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http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html
Jared Diamond. "Who Are the Jews?" Natural History 102:11 (November
1993): 12-19. Summary:
Diamond argues that Ashkenazic Jews are connected to "their ancient Arab and
Egyptian neighbors." (p. 18). Yet he admits: "Although the Jews have been
scattered for only a few thousand years, their faces often reflect their scattered
homelands." (p. 12). Diamond's explanations are somewhat bizarre. While he is willing
to consider Indian Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Ethiopian Jews descendants of converts and
mixed marriages (p. 18), he seems to think Ashkenazic Jews are more purely Israelite than
other Jewish groups. He suggests that natural selection, rather than intermarriage and
conversion, explains how Jews resemble their non-Jewish neighbors (p. 16). In other words,
Jews move to Europe, speed up the process of evolution that usually is slower among other
human groups, and somehow magically start to look like Russians, Poles, Italians, and
Germans, without any genetic contact with them. Skin color and ABO blood group studies
contradict the notion that Jews are all homogeneous Middle Easterners (Diamond p. 14, 16)
and "G6PD deficiency" genetics is common to Ashkenazim, Russians, and Germans
(p. 16-17). But Diamond keeps insisting that this was not due to mixing. "In their
fingerprints, Rhesus blood group frequencies, haptoglobins, and several enzyme markers,
Ashkenazic Jews resemble Sephardic and Yemenite Jews and differ from Eastern European
Gentiles. Furthermore, in these respects Jews resemble many Gentile peoples of the eastern
Mediterranean, such as Samaritans, Armenians, Egyptian Cops, and Syrian, Lebanese, and
Palestinian Arabs." (p. 16) "Thus, judging by neutral markers, the non-Jewish
contribution to the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish gene pool has been low. These groups
of Jews may really be transplanted Semites, not converted Khazars or products of massive
intermarriage." (p. 18). But this does nothing to explain the magical way in which
Jews come to resemble their neighbors. It is as if a Dutchman moving to South Africa would
have descendants who would at least be beginning to look more like native Africans, or
descendants of the Mayflower starting to adopt American Indian facial characteristics, or
Englishmen in Australian turning Aboriginal. Are such things happening absent
intermarriage? Obviously not. And how and why would a minority group drastically change
its physical appearance (e.g. lightening skin) in order to blend in with the majority? Is
this idle speculation? His article contains the typical Koestler-bashing, which shows that
one of his intentions was to use genetics research to "disprove" any sort of
connection between Khazars and Russian Jews. While he provided a valuable service in
summarizing some scientific studies for the general public, his overall explanation is not
credible. (In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel he indicated that he believes that
geography determined historical patterns much more than human action.)
"Jews and Arabs Share Recent
Ancestry." Science Now (American Academy for the Advancement of Science,
October 30, 2000). In the last sentence, it is admitted that European Jews mixed with
groups residing in Europe. Excerpts:
"More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied
inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region
within the last few thousand years. The results match historical accounts that some Moslem
Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region
that includes Israel and the Sinai... Intrigued by the genetic similarities between the
two populations, geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who
collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men. Her team examined the Y
chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. The
Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they
clustered into just three of many groups known as haplogroups. Other short segments of DNA
called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common
ancestors within the past several thousand years. The study, reported here at a Human
Origins and Disease conference, will appear in an upcoming issue of Human Genetics. Hammer
praises the new study for 'focusing in detail on the Jewish and Palestinian populations.'
Oppenheim's team found, for example, that Jews have mixed more with European
populations, which makes sense because some of them lived in Europe during the last
millennium."
This finding, along with Nathaniel Pearson's research
(whose Ukrainian Jewish Y-chromosomal haplotype matched with an Uzbekistani Uzbek, an
Uzbekistani Tajik, and two men from New Delhi in northern India), contradicts
the assertion of other geneticists that Ashkenazim are not at
all descended from Khazars and other European converts.
Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East
Posted by Kevin Brook to Kulanu's listserv in November and December 2001
A new study of interest has been published in the November 2001 issue of The American
Journal of Human Genetics (volume 69, number 5) on pages 1095-1112. Entitled "The Y
Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East" and
authored by Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Bernd Brinkmann, Partha P. Majumder, Marina Faerman,
and Ariella Oppenheim, the article discusses the results of a new genetic test on 526
persons (from the Ashkenazic Jewish, Sephardic Jewish, Kurdish Jewish, Muslim Kurdish,
Jordanian Arab, Syrian Arab, Lebanese Arab, Israeli Arab, Palestinian Arab, and Negev
Bedouin populations). The results were as follows:
 | Kurdish Jews and North African Jews are very closely related in their paternal lineages.
|
| Kurdish Jews and North African Jews are less related to Ashkenazic Jews; the differences
between the Sephardic/Oriental and Ashkenazic Jewish groups are described in the abstract
as slight yet significant. |
| Ashkenazic Jews, while related to other Jewish groups, might also have a certain amount
of European ancestry. |
| Jews are more closely related to Armenians, Kurds, and Anatolian Turks than to their
Arab neighbors. |
| The haplogroup Eu 9 derived from northern Middle Easterners, while the haplogroup Eu 10
derived from more southerly Middle Easterners. Palestinian Arabs and Bedouins often belong
to Eu 10 and could have substantial ancestry from the Arabian Peninsula.
|
The above study is summarized by Judy Siegel in her Jerusalem Post article
"Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." (November 20, 2001).
An exceptional North African Jewish community is Libyan Jewry, which appears to differ
noticeably from Moroccan Jewry, Tunisian Jewry, and Algerian Jewry. According to Noah A.
Rosenberg, Eilon Woolf, Jonathan K. Pritchard, Tamar Schaap, Dov Gefel, Isaac Shpirer, Uri
Lavi, Batsheva Bonne'-Tamir, Jossi Hillel, and Marcus W. Feldman in their article
"Distinctive genetic signatures in the Libyan Jews." (Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) 98:3 (January 30, 2001): 858-863), "...Libyan
Jews... separate from and show strong differentiation from the other populations of our
study. This population has a unique history among North African Jewish communities,
including an early founding, a harsh bottleneck, possible admixture with local Berbers,
limited contact with other Jewish communities, and small size in the recent past..."
In the article "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian
Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews"
(Human Genetics 107(6), December 2000, pp. 630-641), Ariella Oppenheim, Almut Nebel, Dvora
Filon, Mark G. Thomas, D. A. Weiss, M. Weale, and Marina Faerman presented evidence that
Israeli Jews and Israeli/Palestinian Arabs are genetically similar but not identical. They
suggested that these groups shared common origins, with somewhere between 70 to 80 percent
of Jews and about 50 percent of Arabs sharing ancestry. The study clarifies the finding of
Michael F. Hammer, Alan J. Redd, Elizabeth T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, Hamdi Jarjanazi, Tanya
Karafet, Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti, Ariella Oppenheim, Mark A. Jobling, Trefor
Jenkins, Harry Ostrer, and Batsheva Bonne'-Tamir in "Jewish and Middle Eastern
non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes",
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97:12 (June 6, 2000) that Ashkenazi
Jews are related through paternal ancestry to Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and
Anatolian Turks. Meanwhile, Aravinda Chakravarti, director of the McKusick-Nathans
Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, found that the mutation DFNB1,
which causes deafness, is found among Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and other Mediterranean
populations.
Notice that the latest study by Nebel et al., like the previous ones, focuses on
paternal ancestries rather than maternal ancestries, so the assumption that
Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian Jews did not mix with Berbers and that Kurdish Jews did not mix
with Kurds may not necessarily be correct. The Yemenite Jews serve as a useful comparison
- the Yemenite Jewish paternal lines appear to come from Israelites while their maternal
lines resemble those of Yemenite Arabs. Might the same (increased diversity in mtDNA
lineages compared to Y-chromosomal lineages) be true of North African Jews and Ashkenazi
Jews?
Quotes:
"In comparison with data available from other relevant populations in the region,
Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent
(Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors." - from the abstract to
Nebel et al., "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the
Middle East" in Am J Hum Gen.
"Surprisingly, the study shows a closer genetic affinity by Jews to the
non-Jewish, non-Arab populations in the northern part of the Middle East than to
Arabs." - from the article "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient
tribe" by Siegel in the Jerusalem Post.
I would like to add to my remarks concerning the latest Jewish DNA study ["The Y
Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East" by Almut
Nebel, Ariella Oppenheim, et al., The American Journal of Human Genetics 69:5 (November
2001): 1095-1112].
First, it says that Jews are most related to Kurds and secondarily to other northern
Mediterranean groups, then to Arabs and Europeans.
Second, this study correlates nicely with the finding that the Cohen Modal Haplotype
(CMH) is found not only among Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews but also among Iraqi
Kurds*1 and Armenians*2. Plus, Familial Mediterranean Fever is found among Ashkenazic
Jews, Iraqi Jews, North African Jews, Armenians, Druze, Anatolian Turks, and Arabs*3.
Third, one point not fully clarified by Ha'aretz*4 and the Jerusalem Post*5 is the
following quote directly from the Nebel, Oppenheim, et al. study, which shows that
Ashkenazic Jews do have some non-Israelite elements (perhaps Khazarian and Slavic) in
paternal lineages. The researchers wrote:
"Previous studies of Y chromosome polymorphisms reported a small European
contribution to the Ashkenazi paternal gene pool (Santachiara-Benerecetti et al. 1993). In
our sample, this low-level gene flow may be reflected in the Eu 19 chromosomes, which are
found at elevated frequency (12.7%) in Ashkenazi Jews and which are very frequent in
Eastern Europeans (54%-60%) (Semino et al. 2000). Alternatively, it is attractive to
hypothesize that Ashkenazim with Eu 19 chromosomes represent descendants of the Khazars,
originally a Turkic tribe from Central Asia, who settled in southern Russia and eastern
Ukraine and converted en masse to Judaism in the ninth century of the present era, as
described by Yehuda Ha Levi in 1140 AD (Dunlop 1954)."
This finding, along with Nathaniel Pearson's research (whose Ukrainian Jewish
Y-chromosomal haplotype matched with an Uzbekistani Uzbek, an Uzbekistani Tajik, and two
men from New Delhi in northern India), contradicts the assertion of other geneticists that
Ashkenazim are not at all descended from Khazars and other European converts.
Footnotes:
| 1 C. Brinkmann et al., "Human Y-chromosomal STR haplotypes in a Kurdish population
sample." International Journal of Legal Medicine 112 (1999): 181-183.
|
| 2 Communication from Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan of the Armenian Anthropological Society.
|
| 3 Nicholas Wade, "Gene From Mideast Ancestor May Link 4 Disparate Peoples."
The New York Times (August 22, 1997). |
| 4 Tamara Traubman, "Study finds close genetic connection between Jews, Kurds."
Ha'aretz (November 21, 2001). |
| 5 Judy Siegel, "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." The
Jerusalem Post (November 20, 2001). |
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