WATCH: Are Jews Genetic Descendants Of The Biblical Israelites?
May 4, 2017 By Sam Kestenbaum
Do you think that Israelis are the descendants of the biblical Israelites? It’s a simple but provocative prompt — one which the videographer and man-on-the street interviewer Corey Gil-Shuster recently put to half a dozen Israelis.
Gil-Shuster, the man behind the “Ask Project,” interviewed an anti-Zionist Hasid, a woman from a West Bank settlement and a self-described atheist and uploaded their responses to YouTube last month. Their answers varied widely.
Gil-Shuster clarified in one interview that he was asking “genetically,” and also asked why it was that Jews from different parts of the world varied in appearance. “There was some fringe mixing but in general we are all descendants of the Israelites,” one woman said. “We can’t really tell,” another man said. “Because we don’t have DNA from an Israelite who died 2000 years ago.”
Gil-Shuster asked his interviewees if they had heard the claim that some historians make that many “European Jews, for example, converted hundreds of years ago.”
http://forward.com/fast-forward/370957/watch-are-jews-genetic-descendants-of-the-biblical-israelites/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc4iogeOUXNw1RZSNTOlMeg
