Affirmative reaction: new formations of white masculinity

Within the politics of nationalism and nation-building, the emigration of ethnic and religious minorities, whether voluntary or involuntary, appears to be a commonly occurring practice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey still carried the legacy of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious diversity in which its Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities had official minority status based upon the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. However, throughout the twentieth century, Turkey's non-Muslim minority populations have undergone a mass emigration experience in which thousands of their numbers have migrated to various countries around the globe. While in the 1920s the population of non-Muslims in the country was close to 3 per cent of the total, today it has dropped to less than two per thousand. This article analyses the emigration of non-Muslim people from Turkey and relates this movement to the wider context of nation-building in the country.     

The ideological contest between Greek‐Cypriot nationalism and Cypriotism 1974–1995: Politics,social memory and identity

As a result of the division of Cyprus in 1974, and until the mid‐1980s, Greek‐Cypriot nationalism was suppressed at the expense of Cypriotism, an ideology that pledged support to the political independence of the island. The retreat of nationalism, however, was temporary and it soon resurfaced as a dominant ideology, albeit in a changed form. The new Greek‐Cypriot nationalism does not go unopposed. Whereas the clash between Greek nationalism and Cypriotism is not a recent phenomenon, in the post‐1974 years it has acquired a greater intensity and constitutes the major battle in the Greek‐Cypriot contest over identity. This essay examines the post‐1974 period and especially the revival of Greek‐Cypriot nationalism since the mid‐1980s. The aim is to analyse the ideological contest between Greek nationalism and Cypriotism as it becomes articulated in the social construction of cultural and political identity and the collective memory of the Greek‐Cypriot community.     

Origins of Falasha Jews studied by haplotypes of the Y chromosome

DNA samples from Falasha Jews and Ethiopians were studied with the Y-chromosome-specific DNA probe p49a to screen for TaqI restriction polymorphisms and haplotypes. Two haplotypes (V and XI) are the most widespread in Falashas and Ethiopians, representing about 70% of the total number of haplotypes in Ethiopia. Because the Jewish haplotypes VII and VIII are not represented in the Falasha population, we conclude that the Falasha people descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia who converted to Judaism.     

Under the Law of God: mimesis and mimetic discipleship among Jewish‐affinity Christians

Messianic Judaism, a network of congregations that incorporate Jewish ritual into evangelical worship, is one branch of a fast‐growing trend among Christians globally towards ‘Jewish affinity’. Drawing on a multi‐site comparison in North America, this article examines one of Messianic Judaism's most significant internal debates: should non‐ethnically Jewish ‘gentile believers’ (GBs) obey biblical laws? It argues that GBs do not simply imitate Jews badly, as outsiders and their own leaders often believe. Rather, their actions are best characterized as mimesis in two complementary forms: mimesis of Jews and ‘mimetic discipleship’ of Jesus‐the‐Jew. Taken together, these forms offer a heuristic tool sufficiently capacious to explain both individuals’ propensity for Jewish practice and the socially specific ways it is constructed. I conclude that Jewish affinity reflects a key problem in contemporary Christianity, namely what happens when people in one religion (Christianity) come to believe that their God incarnated in the body of a man they now associate with another religion (Judaism)?     

Assessing temporal and geographic contacts across the Adriatic Sea through the analysis of genome-wide data from Southern Italy

Southern Italy was characterised by a complex prehistory that started with different Palaeolithic cultures, later followed by the Neolithization and the demic dispersal from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Bronze Age. Archaeological and historical evidences point to a link between Southern Italians and the Balkans still present in modern times. To shed light on these dynamics, we analysed around 700 South Mediterranean genomes combined with informative ancient DNAs. Our findings revealed high affinities of South-Eastern Italians with modern Eastern Peloponnesians, and a closer affinity of ancient Greek genomes with those from specific regions of South Italy than modern Greek genomes. The higher similarity could be associated with a Bronze Age component ultimately originating from the Caucasus with high Iranian and Anatolian Neolithic ancestries. Furthermore, extremely differentiated allele frequencies among Northern and Southern Italy revealed putatively adapted SNPs in genes involved in alcohol metabolism, nevi features and immunological traits.     

Building the New Zion: Unfinished Conversations between the Jews of Venta Prieta, Mexico, and Their Neighbors to the North

In 1950, Raphael Patai published his research on Venta Prieta, a Mexican town in which some residents lived as Jews despite having little knowledge of Judaism. Like other visitors, Patai was perplexed. Why did they wish to live as Jews? While Patai never answered this question to his satisfaction, he believed the answer would be found by developing a psychological profile of the residents, an approach in keeping with culture and personality theorists of the day. The present article provides a different solution. Drawing on additional sources, and short visits, we argue that Venta Prieta was not only a stop on the Jewish tourist circuit by 1950 but also developed out of a unique exchange. While U.S. Jews, as evangelical Protestants before them, provided a model for upwardly mobile Mexicans, Venta Prieta enabled middle-class tourists to experience Judaism in a pastoral setting and to "repair the world" (tikkun). [Keywords: Judaism, tourism, dialogical anthropology, social change, social mobility]     

Corrective conversion: unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion in Israel

Gauri Viswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation‐state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion's disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non‐Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.     

The Cuban community in Puerto Rico: A comparative Caribbean perspective

The purpose of this article is to present the opinions of the Argentine intellectual, Leopoldo Lugones, regarding the Jews and the reasons for his seemingly contradictory attitudes towards them that mirror both the general precariousness of Jewish existence in Argentina and the contradictions of Argentine nationalism. Moreover, these writings also reveal other related aspects of Lugones’ thought and provide a partial overview of Argentine nationalistic thought from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1930s, thereby offering insights into the nature and evolution of Argentine nationalism in reaction to Jews and other immigrant groups.     

National purities and ecological disasters: Greek modernity and the war on nature

The ecological peculiarities we have experience lately are unintended consequences of the intellectual, scientific, and political patterns of modernity. This paper aspires to discuss nationalism as a cultural mechanism at the service of man’s scientific quest and domination over nature. As a major force and a by-product of the political project of modernity, nationalism appropriated designated landscapes and allowed their transformation into polluted environments. Through a strong alliance between state and industry, the pure and the pristine have mutated into the polluted and the contaminated. This paper will focus on the narratives of modernity, chemical agriculture, and environmental pollution in Greek Macedonia. It will discuss how our past emphasis on national politics and identity overshadowed early local concerns for environmental pollution, illness, and death. The mantle of nationalism can be held accountable for the miasmatic geographies that modernity created, threatening the nation with pollution, and vulnerable citizens with dreadful diseases and ailments, such as cancer.     

Clinical anthropometry and canons of the face in historical perspective

Measurements of the human face as part of the body have been performed since the Greek era, and many aspects of ancient measurements can be found in modern clinical anthropometry. A historical appraisal of the use of facial measurements is presented. The influence on modern facial anthropometry of Greek proportion sciences, the golden proportion, canons of important Renaissance artists, physical anthropology, and cephalometry are discussed. The main difference between human measurements in classic times and modern anthropometry is the denial of realistic sizes and proportions in former times. Human forms and canons were depicted in a way the artist or scientist preferred, rather than how they objectively were. For reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, realistic sizes and proportions are assessed using anthropometric techniques and used as guidelines to correct deformities or disproportions.     

Hypersensitive PCR, ancient human mtDNA, and contamination

When highly efficient polymerase was used with high cycle numbers (50-60), strong amplifications were observed, but negative controls were also unexpectedly amplified in a study of ancient human mtDNA from 2000-year-old skeletons. The results of a series of tests revealed that the hypersensitive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) generated by higher cycles and the presence of contaminant DNA (though at extremely low levels) should be responsible for the amplification of negative controls. We suggest that PCR sensitivity be optimized to take advantage of highly efficient polymerase and at the same time prevent "background DNA" from becoming "contaminant DNA" and obscuring the analysis of authentic ancient DNA. We propose the use of multiple positive controls when amplifying ancient human mtDNA samples to indicate the sensitivity of individual PCR amplifications and to monitor the contamination levels of modern human DNA. This study provides some suggestions as to how to amplify and analyze ancient human mtDNA when unavoidable and extremely tiny amounts of modern human DNA exist.     

Nationalism,displacement, and ethnoreligious differentiation in Turkey’s southern borderlands

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, this paper examines the shifts in the positioning of ethnoreligious differences vis-à-vis Turkish nationalism over the past decade. Hatay was annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, 16 years after the foundation of the Turkish nation-state, and did not experience the national homogenization that characterized the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in the post-WWI era. Its ensuing ethnoreligious diversity with a population composed of bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish, Christian, Alawi, and Sunni communities characterized the region’s peripheral border status until the new millennium. In this paper, I focus on two major shifts in Turkish politics which reoriented the ethnoreligious identities of these communities. First, I interrogate the short-lived turn to pluralism in mid-2000s to late-2000s when Hatay’s religious diversity gained prominence as an exemplar of Turkish Muslim tolerance. Built on the nostalgia for Ottoman cosmopolitanism against Turkey’s Republican model of nationalism, this regime celebrated the ethnoreligious difference of Hatay’s residents as long as they were identified as representable elements of the nation. I then turn my attention to the emergent ruptures in this discourse of multireligious nationalism with the outbreak of the Syrian War, Turkey’s foreign policy, and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Hatay. In showing how both polities operated within and through rather than replaced the formerly hegemonic understandings of national unity, this paper reveals the constant reworking of national and ethnoreligious identities at the Middle Eastern borderlands.     

Minority status in an ethnic democracy: The status of the Arab minority in Israel

It is commonly assumed that democracy in deeply divided societies takes either a majoritarian or consociational form. While the state in both types is ethnically neutral, there are some countries that combine viable democratic institutions with institutionalized ethnic dominance. The article introduces this third, so far not recognized, general type of ‘ethnic democracy’ and demonstrates its utility for Israel in treating its Arab minority. The tensions and contradictions in Israel's dual character as a Jewish democratic state give rise to five Arab demands that the Jewish majority reject: making Israel non‐Jewish and non‐Zionist, accepting Palestinian nationalism, lifting all restrictions on Arab individual rights, granting Arabs certain national collective rights and incorporating Arabs into the national power structure. Each Arab demand is discussed in detail and the rationale for Jewish objections is spelled out. The problem can be reduced, but not resolved, by establishing a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people and by according Israeli Arabs the status of a Palestinian national minority within the Jewish state. These issues are not unique to Israel but rather common to ethnic democracies. It is concluded that the Israeli experience is becoming increasingly relevant to states which are democratizing but keeping appreciable ethnic dominance.     

Induced abortion--a historical outline

An historical review of the use of induced abortion is presented, beginning with early eras. The Chinese were the 1st to record the practice of induced abortion, with this operation being administered to royal concubines recorded at 500-515 B.C. Induced abortion was not used in ancient Greece, either for criminal or ethical reason. However, the ancient Greeks did utilize compulsory abortion for serious economic indications, as a means of controlling natural growth. Greek medical, gyneoclogigcal instruments for adminsitering abortions were described by Hippocrates. The Greek moral attitudes on abortion were largely adopted by the Romans, which were later altered by the appearance of Christianity and new ethical ideas. These ideas dominated European attitudes, along with the Church of Rome, limiting induced abortion to cases where the life of the mother was threatened. This attitude has existed until the present century, when these moral ideas are being challanged seriously for the 1st time in modern history.     

Genetics,History, and Identity: The Case of the Bene Israel and the Lemba

The paper examines the impact of genetic research on the religious identity of the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community and the Lemba Judaising group of southern Africa. It demonstrates how DNA tests which happened to support the possibility of the communities' legends of origin affected their self-perception, the way they are viewed by their neighbors, and their image in the West. It is argued that in both cases what accounted most for the Bene Israel and Lemba responses to the tests was the way the results were portrayed in the mass media, the history of the development of Judaism in their communities, and the local realities.     

Canada's pluralism in comparative perspective

Hans Kohn's definition of a more "liberal, civic Western" and "illiberal, ethnic Eastern" nationalism has been highly influential in providing a framework for our understanding of different types of nationalism. This article challenges the Kohn framework as idealized and argues that it did not reflect historical reality and is out of step with contemporary theories of nationalism. Its continued use also ignores the evolution from communist to civic states that has taken place in central-eastern Europe during the 1990s. The assumption that Western nation-states were always "civic" from their inception in the late eighteenth century is criticized and a different framework is proposed that sees Western states as only having become civic recently. In times of crisis (immigration, foreign wars, domestic secessionism, terrorism), the civic element of the state may continue to be overshadowed by ethnic particularist factors. The proportional composition of a country's ethnic particularism and civic universalism has always been in tension and dependent not on geography but on two factors: the historic stage of the evolution from ethnic to civic state and nationhood and the depth of democratic consolidation.     

Identifying genetic traces of historical expansions: Phoenician footprints in the Mediterranean

The Phoenicians were the dominant traders in the Mediterranean Sea two thousand to three thousand years ago and expanded from their homeland in the Levant to establish colonies and trading posts throughout the Mediterranean, but then they disappeared from history. We wished to identify their male genetic traces in modern populations. Therefore, we chose Phoenician-influenced sites on the basis of well-documented historical records and collected new Y-chromosomal data from 1330 men from six such sites, as well as comparative data from the literature. We then developed an analytical strategy to distinguish between lineages specifically associated with the Phoenicians and those spread by geographically similar but historically distinct events, such as the Neolithic, Greek, and Jewish expansions. This involved comparing historically documented Phoenician sites with neighboring non-Phoenician sites for the identification of weak but systematic signatures shared by the Phoenician sites that could not readily be explained by chance or by other expansions. From these comparisons, we found that haplogroup J2, in general, and six Y-STR haplotypes, in particular, exhibited a Phoenician signature that contributed > 6% to the modern Phoenician-influenced populations examined. Our methodology can be applied to any historically documented expansion in which contact and noncontact sites can be identified.     

The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples

Despite its appearing to be a simple question to answer, there has been no consensus as to whether or not the alignments of ancient Greek temples reflect astronomical intentions. Here I present the results of a survey of archaic and classical Greek temples in Sicily and compare them with temples in Greece. Using a binomial test I show strong evidence that there is a preference for solar orientations. I then speculate that differences in alignment patterns between Sicily and Greece reflect differing pressures in the expression of ethnic identity.     

Max Weber in the thought of Edward Shils (1910–1995) and Ernest Gellner (1925–1995): the paradox of two Weberian approaches to the understanding of nations and nationalism?

This article traces the paradoxical impact of Weber's oeuvre on two major scholars of nationalism, Ernest Gellner and Edward Shils. Both these scholars died in 1995, leaving behind a rich corpus of writings on the nation and nationalism, much of which was inspired by Max Weber. The paradox is that although neither scholar accepted Weber's sceptical attitude to the concept of ‘nation’, they both used his other major concepts, such as ‘rationality’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘unintended consequences’, the ‘ethic of responsibility’ and ‘charisma’, in their very analyses of the nation and nationalism. And they both saw, each in his own way, the nation and nationalism as constitutive elements of modern societies. However, the paradox ceases being a paradox if one sees the integration, by Shils and Gellner, of concepts of the nation and of nationalism in the analysis of modernity, as a development of Weber's ideas.