The conduct of ethnographic inquiry can’t be reduced to a sound byte, but recognizing cultural similarities is not the end product of ethnographic research, as it is in New Mexico. Rather, recognition of similarities is where ethnographic investigation begins.
Cultural distinctions are weighed as heavily as similarities in ethnographic research, since that’s the only way to be fully and impartially informed, rather than partially informed, and biased by that one-sided view. Every cultural item must be examined in the broadest of essential contexts; the only way to secure and verify an accurate conclusion.
The best remedy against reckless ethnographic sophistry is to teach the theories, methods and techniques of ethnographic study as a permanent part of broader Jewish Studies curricula—and to start doing it now.
Q: In an interview in the Atlantic you said that you think that lost tribes logic is anti-Semitic, is that still the case?
A. Yes—even more so, now, than when the Atlantic interviewed me. Early in my doctoral research I first noticed that literary motifs employed in reporting on New Mexican crypto-Jews, are shared with colonial Lost Tribes narratives that were used to redefine (as “lost” or “hidden” Jews), almost every non-white, non-Christian and tribal people in the lands of European conquest.
Colonial narratives similarly drew negative biological boundaries around the cultural characteristics of native peoples, disenfranchising them as both immutably Jewish, and immutably “savage,” the better to justify European savagery in the name of civilization.
While the New Mexican variant clearly differed, I found it to be a modern revival of 19th century race-science, which is also inherently anti-Semitic; I found it to be equally self-authenticating of its academic promoters, and a complete violation of ethnographic scholarship norms and fieldwork ethics. Above all, the canon’s Jewish-by-disease claims breathed life into the ashes of local anti-Semitism (and perhaps beyond), rekindling the notion that Jews comprise a contaminated and contaminating, “race.”
Q: What is your opinion of DNA testing to determine if individuals have Jewish ancestry?
A. You cannot determine anyone’s religious affiliation or that of anyone’s ancestors, using DNA. DNA mutations or “markers” pop up all the time, over time, in all populations. Some will be shared across different populations, some will be specific to a given population, some have no consequence, some are advantageous, and some are disadvantageous. But DNA can give us only two vectors of information: time and place that a marker emerged. That’s all.
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