I do not like taking the bus from downtown Hartford on Saturday afternoons.
It's not because I don't like Hartford. I don't not like Hartford...It's kind of a nothing city, so whatever. What bugs me is that there's a group of young black men who stand on the corner of Pearl and Main, right in the middle of the hub where all the bus lines converge, where everyone is getting on and off, and they talk on a big amp about being Black Hebrews. A lot of blather about religion God thinks this and that, yadda yadda yadda. I don't usually want to listen to them, or even make eye contact. They seem like they'd be the conversational equivalent of a Tar Baby. The only winning move is to walk away.
One afternoon I heard them saying that the Jewish people in Israel don't belong there, because their genes are all European, and the actual Jews are the Ethiopian Jews.
But here's the thing about genetics: if you go back far enough in your family tree, even just a few hundred years, you have so many different ancestors that your actual genetic heritage gets lost in the shuffle. Go back a thousand years and mathematically speaking you've got more ancestors than are currently alive on the planet. (There's a great deal of overlap when you go back that far.) Ultimately everyone is a relative of everyone -- I mean, you knew that, but the strange thing is that this relation to everyone is really recent, even compared to the timespan of human civilization.
Which means that trying to claim an ancient heritage based entirely on genetics, while very tempting, is mostly wishful thinking and hokum.
Culture does not live through genes. Culture lives through language. Jewish people have kept the Torah, they've kept the Talmud, they have preserved the Hebew Language, they have revived it from its dormant status as a priestly tongue into a native tongue once more. Thus the Jewish community continues.
I wonder if even one of those fellows on that Hartford street corner knows Hebrew.