Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin Kimberly A. Arkin Noah Tamarkin, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 280 pp. Noah Tamarkin's Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa is a fascinating exploration of why and how the Lemba of South Africa became interested in and engaged with genetic studies of Jewishness. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lemba leaders—most particularly the entrepreneurial, unrecognized traditional Lemba leader Kgoshi Mpaketsane and members of the Lemba Cultural Association (LCA)—eagerly agreed to and facilitated testing of male elders. They also celebrated the results of these studies, which documented high incidences of the so-called "Cohen Modal Haplotype" on the Y chromosomes of Lemba test subjects. The high frequency of this haplotype, which got its name from its relative frequency in the genomes of men who claim descent from Cohanim, or the Jewish priestly class, offered a particularly useful kind of "proof" for many Lemba of what they had always already known: they were black Jews. Unlike much of the flourishing anthropological literature on DNA science, Tamarkin is not interested in what happens in genetics labs or in the ways that scientists involved in this kind of research (sometimes inadvertently) naturalize certain kinds of social categories. Instead, he traces out what he calls "genetic afterlives," by which he means the production and circulation of genetic knowledge that happens outside of laboratories and peer-reviewed journals. In particular, he asks how subjects of genetic research make sense of and produce their own stories with genetic research. He writes: [End Page 187] My contention is that there are multiple worlds in play in this kind of genetic research that are not necessarily shared among all actors, and if we focus on the knowledge politics of scientists exclusively, it is at the expense of other, less powerful actors who ultimately must continue to live with genetic ancestry's implications in ways that geneticists are not subjected to (25). And indeed, without attending to these "afterlives," the Lemba's voluntary participation in Jewish genetic research might look like support for the racializing logics behind long-standing European interest in Lemba as Jews. For late 19th and early 20th century colonial researchers who conflated race, place, and culture, Lemba Jewishness solved a particular kind of categorical problem: the existence of a Bantu population with "non-Bantu" cultural practices, including a refusal to eat pork, the practice of endogamy, and a commitment to early circumcision. Jewishness solved this problem by giving the Lemba "extra-African" origins. For late 20th and early 21st century scientists interested in "Jewish DNA," genetic ancestry testing has been a way to document not only the relatedness of (predominantly white) Jewish populations all over the globe, but also the difference between Jews and other "Semitic" populations, most notably Palestinians. Much like its antecedent in the colonial period, this project also seeks to solve a particular kind of problem by offering genetic "proof" of Jewish indigeneity in Israel, exile from Israel, and persistent, distinctive peoplehood in diaspora. But Mpaketsane and other members of the LCA firmly rejected the foundational premises of both of these projects. For many Lemba, genetic Jewishness is not a sign of non-Africanness. Instead, Tamarkin's interlocutors insisted in a whole range of ways that all Jews were originally African and that therefore they were the original Jews. As a result, many Lemba argued against the idea that they were a "lost" tribe with residual Jewish practices. They were also not a victimized population in need of being "rescued" and "returned" to an Israeli homeland. Nor did they need to stop being Christian in order to be Jewish. Furthermore, Lemba cultural leaders insisted that they had always known they were Jewish and had not needed a test to provide this information. So why, exactly, were they eager participants in this research? Tamarkin shows why through a masterful ethnographic exploration of the way scale and context matter in the production of genetic meaning. His first chapter attends to the apartheid history of Lemba engagement [End Page 188] with questions of Jewishness and ancestry. The second chapter...