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'Jewish Genetics' And 2015; 13(2): 90–102, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2015-0010 Open Access Ian Vincent McGonigle ‘Jewish Genetics’ and the ‘Nature’ of Israeli Citizenship Abstract In 2013, the Israeli state announced that it may begin to use genetic tests to determine whether some prospective immigrants are Jewish or not. If implemented, the state would be enshrining Jewishness at the level of DNA, rendering “Jewish genes” legally legible, and making DNA signatures a basis for decisions on basic rights and citizenship for the first time in its history. Herein, I examine the Israeli context of “Jewish genetics,” and I situate this contingent historical moment within the diverse political philosophy of Zionism, particularly as it relates to configurations of Jewish ethnicity and modes of citizenship. At issue is the possibility of a novel application of genetics in distributing citizenship, entailing a unique application of Jewish political thought, an articulation of a secular Zionism that foregrounds biology in determinations of civic inclusion. Keywords Biopower, Citizenship, Ethnicity, Genetics, Israel, Negative Dialectics, Zionism Received 5 October 2015 Accepted 1 November 2015 INTRODUCTION In July 2013, Israel’s Prime Minister’s office stated that in the future, Russians wishing to makealiya (immigrate) to Israel might need to take a DNA test to prove their Jewishness (McGonigle and Herman 2015; Zeiger 2013). While this statement was meant to indicate that the state would use genetic tests to verify a “biological connection” with a Jewish parent or grandparent, a genetic measure of kinship to establish transmission of Jewish identity is not necessarily recognized by Jewish religious law. If implemented, the Israeli state would thus be enshrining Jewishness at the level of DNA, rendering “Jewish genes” legally legible, and making DNA signatures a determinant of basic rights and citizenship for the first time in its history. The State of Israel is explicit in defining itself as the homeland of the Jewish people, and is thus both ethno- religious and national in its own self-image. The commitment to the Jewish character of the state, however, raises perennial national concerns, and frequent moral panics, over who is a Jew, how this can be determined, by what credible authority, and what exactly this says about the “nature,” or fundamental modality, of citizenship in Israel. Genetic tests for Jewishness would respond by functioning as a metric of legitimate inclusion in the state, constructing a virtual biological border, and providing an unequivocal substrate for calculating ethnic belonging. A test for Jewishness, however, could also engender a novel form of governmentality and “biopower” (Foucault 2009) for the state, a new way of imagining and managing the population at the level of bare life. Although it is unlikely that genetic tests for Jewishness will become the main criterion for securing Israeli citizenship, the rise of “Jewish genetics,” and its circulatory semiotics, exemplified most strongly by the recent state announcement, demands an examination of the curious relationship between biology and citizenship in Israel. Herein, I discuss the basis of this novel and particular form of governmentality, the management of citizens and populations through “ethnic genetics,” and I situate this contingent historical moment as it relates to the political philosophy of Zionism, particularly regarding conceptions of Jewish ethnicity. This reading imposes an “immanent critique” of the phenomenon of the molecularization of ethnicity in the context of the Jewish ethnonation. To follow the Frankfurt school of critical theory, I attempt to breach between ideas and reality, and “confront the Unauthenticated PB Download Date | 1/16/17 12:01 AM 90 2015; 13(2): 90–102, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2015-0010 existent in its historical context, with the claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relationship between the two and thus transcend them” (Held 1980:183). The thrust of this article is therefore to interrogate how, and why, Jewish genetics can fit with or reshape prior ethnic and political imaginaries, thus exposing why the Israeli state is attempting to understand itself in the present through technoscience. This line of thought assumes that what exists, ontologically, depends on how and why we know it. Rather than regarding ethnic genes as being pure essences “in themselves,” then, this “negative dialectical” critique emphasizes the necessary historical particularities of the mediations of their ontological claims (Adorno 1980[1966]) and precisely strives for the “negation of reification” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002[1947]:vii). This reading may therefore also help in thinking about how and why other states might similarly draw on genetic technologies in determining rights to citizenship, and in imagining the borders of ethnic belonging. JEWISH ETHNICITY While clear-cut racial divisions are perhaps the ideological construction par excellence, the borders of ethnicity are being complexified and reformulated with the latest next generation genomic sequencing technologies.1 “Nature” becomes more political, more geographically and historically specific, and more culturally particular, as genomic technologies get grounded in different national spaces. In the Israeli context, ethnic genes have already entered public discourse, especially since geneticists have been describing the genetic structure and historical migrations of Jewish populations (Atzmon et al. 2010; Behar et al. 2004, 2006, 2010; Bray et al. 2010; Ostrer and Skorecki 2013; Ostrer 2001). It has been said that such genetic research is contributing to a “‘biologization’ of Jewish culture and historical narrative” (Egorova 2014:354), as lay commentators now often turn to DNA evidence as a “rhetorical means for inscribing identities,” especially to support “favoured accounts of the origin and historical development of the tested communities” (Egorova 2014:360). There are strong reasons for the popular appropriation of these scientific findings. Jewish population genetics studies usually treat diverse diaspora groups of Jews as a related cohort, and often trace genetic data to support the narrative of a line of descent from the ancient tribes of Israel. In this regard, Jewish genetics reiterates, and lends credibility to, the Israeli state’s founding narrative of return to the Holy land. While Jewish genetics studies make claims about general ethnic groups and their historical migrations, Jewish genes are not a sine qua non in guaranteeing “authentic Jewish” identity at an individual human level. Individuals with no historical or biological connection to the Jewish tradition may, of course, make a religious conversion and become Jews. Conversely, non-Jewish donor sperm and ova may be used in assisted-conception clinics to produce babies that are legally Jewish in the eyes of the Israeli state, though only when the gestating womb (including surrogates’) is deemed to be of Jewish “identity” by the rabbinate, and therefore recognized by the state (Kahn 2005:184). On the other hand, so-called “Jewish DNA” is also being read through personal genomic testing, even when Jewish genes are located in areas of “non-coding DNA,” that is from genetic material that probably does not in itself determine a specific physical trait. These so-called Jewish genes may not make a difference at all (phenotypically, at least), and yet they would become vital if they become the legible traces that decide rights to citizenship in Israel. Regardless of the debated validity or biological importance of such Jewish genes, at issue is the question of why genes are becoming a site for the Israeli state to imagine control of the population. It has yet to be made clear what this potential development says about the trajectory of the Israeli state, its commitments to religious law, and how this emergent phenomenon connects with, or breaks from, a longer history of Jewish political thought and imaginations of Jewish ethnicity. Despite the ambiguity over the legal, biological, and social “nature” of Jewish genes and their intermittent role in the reproduction of Jewish identity, Israel is an ethnically diverse country.2 And while Jewishness has often 1 See Prainsack and Hashiloni-Dolev (2009) for a review of the impacts of the so-called “new genetics” on collective identities, including nation, race, and ethnicity. 2 With many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa, France, India, Latin America, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, the US, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the ex-Soviet Union, not to mention Israel’s indigenous Arab minority of close to 2 million people. Unauthenticated 91 Download Date | 1/16/17 12:01 AM 92 2015; 13(2): 90–102, DOI: 10.1515/tra-2015-0010 been imagined as a biological race,3 the initial origins of the Ashkenazi Jews who began the Zionist movement in turn-of-the-century Europe actually remain highly debated and enigmatic. Recent population analysis by geneticists has led to an unresolved and hot debate (Abu El-Haj 2012; Elhaik 2012; Kohler 2014). One of the most contentious claims made is that European Jews are descended from converts to Judaism from the Khazar Empire, which covered much of Eastern Europe during the second half of the first century CE (Koestler 1976; Sand 2010). Regardless, Jews are widely believed to have resided in the Levant for several centuries prior to the destruction of the Second Temple,4 and European Jews are thought to have resulted from dispersals of Jews to the north into
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