In 1878, for example, Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and father of eugenics, used the new, ground-breaking discovery of photography to sweep multiple images of Jewish adolescents into a composite image of the Jewish racial “type”—what Daniel A. Novak called a photographic science fiction.
Q: Your research focuses on a specific instance of confusion typical of what proliferates in the gap between ground-breaking discoveries and our ability to make good sense, let alone good use of them. Can you elaborate?
A. Like photography in the 19th century, completion of the Human Genome Project in 2004 was a ground-breaking discovery. It’s like coming upon a vast new ocean; knowing it exists, with no idea of where to go or how best to navigate it. The gap between an unprecedented discovery and its meaningful management provides an opening for sophistry to proliferate until better knowledge can replace it.
For example, in the wake of the Human Genome Project, and following Galton’s notion that he could register “types” of the racial and diseased, a handful of modern New Mexican academics—sophists with no training in ethnography or genetics—began sweeping superficial Hispanic and Jewish cultural similarities into a false “crypto-Jewish” composite; an ethnographic cultural fiction.
They went on to invent demonstrably unfounded, malignant genetic signatures for purportedly “Jewish” diseases shared by Jews and non-Jews, the better to ferret out hidden Jews among unsuspecting Hispanics.
Rather than discovering Hispanic crypto-Jews, or legitimate ways to identify them, they repatriated 19th century race-science in the age of the Human Genome.
Q. What are the primary indicators that you look for to determine that this type of identification is taking place?
A. Recognition that two different populations share some similarities should never be given, or taken, as a discovery that the two populations are one-and-the same, or that one is secretly a proponent of the other.
Any such claim should immediately be dismissed as sophistry, or what Samuel Sandmel called “parallelomania.” Clearly, swastikas woven into 19th century Navaho blankets are not evidence of 19th century “Navaho Nazis.”
In New Mexico, however, instances of similarity between (usually Ashkenazi) Jews, and Hispanic Christians, are given as evidence of a (Sephardi) crypto-Jewish past, even though cultural similarities, unexamined in the contexts required to secure and verify their meaning, are not evidence of a cultural relationship.
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