Genetics and history expose the Nazi fantasy, revealing that Jews were never strangers to Europe but one of its deepest ties to antiquity, writes Michael Cohen. The irony is that the community the Nazis condemned as alien was, in genetic and cultural terms, more closely linked to the classical Mediterranean than the Nazis themselves. Genetic studies confirm what is visible to the eye: Ashkenazim cluster closer to Southern Europeans than to Northern ones. To think of Jews as outside Europe is to misunderstand Europe itself. And perhaps the more radical recognition is that Jewish history was never truly elsewhere.