Who Do You Think You Are?: DNA and Jewish American Ipseity

Abstract

Who Do You Think You Are?:DNA and Jewish American Ipseity Laurie Zoloth (bio) REVIEW ESSAY DNA Test Results Videos 23andMe, https://www.youtube.com/user/23andMe There is a small town in Tennessee where the people think that they are Turkish, or rather that they are a tribe of people, called Melungeons, that is descended from Turkish sailors, who sailed with a Portuguese crew, or perhaps with Francis Drake, in the 1700s, and ended up in coastal Virginia, and from there walked into the woods of the Appalachian ridge, where their descendants live today. In fact, they are sure of it. They look, it is true, unlike many of their neighbors—darker skin, curly hair. For many years, they said they were Portuguese, then settled on Turkish. There is a book about this story, The Resurrection of a Proud People: The Melungeons written in 1994 and reprinted in 1997, and another, From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish American Dialogue, written in 2003; their author, local historian Brent Kennedy, also claims Melungeon ancestry. Although Kennedy "cannot prove his theories and ideas to a 100 percent, in his heart, he feels himself to be of Turkish descent."1 Of course, when the Turks heard of this, they were delighted, and the Turkish ambassador, it is said, awarded the community a special plaque. Visits were arranged. I first heard about Melungeons when bioethicist Carl Elliott and I were co-PIs on an NIH grant, one intended to research the ethical implications that would occur when the human genome project was unrolled, and we would enter a "new era of genetic medicine." We were curious to understand if genome mapping would change earlier ideas about family, [End Page 455] origin narratives, history and identity. It was in the early 2000s, and we invited Bennett Greenspan, then just proposing the idea of commercial ancestry testing, to talk to us, along with Melungeon informants and an assortment of scientists. There were a lot of claims about Jewish ancestry then—an African tribe, the Lemba, claimed Jewish heritage, and then there were all those people in New Mexico, who were coming up with narratives about elderly relatives lighting candles in the basement and that meant they were really secret Jews. Our Melungeon informants too told me: "You know the real secret, don't you, the Melungeons are Jews!" The anthropologist I interviewed for the project was a skeptic. "People will go a long way to prove they are not Black," she sighed. (It turned out that the claim about being a Lost Tribe was especially common in communities where a Protestant missionary had at some point taught Hebrew Scripture—who wouldn't want to be the Israelites?) We were curious to understand how elaborate genealogical narratives, ones that told of endurance, true love across time, and exotic encounters that played out in the ordinary worlds of Tennessee mountain towns and New Mexican desert landscapes, would survive. Twenty and so years later, of course, all the beautiful stories, all the Lost Tribes and the lost Jews have been refracted and reframed just as we suspected they might, by the language and calculus of genetics. So now, instead of faint memories of lost candle lighters or the search for Mogen Davids on tombstones, we have YouTube videos of people who have sent their saliva away and gotten an answer that seems far more sciencey: a little chart with numbers and percentages. One YouTube video shows the actor Mayim Bialik revealing her 23andMe results, in which she makes jokes about her body and her character, both of which are "in her DNA," with the certainty that a medieval theologian would locate them in the soul. Indeed, the DNA code and the percentages have become the stand-in for the idea that deep within each of us, unseen, yet powerfully determinative, is a secret, inner self, an authentic self, our "really real," untouched by history, or context, or our actual choices. "It can tell you why you cry at commercials with puppies," says Bialik, "but what if I am really a boy?" She finds out that her "genetic muscle composition is common in elite power athletes!" and after reading off...