Harvard University Press Blog

Tracing the Ties that Bind Blacks and Jews in History and Myth

Tudor Parfitt, once described as “a sort of British Indiana Jones,” writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas that he first encountered black Jews “in any form” in late 1984, when he’d traveled to the Sudanese border with Ethiopia. He’d been sent to the border’s refugee camps to investigate reports that the Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) there were being mistreated by the Christian Ethiopians, all of whom were fleeing the year’s famine. Though their status as Jews was being contested, Parfitt was present for what he describes as “the first stages of the Israeli attempt to save thousands of these impoverished and desperate people from famine and persecution.”

Not long after, while speaking in South Africa about the Ethiopian Jews, Parfitt met another group of black Jews, this time from the Lemba tribe. The Lembas explained to Parfitt that they were blood relatives of the Ethiopian Jews, and that the Israeli acceptance of the Ethiopians should also legitimize their own Judaism, hitherto difficult to claim. Despite being intrigued by the notion that the people he’d met in the Sudan were now acting as a “proof community” for others, Parfitt found the idea of any connection between the Beta Israel and the Lemba of Soweto doubtful.

Out of curiosity he spent time with the Lemba, and while he came to consider it quite possible that their customs and traditions had something to do with the Semitic world he was unable to uncover any record of Jews having settled in southeastern or central Africa as far back as the Lemba’s oral tradition extended. Another year or two passed before, while researching a history of the Jews of the Yemen, Parfitt uncovered some evidence that could actually corroborate the Lemba’s story of their own heritage. “And it was at this point and rather out of frustration,” he writes in Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, “that I turned to genetics.”

In 1999 the findings of the Lemba’s genetic tests were front page news around the world, the subject of television documentaries such as NOVA’s The Lost Tribes of Israel, and even featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. As reported by the New York Times:

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection… But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The genetic signature of priests—a hereditary caste, different from rabbis but with certain ritual roles—is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Dr. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, says that he has discovered Senna—Lemba tradition maintains they came from that mysterious northern city—and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

Since that burst of coverage over a dozen years ago interest in the Lemba has been steady, and, coupled with the worldwide interest in the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, there was evidence of an enduring fascination with the very idea of black Jews. For Parfitt, the intensity and duration of that fascination sparked a new series of questions:

Why did these stories generate such media interest? Was it because the stories were about Jews? Or because they were about blacks? Or both? Was it because, at some deep level in Western consciousness, Jews are actually assumed to be black and that therefore these stories about black Jews could be taken as a final vindication of an age-old presumption? Or was it that people believe that Jews are not black at all and cannot be black and therefore that the idea of black Jews appeared more than usually quixotic—and therefore good copy? Whatever the reason, this topic achieved worldwide coverage, and articles on the Lemba and Beta Israel have appeared in the world’s major newspapers with some regularity. The topic touched a nerve in a way that none of the work with which I had hitherto been engaged had done. Somewhere at the nexus of these issues of history, prejudice, and convention there seemed to me to nestle aspects of Jewish and black history that had not been fully studied before.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas, our most thorough tracing of the ties that bind blacks and Jews in history and myth, is the result of Parfitt’s work to understand those histories.

A Portal into a Vanished Jewish World

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s Pale of Settlement was home to 40% of the world’s Jews—and so foreign to the rest of the country that Russian Jewish intellectuals called it “our own kind of dark continent.” How to capture this rich, mysterious land, its people and traditions? For peripatetic playwright and journalist S. An-sky, the answer was the 2,087-question Jewish Ethnographic Program, a survey now translated into English for the first time in The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. While world war and revolution prevented the survey from ever being distributed, in Nathaniel Deutsch’s hands the unanswered questions (a selection of which can be found below) and the story behind their assembly disclose a riveting account of a lost world.

Beginning with a query about a person’s soul before it enters the body, and ending with the question “What kind of life will there be after the resurrection of the dead?,” An-sky’s survey covers all aspects of Jewish life, from birth to childhood to education to marriage to aging and death.

In an introductory section, Deutsch sites The Jewish Ethnographic Program in its intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts, and in the context of An-sky’s life and work. He describes his own history with the translation project, including ultimately quixotic attempts to elicit responses to the questions from subjects ranging from elderly people who had once lived in shtetls, to rabbinical students, to observant Jews. As he was translating the questions, Deutsch also lost himself in the project of their annotation:

Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on.

By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself.

On Fathers, Evolution, and Bedtime

Dads got their annual time in the spotlight over this past week as we geared up for and then celebrated Father’s Day. Here at HUP we’ve been glad to see a book we published last year get a nice bit of attention in the Father’s Day media blitz. It’s called Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior, and it was co-written by Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson.  Just in the past week the BabyCenter blog cited the book; it featured in a Vancouver Sun op-ed; and there was a particularly thorough post about the book on MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle looked at how anthropologists suggest that current social trends might be reshaping fatherhood in the mold of the “good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering,” an era when researchers like Gray and Anderson assert that fathers were more active in their children’s development than in much of modern history.

All of this attention on modern fathers, and this welcome coverage of Gray and Anderson’s rich evolutionary perspective, makes a recent article on a persistent societal barrier between motherhood and fatherhood even more interesting. The piece appeared on Jezebel last week and is titled “Could A Mom Have Written Go The F--k To Sleep? And Would It Have Been A Bestseller?” (Well, actually, Jezebel doesn’t bother with the coy hyphens, and, in what follows, neither will we. Be warned.)

For those who’ve somehow missed it, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a parenting and publishing sensation.
It’s a picture book, written by the novelist Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Roberto Cortés, that gives us a father at his wit’s end come bedtime. The book began as a lark, picked up steam online, went to number one on Amazon, had a first printing of 300,000 copies, has been performed by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog, and has already been optioned for film. That kid who wouldn’t go to sleep is suddenly making an awful lot of money for daddy.

What Amy Sohn asks in her Jezebel piece is whether a mother could have gotten away with a book like this—and been met with a reception that would pay for her kid’s college just based on preorders. From her piece:

As much as I want to believe that “Funny is funny” and it would have been a runaway success regardless, I can't help but think that things might have gone down differently.

A mom who even thinks the word “fuck” around her kid? A mom who can’t get her child to sleep or is unwilling to co-sleep to do it? A mom who isn’t more lovable than caustic, always and forever? I can't help but think the Internet masses on parenting sites like this would have a field day with it, raking me over the coals for the same sentiment that is so funny when expressed by a dad.

— If you hate being a mom so much, why did you have a child in the first place?

— Clearly your daughter can’t rest because you work.

— You have an anger management problem and you're giving your kid ADHD.

— You need Zoloft.

— I pray that you bring no more children into the world because it will spare another individual the years of therapy he will need to get over the trauma of having been raised by such a selfish and insensitive person.

And, of course: That book is so lame, I could have written it.

The Evolution of the Human Head

Okay. A Homo Erectus, a Neanderthal, and a Human Being are walking down the street. Upright, loping gait, strolling down Mass. Ave. From the neck down they all look pretty much the same. Up top, though, at the head, the human looks markedly different. Smaller brow, face set back underneath the forehead, shorter face, much smaller jaw, in fact drooling a little from having just visited the dentist to get rid of a couple of wisdom teeth that had no room to grow. Oh, this isn’t a joke. It’s the evolution of the human head. Or, more specifically, it’s The Evolution of the Human Head, by Daniel E. Lieberman.

Lieberman is the chair of Harvard’s recently formed department of human evolutionary biology, and his new book is the culmination of years and years of research into the development of the human head. Why does the human head look the way it does, so different from that of all other mammals? How is it that something so incredibly complex, that controls so many interrelated functions, has been so adaptable? How does the organ through which we eat, hear, smell, sense, think, and speak manage to grow from the size of a grape to the size of a honeydew? What behaviors are still shaping the human head, faster than could be accounted for by natural selection? And what can the evolution of the human head tell us about the rest of the human body and how we evolved as a species?

As Lieberman explains in the video below, all of these questions led him to write this weighty new entry into the literature of evolutionary biology.

 

 

HUP Jackets: How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

Last month we introduced our new series of audio slideshows spotlighting jacket design. We’ve just finished up the latest installment, again featuring HUP Art Director Tim Jones. This time, he explains his design for Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need?  

The book consists of short articles intended to convey the various ways in which we humans are as much the product of our evolutionary history as is any other species.  New Scientist called it an "eclectic collection of essays on humanity and evolution with something for everyone."

And the slideshow has even more!  There are bunnies, there are sheep, there's the world's loneliest cow, and there's a gang of roosters that we just couldn't quit.  Take a look.  

 

 

 

 

Fat Talk Revisited

About a decade ago, we published a book called Fat Talk by Mimi Nichter, currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The book, which one reviewer called “a tantalizing glimpse into the intimate world of adolescent girls,” was the result of years spent interviewing hundreds of teenage girls about the ways that they think and talk about their bodies. Nichter and her colleagues found that girls didn’t so much diet as talk about dieting, engaging together in “fat talk,” an ongoing, ritualistic dialogue that served to build solidarity among them.

Last week, dozens of college campuses across the country took part in an organized event called “Fat Talk Free Week,” which Professor Nichter supported by offering “A Brief History of Fat Talk.”  We invited Professor Nichter to comment here on the movement and its reference to her work.    

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A couple of weeks ago I was walking across my college campus and a colorful poster on the side of a building caught my eye. It read “Fat Talk Free Day.” As I read on, I learned that there was an upcoming sorority event on the college mall where women could “Take the Pledge” to free themselves from fat talk. There was also a Dove “Real Woman” speaker who was coming to campus to speak about “Embracing Real Beauty.” How curious to find a term I had coined ten years back having a new life. What was this fat talk revival all about? Googling the event as I walked, I found that a sorority had adopted “banning fat talk” as their “activity of the year” in an effort to free women, at least those on college campuses, from this common ritual.

I tried to wrap my head around Fat Talk becoming a social movement among sorority girls. And why was it occurring now? It seems to me that fat talk is as common today as it was when my colleagues and I first conducted our fieldwork. I still hear it everywhere, in the high schools and college campuses where I continue to do research, and among my own friends and colleagues.

So what purpose does fat talk serve? By the time a white middle class girl reaches adolescence, she has become a competent participant in this fat talk discourse. Saying “I’m so fat” or complaining about specific body parts (“I hate my thighs,” “Can you believe how big my butt is?”) is really much more than an observation about how a girl looks or feels. It’s a call for support from her peers. Comments like these evoke a response that the girl is not fat, that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Fat talk is a kind of social ritual among friends, an attempt to create solidarity. Saying that you dislike your body makes it clear that you don’t think you’re better than your friends, even if you are thinner than them. When the statement comes before eating, it provides an apology or excuse for what you’re about to indulge in (“I know I really shouldn’t but…"). In the household, there is also a lot of fat talk exchanged between mothers and daughters.

Fat talk is a popular idiom which results in support from friends and family, but at what cost? While it may seem innocuous, fat talk can result in slippage from an initial place of gathering support from friends to a self-destructive space. Commenting in a negative way about one’s body can have a host of ramifications including the lowering of self-esteem and the development of negative self-concept. It reinforces the message that you are far from “perfect” and constantly need to monitor and work on yourself. Further, by engaging in frequent self-deprecation, one can lose sight of who they really are and the enormous potential beneath the surface.

Facebook vs. Evolution

The Facebook movie is upon us.  "The Social Network" was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club") and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing"), and by all accounts it's among the best work either has done. The review aggregating site Metacritic has it with a pretty staggering Metascore of 97 out of 100. 

The film is about the founding of the social networking-cum-world conquering site Facebook, which currently boasts over 500 million users around the world, most likely including you. Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the story has the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, making quite a few enemies for himself on his way to helping us all make more friends. So, is it working? Is it useful? Really, how many friends does one person need? 

150. 

That’s not me talking. That’s evolution. 

The number 150 has come to be accepted as the limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships. You may know it as “Dunbar’s Number,” named for Robin Dunbar, anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Dunbar describes the figure as the upper limit to the number of people with whom humans can actually form relationships strong enough to rely on. Put another way, it’s the circle of people who will do you a favor. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain a greater number of relationships at the level of complexity required for a bond to be “real.” 

Dunbar arrived at the number by working outwards from the social intelligence theory of why primates have such large brains. The theory holds that the complex social world in which primates live spurred the evolution in brain size. Basically, primates are more dependent on their social bonds than other types of animals, and those bonds are also more complex and socially informed. This hypothesis, according to Dunbar and others, is supported by a strong correlation between the size of a group (and hence its social complexity) and the relative size of the neocortex. Dunbar examined these correlations, plotted the sizes of various primate brains against the sizes of their social groups, determined the relationship, plugged in the size of the human brain, and got 150. 

Author of Men responds to Mansfield

Below, Richard Bribiescas, author of Men: Evolutionary and Life History, responds to Harvey Mansfield's review of his book in a February 26 article for Forbes.com.

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Mansfield says that in my book "nurture loses to nature." I disagree. On page 12 I say "The age-old argument of nature versus nurture is misguided. An organism's physiology (nature) is in many ways meant to respond to a changing environment (nurture). An unyielding physiology is seldom advantageous since the environment is never static.  In other words, are human males the product of nature or nurture?  The answer is yes."

He also quotes my statement "It doesn't take a degree in biology to notice that men and women are utterly different" but omits the rest of the paragraph. In full, the statement reads "It doesn't take a degree in biology to notice that men and women are utterly different. Physical and behavioral contrasts pervade everyday life. Men, on the average, are taller and physically stronger than women. Men don't have babies. Men make up half of the human population, but they are involved in far more than half of humankind's destructive and violent behavior. Men age differently than women do, and men die sooner and at a more rapid rate than women".

He then points out that a "cultural anthropologist, believing that culture, not biology, makes us different, would never make this statement." And he says that I am "spitting into the prevailing wind of feminism and gender-neutrality in Western societies." Well, again, I need to point out a comment I make early in the book "I don't think any biological anthropologist would deny that cultural and social forces have a tremendous effect on how humans, including males, behave and how their physiologies respond to environmental challenges." And on page 12, I also summarize how biology and Darwinism has been misused in the name of social and political agendas.  This is indeed an important point to recognize to move the field forward and to have an honest and open discussion.

As to whether I am 'spitting' into the wind of feminism and western gender-neutrality, I'm not sure what Professor Mansfield means here, unless he is taking a swipe at my research which involves the measurement of hormones in saliva. If that is so, well played -- he succeeded in getting a chuckle out of me. More importantly, it might be useful to read the wonderful works of my colleagues who contribute steadfast breezes to the prevailing wind of feminism. Their scholarly works are evident throughout my bibliography.

I am flattered that Professor Mansfield has used my book as the basis for an overarching critique of the ideas of Darwin and numerous colleagues who make the study of evolution such a vibrant scientific discipline. I do not think scientific authority has anything to do with ethics. My book's purpose was to ask readers to consider information that is supported by mounds of scientific research. The ultimate authority lies with the readers who must employ their own capacity for critical thought and decide for themselves whether the perspective presented in this book has any merit.

-- Richard Bribiescas, March 2, 2009

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||| More on Men: Evolutionary and Life History

Grrlscientist on Kate Jackson

A nice review of Kate Jackson's Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo by Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life:

During the years that I have written book reviews for my blog, I have had the great pleasure of reading some astonishingly good books, especially about science. Mean and Lowly Things is one of the best, and in fact, even though this book is newly published, I think it qualifies as the "classic field biology book" that helps to define and explain this sort of research to the public. In view of my own passion to continue researching the parrots of the remote islands in the south Pacific Ocean, I might be overly emotional regarding field work in distant lands, such as what is recounted in this book. However, by the time I finished reading this book, I experienced intense sadness because I felt as though I was closing the covers upon a beautiful world and a dear group of friends whom I had experienced so much with, and whom I wanted to continue working with.

More on Kate Jackson and more on the book.

Chimps bear arms

Until now we thought that humans were the only animals that craft weapons designed to help them kill other animals. Well, it's time for us to move over. Researchers in Senegal have observed chimpanzees fashioning crude spears out of tree branches and jabbing those spears into tree-branch hollows where bush babies (small, noctural primates known by the more scientific name of "galagos") sleep during the day. While chimps have been known to make tools for more benign purposes--using a a leaf as a sponge for soaking up drinking water, for instance--this is the first known observation of chimps using tools specifically designed for hunting. One researcher claimed that the chimps' stabbing motions reminded her of "the shower scene from Psycho." I guess all we can do now is hope that the chimps don't come for us.

Toward the end of the article, we're treated to a quote from renowned primatologist and HUP author Frans de Waal, who predicts that we'll continue to discover that behaviors we had previously thought unique to humans will turn out to not be so unique after all:

Frans B.M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said aggressive tool use is only the latest "uniquely human" behavior to be found to be less than unique.

"Such claims are getting old," he said. "With the present pace of discovery, they last a few decades at most."

de Waal's latest book for HUP is Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies, but he's also the author of Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, and Peacemaking among Primates.