl’s cofounder, and Israel Zangwill, who left the ZO on becoming aware of the existance of the Palestinian population: "Meanwhile, it is important to inquire in detail into the fundamental problems of Zionism. The question of race has already been discussed, and we arrived at the conclusion that the alleged purity of the Jewish race is visionary and not substantiated by scientific observation. [Footnote: Max Nordau, an avowed disciple of Lombroso, knows that anthropological research has dissipated the notion of Jewish racial purity, but he places more confidence in the acute powers of observation of the street loafer who recognizes a Jew by his nose. "To be sure, the street loafer's diagnosis is not infallible, still it fails him only rarely. But then the scientific diagnosis is not always reliable. The acute eye of the street loafer," concludes Nordau, " is sufficient proof that the Jews are a race, or at least a variety, or, if you please, a sub-variety of mankind." ( Le Siècle, 1899; Zionistische Schriften, p. 305). Zangwill asks, "Whoever heard of a religion that was limited to people of particular breed? Of divine truth that was only true for men of dark complexion?" ( Jewish Chronicle, June 18th, 1909).]" The debate has evolved (into genetics) over the last century, but the same uncertainty remains.

As Havradim wrote elegantly above, this side conversation is a perfect illustration of the importance of this article. Science simply doesn’t know either way whether modern Jews are the primary descendants of the Israelites – Wikipedia must be neutral and factual on the question, whilst recognizing that it is a belief held by a large number of people, who are entitled to that belief.

Onceinawhile ( talk) 21:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Weak DeleteKeep The article, as it exists, is effectively a product of WP:SYNTH. I am open to the possibility that a reliable body of literature on the topic might exist but so far it's not demonstrated by the article. Simonm223 ( talk) 15:46, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

DO you mean that Israel's former leading geneticist and historian of genetics, Raphael Falk, whose work Israeli scholarship took up and developed vigorously over the last 2 decades in an abundance of academic studies, and which the page follows carefully, got it all wrong, and the judgement he expressed here, simply by being paraphrased, in a violation of WP:Synth? Nishidani ( talk) 16:08, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Changing my !vote per the statement provided by Nishidani I still think the article isn't necessari ly reflecting the body of work in its best light but we don't delete notable subjects that can be improved. Simonm223 ( talk) 17:50, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I appreciate that willingness to reconsider on the evidence and arguments as they evolve here. Your last concern is shared by several editors, and is reasonable. The problem was and is, that the AfD was initiated far too quickly, before the outline/stub had scarcely got on its feet, within a few days. There was no time for the improvements, and the considerable expansion, the article requires. What one sees now is nothing like what the article will be if it survives deletion and editors are allowed - the more eyes the better - an opportunity to make adjustments and exploit to the full the dozens of strong secondary sources that discuss this topic. Nishidani ( talk) 19:38, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete. This article is not Wikipedia worthy. CarlSerafino { talk) 17:57, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment Please show me where it says an IP cannot participate in an AfD discussion. I am not interested in opinion in this matter. Where on Wikipedia is this stated? Please provide a Wiki Link. Also, Ivotes and AFD comments should not be removed from the AFD discussion, as what happened here. Please refrain from this type of behavior. It only lends credence to the belief that editing the subject article of this AFD is not on the up & up and may be the result of some sort of agenda. ---- Steve Quinn ( talk) 18:28, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  ....non-extended-confirmed editors may not make edits to internal project discussions related to the topic area, even within the "Talk:" namespace. Internal project discussions include, but are not limited to, AfDs, WikiProjects, RfCs, RMs, and noticeboard discussions. Selfstudier ( talk) 18:47, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Also, I forgot to say that I added back the removed IP ivote, the striking out of it, and follow-up comments. --- Steve Quinn ( talk) 18:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• @ Steve Quinn: WP:PIA which has the 500/30 rule for anything related to Palestine-Israel articles. To quote Reverts made to enforce the 500/30 Rule are exempt from the provisions of this motion. So the IP is short the 500 rule and can be reverted. This article also certainly has to do with Israel. PackMecEng ( talk) 18:34, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  And I removed it again, please dont restore ARBPIA violations to this discussion. That would be PROXYING and is itself prohibited. nableezy - 18:52, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Comment I have EC protected this AfD so this does not happen again. Black Kite (talk) 19:00, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Keep obviously impeccably sourced and notable article per WP:SPINOUT. The parent article wherein this needs to be discussed ( Zionism) is at 213kB, way more than WP:SIZESPLIT's recommendation of 100 kB. I am not convinced by the SYNTH arguments, and especially not about such concerns as these from Tombah: [3] The more articles like this are created, the more Wikipedia's credibility declines, and even worse: the sentiments portrayed in this article and similar ones, as well as the massive truth-bending, may actually inspire antisemitic hate speech, if not violence. Wikipedia becomes more, not less credible with the inclusion of research-based content. As for the second point, see WP:NOTCENSORED. Havradim leaf a message 18:55, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  @ Havradim: I think you're looking at the total page size, not the readable prose size, which I measured at about 65kB, but the point stands. To expand the parent any further would only take it further away from optimal size and be to its detriment. Iskandar323 ( talk) 20:33, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Ah yes, I was wondering why my figure differed from yours. In any case, as you correctly pointed out, the present article in its entirety would only burden the parent if it were to be included there. Havradim leaf a message 20:52, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep Article is a great improvement to the project being that there is not one, single article covering this multifaceted topic. Article is strictly adhering to NPOV, which does offend some, but it is well sourced and a great improvement to nothing. Nothing is true on wikipedia until it's verified by reliable sources, and reliable sources do verify this article to be notable enough for keep. This comes to mind Wikipedia:I just don't like it to some of those editors against this article on this page, given the reluctance to improve the article and specific wording even when offered, and instead choosing to remonstrate it from the sidelines. JJNito197 ( talk) 19:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Delete. I don't see this as a notable topic, so much as two opposing notable topics. The page treats positive things like Jewish ethnic unity, and fringey racist things like antisemitic tropes, as being a single topic, but they aren't. Bogus and nasty pseudoscholarship that promotes antisemitism, and legitimate scholarship that rebuts antisemitism, linked together by their relationships to Zionism. Putting them together involves some WP:SYNTH, and creates a WP:COATRACK. But I could envision splitting the page into two pages, although we seem to already have pages that cover the subjects properly. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 00:26, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Hey, yeah! I myself noticed how, astonishingly, it's goingunder the world's radar that places like Yale University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, MIT, Oxford University and Rutgers not to speak of leading European publishers of academic scholarshiop such as Berghahn Books, Springer and Mohr Siebeck are getting away with sheer murder by churning out antisemitic monographs full of 'bogus and nasty pseudoscholarship' by tenured Jewish academics. Must be something connected with the Protocols of Zion, uh? Perhaps there's meat here for some article in Israel Hayom or Arutz Sheva to bring to public awareness the conspiracy afoot in the world's most prestigious ivory towers? Nishidani ( talk) 02:50, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Those crazy kids! As they say, career professors will be career professors. Iskandar323 ( talk) 03:10, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I'm a career professor who had tenure before I retired. And I don't much appreciate the badgering. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 19:38, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Just noticed this, so I'll give you a serious answer. Your delete statement contrasts 'bogus scholarship' promoting antisemitism to legitimate scholarship rebutting antisemitism, and says the synth lies is mixing up the two with Zionism. A mere fragment of the very complex historical picture was sketched in an article no one has accused of synth or using bogus scholarship while examining the nexus. See here. That is just one small temporal focus on the historical theme which, with a much broader scholarship, is addressed in the article. The aut/aut judgment, (either something is philosemitic or antisemitic - and it is a logical contradiction in terms for a Zionist to engage in virulent racial attacks on 'the inner enemy' of Jews who diagree with the movement) above appears to ignore that complexity Nishidani ( talk) 21:19, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I recognize and accept that the adoption of views that some would characterize as antisemitic has occurred by some proponents of Zionism, a documented fact that introduces a significant complexity into the issues discussed in this AfD. But there is also the use of race and genetics in pseudoscientific discourse for the purpose of promoting antisemitic and anti-Zionist agendas. And my reading of the page (at the time that I made my delete statement) indicated that the latter is part of what the page is about. On the other hand, the page is also about what I described as legitimate scholarship that looks into race and genetics as a way of supporting Zionism and rebutting antisemitism. I've seen an awful lot of text on this AfD page, but I have not seen (or at least have not been successful at picking it out of all the verbiage) a clear explanation of how secondary sources have treated the pseudoscientific discourse and the legitimate scholarship as being a single topic, as opposed to being two topics that editors have brought together by SYNTH. And it offends me that your (apparently unserious) reply to me sarcastically cited what I was trying to describe as legitimate scholarship as though I had said that it was the pseudoscientific antisemitism. It should be obvious that I'm not calling tenured Jewish academics at serious institutions antisemites, and to caricature my good-faith comment as some sort of laughable conspiracy theory a la the Protocols of Zion makes me uninterested in taking such a reply seriously. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 22:50, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

My flippant remark first remark, I now see, was taken as being personally offensive, and even if that was not my intention, I apologize for giving that impression. And I thank you for the courtesy of replying to my clarification. This is necessary also because my surprise at your initial remark owes much to the fact that I have a certain (small but sticking in memory) familiarity with your record and have respected the quality of your judgment. The AfD doesn't give, even in rebuttals, readers any close notion of what the academic literature is doing in this field. Those absorbed in these historical reconstructive studies are reduced to rebutting fairly short statements by eliciting snippets from an extensive body of serious work, and a page stopped in its tracks while making its first steps out of the cradle/stub gives editors who check it no idea of the topic's range as covered by legitimate scholarship which, precisely has taken up recently a neglected and difficult area of Zionist history - what is called variously the 'rancorous internal dialogue' (Sokolff and Glenn 2011 p.3.) or 'attacks on the internal enemy', much of its mirroring the old antisemitic stereotypes, which were long conducted among various factions in the Jewish communities. So I thought the distinction you drew odd. Antisemitism is always pseudoscientific by definition, and has had a vast literature devoted to it, which ignored however its subtle and insidious mirroring in defensive discourse by the primary victims of its xenophobia, Jews. The bibliography of 45 titles addresses, scientifically, the painful fact that such pseudoscience also inflected Zionist perceptions of who Jews were. When one of its most important figures, Ze'ev Jabotinsky states, '"A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-facial type are Jewish." (Jabotinsky|1961|pp=37-49), he like nmumerous other Zionists used 'mutatis mutandis' the standard race tropes of antisemites, only, and understandably in context, turning the negative connotations on their head. It is this considerable and overlooked paradox that Jewish and diaspora scholarship is now putting under the microscope, and what the article aspires to introduce to those unfamiliar with the cusp of this modern scholarship, which studies the heritage of this discourse from 1895 down to its variations in genetic identity debates in recent times. Regards Nishidani ( talk) 08:34, 19 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Merge to Genetic studies on Jews of which this appears to be an unnecessary content fork, taking care to excise any SYNTH. I am ambivalent on the utility of a redirect, but I don't think it would be harmful. Otherwise delete upon completion of the merge. - Ad Orientem ( talk) 03:11, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  @ Ad Orientem: Merge to an article that's already bloated with 85kB of readable prose and in desperate need of paring down? As well as not to Zionism, which is the page's parent as it is currently structured? Iskandar323 ( talk) 03:23, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I don't think there is enough here as of right now, to justify a standalone article. And the SYNTH concerns strike me as legitimate. Given the size of the article, I don't think it's likely to add much to its parent. - Ad Orientem ( talk) 03:28, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Especially since it seems that there is not a lot of consensus to introduce this topic there. Havradim leaf a message 03:29, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  It's not a good idea merge the article about the pseudoscience into the article about the science. That would confuse readers, be WP:UNDUE for the article about the science, and risks legitimizing the pseudoscience. That's why modern flat Earth beliefs is a separate article and not part of the article about Earth, why eugenics is a See Also in genetics, and not a section of it. Levivich ( talk) 03:26, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  That may be a fair point. But if it is, then article should explicitly label the beliefs in question as a specie of pseudo-science. - Ad Orientem ( talk) 03:32, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• @ Ad Orientem: That's impracticable, since this article appeared to arise from a refusal to entertain the idea that the topic had any place in the strictly 'scientific' cast of Genetic studies on Jews. Nishidani ( talk) 03:27, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I've read a large part of the nigh 2500 pages of material in the bibliography and the distinction proposed, while obvious - 'race' is sheer and pernicious nonsense - turns out to be rather complex. Race was thought scientific, and Zionists, like everyone else at the turn of the 19th-20th-centuries, worked out much of their thinking in terms of 'race' in all of its fluid conceptualizations. While that 'racial' concept, esp. after 1946, died on its feet, there remained, all of the sources allow, a pseudoscientific overhang in Zionism's conceptual baggage after 1948. And what the scholarship in the last decades has been concerned with are the implications and complications that arise when Zionism struggles to reformulate its contemporary thinking in terms of this racial residue in its foundational history within the ambit of the emergent science of molecular genetics. Genetics, in short, is a matter of pure science but, in this discursive context, is entangled in the ideological premises of Zionist identity debates. So there is an overlap, one that in the history of ideas concerns the social and historical forces that inflect all thought, science included. As I see it, the best way to handle this - an approach already in the literature, - is to write out the historical genealogy of the ideas with their pseudoscientific roots, from their origin, and show how this heritage from the past still exercises a notable force in contemporary identity thinking and genetics. That would come under the larger sphere of the history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge. Nishidani ( talk) 03:48, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete. Combining topics, even that are related/adjacent into a new topic that is not itself subject of major treatment in RS gives a WP:SYNTH problem; incidental intersections are better dealt with at the established topic pages per WP:NOPAGE. Bon courage ( talk) 11:58, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

be so kind as to sample the sources in the bibliography where these 'related' topics are obviously the 'subject of major treatment in RS. Nishidani ( talk) 12:12, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Already did, and you're wrong - which I why I'm for deletion. Bon courage ( talk) 12:30, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Again, these are vague claims. All of the bandied assertions about WP:Synth I have read above so far simply state 'this in my opinion'. Opinions are terrible things unless they are buttressed by grounded evidence and solid logic. Or perhaps no one reads Plato these days and I am an old fogey for expecting cogency of argument. Nishidani ( talk) 12:41, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

No, you're very up-to-date in reversing the burden of evidence. If this (and 'this' seems to be a shifting concept in the above discussion) was a major coherent topic there'd be major sources directly on it that would settle matters, rather than stuff that can be remixed, diced and stretched to fit this apparently polyvalent concept. The lack of verified text, even in the very lede, speaks volumes. Basically this attempt is not encyclopedic (tertiary summary) but a species of OR/SYNTH. Bon courage ( talk) 13:02, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Thanks. So I am correct in my inference that you have not troubled yourself to glance at, to cite just one example, the works of Raphael Falk who wrote extensively on Zionism, race theories and the enduring impact of such ideas on work on the genetics of Jews down to recent times. Nishidani ( talk) 14:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Falk and his views is a good topic for an article (as we have). But lot of people write lots of stuff mentioning things which they say are connected (primary research iow). It would be possible to have a polynomial explosion of articles if every such conjunction got an article, even though there's a impressive stack of academic "RS" one could argue supports it: Aluminium and Alzheimers! Germans and torture! Pope and Shakespeare! Johnson and Shakespeare! Jonson and Shakespeare! Verdi and Shakespeare!). Wikipedia articles are summaries of accepted knowledge on encyclopedic topics. What is being proposed is just at the wrong level: too original and clever by half. Wikipedia is dumber. Bon courage ( talk) 14:28, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Leaning to delete. Not 100% sure yet as I haven't managed to follow the long discussion here but on the basis of reading the (rich, well researched and fascinating) article it strongly seems to me to be an original essay and not an encyclopedia article, and that would be difficult or impossible to turn it in to one. In general, "and" topics are not good Wikipedia articles, as the risk of SYNTH and POV-pushing is always high, plus we have so many adjacent articles, such as Jewish identity, Who is a Jew, Genetic studies on Jews, Muscular Judaism, Scientific racism... It is striking that almost every statement here, while sourced to a scholarly text, could be placed next to a statement saying almost the opposite thing equally sourced to a scholarly text, because these are not issues where there is clear scholarly consensus which could be paraphrased in our neutral voice but rather a contentious area where scholars put forward their arguments for debate, which is why it reads as an original essay. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 13:54, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

For your benefit, Bob. The article is still a stub, but I assure you that the three topics are thoroughly discussed, together in an abundance of the sources listed. The outstanding historian of science and geneticist, R.Falk, wrote a whole book on the topic, which I don't expect editors to familiarize themselves with. But here is the gist of his argument.

‘All three ( Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, Shneor Zalman Bychowski and Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer) hoped to re-establish a Jewish entity within its ancient natural biological context in the name of universal human values. I suggest that this humanistic version of nationalism also allowed maintaining, especially among the practising Zionist writers, explicit racial and eugenic notions in spite of, and long after the inception of the ominous developments in Nazi Germany. These notions have persisted, though in a thinly disguised mode, in post-Second World War Israel. Above all, I suggest that the history of the relationship of Zionism and scientific biology, which has made an effort to single out Jews from non-Jews on the one hand, and to unite the distinct Jewish communities on the other hand, provides a problematic case of the utilisation of biological arguments as “evidence” for whatever social, economic, or political notion that has been put forward. During the hundred years since the establishment of political Zionism, the only logical and causative sequence that can be discerned is the one leading from the prejudices of the persons involved –Zionists and anti-Zionist alike-to whatever biological facts they choose to claim. And, in spite of the changing circumstances and contexts, the same old issues have been recycled again and again, where each side has utilised the evidence in its own way.Raphael Falk. Three Zionist Men of Science: Between Nature and Nurture, 2007 p.154.

All delete arguments are assuming either that this kind of material, in numerous books and articles, doesn't exist, or that, even if the above statement combines all three topics, it shouldn't be written up on wikipedia. Nishidani ( talk) 14:06, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I do not believe that either is a fair summary of my argument. jps ( talk) 14:16, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Nor mine. Bon courage ( talk) 14:29, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Well, explain why that one (of many) quotes does not undermine the assertion that these three contiguous issues are not the object of extensive scholarship. In other words, respond directly to what the citation states, and show why it does not meet the gravamen of your objections. Opinions must reason in terms of facts. Just restating them without regard to factual evidence is meaningless. This is not Twitter or Facebook Nishidani ( talk) 14:33, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

You can pick out and interpret such text as being in line with the synthetic title of this article, but even then it's just incidental scholarly writing which might have a place elsewhere in the encyclopedia (attributed to Falk). There's no encyclopedic topic here however. Bon courage ( talk) 14:47, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

All delete arguments are assuming... Try changing "all" to "no" and you will have a fairer summary. I feel like you are still talking past people here. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 15:16, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Again, these responses are just confirmed reiterations of an unargued opinion. Nishidani ( talk) 16:10, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The three figures Falk discusses were incredibly peripheral to the Zionist movement. I doubt any of them would occupy space in any balanced history of Zionism. Nor is their Zionism sufficiently a defining feature of their lives and careers for it to even be mentioned in their Wikipedia biographies currently. Falk picks on them because they are interesting case studies of "men of science" who were influenced by Herzl, but it is not encyclopedic to hang an article on this subject on these minor figures. It also exemplifies the way the (current version of the) article completely neglects the large number of Zionists who never took a position on race and genetics or who actively opposed the idea that Jews constituted a race, giving the impression of a narrative Zionism-as-racism that distorts history. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 15:33, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

'The three figures Falk discusses were incredibly peripheral to the Zionist movement'. That is an opinion, Bob, and one particularly odd given the adverb used to qualify its ostensible marginality ('incredibly'). When the article manages to get round to the role of Arthur Ruppin, and fleshens out the details of post-war ethnic planning, it will become evident that this concern is not marginal. Were it marginal, it would never have become the object of so much scholarly investigation in recent decades. using what wikipedia articles write as a sure index of relevance is patently silly. The article does not hang on 3 minor figures. In that specific paper, Falk illustrates his thesis by focusing on them, to thicken out points he made more broadly in his later book-length study, Zionism and the Biology of Jews, (2017), which again, no one appears to have read. Nishidani ( talk) 16:10, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

We should definitely include those like Israel Zangwill who opposed the idea of Jews as a race. That would be a valuable development. As to the fact that many said nothing on the topic, the article doesn't suggest otherwise, but we can be more explicit. On the latter point, the nuance is that - as many of the sources explain - anyone using the political term "return" is effectively talking about the Jewish people in this way, even if not explicitly the term race. Onceinawhile ( talk) 15:56, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

@ Bobfrombrockley: This got me curious, so I wondered off to the pages for those three to see the mentions, and, finding little, set about searching for what mentions might be missing. I've just finished fleshing out the first, Redcliffe N. Salaman, and it turns out he was a lot more politically prominent that his page previously gave him credit for (there was nothing there). He was president of the English Zionist federation and more generally flew quite high in a number of Jewish society circles. If the other two are anything like this, than it would appear that Falk simply knows better than Wikipedia, which is eminently plausible. Anyway, just fyi. Iskandar323 ( talk) 16:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Yes it's my "opinion" that these three figures were peripheral to the movement. Maybe I'm wrong and Salaman was more central than I realised (thanks Iskandar for improving his article), but I've read a lot of accounts of the history of Zionism and he is certainly never a major character. My response here is to the comment concluding "gist of his argument" which I read as framing the quote about these three guys as definitive proof that there is a "thing" that this article is about, while to me it feels like an arcane topic.

I don't understand why "That is an opinion" is a counter-argument to what I said. The current article is an almost arbitrary threading together of "opinions" held by scholars, without proper acknowledgement that their positions are interpretations of history and not established facts. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 17:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Well, I too have read long and widely in the topic of Zionism including several histories. And I find as often as not, that much of what I have learned from other reliable academic sources and articles on the movement is 'invisible' in the dominant mainstream works. That's one of the reasons I finally decided to write up Herzl's Mauschel. Plenty of scholarship on it, which however isn't picked up in numerous general books on the history of Zionism. For an analogy- I was forced to read many books on Catholic history when quite young, but only really got to know it by reading works on the topic written by lapsed or non-Catholic historians. I have several sources that note, furthermore, that this kind of sensitive topic has never been given, despite its importance, the attention it deserves until relatively recently. As anyone knows from the New Historians a mass of research emerged only after 40 years when certain taboos were loosened. Those outside the fold, over that period, contested the narrative, and many of their arguments suddenly reassumed importance. A lot of people yawned when Ari Shavit's book, meant to startle with the exposure of hidden truths,(My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel,) came out about the Lydda expulsions, Obviously the chap lived within a mental closet in which this kind of well-known story held no traction or was quietly brushed under the carpet. it surprised some Zionist readers, I guess, but no one outside the fold who is familiar with the history would have thought a secret had been exposed. I could name dozens of examples. Nishidani ( talk) 19:55, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I think this comment encapsulates the nub of the problem. One or two Wikipedia editors think the mainstream history is wrong, and use Wikipedia to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS and set the record straight -- leaning on facts, but not following the weight given by the mainstream sources. In an article like Zionism, positions which are marginal in the mainstream literature are never going to get more attention than appropriate per due weight, so here's a spin-off article where they can be unfolded -- but it's on a topic that some scholars have of course written about but that most people wouldn't see as a topic requiring a Wikipedia article. This seems to me to be a form of original research. It would be a great journal article, but can never be a good Wikipedia article. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 09:57, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Hi Bob, I read your comment above as – rightly – hanging primarily on our judgements of weight and marginality. I believe the topic has been clearly demonstrated to be highly significant in the literature. For example, the 2015 Oxford Bibliographies review of the major literature on Jewish genetics, states that: ...contemporary geneticists and their critics often consider similar questions and controversies such as those raised in pre-1980s studies based on blood groups, and even earlier biometric studies undertaken by 19th- and early-20th-century eugenicists and their critics. Zionist and anti-Zionist politics significantly inform historical and contemporary Jewish genetics literatures, at times explicitly and more often implicitly. In other words, they are stating explicitly that Zionism is a significant sub-topic of Jewish genetics and the prior related biometric (=race) science. I doubt we could find a better third party source to opine on this question of relative significance. Onceinawhile ( talk) 12:08, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Having now been made curious as to the context in which Falk uses these three individuals as examples, I went and read that article. I don't see him particularly reference them for their prominence. He actually uses them as examples of individuals with disparate concepts of nationalism that were nevertheless drawn together under the same 'roof of Zionism' and the common thread of scientific biology. Iskandar323 ( talk) 18:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

@ Bobfrombrockley: FYI just before you submitted your comment, the article was restructured and reorganized, taking into account some of the suggestions from editors throughout this discussion. I think it might address a number of your points – it is still not perfect of course, but gives an improved sense of what this article will be able to become when fully developed. Onceinawhile ( talk) 14:45, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep, Levivich's and Nishdani's arguments are compelling, and the sources do seem to satisfy WP:SIGCOV. I have to agree that the article still doesn't look great, though. Boynamedsue ( talk) 16:52, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Indeed. There's a lot of work to do, particularly because there are so many sources of exceptionally good quality dealing with a, to judge from the above, topic relatively unfamiliar to the broad reading public. The article as it stands errs by a very approximate arrangement of important points so the way forward will be to provide the exposition with the historical contexts of each idea. Ideas without context distort understanding - themes risk becoming memes in a rhetorical set of simplifications. To do this, will take at least some weeks, if in the meantime the promising stub we have is not detonated. Nishidani ( talk) 17:01, 13 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Delete. I've looked at the titles of the 36 sources currently used in the article and not a single one mentions the three topics of this article togther (the closest is probably Falk's book). I don't see why this article needs to exist - any useful information can be added to other articles. Alaexis _¿question? 12:44, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  You stopped looking after the titles? nableezy - 12:56, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  So please enlighten me, are there any book-length works dealing with this specific triad? Alaexis _¿question? 13:09, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Scroll up and read. And in the future, don't vote in an AfD when you haven't read any of the sources, you're wasting everyone else's time. Scanning the titles in the article isn't good enough (though it seems you missed the titles that mention Zionist eugenics and Zionists and the genomic Jew...). Hot takes aren't helpful at AFD. Levivich ( talk) 13:38, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Where exactly are you pulling the requirement for book length works dealing with the topic for an article from? The requirement is significant coverage, and that includes scholarly works in journal articles or chapters or sections of books. And also, as the comment above me shows, even your title browsing skills are lacking. nableezy - 14:53, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I don't think you should be voting in a deletion discussion when you don't understand WP:SIGCOV. Significant coverage does not require a book length work, it requires non-trivial coverage. "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." It certainly does not need to be book length, AfD's have supported "keep" based on a few paragraphs spread over three newspaper articles. I would hope the closer ignores this !vote. Boynamedsue ( talk) 17:36, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  If there are no book-length treatments, are there at least multiple scholarly articles on the connection between these three topics?

  For a compound topic, I think that it's important to have sources which deal with the connection between the three. Is there a connection between Wall Street, cocaine and risk taking? You bet but unless there are multiple scholarly sources which describe this together, I think it should stay a red link.

  I've looked at the sources in the article and the ones listed by Onceinawhile but I don't see why we need a separate article while we already have Genetic studies on Jews and Zionism#Ethnic_unity_and_descent_from_Biblical_Jews. Alaexis _¿question? 13:48, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Hi @ Alaexis: see Education sector responses to substance abuse and Substance abuse in ancient Rome for equivalents to the example you gave. And bear in mind that race and genetics are closely-connected topics, so this is A+[B1+B2], not A+B+C as in your example. Either way, this is simply how the sources cover the topic. You’ll see above some suggestions for an improved title, most of which are variations on replacing [race+genetics] with a single word.

  Re the existing parent articles here, at approx 2,000 words, the current version of this article would represent c.20% of Zionism, and about 15% of Genetic studies on Jews. And when this article is fully built out it should be double or triple its current size, based the information still in the sources currently in the bibliography. Even just 20% would fail WP:DUE on either of those articles, which are much wider topics. Onceinawhile ( talk) 15:16, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  And bear in mind that race and genetics are closely-connected topics, so this is A+[B1+B2] That is another contentious statement. Race is socially constructed, whereas genetics is not. At the interface of the discussion of race and genetics there is often a failure to acknowledge that genetics is clinal, a point that is right there in the lead of the page you linked to: patterns of human variation have been shown to be mostly clinal, with human genetic code being approximately 99.9% identical between individuals, and with no clear boundaries between groups. And this is one excellent reason why we should not have another page that purports to be about something AND race AND genetics. Because we don't want the encylopaedia to unintentionally propagate the misunderstanding that race is closely connected to genetics. There is a relationship, and that is as far as it goes. Acquaintances but not bedfellows. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 15:44, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

We all have personal opinions, and we can turn anything into a humongous thread by expressing them and replying to everything everyone says. The point is, when a significant volume of academic literature deals with three topic together -Zionism, race and genetics - we just write up and paraphrase this topic. If contsted, we should make our points, and ensure the threads do not become unmanageable and intimidating to editors who might want to add their opinion, but find the threads too long to digest. Nishidani ( talk) 16:15, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

we can turn anything into a humongous thread by expressing them and replying to everything everyone says, says the editor on his 25th reply in this thread, who feels the need to reply on every non-keep !vote. But does a significant body of academic literature conflate race and genetics? No! Look again. For instance, Falk (2017), much discussed above, argues that there is no scientific basis for Zionist eugenic claims, and that Jews are genetically just as diverse as any other population group. His argument is that the idea of a "Jewish race" is harmful and misleading. He avoids using the terms race and genetics together, and this is why he speaks of "The Biologization of Race" as a futile endeavour: No wonder that against such a background, when the Nazis came to power, they had to mobilize their best anthropologists to identify – in vain – Jews in order to discriminate against them. Of course, soon they had to fall back on more straightforward devices to label Jews, such as the Yellow Patch. (Falk, 2017:30}. He argues against a Zionist Lamarckian driven eugenics, and so the question he is considering is eugenics. As Levivich notes, the author is a geneticist, and he brings his expertise to bear, but in so doing, his thesis is that race is not discernible in biology, and that the idea of a Jewish race is, as I say, harmful and misleading. He has been criticised for ignoring other historical-cultural aspects, but that is not his focus. He says:

The questions “what is a race?” or “who is a Jew?” largely ignore the fact that (within the human species) any marriage circle can be viewed as a potential race. Considering that any female and male of a species may produce progeny with other members of that species, the patterns of marriages or sexual relationships for humans, in general, are resolved not so much by biological determinants, but rather by geographic or socio-cultural affinities and barriers. Today it is common among researchers in the humanities, the social sciences, and even the natural sciences to say that at least as far as humans are concerned, (biological) races do not exist. The biological races that were presumably discovered were in fact the illegitimate product of the classification system imposed on nature. Classification by races is a social construct. As a rule, the use of the term “race” for multiplicity, which is based on the typological mind-set, has been pushed aside in the scientific parlance and replaced by “population” in terms of statistics

(Falk, 2017:144) (emphasis mine). We should not allow the fact that he dismisses a concept of biological race through genetics and other means muddy the waters of an encyclopaedic article that purports to follow his thesis. He is discussing Zionist eugenics, and in so doing he brings genetics to bear. "race and genetics" do not go together in his thesis.

What then of the other sources? Similar can be said of these. People have come down hard on Alaexis, yet their point is not without merit. The sources presented do not characterise this as "race and genetics". They do talk about race, they do talk about genetics, but they do not put those words together, because that creates a confusion. We know it creates a confusion, because an editor said, a couple of copmments up, And bear in mind that race and genetics are closely-connected topics. I trust we see now that no, there is not a close connection between race and genetics, except inasmuch as it is in the mind of eugenicists and pseudoscientists. You have consistently mischaracterised this objection in this discussion, so the volume of information editors are being asked to consider is indeed large, but the discussion would go easier if there were less bludgeoning and more discussion. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 17:54, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

+1 to less bludgeoning. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 19:06, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Agreed. And less arguing about the correct title. We can have an RM after. Onceinawhile ( talk) 19:17, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

we don't want the encylopaedia to unintentionally propagate the misunderstanding that race is closely connected to genetics I really don't think anyone is intentionally trying to do that and I think it is kinda hard to get that impression from the reworked opening para. This is not another page about Race and genetics. It is about genetics and racial concepts in Zionist thought. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:42, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Read the thread above, where such points were amply answered. Numerous sources link and analyse all three topics. Genetic Studies of Jews concerns modern scientific studies etc-. Nishidani ( talk) 14:04, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Keep Per Levivich, Nishidani, et al. It is expected that !voters will bother to peruse the discussion, however long, than write facially incorrect stuff. TrangaBellam ( talk) 23:46, 14 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment: It should be noted, for the record, that this AfD we born out of an anonymous IP posting at WP:FTN, in breach of the ECP restrictions on internal project discussions for this WP:ARBPIA CT. Iskandar323 ( talk) 16:22, 15 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Delete per Sirfurboy and AndyTheGrump. DFlhb ( talk) 01:10, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply
• Comment, I checked the abstracts of several sources mentioned by the proponents of the article. This article's scope was not defined by those soures. For example, a paper cited as an example of a prime source [4] focuses on race and Zionism. When it discusses genetics, it highlights how genetic studies undermine racist ideas, "In the early thirties a shift took place in the scientific discourse on racial mixture. William Provine defines it as a shift 'from condemnation to agnosticism' (1973: 794). It was partly the result of scientific developments. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, geneticists began to acknowledge the fact that human heredity was more complex than they had thought. Why is "genetics" placed in the title and lead? Rjjiii ( talk) 04:41, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Hi Rjjiii, that paper covers only the history of the first half of the 20th century. Other sources cover the wider period, and explain that whilst race science fell away, from the 1950s onwards, its use in politics was replaced by genetic science. See for example: Burton 2021, p. 11: "In contrast to the rest of the region, the history of genetic research on Jews in Israel has been relatively well studied. Historians and anthropologists have critically examined how the structuring assumptions of Jewish race science in early-twentieth-century Europe and North America, and their relationship to Zionist nationalism, reverberate within the genetic studies of Jewish populations by Israeli scientists from the 1950s to the present."; Baker 2017, p.105 “Like Zionism’s new Jew that emerged from nineteenth-century European race science, the genomic Jew, a product of “population genetics,” springs from the same milieu” and Ostrer 2012, p.33 “Often, race science and Zionism went hand-in-hand, and the identification of a Jewish race provided justification for an ancestral homeland… The issues that preoccupied the Jewish intellectual leaders of 1911 are the same ones that preoccupy the leaders of today. Who are the Jews, a religious group or a genetic isolate? Did they originate from Middle Eastern matriarchs and patriarchs? Fishberg lacked the tools for answering these questions. The genetic methods that would eventually provide answers were starting to develop in Fishberg's New York in the Columbia University laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan. The precision of these genetic tools continued to improve over the course of the twentieth century, and as they did, Fishberg's intellectual heirs sought to apply them to the issues of Jewish origins and identity.” Onceinawhile ( talk) 06:25, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  These quotes seem to indicate that there are two related but very different topics - early 20th century race science (which was adopted by some key Zionists) and late 20th century genetics (which has had a minor role in debates relating to Israel’s legitimacy) - and that a couple of writers have noted a slight connection - or “reverberation” - between them. This is exactly why it feels like an original essay rather than a coherent Wikipedia article to many commenters here. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 16:34, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Hi @ Bobfrombrockley: you made the same "couple of writers" claim on the article talk page earlier today and I promised you a dozen. See below an example dozen scholars, in alphabetical order - all their articles making the connection are already detailed in the article:

  • Abu El-Haj, Nadia
  • Baker, Cynthia M.
  • Burton, Elise K.
  • Egorova, Yulia
  • Falk, Raphael
  • Hart, Mitchell B.
  • Kandiyoti, Dalia
  • Kirsh, Nurit
  • McGonigle, Ian V.
  • Ostrer, Harry
  • Schaffer, Gavin
  • Tamarkin, Noah

  Onceinawhile ( talk) 19:39, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I think this list is a little misleading. Many of those scholars are either writing about early 20th century race science or recent genetic debates, and connecting the two only briefly. For example, Egorova's piece is on the latter, and uses the word "Zionist" or "Zionism" three times, twice in a paragraph in the lit that briefly summarises the history and once in a paragraph that mentions 1950s Israeli scientists unconsciously internalising Zionist ideology. Hart, in contrast, focuses on 1880-1940 and only mentions genetics in quite passing ways, for instance in framing his 2011 book by saying that we now know, due to genetic research, that there is no such thing as race. Kandiyoti's book is a literary study of how conversos are represented, in which none of Zionism, race theory and genetics are core topics at all.

  In general, this list strengthens the view I am moving towards, that this article looks at two different topics and should either become the nucleus for two different articles or the two halves should each be folded into the relevant main articles. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 08:28, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Egorovga is highly synthetic, brief. She mentions all 3-using a word-count argument on Zionist to suggest its inadeuacy is far-fetched. All sources focus on different date spans, 1880-1914,1895-1930s, 1980s onwards etc, but no where in the world of scholarship do we consider that treatments of a theme in specific epoches invalidates the history of variation in thematic continuity. In short, this looks like hairsplitting. You simply can't thresh out themes that are intimately connected, except to maim exposition and understanding. It can't be done without denying our readership an overview. Works on this negelected triadic nexus are coming out so fast it's hard to keep up with them. I've reading this morning one just out, Marina B. Mogilner's Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire , Indiana University Press ISBN  978-0-253-06612-1 2023 where, like many of the scholars we cover dealing with the Germanic sphere of race and zionism, she notes a systematic turning of the eyes of scholarship from the topic until very recently. Nishidani ( talk) 09:12, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• A reverberation / from the same milieu / same preoccupation Iskandar323 ( talk) 16:45, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  You already said that in your !vote. The number and quality of sources indicate that is not an "original essay". If it "feels like" that then it must at least have something to do with your own constructive editing/debating of the article itself, while at the same time saying that you are "leaning delete", an apparent contradiction. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:50, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  At the moment, I'm shifting from leaning delete to leaning rename. I increasingly think there is a valuable article on Jewish or Zionist race science, focusing on the late 19th/early 20th century. The a+b+c title and shoe-horning in a tenuously related recent genetics debate makes it an inherently problematic article. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 08:01, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  The article as it currently exists is like a game of twister, trying to twist together different subjects into an original thesis (seemingly that genetic studies of Jews are tied to antiquated racial beliefs and run by ideologues). There is justification for an article on Biological Judaism, which is an actual widely discussed subject. We can then comfortably use more sources, and properly contextualize the impact of Zionism on the concept, and the impact of the concept on Judaism, while integrating genetic studies, lost tribe research missions, etc. Drsmoo ( talk) 18:24, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Should it be created, I promise not to contest it as a fork. Selfstudier ( talk) 18:47, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I’m referring to an RM for this article, which has a talk page discussing how it’s problematic that the first source in the lead relates broadly to Jews. Drsmoo ( talk) 19:01, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  If not deleted, then we can look at other titles. Selfstudier ( talk) 19:03, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I don't think whatever you are thinking of above is a 'widely discussed subject' in those terms. A search for specific phrase "Biological Judaism" yields little, and of what little there is, most of it seems to lead back to an obscure 2003 article by Robert Pollack entitled The Fallacy of Biological Judaism. I imagine that specific word combo is rare because "biological [insert religion]" is a somewhat nonsensical word combo. And I equally assume you are also not thinking of "Biological Jew", which is a slightly more frequented term, but largely due to the intense discussion around one specific work, The Biological Jew by Eustace Mullins - an odius work by a man described with no ambiguity as "a one-man organization of hate". Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:18, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  But, to be fair, "Biological Judaism" has 40 times as many hits as Zionism, race and genetics. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 21:02, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Is that really your takeaway? You are comparing what is being presented as an adjective-noun term with what is clearly a descriptive title. It is reasonable to query whether an adjective-noun as a standalone term has prior usage and in what context. Descriptive titles on Wikipedia, by contrast, often have no prior precedent. Or if you think the former is a descriptive title, then better a neutral descriptive title without explicitly negative connotations then those with potentially onerous baggage. Iskandar323 ( talk) 21:45, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Sigh. Judaism is a a religion, not a species with a biology. Catholics were severely warned against marrying out with people of other religions. Not for that would one speak of Biological Catholicism, except to make a Mick's eyebrows twitch with perplexity. Nishidani ( talk) 21:58, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

seemingly that genetic studies of Jews are tied to antiquated racial beliefs and run by ideologues

Blustering caricature

It's hard to cope (only in terms of time) with all the systematic distortions about WP:SYNTH and WP:OR sprawling through this thread. Numerous sources state that (a) since 'racial science' for several decades from 1880 onwards was considered a legitimate field of enquiry (b) Jewish scientists like their peers everywhere contributed to the topic. (c) There was a notable discursive overlap between racist stereotyping prejudices, particularly among antisemites, and the ostensible outcome of what we know now to be a pseudo-science of races (d) Jewish scientists and thinkers took up the challenge to rid their discipline of the antisemitic hostilities intrinsic to much of the 'science' by creatively reworking the field to present a modified, alternative or variant number of models of a Jewish type/race in terms of that 'racial science.(On this there is a mastery survey, namely Veronika Lipphardt's, Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über »Rasse« und Vererbung 1900-1935, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008 ISBN  978-3-525-36100-9) (e) Concurrently, in Zionist circles, this tradition's ideas were drawn upon in order to provide a 'scientific' warrant for their proposal to extricate Jews from the European antisemitic world which oppressed their development (f) by asserting that, given a land of their own in Palestine, a 'new Jew' racially and culturally distinct, could be formed (called 'muscular Zionism' after Max Nordau's book, a term which borrowed on the older Christian notion of 'muscular Christianity'). (g) This would solve the 'Jewish Question' the antisemites complained of by ridding Europe of Jews /from a Zionist perspective i.e., 'giving good riddance to Europe and its Jew-hating tradition'and (h) restore the creativity, masculinity and, yes, racial purity that, in their view, was the presupposition for the ancient achievements of the biblical world of Israelites/Jews, but in a secular, technological version. (i) This tradition carried over into some important aspects of Zionist planning once Israel was established such as studies in blood typologies of different immigrant groups and eugenic concerns and (j) wagged its tail when the new science of genomics emerged, and molecular genetics began to focus on Jewish DNA to see whether (k) scientific evidence might, via shared DNA, allow one to trace back all major Jewish diaspora communities to founding fathers in the Middle East, a premise of the theory of 'return' and (l) confirm one of many viewpoints about who is a Jew, namely by demonstrating that, unlike most other nations, they were, beyond shared religion and culture, also somewhat uniquely, conjoined by an historical biological kinship.

This is what the topic promises to survey because these elements are all variously present in a mass of academic literature, thoroughly familiar to historians of Judaism and Jewish thought, though systematically ignored for several decades, until the 1980s, when the subject was picked up and soon snowballed into a major scholarly focus (see soon the section I will write on 'Understating the role of race in Zionism' which lists and summarizes authoritative statements by several major scholars of how and why this intricate, thematically crosswoven topic was ignored, neglected or suppressed)

Had editors exercised patience, and collaborated to improve the stub, rather than entangling it in a torture-chamber of ill-focused opinionizing on the abstract idea that appears to scandalize those unfamiliar with these recent studies (Zionism/race) we would already have had a much better article. As far as I can see, the only objection visible here is WP:IDONTLIKEIT, with its sororal handmaiden WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT, both in the service of WP:CENSORSHIP. Nishidani ( talk) 20:39, 16 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Points a-j here are a series of theses or propositions (most of which I would agree with). They outline an excellent essay or journal article plan. But they don't outline an excellent Wikipedia article for a number of reasons. Each one of them (apart from a and maybe b) needs arguing for and could be contested with alternative theses. For example, Endelmann could be used to argue that Jewish racial science was short-lived and fundamentally discredited by Nazism, while Egorova could be used to argue that biological/genetic understandings of Jewishness have only limited political purchase today in contrast to other understandings. Most of the topics taken in on the journey from a to j are or should better covered in more general ( Jewish identity) or more specific ( muscular Judaism) WP articles. And in the journey from a to j there is a very sharp turn at step (i), where we leap from a series of closely connected topics to a radically different topic. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 09:04, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Discuss all this at the article please, here we are concerned with GNG and deletion. Bob, etc can keep repeating ad nauseum that there is no article but it is clear that there is no agreement on whether that is the case and that good sourcing exists is just a fact. Selfstudier ( talk) 11:16, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Bob, Jewish identity, given the historical depth, the manifold cultural variations in regional reflexes over half the globe, and esp. the fact no one can agree on what constitutes it ('introduce two Jews and you will get three points of view' proverbially reflects this marvellous self-awareness of how complex identity is) is a massive topic only a fool would think could be summed up in an average wiki-length article.

I can't see the point you make of Endelmann and Egorova etc. Scholars have common ground, and disagree on much. Articles note the common ground and the different judgements made by other experts. So when we note that Engelmann states what you cite him for, we would also note several sources that tweak the finality of race science after Nazism. Just one of many in my notes,

Chaim Sheba,Sheba is a good example of what I noted above- that many doctors in post-war Israel had been trained in the German sphere, and quite a few never quite threw off some of the earlier premises of race science standard in curricula who became director general of the Health Ministry in 1950, argued, according to a 2005 report that “a high concentration of those ill in body and soul would jeopardize the future of Jewish community in Israel. To support his argument, he used examples from genetic theories which purported to show national gene pools weakened through a lack of genetic vigilance.” Sheba was influential in temporarily preventing Cochin Jews from immigrating. The communist newspaper Davar asserted that a community “with numerous sick, decadent, unrestrained elements will not withstand the social and security test.” Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in 1950 that North African Jews’ “primitivism is unsurpassed…. They have little talent for comprehending anything intellectual” and “lack any roots in Judaism.”(Seth Frantzman, 'Israel’s Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering,' The Forward 21 April 2014

We really must give the article breathing space to develop, without cutting in the bud every formulation added by niggling at its inadequacy. We haven't anything like the full picture before us. See below. Nishidani ( talk) 12:46, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The only difference between scholarly articles and what we do on wikipedia, is that the one engages in original research, the other, if one subscribes to FA principles, simply gathers the best available modern sources on the topic, and, having mastered them, set forth what the books and articles say, avoiding inferences or original interpretations. I personally feel the difference strongly. Having published on race and nationalism esp., I make in my reading of sources all sorts of notes on (a) missed connections (b) partial coverage that fails to take into account relevant scholarship, etc.etc., and simply put the latter into my own files. Most of what I learn ends up, for this reason, improving my personal knowledge considerably, but not wikipedia's. But that is the rule. No synthesis, no personal research.

A second thing content editors like myself know, if that if you start a stub on anything that might be mininally controversial, it will be aborted: from the outset it will be tweaked, reverted, questioned in every word or every other sentence, esp. by editors who approach wikipedia with political interests or the 'politics of culture', and huge talk page arguments or AfD threads will ensue which totally jam up serene completion of the initial work. That's why I learnt, when taking on a very sensitive topic like Birkat HaMinim which languished for a decade as a pathetic and misleading stub, I wrote it over a month off-line. I knew that if I touched it substantially with an edit or two, then the usual heckling process of synth"! original research! POv-pushing! would let a fascinating subject miscarry. Not out of bad faith, no. But simply because the sensse of a sentence in a provisory lead, or first section under construction cannot be grasped unless you are aware of all of the subsequent details from the scholarship that will clarify them. Most of the criticisms here are of this kind, and that is why I outlined how I think, having read nearly all of the sources, sometimes twice, the article, if allowed to develop, would look like.

I put these finished articles up for comment, peer-editor scrutiny, they almost never encounter the wrestling pettifogging we observe here. They are examined, often by 600-800 eyes for a few days, and then left subsdtantially as they were written because they are neutral, finished, thorough, and therefore encyclopedic.

Over 99& of edits on wikipedia are housecleaning, forum or talk page kibitzing or polemics, reverts, minor corrections or tweaks or additions -absolutely necessary of course. Giving one's opinion is something we all enjoy, brief fixes and then moving on to other blips in the infinite flow of edits, doesn't ruin one's day by unrewarding mechanical overhauling. Only 0.76% of our 6,600,000 articles achieve FA status as default reference articles of guaranteed excellence and reliability for the global readership. That work is done by a small number of content editors mainly, it does not come of incremental adjustments over a decade+ of negotiation. Someone at some point has to take the whole article and its subject matter in hand and make it all cohere in consonance with our best working principles. What had happened here fits a predictable pattern, so I am not surprised. But people who decide its fate one way or another should examine what they want from wikipedia, endless stubs, split articlettes, mishmashes of accumulated edits made without an eye to the whole article. or encyclopedic work. Nishidani ( talk) 12:46, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

• Comment - A closer is going to need to read all of this, and at this point there are over 20,000 words here. Just under 5,000 of these from Nishidani alone. This is an hour or more of reading! Please could we keep discussion focussed. This is not a place for a long meta discussion about how to write articles, nor for any other meta discussion. We are looking at whether there is an encyclopaedic subject here and what exactly it is, and thus whether it is already covered by other articles. That is all. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 14:59, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  and thus whether it is already covered by other articles Only one editor has alleged a fork, afaics. Here is another source for your interest, note the title:-

  Falk R. Zionism, race and eugenics. In: Cantor G., Swetlitz M., editors. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press; Chicago: 2006. pp. 137–162. (The book is in the article Biblio already) Selfstudier ( talk) 15:13, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Right, and like his other book, Falk's thesis in that book is that Zionism has been influenced by racist and eugenicist ideas. The book has been criticised for being too polemical, although the thesis is well argued. The interface with genetics lies in the eugenics. The argument from some Zionists apparently being that Palestinians are a "genetic threat". This is related to the Zionist eugenic hope discussed above. So it is a good source for something but it is not a good source for the page as it is. Is this a history of the strand of eugenic thinking amongst Zionism? If so, Zionist eugenics makes some sense, if and only if you can demonstrate that this subject is significant enough to spin it out of Zionism. Is it about the genetic realities? Then we have Jewish genetics. What that source is not about is some subject that conflates genetics with race in the head subject. For Falk, it is clear that genetics is the science that demolishes eugenic pretensions. Genetics is not the subject, it is the cure. We should be extremely careful about creating any new pages that have the words "race and genetics" together. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 15:55, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  This source is a chapter in a book not another book. As already stated, the article is not about race and genetics per se. It is about these two subjects in Zionist thought and for me, this has been successfully demonstrated and not just by Falk. Btw, which parts of Falk book is criticized as polemic and by who? Selfstudier ( talk) 16:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  Which parts of Falk book is criticized as polemic and by who? I can't find the criticism about it being too polemical. It would have been a review of his book. I have struck the comment as it may be misremembered, and in any case is unimportant. Shlomo Sand referred to conceptual weaknesses, but also approves of much of the work. For instance in The Invention of the Jewish People, page 266. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 08:09, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  While I agree "race and genetics" is phrasing that should generally be avoided in any article titles (except the article about race and genetics, of course), this is an WP:RM argument, not an WP:AFD argument. However titled, there are WP:RSes (the geneticist Falk's works "Zionism and the Biology of Jews" and "Zionism, race, and eugenics", the "Zionist eugenics" article, the "Zionism...and the Genomic Jew" chapter, the chapter about Zionism in a book about Jewish doctors and race science, etc.) about the topic of Zionism and race/ genetics/ eugenics/ genomics/ race science-aka- scientific racism, or however one might describe it -- all of those terms have been used by the aforementioned RSes in various combinations, and they're all talking about the same thing. Some RSes cover the topic while covering a superset, e.g. a chapter about Zionism in a book about Jewish doctors and race science, whereas others cover a subset of the topic, e.g. the article that is specifically about Zionist eugenics. I would describe it as "Zionism and scientific racism" (which includes eugenics, which includes genetics or, more accurately, "pseudo-genetics"). What would save everybody time is if all the "delete" voters changed their votes to "keep" in recognition of the RSes supporting this topic, this AFD was WP:SNOW-closed, and then discussion about title and content can continue on the article talk page. Levivich ( talk) 16:24, 17 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  We are at the one week mark already, so it seems unrealistic that time would be saved by any attempt for a quick switch of !votes. Rather this will either be closed shortly or a closer will extend, hopefully with guidance as to what they want further discussion to focus on. For my own part, the reason I have !voted delete is because the whole subject as it stands has an element of synth. The lead of the article does this in the very first paragraph:

  In the late 19th century, a discourse emerged in Zionist thinking seeking to reframe conceptions of Jewishness in terms of racial identity and race science. In more recent times, genetic science generally and Jewish population genetics in particular have been used in support of or opposition to Zionist political goals, including claims of Jewish ethnic unity and descent linked to the biblical Land of Israel.

  It is that in more recent times that throws in the subject of genetic science and then changes the article from a discussion of the Zionist thinking to opposition of Zionist goals as well as a broader discussion of questions of descent.

  Despite a week at AfD, editors invested in this page have not yet taken on board that the subject as framed is SYNTH. That an RM would resolve my own primary objection here is a given, but my reason for not changing my !vote to a keep-and-rename is that the actual subject is still being skewed by the title, and what is required is a clear consensus as to what the subject is. If it is after Falk then the issue is something like Zionist eugenics - a title that altogether avoids WP:AND. But I don't want to dictate what the subject is. Another title may be better. What I would like to know from the invested parties is what exactly they want the article to be about, because simply keeping this article as it is will probably lead to a messy RM with competing titles and no clear consensus. If the article scope could be decided now, then the RM becomes a technicality. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 07:54, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  You mean editors haven't taken on board your personal opinion and insistence that it is synth, despite the provision of voluminous sourcing around the subject to the contrary and general agreement that it might be the title that is more of a problem than the subject per se? This discussion has run its course and an AfD can't help determine title or scope - those are very much discussion for the talk page of the subject page itself. AfD is neither the right place nor mandated for this. Iskandar323 ( talk) 08:54, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  AfD is a discussion, and if a body of editors remain unclear on the proposed scope of the article, that discussion has not run its course. If a recently created article has potential but does not yet meet Wikipedia's quality standards, then draftify is the appropriate alternate to deletion per WP:ATD-I. We can resolve the head issue now, and keep the article subject to RM, or else take it to draft and thrash out the issues on the draft. There is no sense in which I would agree that this article under this title is ready for mainspace. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 09:08, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  If you now think it should go to draft, because the title/scope issues are temporarily insurmountable, then you should be changing your vote to that. Iskandar323 ( talk) 09:12, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  AFD decides whether topics are notable, not whether "this article under this title is ready for mainspace". "AfD is not cleanup." This is a GNG-notable topic as demonstrated by all the sources cited/quoted in this discussion that cover this topic, as a whole, in depth.

  It's true, though, sadly the time has already been wasted, by editors arguing that a topic is not notable because they think the topic is presented in a non-NPOV way in the article. That's been pretty disruptive, particularly when it's so obvious that so many editors did not bother to review the sources before voting. Levivich ( talk) 14:16, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  The topic of Zionism, race and genetics is not notable. Literally no one frames the topic that way. What is evident, however, is that there is a topic (maybe more than one) that is notable. If there is agreement on what that is and that the article should be about that, I would be happy to move my !vote to "keep on understanding of RM". BobFromBrockley indicates the same. That looks like the beginnings of a potential consensus. The decision for the invested editors now is really whether they want to come to a consensus view on that topic, or whether they prefer to hold on in the hope this gets closed as keep or no consensus. Sirfurboy🏄 ( talk) 17:07, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

  I would switch my !vote from leaning delete (perhaps draftify rather than delete, which hadn't occurred to me as an option) to keep-and-rename if there were signs it was possible to get a consensus on a new title and sharp focus that avoided the intrinsic SYNTH issues with the current title/focus that I still don't think have been addressed. BobFromBrockley ( talk) 12:39, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

If you still prefer not to read the score of sources which refer to the continuity of early Zionist ideas of race and modern genetic studies on Jews, and persist in asserting this is synth, well at least consult Kirsh, Nurit (December 2003). "Population Genetics in Israel in the 1950s: The Unconscious Internalization of Ideology". Isis. 94 (4): 631–655. JSTOR  386385. which documents how the earlier Zionist ideas of race were absorbed into Israeli population genetics in the 1950s and abide there in the discipline as unconscious influences. There i9s zero synth in the topic title and the article. Please desist. Nishidani ( talk) 08:37, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Yes, that's good for the middle bit and together with Falk, puts paid to the idea of separated subjects/synth. Selfstudier ( talk) 10:37, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Can you show me where in that article it documents racial ideas being absorbed into genetics, and abiding there? Because the article describes how both are influenced by ideology, but explicitly documents their differences:

“But although both Israeli geneticists of the 1950s and 1960s and Zionist racial anthropologists of early twentieth-century Europe were anxious to prove that the Jews have a common biological origin and their uniqueness has been preserved, there are important differences between them."

"Racial anthropology was affected by ideological and political ideas and was also used to influence those ideas; in contrast, the relationship between population genetics and ideology was not reciprocal, since the influence of population genetics in Israel was insignificant. It did not arise in reaction to any previously published views and was not used as propaganda, or in any decision making process."

The closest I see to the connection you are claiming is this:

"The Israeli research publications never mention the eugenic and racial aspects of their research, nevertheless, they tried to use different terms and different criteria from those of German bioracial science and eugenics." "Footnote: Goldschmidt and her collaborators preferred to focus on pathological traits and refrained as much as possible from anthropomorphic measurements." Drsmoo ( talk) 13:00, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Whoops. Yes I should have written 'abided' for 'abide' in referring to Kirsh. The idea that Zionist racial thinking on Jewish 'biology' formed an ideological heritage persisting past the Holocaust into Israeli genetics from the 1950s through the 1960s is the focus of Kirsh's period-bound study. In Falk's more comprehensive overview the influence of Zionist biological theories about Jews is given as persisting, with endless variations, on Jewish and Israeli thinking for the whole of the 20th.century. Your objection changes nothing. Zionism, race and genetics is a coherent focus of many studies. Nishidani ( talk) 13:50, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Picking the bits we like out of the conclusion is a game that can be played by two:

"If Sheba stands at one end of a scale, Goldschmidt stands at the other, since the emphasis in her writing is on genetic issues rather than on historical and anthropological ones. Yet, as I have shown, there is evidence that she too had assimilated the Zionist narrative. Zionist ideas were so ubiquitous in Israeli society that they permeated the scientific work not only of Sheba, a Zionist activist in both the military and the political frameworks, but also of someone like Goldschmidt, whose identity and self-perception were determined primarily by her role as a scientist." Selfstudier ( talk) 14:01, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Not about picking bits, Nishidani said the article was about racial ideas being absorbed into genetic studies. But I’m not seeing that in the article, which is about how both are influenced by Zionism. I’m asking if someone could please cite the part(s) of the article that state racial ideas were absorbed into genetic studies. Drsmoo ( talk) 15:11, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Sigh. Take a deep breath and . . .The article is about Zionism, race and genetics. You and many others are not seeing this or that in the article because, as soon as the stub went up, it got hit with urgent calls for deletion, mostly by editors who haven't any acquaintance with the dozen sources originally there, let alone the 44 major books and studies on Zionism's early entanglement in racial science down to the 1930s, and the aftermath of that ideological tradition in early postwar Israel and the diaspora in the last three decades. A huge amount of investment in time and energy in sedulously replying to repetitive undocumented assertions of wp:synth for a week has hamstrung its completion. By my calculations, just handling the information in those 44 sources will create a 100kb article. It would only need a week or so to do that and quadruple the content. But with a death-sentence hanging over a legitimate topic like this by adventitious nagging and ball-and-chain pettifogging, one refrains from any major effort until someone decides either way. One doesn't fatten a skeleton being trundled over the cobblestones to Tyburn or, as one might say in Landsberg am Lech, Galgenweg. One just thinks of Mallarmé 's wonderful poem, Brise Marine, the first line and the 'adieu suprême des mouchoirs'. To share a 17 year old boy's amibitious but inept translation and give you the kind of feeling one has trying to breast the marathon-long hurdles of writing serious articles for wikipedia against the pressure of aimless chat.

The sheer fatigue of flesh! and books - I've read them all.

To bolt, flee, fly beyond and be amongs birds that call

In swooned fall and flight over unknown foam and skies!

Nothing! -not even gardens reflected in aged eyes

Can keep this brine-drenched heart from brooding without rest

Night after night! Nor the empty clarity, desert-white,

Of sheaved paper blankly protected by lamp-light,

And a youthful wife, suckling a child at her breast.

I’m off! Trim your masts as I, wayward schooner,

Unanchored from ink , sail forth towards exotic nature!

Boredom, desolate of hope, in pitiless grief,

Trusts again in a final farewell's hankerchief!

And perhaps the masts, inveigling storms to the deck,

Are those winds bend headlong into shipwreck

Lost, unmasted, unmastered - no bountyful isles in sight

Yet hark, o beating heart, to shanties this wintry night.</ br>

This AfD is a palmary example of wikipedia as a waste of time, esp. if the sceptical input has all of the omniscient thoughtlessness of chatbots. Nishidani ( talk) 16:47, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I’m not seeing that in the article, which is about how both are influenced by Zionism Uh huh, this article is Zionism, race and genetics which is about how both are influenced by Zionism, right? Falk says that Zionist ideology persisted (Falk "especially among the practising Zionist writers, explicit racial and eugenic notions in spite of, and long after the inception of the ominous developments in Nazi Germany. These notions have persisted, though in a thinly disguised mode, in post-Second World War Israel.· and this latest source is saying similar, as you have just acknowledged. Trying to make the discussion about something else isn't going to help. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:42, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The article discusses the influence of Zionism on early racial studies, and the influence of Zionism on genetic studies, but I don’t see talk of an ideological heritage or one being absorbed into the other. Drsmoo ( talk) 16:58, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

If you want me to agree that racial science was not absorbed into eugenics and the latter not absorbed into genetics, happy to do that. Not sure what you mean by "ideological heritage", if you mean Zionism and its influence in those areas, we have just discussed two sources that affirm such an influence. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:13, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

I'm noticing that some of the editors who have been commenting (and commenting, and commenting) in favor of keeping, are making the argument that those of us who have argued that there is SYNTH are doing so because we are too lazy to have read the sources. Thus, those who argue that there is no SYNTH are the keepers of The Truth, and can summarily (if lengthily) dismiss anyone who disagrees with them. More plausibly, there are editors who have carefully looked at the sourcing, and concluded that there is no SYNTH, and there are other editors who have carefully looked at the sourcing, and concluded that there is SYNTH. The person who closes the AfD will have to sort out how to balance those opposing arguments. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 17:15, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

::On the talk page editors have repeatedly asked for a bulleted list of things those who make these claims consider unfactual or synth. Twice some were given, and duly answered, with tweaks to the text when the claim was considered to have some value. The third time, the answer to these requests was silence. The much larger number of people commenting here but not editing the article waived that option of allowing us to verify the claim. Lastly, those who have read the 2,000 pages of sources diligently don't have any truth to flourish. They do have some competence, compared to others who don't do so, in assessing what the scholarly literature is saying. Here as in the world there are only perspectives along side brute facts no one contests. All content editors ask is that brief repetitions of WP:Synth be documented by specific evidence for that conclusion (which then can be addressed at the article) not policy flagwaving in a ballot of numbers or head-counting. Nishidani ( talk) 19:13, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Wikipedia:What SYNTH is not Selfstudier ( talk) 17:26, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

Wikipedia:The Last Word. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 17:47, 18 July 2023 (UTC) reply

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.