The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology

Abstract

This book is brimming with insights about the complex ways in which ancestry and population genetics have informed Jewish identity making and seeking. The author knowingly steps into the highly charged arena of scientific, religious, and cultural claims about authentic or provable Jewish identity, and convincingly elucidates the many slippages that exist between genetic information and cultural, national, religious, and ethnic heritage. Instead of reading DNA as a script, El-Haj argues that “DNA evidence does not generate historical stories” (240), and that taking DNA evidence as proof is problematic because “the messiness and density of the social world is reduced to clean lines on phylogenetic trees” (241). The Genealogical Science explores this messiness and density in six chapters that delve into various dimensions of Jewish identity and ancestry genetics. El-Haj is interested in knowledge production, specifically how genetic sciences have generated new epistemologies that inform Jewish identity, historical narratives, and stories of origins and belonging. How are narratives crafted with the tools of anthropological, population, and ancestry genetics? How do these emplotments reinforce or trouble popular or emergent understandings of the Jewish people's long history of struggle, diaspora, and community?