Genealogical Bewilderment

LOST ANCESTORS AND ELUSIVE LINEAGES

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile — there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.

— HENRY WIENCEK

ORIGINS ARE OFTEN DESCRIBED as lost or hidden away, a buried treasure to be sought after, a secret to be penetrated or a lost memory to be retrieved, as demonstrated by book titles like The Mystery of Life's Origin, Hidden History: The Secret Origin of the First World War, or Philology: The Forgotten Origin of the Humanities. One of the key insights of modernity was the realization that we live in a world where the origin of almost everything is veiled from us: the origin of the world, the origin of life, the origin of the reasoning that impels us to inquire into origins.

This is where scholarship has an important role as an agent that can help to reconnect us to our hidden origins. Where people once turned to religion and myth to satisfy their curiosity about origins, many of us now turn to science and historical scholarship for answers about how things truly began, and these fields can claim some major advances. Darwin's insight into the origin of species involved the uncovering of a common ancestry hidden in the background of living species that earlier scientists had supposed to have originated independently of each other. To hypothesize a Big Bang at the beginning of the cosmos, an event that took place fourteen billion years ago, scientists had to work backward from what they could see of the universe today, from the distances between heavenly bodies and the speeds at which they were moving, and it took another feat of detective work to figure out that the continents all originated from the breakup of a supercontinent hundreds of millions of years ago. The origin of the Jews also lies in the realm of the unseen, and if scholars have had any success in uncovering it, it is because they enlist the same techniques used to uncover the origin of species, language, and religion, methods by which the mind traverses gulfs of time and discerns invisible causes.

The irony here is that if anyone bears responsibility for "losing" the origin of the Jews, it is probably the modern scholar. It was the critical study of the Bible that called the biblical account into question in the first place and questioned the continuity between the ancient Israelites and later Jews. In the same period geologists, biologists, and scholars of the ancient Near East greatly expanded the length of the past, making it much murkier and harder to penetrate, and the critical study of creation myths and foundation legends showed that such stories often conceal the truth of how things originate. But having introduced the problem, modern scholarship also promised a solution by introducing new ways of searching for the origin of the Jews. The following chapters survey these various approaches, examining a range of methods and theories that come from different disciplines but that all have the goal of finding origins that are lost, hidden, or forgotten.

This and the next chapter are devoted to methods that frame the search for origin as a research for roots, for distant ancestors. The root is one of the oldest and most pervasive metaphors for origin in use today; it depicts whatever is being understood as a tree or plant that branches out from something buried in the ground, and implies the existence of something flowing from the root into the trunk and branches — identity, culture, DNA — that connects every-thing together into an organic whole. As Christy Wampole has pointed out in a recent study of the metaphorical thinking involved, the root captures a number of the qualities that people associate with origins. It is often seen as the most stationary and enduring part of the tree; it is considered older than the rest of the tree, the part from which everything else arises; and at the same time it is the most inaccessible part of the tree, connecting it to the ground and feeding its growth but all in a way that is invisible. As it happens the root is not older than the rest of the tree, and the comparison is misleading in other ways. Scholars have made various attempts to challenge the analogy, but it continues as one of the most productive metaphors for thought, structuring how scholars conceive of the relationships among species, languages, human populations, and much else, and it captures the subterranean character of origins that is our focus here: our sense of origin as something buried underground, something important for understanding what the tree has grown into but cannot be seen, and something that has to be dug out to be understood.

In the next two chapters I will focus on two of the methods scholars use to uncover the root of the Jews — genealogy and etymology. In both cases the Jews are conceived as an organic and inter-connected whole, a tree with many proliferating branches and stems that grow in different directions but that all arise from a firmly situated root composed of the ancestors from which the Jews descend. The search for origin is the effort to follow the structure of the tree backward to this hidden root. Both genealogy and etymology are about establishing connections between then and now, but they are also about tracing the flow of something through these connections, something transmitted through the tree's invisible vascular structure, from the ancestors to their present-day descendants. In what follows I explore what scholars have been able to learn about the origin of the Jews in these ways but also think about the limits of this way of conceiving origin; why it is difficult from a practical, methodological perspective to establish the connections needed to relate Jews to their ancient ancestors; and why it is that, at a deeper, conceptual level, some scholars think it is never really possible to trace something back to its...