DNA, Schmee-NA! The Genetic History Of The Jews By John Derbyshire

The Jews are an ideal subject for studies in population genetics, forming as they do an unusually well-defined "genetic island": small founder group, little exogamy, long history. It is therefore odd that Jewish scholars have been especially prominent in the resistance to population-genetics research. The paradigm that dominated the human sciences through the later decades of the 20th century, of an infinitely plastic human nature imbedded in a uniform, static biological substratum—the "blank slate"—was essentially the creation of anthropologist Franz Boas and his student Ashley Montagu, both of whom were Jewish. The paradigm was upheld, and ferociously policed, by Jewish scholars of the following generation: Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Rose.

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