Other critics have argued that the search for a so-called "Jewish gene" is in any case misguided and politically driven.
Shlomo Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv University, documents in his 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People two decades of contradictory findings in genetic research. He concludes: "After all the costly 'scientific' endeavours, a Jewish individual cannot be defined by any biological criteria whatsoever."
That view was supported in 2013 by Eran Elhaik, an Israeli geneticist at John Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, after he examined much of the recent research looking for a Jewish gene.
In an interview with the Haaretz newspaper, he argued that the researchers' "results were written before they began the research. First they shot their arrow -- and then they painted the bull's-eye around it."
Loosening the definition of who counts as a Jew could be expected to exacerbate existing tensions in Israeli Jewish society.
Rabbinical authorities in Israel have refused to recognize as Jews some 350,000 of the one million immigrants who came to Israel in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That has left these immigrants in social limbo because the rabbis exclusively control personal status matters for the Jewish population, including marriage, divorce and burial. Many have been forced to marry abroad to get round the restrictions.
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