There has been a widely perceived sense of a contemporary resurgence of the category of race in western genetics, epidemiology and medicine. In what follows, some important American and British journals in these fields are surveyed for their content from 1946–2003, with the aim of comparatively tracing the use of the race category among American, British and Israeli authors. Three crucial stages are delineated along this time line, and the correlations between the use of the race category and developments in (...) genetics, as well as the changing guidelines for researchers in the USA, are examined. Concepts of individuality and collectivity in the three fields are analysed in relation to the use of ‘race’ in the surveyed journals; there follows also a discussion of some recent critical reflections on that use. It is concluded that there has been both continuity in, and reconstruction of, the roles of ‘race’ within the genetic/medical discourse. (shrink)

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The (...) Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups. (shrink)

The history of Israeli science and technology offers a unique case study of a young and small nation that has developed an unprecedented love affair with science and technology. Unlike other nineteenth-century ideologies, Zionism was never considered to be founded on science. Nevertheless, from the very start, the Zionist movement perceived the sciences, pure and applied, as central to its program of creating a new Jewish society in the Land of Israel. Modern science was to provide twice for the Jews: (...) a relief from their suffocating religion and the tools needed to recover their ancient land from its ruins. Israel would remain the people of the book, but it would be the Book of Nature, not of God, that would set it free. Sharing the universal knowledge and values of science with mankind, the Jews would finally become both normal and self-determined. Thus, already in the nineteenth century, long before the State of Israel was founded, Zionist visionaries had dreamt of it as a modern version of Francis Bacon's utopian Kingdom of Bensalem, where science and technology would provide health, wealth, and power. (shrink)