Yearning for the long lost home: The lemba and the jewish narrative of genetic return

Developing World Bioethics

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 127-132

  Zoloth, Laurie ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONFERENCE PAPER; ETHNOLOGY; GENE MAPPING; GENEALOGY; GENETIC ANALYSIS; HAPLOTYPE; HUMAN; JEW; PRIORITY JOURNAL; SOUTH AFRICA; Y CHROMOSOME; ARTICLE; BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH; GENETIC SCREENING; GENETICS; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; MALE; NEGRO; PEDIGREE; POPULATION GENETICS; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION;

AFRICAN CONTINENTAL ANCESTRY GROUP; CHROMOSOMES, HUMAN, Y; GENETIC RESEARCH; GENETIC SCREENING; GENETICS, POPULATION; HAPLOTYPES; HUMANS; JEWS; MALE; PEDIGREE; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION;

EID: 0344120724     PISSN: 14718731     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1046/j.1471-8731.2003.00068.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (4)

1. Sonia Levitan. 1983. The Return. New York. Fawcett Juniper.
2. Karen Brodkin. 1999. How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America. Piscataway, NJ. Rutgers University Press.
3. There are several discussions about how kinship and heredity determine identity and destiny in Jewish law, but they are contradictory in nature, and based on differing sources of case law. For certain specific diseases, there seems to be recognition of familial, not just maternal transmission. In the case in which a boy bleeds to death following a circumcision, and then a second boy also dies in this manner, it is understood that all males born to the sisters of that family are exempt from the requirement of circumcision, since this bleeding disorder is understood as what we would now see as a genetic disease. But in the matter of behaviour, of possibilities, of character, and of achievements, the law is complex. Each person must shape his/her own fate, and this construction of the self is achieved only with study, decent community activity, and prayer. Can even the greatest of scholars be assured that their children will be scholars? Not at all. The Talmud is clear: wisdom is not acquired genetically. The language of the Gemara is 'yerusha, or heritage, cannot confer status.'
4. It is prohibited to discriminate a convert as a 'ger', and it is considered impolite to refer to the convert as distinctive, or less than fully Jewish. The convert is required to rename themselves - taking on the name of a son/daughter of Sarah and Abraham for all ritual purposes, and some rabbinic authorities allow consanguineous, sibling marriage of two former siblings once they are converts, since they are no longer the son/daughter of those non-Jewish parents - an extreme form of identity swapping.