Episode 59: Are Jews indigenous to Israel?
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re trying something new at AHA: Short-from episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East. Our first question sent in by a listener: Are Jews really indigenous to Israel?
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are Jews indigenous to Israel? |
| 0:07.0 | If we take seriously the argument that they're not, then we have to ask where else are they indigenous to? |
| 0:14.0 | So Jews of Germany or indigenous to Germany theoretically, Jews of Russia are indigenous to Russia, Jews of England |
| 0:21.1 | or indigenous to England, in the actual partition talks at the United Nations in 1947 |
| 0:27.1 | to establish a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. This is the position taken by the |
| 0:32.3 | Syrian delegate and the Lebanese delegate and the Iraqi delegate and generally the Arab world, |
| 0:36.2 | where they got up and they said, hey, the Jews are not a people, they're a religion, you can't establish a state for a religion, |
| 0:41.0 | that was said at the UN, nothing is new under the sun in these arguments, and B, the Jews belong to all the places where they live. |
| 0:50.2 | And the problem with that was very simple. They were never allowed to. Nobody, in all the long |
| 0:57.1 | history of the Russian Empire, seriously contended or seriously acted, or the actual legal regime |
| 1:03.5 | of the empire literally allowed the Jews to be Russians. They were always a distinct ethnic national |
| 1:10.1 | minority and treated as such and |
| 1:12.4 | limited with the special limits because they were not Russians. And that's true of Poland |
| 1:17.6 | and that's true of Germany. In France there was this whole, you know, after the revolution |
| 1:22.2 | there was this whole concept of emancipation. I give nothing to the Jews as a nation, the |
| 1:27.1 | French Revolutionary said, but I give everything to the Jews as a nation, the French revolutionary said, |
| 1:28.1 | but I give everything to the Jew as a citizen, as an individual, meaning emancipation, |
| 1:33.0 | stop being Jews as a collective and just become citizens of France. Frenchman of the mosaic |
| 1:37.9 | persuasion was the phrase. Great, except that in actual practice, it never actually worked out that way. |
| 1:45.0 | The French emancipation, the idea of Jews being individuals with individual rights, were brought to the German-speaking lands, |
| 1:51.0 | essentially by the Napoleonic conquest at the point of a spear, and failed to take root socially. |
| 1:59.0 | So the laws of the ghetto, the laws restricting Jews, the laws |
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