Jews have no ancient connection to the land. The connection is a modern invention, a nineteenth-century nationalist story retrofitted onto a religion.

The fuller answer

Ask them to date the invention. If the attachment to the land was manufactured in the nineteenth century, then nothing written before the nineteenth century should carry it, which turns an argument about feelings into an argument about documents. That is ground you can hold with a browser and an evening. And the strongest documents are not in the soil. They are in the prayer book, they are dated, and our side hardly ever uses them.

Three strands, and blurring them is how this gets lost

Presence, liturgy, archaeology. They answer three different sentences and they are not interchangeable.

Presence answers “the Jews left”. Liturgy answers “the longing was invented”. Archaeology answers “they were never there in the first place”. Reach for the wrong one and you will be delivering a lecture on potsherds to somebody who asked about the nineteenth century.

The prayer book is dated evidence

Around 200 CE the Mishnah is already sorting out a problem that only exists for people who face Jerusalem when they pray. Berakhot 4:5 takes the case of a man on a donkey who cannot get off. He turns his face towards the Temple, and if he cannot turn his face, it is enough that he “focus his heart opposite the Holy of Holies”. The next paragraph does the same for a ship, a wagon and a raft.

The rule underneath it is a compass. Praying outside the land, you face the land. In the land, Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the Temple. That is why the ark in every synagogue in Britain sits on the wall nearest Jerusalem, and the rule was written down about seventeen centuries before anybody built one in Golders Green.

The Amidah is the same argument in fixed wording. The Mishnah has Rabban Gamliel requiring eighteen blessings every day, and two of them are territorial and completely unambiguous. One asks God to “raise a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the earth”. A later one asks Him to “return in mercy to Jerusalem, Your city” and to rebuild it “soon, in our days”. Morning, afternoon and evening, for as long as there have been Jews saying it. The oldest ordered prayer book we hold is the one Amram Gaon sent to the Jews of Spain, and Amram died in 875.

Then a fast day. The Mishnah lists what happened on the ninth of Av: both Temples destroyed, Beitar taken, “the city of Jerusalem was plowed”. Jews have gone without food and water on that date ever since, for a city.

One of these is not ancient, and you should be the one who says so. “Next year in Jerusalem” is medieval. It appears in the Machzor Vitry in the twelfth century, it is absent from the haggadot of Rashi and Rabbenu Tam, and the earliest haggadah carrying it is the Birds Head Haggadah of the early fourteenth century. Concede that unprompted. It is still six hundred years before Herzl, and somebody who has just watched you correct your own evidence will take the rest of it seriously.

The people never all left, and the low point is the proof

In 1267 Nachmanides wrote to his son from Jerusalem and described what he found: two brothers who dyed cloth, and about ten men who came to their house for Sabbath services. He had a synagogue running within weeks. That is the worst it ever got and it is still not nothing.

Jews were in Hebron from at least the tenth century, when Karaites lived there. In 1540 Malkiel Ashkenazi bought the courtyard that became the Jewish quarter and built the Abraham Avinu synagogue, and the community he founded ran there until the massacre of 1929. Ottoman tax registers count 48 European Jewish families in Safed in 1525 and 143 Portuguese and 324 Spanish households there by 1555, which is where Joseph Karo compiled the working code of Jewish law. In Jerusalem the Palestinian rabbinic academy sat until the late eleventh century and held its annual assembly on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Temple Mount, which we know because its post survives in the Cairo Geniza.

An Ottoman tax collector is not a Zionist witness. That is the point of using him. The registers were kept to raise money, by an empire with no stake in this argument, and they count Jewish households by name in towns people will tell you were empty of Jews.

Now the concession, and it does more work than the claim. Individual towns did empty. Tiberias had no Jews at all for roughly seventy years until 1740, when the ruler of the Galilee invited Haim Abulafia to come and rebuild the community. The honest sentence is about the land and not about any one town: the presence thinned to almost nothing, in places to nothing, and was never extinguished. A tradition that was invented in 1897 does not send people to buy a courtyard in Hebron in 1540.

The Khazar theory, and what the genetics does and does not establish

Three findings, and then the limits, in the same breath, because the overclaimed version of this is the easiest thing on the page to destroy.

This is the short form, for when descent turns up inside an argument about the land. The long form is European converts, which takes the Khazar paper, the maternal-lineage studies and the “not real Semites” move one at a time.

Testing in 2013 of 1,774 individuals from 106 populations, 261 of them from the Caucasus, found no particular similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasus populations. Y-chromosome work published in 2000 put six of seven Jewish communities in a cluster with Middle Eastern non-Jews, including Palestinians and Syrians, and could not statistically separate them. And 33 genomes recovered from the fourteenth-century Jewish cemetery at Erfurt turned out to resemble modern Ashkenazim closely, and modelled as a mixture of Middle Eastern, southern European and eastern European sources. No Caucasus component in any of it.

What that does not license. Ashkenazi genomes are not overwhelmingly Levantine. One careful estimate puts them at roughly 53 per cent European ancestry against 47 per cent Middle Eastern, most of the European part southern European. The maternal side is harder again: a 2013 study argued that the four major founder lineages, about 40 per cent of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA, have prehistoric European rather than Near Eastern ancestry. That is disputed and it is not resolved.

So never say Jews are genetically Middle Eastern. Say the measured thing. A Levantine component appears in every study of every Jewish community, and a Khazar one appears in none. Then fence it yourself, out loud: ancestry is not title, the same analyses put Palestinians among the closest relatives of Jews, and a world that hands out countries by genome is not one anybody should be arguing for.

The two replies that are already loaded

“Connection is not title.” Agree instantly. Nobody derives sovereignty from a siddur. Connection is what was denied and connection is what has just been established, and the legal argument runs separately, in why the state exists and in the settlements.

“Everyone has an ancient connection to somewhere.” Perfectly true, and it is the whole case. Every people has a place it came from and a story about it, and exactly one of those peoples is told its story was drafted by nineteenth-century nationalists and that the conclusion is that its state should not be there.

The lines

Your own words are better than these. Take the shape.

Give me a date for the invention. Around 200 CE the Mishnah is already ruling on which way to face when you can’t see Jerusalem.

The prayer asking God to gather our exiles is in the oldest siddur we have, sent to Spain by a man who died in 875.

“Next year in Jerusalem” is medieval, not ancient. I’ll tell you that myself. It’s still six hundred years before Herzl.

An Ottoman tax collector counted 324 Spanish Jewish households in Safed in 1555. He wasn’t a Zionist and he wanted the money.

Everyone has an ancient connection somewhere. Mine is the only one people tell me was made up last century.

Put one text in your pocket

Two lines with a real day in them.

Action. “On Sunday evening I will open Sefaria, read Mishnah Berakhot 4:5 and the tenth blessing of the weekday Amidah, and learn one sentence of each by heart, plus the year 875.”

Coping. “If somebody says continuity of prayer is not continuity of a national claim, I will say they are right, that I am answering the charge of invention and not arguing sovereignty, and ask them for their date.”