Other: Ashkenazi

by Bill Miles

It’s census time again: are you ready to be visited by the Bureau? Have you ever wondered why the Census Bureau doesn’t want to count us as Jews?

DNA analysis out of Israel not only traces the origins of forty percent of Ashkenazi Jews to just four female ancestors. It also helps threaten a half-century taboo on an exceedingly sensitive notion: that there is such a thing as a Jewish race. Ever since the Nazis employed their pseudo-science to identify and then wage war on the “Jewish race,” bureaucrats and biologists alike, even in America, have been understandably skittish about using the term, lest it be misconstrued or abused.

Scientists from Rehovot and Haifa (Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center) are challenging the conventional wisdom that the first Jewish communities in Europe were founded by Jewish men from the Middle East who took local women as wives. Mitochondrial evidence points rather to Middle Eastern foremothers as well. These findings add to those out of the University of Utah showing that a host of genetic diseases among Jews of European origin, including Tay-Sachs and Gaucher, may be negative byproducts of a positive process – to promote brain cell growth and interconnectivity.

All this ethnogenetic insight belies governmentally-mandated accounting practices. I am referring, of course, to the otherwise racially-sensitive practices of our Census Bureau.

For sure, leading lights in academia had been claiming for years that race doesn’t actually exist.  It’s just a social construct, they insist, without any biological or scientific basis. Contrast the malleable number of “races” acknowledged by the U.S. Government –twenty or so, subject to periodic revision - with the stable number of blood types: just four. Still, the Census Bureau instructs us to state our race (question # 9 on the 2010 form. At least this time the wording does not scare us with the reminder – as it did in 2000 - that Title 13 of the United States Code requires us to fill it out the form.) Governmental acknowledgement of an “Ashkenazi gene hypothesis” – either by its scientists or census mavens - may be the just prompt for American Jews to reconsider how they figure (or don’t) in our decennial polling ritual.

Of course, Hitler and the Holocaust have made it impossible for the U.S. Census to statistically re-create a “Jewish race”: the term alone is fraught with too much history to handle.  But because the Census Bureau can’t ask about religion (it is too obtrusive), millions of Americans - for whom “Jewish” is as much an ethnic as a religious designation - merit less Census Bureau recognition than do our Guamanian and Chamorro neighbors. They do have built-in check-off status as races in the census form, along with Filipinos and Samoans and others.

Racial labels are notoriously misleading and untidy, a fact that an increasing number of multiracial families encounter when filling out government census forms.  In a previous census exercise, I was stumped at the column for spouse.  My wife is from Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean. Her father’s line is South Indian (Dravidian, if you want to be a stickler) and her mother is of Chinese stock. There is a grandparent from Brittany and rumors of an Amerindian ancestor. And it goes without saying - and most Martinican families do prefer not to say it - that her family tree also includes African slaves, the crucible of most Caribbean societies. She is also a ger: a Jew by choice.

After checking off several boxes for my wife on the standard ethnic menu, I felt I should also check out the “Some other race” category. But what to enter there?  When I called the Census Bureau’s 800 number for guidance, the census aid was polite to a fault and scrupulously non-directive. “We’re not allowed to tell you,” she apologized, after looking through her standard list of Other Races. “It’s up to you.”

I rejected “Caribbean” - it’s more geographic than ethnic. “Antillean” was too unfamiliar. In the end, I wrote in “West Indian.”

But what about our children’s “race”? At first the census helper said that I should repeat Mom’s profile for our children - both of whom, for what it’s worth, were born in Boston.  Then she suggested I put down whatever the kids (at the time, only twelve- and ten-years old) considered themselves to be. Then the census helper conceded that I should just fill in whatever I thought my kids were.

Seeing at last how the Census race game is actually played on the field, I foisted the question on to my daughter.  “What are you, honey?”  None of her answers were bureaucratically helpful: “I’m American, I’m French, and I’m Jewish.”

Which is why, under the racial rubric of “other,” I have tried to make the Census Bureau count me as an Ashkenazi Jew. And should I be challenged on the existence of an “Ashkenazi race” by either Sephardic or Mizrachi co-religionists on one side, or government human bean counters on the other, my response will invoke the most recent scientific advances in DNA and genetics. For even if Jews around the world are linked ethnically, medicine confirms significantly different clusters of biological traits.

Census taking is as much about the politics of identity as it is about legislative apportionment and federal funds disbursement.  Nor is it confined to a once-in-a-decade head-count-by-government in the USA. In light of Jewish history and minority status in the diaspora, I find it ludicrous to pigeonhole myself as “Caucasian,” or “White” (this year’s preferred term). Instead, I tick and jot “Other: Ashkenazi.”

The human bean counting bureaucracy in Washington has again determined how we may list ourselves on Uncle Sam’s forms – even if bi- and multi-racial Americans have led a partially successful struggle against bureaucratic racial labeling to permit multiple listings for individuals. In Israel, it is the ultra-Orthodox who refuse to participate in such counting exercises entirely, citing the Biblical linkage between censuses and plagues. (The epidemic following the census ordered by King David carries particular weight.) But here in America, the protest should be against crude tally-by-color, not the principle of the census itself.

Tell your Congressman that we are not afraid to be enumerated. Write to the Census Bureau. Let them know that they should count us in.

Bill (William F.S.) Miles is professor of political science and the former Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.