"You DON'T Descend from All of Your Ancestors" and Jews

This video has really been on my mind since I watched it the other night. While you still could not have been born without all of your ancestors, you don't actually contain genetic material from all of your ancestors. Because of the way that you don't inherit 100% of the DNA from each parent, the further back you go, the less you have in common genetically with any given ancestor, until eventually it is not genetically meaningful to say that you are descended from that person any more than any other person alive on that day. Doesn't mean it isn't meaningful in any way, so long as you still believe in cause and effect, but it does materially matter for your biology.

In the video, it's described as being a single distilled point which emerges from an anonymous ocean of humanity, increasingly refined until you come to a point where you exist, and then as you follow the generations of your descendants, the remnants of yourself are gradually dissipated back into an anonymous ocean of humanity, wherein nobody alive could be meaningfully said to have a part of you in their DNA any more than any other human. Since the family trees of royals are so well known, he follows the family tree of King Charles III back further and further until by the 15th century none of his ancestors can lay claim to a single gene being their contribution to King Charles III. Had they died without bearing children, he never would have been born in our timeline, and yet it's hard to say genetically that he descended from them for he does not resemble them in any meaningful way on the genetic level. Even looking at the portraits you really can't see the family resemblance.

For one, it has made me feel a lot better about being infertile. I can never genetically reproduce, and yet for some reason I mind less knowing that my contribution to the human gene-pool would have eventually been dissipated into nothingness anyway. In fact, non-biological things I do are more likely to survive than any of my genes.

Judaism as a religion contains many aspects of ancestor worship. We do a lot of revering of our ancient ancestors who we claim to descend from, whether it be mythical figures like Abraham and Moses, legendary figures like the Maccabees who we know did exist, or more recent ancestors like the rabbinic sages of the Talmud. Many Ashkenazi Jews claim to be indigenous to the Levant based on ancestors having lived there up until the Roman-induced diaspora. Had these people never had children, none of us would be alive as we are, but genetically speaking, we just have nothing in common with them any more than anyone else, because math. Saying things like "We're really middle-eastern, biologically" or "We were born to live in the desert" are simply wrong for Ashkenazim. It's not mathematically accurate. We can only really lay claim to actually being genetic descendants of Jews from the 15th century or later. So, like, the Majorcan cartographic school? I mean that's pretty neat, although they were actually Sephardic, so Ashkenazim don't get to claim them as genetic ancestors either. We got the Baal Shem Tov, I suppose.

That doesn't mean that the sages of the Talmud are not our ancestors or that we can't see ourselves in them and them in us. But they are our spiritual ancestors. Our cultural ancestors. It's something that we claim, but not something that is genetically marked. We could not have lived if not for them, but that does not mean we are them, if that makes sense.

It also just feels like another erosion upon the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel. It is our spiritual homeland, but it is not our literal material homeland. We don't have anything biologically in common with the Jews who lived there. It's a cultural and religious tradition to see ourselves as descended from them. We derive spiritual meaning from it. We should not be deriving political power from it.

It also has implications for people concerned with the "diluting of Jewish blood." The dissipation of genetics is actually a two-way direction. The further back you go, the more you are dissipated. If a convert or intermarriage happened in 1250 CE Poland, they are completely indistinguishable genetically from any other Jewish ancestor when you look at the DNA of the Jew-born Jew. All humans eventually melt together. By the time you get to Moses at Mount Sinai (an event that is so old we have no material evidence it ever even happened at all) those humans are genetically dissipated across the entire human gene pool. Anyone could be descended from them. You couldn't possibly run a DNA test that would tell you one way or another. So to be descended from these mythical, legendary, and even historic Jewish ancestors; is just as much a matter of claiming them as ancestors for a Jew-born-Jew as for a convert or adoptee. They are spiritual, cultural, but not genetic. There is no blood test to tell you that you are descended from Rabbi Yochanan or Rabbi Honi. They are real people who really lived, but as time passes, they might as well be Moses and Aaron to us. Eventually this will even be true of the Baal Shem Tov, who is currently recent enough that some Jews could claim to be his genetic descendants in a scientifically material way.

It also makes our "foreignness" in the diaspora completely unscientific. If we lived in Spain, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, Ethiopia, China, India etc. for 400+ years then we have just as much of a claim to being "from" those places as any Spaniard, German, Pole, Lithuanian, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Ethiopian, or Han person. You could not take a Jew and a Pole in 1850 and do a genetics test that tells you which is which based on finding specific ancestors. It is only because they kept fucking expelling us from places and banning us from places that we retained any sort of foreign status or genetic distinctiveness. Our insularity and incestuous practices have led to the Ashkenazi gene pool being particularly unique in the field of genetics, so perhaps our genetic traceability goes back a little further, but I highly doubt it truly goes back 2000 years if the British Royal Family is only able to go back 400 years and they're certainly more exclusive and incestuous than Ashkenazi Jews.

This next part is a liiiitle spicy... but it also makes me feel a little bit less like I have to justify my own existence, or atone for being born. I am not the physical continuation of anyone in particular, but a gradually individuated instance of humanity which has emerged from the sea, born into a particular place and time, existing within the context of all that is and all that has come before, but not physically the continuation of anyone in particular. I am gradually more-so a continuation of certain instances of humanity in more recent memory, but it's a gradient that spreads out into nothingness. I am not a physical continuation of someone from centuries past who would be disappointed in who I am. Maybe other people never have this problem but I think it makes it easier to cope with knowledge of history. It becomes a context you live within, and you can have responsibilities to that context, but it's not like, biologically inside of your bones until you get into much more recent memory.

Anyway. Just some thoughts. I think Jews in particular get a lot of ancestor guilt so this video was really interesting to me.