What Does a 122.1 Bg Reading Mean in a Blood Test
W hen my parents sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company tardily last year and were informed via e-mail a few weeks later that they are both "100% Ashkenazi Jewish", it struck me as slightly odd. About people I know who have washed Dna tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas – Chinese, British, West African. Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents' Dna.
Subsequently arriving in eastern Europe effectually a millennium ago, the company's website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and past custom, mixing merely occasionally with local populations. Isolation slowly narrowed the gene pool, which at present gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them autonomously from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came equally no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in pocket-size towns and villages in eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, upwards until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.
Only still, there was something disconcerting nigh our Jewishness existence "confirmed" by a biological exam. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness equally something that exists "in the blood".
The raw memory of this racism fabricated whatever proffer of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone "looked Jewish" my grandmother would respond, "Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?" However evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn't finish my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an aboriginal identity "confirmed" past modern scientific discipline was too alluring.
Not that they're alone. Equally of the showtime of this year, more 26 1000000 people have taken calm Deoxyribonucleic acid tests. For most, like my parents, genetic identity is assimilated into an existing life story with relative ease, while for others, the exam can unearth family unit secrets or invert personal narratives around ethnic heritage.
Just every bit these genetic databases grow, genetic identity is reshaping not simply how we understand ourselves, but how we can be identified past others. In the past year, constabulary enforcement has become increasingly adept at using genetic data to solve common cold cases; a recent study shows that even if you haven't taken a test, chances are you tin can be identified past authorities via genealogical sleuthing.
What is perhaps more than apropos, though, is how regime effectually the world are also get-go to apply Dna to non only identify individuals, only to categorize and discriminate against entire groups of people.
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Primary Rabbinate of State of israel, the peak religious authority in the state, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some union licenses.
In State of israel, matrimonial police is religious, not civil. Jews tin ally Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by police to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate co-ordinate to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed downward through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this but involves handing over their mother'due south birth or union certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where beingness Jewish is divers differently or documentation is deficient, producing bear witness that satisfies the Rabbinate'due south standard of proof can be impossible.
In the by, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people originate or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity forth the matrilineal line. But every bit was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed past David Lau, the Ashkenazi primary rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis accept been requesting that some people undergo a DNA exam to verify their merits before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, merely for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in State of israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the system has seen up to fifty cases where families have been asked to undergo Deoxyribonucleic acid tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian-speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 one thousand thousand-strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although almost self-identify every bit Jewish, hundreds of thousands are non considered so past the Rabbinate, and routinely take their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including union.
For nigh two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant community in the face of what they run into as targeted discrimination. In cases of marriage, Farber acts as a blazon of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a instance for his clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges. He fears that Deoxyribonucleic acid testing will place even more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian-speaking community. "It's as if the rabbis have get technocrats," he told me. "They are using genetics to requite validity to their discriminatory practices."
Despite public outrage and protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA testing, and reports keep to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used. One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for genetic material to prove that she was not adopted. Another man was asked to have his grandmother, ill with dementia, accept a exam.
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active fellow member of the Russian-speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. "I was approached past someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony possibly 15, twenty years agone, who recently received an official need maxim if yous want to continue to exist Jewish, we'd like yous to do a DNA test," Shindler said. "They said if she doesn't do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. Merely she is likewise humiliated to go to the press with this."
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees every bit role of a broader stigmatization of Russian-speaking immigrants in Israeli society every bit unassimilated outsiders and second-course citizens. "It is sad because in the Soviet Spousal relationship we were persecuted for existence Jewish and now in Israel we're being discriminated against for not existence Jewish enough," he said.
As well as being securely humiliating, Shindler told me that at that place is confusion around what being genetically Jewish means. "How exercise they decide when someone becomes Jewish," he asked. "If I accept 51% Jewish DNA does that mean I'm Jewish, simply if I'k 49% I'm not?"
But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used. He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry exam, just one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA – Deoxyribonucleic acid that is passed down through the mother – that tin can be found about exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews.
A number of years ago Carmel consulted genetic experts who informed him that if someone bears this specific mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic acid marker, there is a 90 to 99% chance that this person is of Ashkenazi ancestry. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in 2017 that states that this specific Deoxyribonucleic acid test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues accept been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
For David Goldstein, professor of medical inquiry in genetics at Columbia University whose 2008 volume, Jacob'south Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, outlines a decade's worth of research into Jewish population genetics, translating scientific insights almost small genetic variants in the Dna to normative judgments about religious or indigenous identity is not simply problematic, but misunderstands what the science actually signals.
"When we say that in that location is a point of Jewish ancestry, it's a highly specific statistical analysis done over a population," he said. "To think that y'all can utilise these type of analyses to brand whatsoever substantive claims about politics or religion or questions of identity, I retrieve that it's frankly ridiculous."
Merely others would disagree. Equally DNA sequencing becomes more than sophisticated, the power to identify genetic differences betwixt human being populations has improved. Geneticists tin can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mount range.
In recent years, a number of loftier-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the quondam New York Times scientific discipline writer Nicholas Wade. In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Man History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences betwixt those groups.
His book was strongly denounced past almost all prominent researchers in the field as a shoddy incarnation of race science, just the idea that our Deoxyribonucleic acid can determine who we are in some social sense has also crept into more mainstream perspectives.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times concluding year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich argued that although genetics does not substantiate whatever racist stereotypes, differences in genetic ancestry practice correlate to many of today'southward racial constructs. "I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism," he wrote. "But as a geneticist I also know that it is but no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among 'races'."
Reich's op-ed was shared widely and drew condemnation from other geneticists and social science researchers.
In an open letter to Buzzfeed, a group of 67 experts also criticized Reich'due south careless advice of his ideas. The signatories worried that imprecise language inside such a fraught field of research would make the insights of population genetics more susceptible to being "misunderstood and misinterpreted", lending scientific validity to racist ideology and ethno-nationalist politics.
And indeed, this already appears to be happening. In the United States, white nationalists have channeled the ideals of racial purity into an obsession with the reliability of straight-to-consumer DNA testing. In Greece, the neo-fascist Gilded Dawn party regularly draw on studies on the origins of Greek Deoxyribonucleic acid to "show" 4,000 years of racial continuity and ethnic supremacy.
Virtually concerning is how the conflation of genetics and racial identity is being mobilized politically. In Australia, the far-right I Nation party recently suggested that First Nations people exist given DNA tests to "prove" how Indigenous they are earlier receiving authorities benefits. In February, the New York Times reported that authorities in Prc are using Deoxyribonucleic acid testing to determine whether someone is of Uighur ancestry, as office of a broader entrada of surveillance and oppression against the Muslim minority.
While Deoxyribonucleic acid testing in Israel is still express to proving Jewishness in relation to religious life, it comes at a time when the intersections of indigenous, political and religious identity are condign increasingly blurry. Just last year, Benjamin Netanyahu's government passed the Nation State constabulary, which codified that the correct to national self-determination in the country is "unique to the Jewish people".
Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian who has written extensively on the politics of Jewish population genetics, worries that if Deoxyribonucleic acid testing is normalized by the Rabbinate, it could be used to confirm citizenship in the hereafter. "Israeli lodge is condign more than of a closed, ethno-centric society," he said. "I am worried that people will showtime to use this genetic testing to build this political national identity."
For Sand, there is a particularly dark irony that this type of genetic bigotry is being weaponized by Jews against other Jews. "I am the descendant of Holocaust survivors, people who suffered because of biological and essentialist attitudes to man groups," he told me. "When I hear stories of people using Dna to prove that yous are a Jew, or French, or Greek, or Finnish, I experience like the Nazis lost the war, just they won the victory of an ideology of essentialist identity through the claret."
But for Seth Farber, the problem with a Deoxyribonucleic acid test for Jewishness runs deeper than politics; it contravenes what he believes to be the essence of Jewish identity. There is a specific principle in Jewish police, he told me, that instructs rabbis non to undermine someone's self-declared religious identity if that person has been accepted by a Jewish customs. The fundamental principle is that when it comes to Jewish identity, the well-nigh important determinants are social – trust, kinship, commitment – not biological. "Our tradition has always been that if someone lives among us and partakes in communal and religious life, then they are i of united states of america," Farber said. "Just considering we have 23andMe doesn't mean that we should abandon this. That would exist an unwarranted and radical reinterpretation of Jewish police."
Every bit I was reporting this story, it frequently struck me as oxymoronic that an institution like the Rabbinate would embrace new technology to uphold an aboriginal identity. It seemed to contradict the very premise of Orthodoxy, which, past definition, is supposed to rigidly maintain tradition in the face of all that is new and unknown.
Just Jessica Mozersky, banana professor of medicine at Washington Academy in St Louis, explained that part of the reason why the Rabbinate might be comfortable with using Deoxyribonucleic acid to confirm Jewishness is considering of an existing familiarity with genetic testing in the customs to screen for rare genetic weather condition. "Because Ashkenazi communities have a history of marrying in, they take this high take a chance for certain heritable diseases and have established genetic screening programs," she explained. "And so this has made it less fraught and problematic to talk nearly Jewish genetics in Ashkenazi communities."
In fact, the Orthodox Jewish community is so comfortable with the idea of genetic identity that they have even put together their ain international genetic database called Dor Yeshorim, which acts equally both a dating service and public health initiative. When two members of the community are being fix for union, Mozersky explained, the matchmaker will check whether or non they are genetically compatible on the Dna database. "This means that the notion of genetics every bit a part of identity is securely interwoven in many ways with communal life," she said.
This is something I could identify with. When I was 16 and attending a Jewish day-school in Melbourne, Australia, nosotros had what was called "rima oris-swab 24-hour interval". Everyone in my class gathered on the basketball courts to provide spit samples that were sent off and screened for Tay-Sachs disease, a rare inherited disorder significantly more mutual among Ashkenazi Jews that eats abroad at the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. As we waited in line, we joked that this was our punishment for our ancestors marrying their cousins.
A few weeks later, after we got the results, I told my grandmother about "mouth-swab day". I was interested in her thoughts on my newly discovered genetic identity, which seemed to connect me biologically to the earth she grew upwards in, a globe of insularity, religiosity, tradition, and trauma.
"It'due south similar I've ever said," she alleged, after I told her that I wasn't a carrier of this rare genetic mutation. "It'southward important to mix the claret."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/12/what-does-it-mean-to-be-genetically-jewish
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