What Darwin’s Galápagos Finches Teaches Us About The Jewish Diaspora - When The Jews Left Israel

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190 years ago, Charles Darwin, the

father of evolutionary theory, arrived

at the Galapagos Islands off of Ecuador

to study the flora and fauna on behalf

of the British Royal Navy. Among his

many discoveries were several dozen

birds, including many varieties of

finches, which Darwin assumed were all

distinct species, as they appeared to be

quite different from one another. Upon

further study, however, Darwin realized

they all belong to a single group within

the Finch family. Darwin surmised that a

single ancestral finch species likely

arrived on the Galopagos and then

diversified across the islands with

natural selection favoring different

traits best suited for different

environments. For instance, the ground

finches from one island had thicker

beaks for cracking seeds. The cactus

finches on another island had longer

beaks for avoiding needles while

feeding, etc. This amazing discovery led

to the development of a concept known as

adaptive radiation. The evolutionary

process whereby a single ancestral

species rapidly evolves into multiple

new species, each adapted to a different

ecological niche. Now, if you aren't

already ahead of me, the reason I'm

giving you this lesson straight out of

AP bio, RAP Aaps, BGdubs, is because

Galapagos finches are, for me, the best

illustration of, you guessed it, the

Jews. Why are some Jews African, some

Russian, some Mexican? Adaptive

radiation, baby. Our persecution and

subsequent expulsion from our ancestral

homeland in Judea, aka Israel, resulted

in Jews being spread out all over the

globe. And as folks settled into

different locations, their offspring

began taking on new traits adapted for

those new environments. For instance,

developing lighter skin to produce more

vitamin D in the low sunlight regions of

Eastern and Northern Europe. Also,

sexual violence, which usually

accompanied the horrible massacres that

have befallen Jews throughout the

centuries, played a role in producing

new generations of Jews with local DNA,

which is often cited as an

interpretation for why Jewish blood is

passed down through the mother and not

the father.

This idea of Jews as a product of

adaptive radiation is at the core of

contemporary Jewish identity, something

absolutely fundamental to the Jewish

story. And yet, it is somehow the one

piece of information least likely to be

understood by the population at large.

How on earth can this be? Simple. We

don't teach it. We don't teach it. I

went to Jewish day school for 13 years,

Jewish camp for 10, attended the college

formerly known as the University of

Pennsylvania, and was never made to

understand this essential truth about

why Jews are who we are. I know there's

so much ground to cover in Jewish

education, the basics alone of Hebrew,

Torah, the traditions. But how can a

concept so important to Jewish identity

be so conspicuously left out of the

curriculum? Here's my hypothesis. Let me

know if you've got a better one. On the

one hand, you have the more religious

Jews who are primarily concerned with

religion. The identity they care about

is being a person in relationship with

God who lives according to the teachings

of Torah. That's what matters. On the

other hand, you have the conservative

and reformed Jews of Europe and America

who for the last 150 years have been

doing their best to balance their

Judaism with a desire to assimilate into

predominantly Christian countries. Thus,

where Christians have a confirmation

ceremony, so too did reformed Jews adopt

their own confirmation ceremony.

Churches have organs and forward- facing

pews, so many Jewish temples added

organs and forward- facing pews.

Christians are bound to their brothers

and sisters around the world through a

shared religious belief. And so, Jews

began to believe that we too are bound

solely by shared religious belief. In

our haste to focus on either God or our

neighbors, we forgot a foundational

piece of what makes us who we are. Well,

according to me anyway. It should be

obvious though, right? I mean, we've all

read the Bible. We know about the

ancient Israelites. We know that those

Jews are the same Jews as today's Jews.

But somehow we don't focus on the

connective tissue, which is most of the

story. It's sort of like a hot dog,

right? Let's call it a Hebrew national

kosher. I'll be frank. We know the hot

dog. We know the cow. And yet in most of

our minds, ner the two shall meet. Our

brain skips the unpleasant part thereby

separating what is actually one entity

into two. Maybe that's what Jews do.

Maybe the millennia of our murder and

expulsion and subjugation are so painful

that somewhere along the line we started

to just skip over that part. Or maybe

it's just that we've become so siloed in

our own communities, so galapagos, that

like Darwin, we mistake each other for

distinct species rather than the one big

finch family we are. Thankfully, the

tide is shifting slowly. Jews, like

myself only a few years ago, are at last

being awakened to what should be one of

the very first things we teach our

children about themselves. Whether it's

because of our modern focus on identity

or the invention of DNA testing websites

or an increasing volume of Jewish voices

educating about this stuff on social

media, the lights are starting to come

on. But we still have an incredibly long

way to go. Both in ensuring our own

community understands who Jews are and

certainly in teaching the world that

barely knows who we are to begin with.

Once we understand that all Jews

everywhere are of a single tribe, a

single nation, a lot of lies and

misconceptions will find they've run out

of the oxygen they need to burn. Funny

enough, aside from adaptive radiation,

there's another term inspired by

Darwin's work that also applies to Jews,

and it's the reason our single tribe is

still here, while nearly all the other

ancient tribes are not. Say it with me

now. Survival of the fittest, baby.

We doing something right.