Anthropological research on the concept of genomic sovereignty shows how the field of what has come to be known as 'Jewish genetics' tends to construct Jewishness as a biological category. By focusing on geneticists' and tests participants' narratives about community-level genomic mapping initiatives and ancestry tests, genetic research emerges here as an endeavour to achieve genomic sovereignty born out of relationally subaltern self-perceptions and concerns about inequality.
While at first glance DNA testing used in the search for social and political recognition of different Jewish groups appears to be the 'weapon of the weak,' which could allow disenfranchised groups to subvert political and epistemological regimes privileging naturalist accounts of group membership, it should instead be theorized as a tool of subordination and control that is imposed upon these groups by those in positon of political and economic power in the fields of contestation in question.
