In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity

Negotiating Jewishness through genetic testing in the State of Israel

“…NGS impacted the growing body of research papers also in the field of "Jewish genetics", which -among others -includes two genome-wide-association studies on the interrelatedness of the world Jewry (Atzmon et al 2010;Behar et al 2010) that have received a lot of media and academic attention. Historians and anthropologists, as well as geneticists, have pointed out the pitfalls of such studies, as they are informed by pre-existing notions and narratives about group identity, (national) history, and origins, and assign genetic markers to supposedly clear-cut ethnic population groups so that "Jewishness" is embedded in the biological rather than in the cultural or social realm (Glenn 2002;Gibel-Azoulay 2003;Abu El-Haj 2012;Egorova 2014;Falk 2015;Elhaik 2016).…”

Next generation sequencing

“…NGS impacted the growing body of research papers also in the field of "Jewish genetics", which -among others -includes two genome-wide-association studies on the interrelatedness of the world Jewry (Atzmon et al 2010;Behar et al 2010) that have received a lot of media and academic attention. Historians and anthropologists, as well as geneticists, have pointed out the pitfalls of such studies, as they are informed by pre-existing notions and narratives about group identity, (national) history, and origins, and assign genetic markers to supposedly clear-cut ethnic population groups so that "Jewishness" is embedded in the biological rather than in the cultural or social realm (Glenn 2002;Gibel-Azoulay 2003;Abu El-Haj 2012;Egorova 2014;Falk 2015;Elhaik 2016).…”

It'S In My Genes: Biological Discourse and Essentialist Views of Identity among Contemporary American Jews

“…In her survey of contemporary texts such as encyclopedias and the “Jewhoo” Web site, historian Susan Glenn (2002) provides further evidence of the prominence of hereditary language in describing Jews. She argues that editors of encyclopedias and biographical reference books employ “blood logic” in their selection of subjects.…”

“…For example, the editors of an encyclopedia on American Jewish women included as Jews people who had rejected Jewish identity, or even converted to another religion, if both their parents were Jewish (Hyman and Moore 1997:xxii). For Glenn (2002:149), “Jewhooing”—the practice of private and public naming and claiming of Jews by other Jews—tells us that compared with traditional Judaism, “secular practices and institutions have been equally (if not more) powerful mechanisms for the enforcement of fixed, embodied, racially determined concepts of Jewishness.”…”