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Posted on 09/26/2003 8:08:09 PM PDT by Destro
Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 27, 2003
A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. The signature is thought to have originated in Central Asia, not the Near East, which is the ancestral home of Jews. The finding raises the question of how the signature became so widespread among the Levites, an ancient caste of hereditary Jewish priests.
The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago, just as the Ashkenazim were beginning to be established in Europe. Ashkenazim, from whom most American Jews descend, are one of the two main branches of Jews, the other being the Sephardim, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain.
The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United States and England, who have been studying the genetics of Jewish communities for the last six years.
They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the researchers suggest.
Their reasoning is that the signature, a set of DNA variations known as R1a1, is common in the region north of Georgia that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom. The signature did reach the Near East, probably before the founding of the Jewish community, but it is still rare there. The scholars say they cannot exclude the possibility that a Jewish founder brought the signature on his Y chromosome to the Ashkenazi population, but they consider that a less likely explanation.
The present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. Dr. Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, one of the authors of the report, said he was looking among the Chuvash, a Turkic-speaking people of the Volga Valley, to see if they might have contributed the R1a1 signature.
Dr. Shaye Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard University, said he could see no problem with outsiders being converted to the Jewish community. He said he considered it less probable, however, that outsiders would become Levites, let alone founding members of the Levite community in Europe. The connection with the Khazars is "all hypothesis," he said.
Even if the Khazar hypothesis is correct, it would have no practical effect on who is a Levite today. "Genetics is not a reality under rabbinic law," Dr. Cohen said. "Second, the function of Levites is so minimal it doesn't mean anything."
Six years ago Dr. Hammer and Dr. Karl Skorecki, of the Technion and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, looked at the Y chromosomes of both Levites and Cohanim. Both are hereditary priesthoods passed from father to son. They were important in ancient Israel, but sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 their functions were taken over by rabbis, and Jewish status came to be defined by the biologically more reliable standard of maternal descent.
If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been followed as tradition describes, then all Cohanim should be descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses, and all Levites from Levi, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki found that more than half the Cohanim, in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities, did indeed carry the same genetic signature on their Y chromosome. Their ancestor lived some 3,000 years ago, based on genetic calculations, and may indeed have been Aaron, Dr. Skorecki said.
But the picture among the Levites was less clear, suggesting that they had a mixed ancestry. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki returned to the puzzle for their new report, based on data gathered from nearly 1,000 men of Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin and neighboring non-Jewish populations.
They found that the dominant signature among the Levites was the R1a1 signature, which is different from the Cohanim signature. The paternal ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the Cohanim from the two branches, who resemble each other and presumably originated before the two branches split. And the ancestor of the R1a1 signature apparently lived 2,000 years more recently than the founder of the Cohanim signature.
The Levites' pedigree does not seem to accord with tradition as well as the Cohanim one does but is venerable nonetheless. "How many people can trace their ancestry back to the 17th century, let alone a thousand years?" Dr. Hammer said.
by Marijke van der Meer, 12 February 2003
The Chuvash share many musical traditions with the Mari, and their languages have mutually influenced each other. But Chuvash is an East Turkic language, as distinct from the Finnic languages as Russian is from English. Like the Mari, the Chuvash also converted largely to Christianity, but in villages they too practice animism, around a "yoodah", an altar or sacred place.
As one poet we spoke to explained, they are orthodox but "inside" they feel a strong affinity with the old practices. In the recent past, in fact, there have been tensions with the Orthodox Church. Now the complete orthodox liturgy and the Bible are being translated into modern Chuvash, which is spoken by some two million people.
Chuvash speakers live throughout the region, but can also be found as far away as the Baltic and Sakhalin. In the many ethnically defined administrative units within the Russian Federation, the titular culture rarely forms a majority, but Chuvashia is an exception, and nearly 70% of the people in this autonomous republic define themselves as Chuvash, on the basis of language, music, social and religious rituals and village customs.
Census
The Chuvash National Congress, which is a member of UNPO, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The congress promotes the preservation of Chuvash language and identity through publications, the school system, theater and the media. The current census being carried out in the Russian Federation is a crucial issue.
The Russian passport names citizenship as being Russian but also lists ‘nationality', and some predict that fewer people outside of the republic will continue to register their nationality as Chuvash. Poet and dramatist Anatoli Kibetch, when asked why it was important to keep the language alive, says that the culture also embodies certain values that have an edifying function.
Descendants of the Bolgars
The Chuvash pride themselves in speaking one of the oldest Turkic languages and they nurture close ties with other speakers of Turkic languages in the region, namely Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. They also see themselves as the direct descendants of the Bolgars, who settled along the middle Volga in the 8th century.
Genesis Chap 10 (after the flood): The sons of Japheth; Gomer and Magog and Madai and Javan and Tubal and Meshech and Tiras.
The sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah...
The sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish,Kittim and Dodanim.
By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations
Well, a half-star for effort.
The Sephardim includes the Jews from pretty much all of the Islamic world, including the once-sizable communities of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and the rest of North Africa (50 years ago, there were 300,000 Jews in Morocco alone). These are the Jews that became refugees when Israel was founded in 1948, and the Arab street was rocked with the ancient "Death to the Jews" chants and increasing violence, In the early '50's, there were more Jewish refugees from Sephardic lands than Arab refugees in Israel and "Palestine." But the jews moved from tents to houses and started new lives and stopped referring to themselves as refugees.
But he gets a half-point, because the most famous and influential of the Sephardics was indeed, those of Spain. (remeber that Spain was larhely muslim from 700-approx 1400).
I like that idea better than anything I can dredge out of my Jewish ancestry, all the way back to the oldest beard-scratcher on record. My ancestry starts with whoever came over here to get away from the Communists and monarchs and other totalitarian filth. Anything before that is better off forgotten and ignored...
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