The Genuine Jewish Type: Racial Ideology and Anti-Immigrationism in Early Medical Writing about Tay-Sachs Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a critical, genealogical analysis of the discourse of Tay-Sachs disease (TSD), a genetic metabolic disorder historically perceived as exclusive, or nearly exclusive, to Jews. Drawing on medical case reports from the period between 1881 (when the disease was first observed) and 1943, i.e., the early years of the Second World War, the study examines how Tay-Sachs was discursively constructed as a Jewish disease. In particular, the study provides an analysis of TSD in the context of anti-immigrationism, especially in 1910s and 1920s US, when both eugenics and Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe were on the rise. The argument illustrates the reification of Jews as "raced" in and through this disease, demonstrating that knowledge about Tay-Sachs (and other group-specific genetic diseases) needs to be examined in socio-cultural terms alongside existing biological accounts. Résumé: Cette étude retrace la généalogie du discours sur la maladie de Tay-Sachs, un désordre génétique du métabolisme, historiquement conçu comme exclusif aux juifs ou pratiquement exclusif à ceux-ci. Elle en propose une critique. Fondée sur l'analyse de rapports médicaux allant de 1881 (date à la quelle la maladie a d'abord été identifiée) à fin 1943, c'est-à-dire les premières années de la seconde guerre mondiale, cette étude décrit comment les discours prononcés autour de la maladie de Tay-Sachs en ont fait un problème juif. Elle se penche en particulier sur le contexte anti-immigration des décennies 1910 et 1920 aux États-Unis alors que l'eugénisme et l'émigration en provenance de l'Europe de l'Est prenaient de l'essor. Elle tente d'établir comment les juifs furent réifiés en tant que « race » à travers et grâce à cette maladie, et montre comment le savoir relatif à la Tay-Sachs (ou à toute autre maladie génétique spécifique à un groupe) relève tout autant de termes socio-culturels que des données biologiques existantes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".