The search for the Jew's gene : science, spectacle, and the ethnic other

This paper considers the collision of spectacle, science, and racial-ethnic identifications in the contemporary scientific search for a "Jewish gene." It aims not so much to distinguish the "line between ‘real’ and ‘fabled’ aspects of the Jew" (as cited in the passage by Gilman above), but to consider the inextricability of both as composite elements, mutually constituting "difference" as racial-ethnic identification. Thus I am concerned with the specular economies of science as well as the knowledge capital of its mediatisation as they come together, troubled, over the Jew’s body. The essay takes as its case study the National Geographic (NOVA/PBS) television documentary, The Sons of Abraham, a film that follows the progress of anthropologist Tudor Parfitt through the Lemba communities of South Africa in a quest to obtain genetic evidence in order to authenticate (or falsify) their claims to Jewish identity