Jews and Their DNA

Eight years ago, I published an article in these pages called "Wandering Jews—and Their Genes" (September 2000). At the time I was working on a book about a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group in the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, many of whose members believe that they descend from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, and about a group of Judaizers among them known as the B'nei Menashe, over a thousand of whom live today in Israel as converts to Judaism.

This led me to an interest in Jewish historical genetics, then a new discipline. Historical genetics itself was still a pioneering field, launched by the discovery that two sources of DNA in the human body, the Y chromosome that determines male sex and the mitochondria that aid cell metabolism, never change (barring rare mutations) in their transmission from fathers to sons and from mothers to children of both sexes. This made it possible to trace paternal and maternal lines of descent far into the past and to learn about the movements and interactions of human populations that originated hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.

In my article, I observed that preliminary studies in Jewish genetics had both "shored up" and "undermined" some conventional ideas about Jewish history. On the one hand, they had indicated that there was a high degree of Y-chromosome similarity among Jewish males from all over the world, coupled with a much lower degree when the comparison was made between Jews and non-Jews in the same region. The one part of the globe in which Jews correlated as highly with many non-Jews as they did with other Jews was the Middle East—precisely what one might expect of a people that claimed to have originated in Palestine (or in Ur of the Chaldees, if you go back to Abraham) and to have spread from it.

Other studies established that the Y chromosomes of kohanim—male Jews said to descend from the priestly caste whose supposed progenitor was the biblical Aaron—had their own unique DNA signature, labeled the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Not only did half of all kohanim, who comprise about four percent of the world's Jewish population, share this DNA configuration, but minor mutations in it pointed to a common ancestor who lived a few centuries before or after 1000 B.C.E.—that is, close to the period in which Aaron and his brother Moses are situated by biblical chronology.

Such evidence seemed to confirm traditional notions of Jewish origins. It suggested that the Jews, while certainly not a "race," were indeed, despite the skepticism of many modern historians, the highly endogamous people they had always considered themselves to be, one that had admixed with outsiders relatively little during long centuries of wandering in the Diaspora. It also strengthened the reliability of the Bible as a historical source. Modern critics who contended that the Bible was a late document that imagined a largely non-existent past had always singled out the priestly codes of the Pentateuch as a prime illustration of this. But if the priesthood was really an institution going back to early Israelite history, rather than the backward projection in time of later generations, revisionist Bible criticism itself needed to be revised.

Yet there was contrary evidence, too. Early studies of mitochondrial DNA reported that Jewish women, unlike Jewish men, did not correlate well with one another globally. Furthermore, the greatest demographic mystery of Jewish history—that of the origins of the Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern Europe—had only appeared to deepen.

The standard Jewish version of these origins was that Ashkenazi Jewry had first crystallized in the late first millennium of the Christian era in the French-German borderland along the Rhine; that it had reached the Rhineland from southern France, to which it had come in earlier centuries either directly from Palestine or via Italy and Spain; and that it had then migrated eastward and northward into Central and Eastern Europe.Even before the advent of historical genetics, however, this account had been challenged. There were linguists who argued that East European Yiddish, the Germanic language of most Ashkenazi Jews, had more in common with the dialects of southern and southeastern Germany than with those of the Rhineland in the west. There were demographers who contended that the Jewish population of the Rhineland prior to the appearance of East European Jewry, which would eventually become the world's largest Jewish community, was too small to account for the latter's rapid growth.

The early genetic findings appeared to support the challengers. If the Rhineland theory was correct, Ashkenazi DNA should have had greater affinities with non-Jewish DNA from northern France and western Germany than with non-Jewish DNA from elsewhere; no one denied, after all, that wherever and whenever Jews had lived, some Gentiles must have joined them or begotten children with them. Yet there was no sign of this. Where, then, had Ashkenazi Jewry come from?

It was a mixed picture. Since then, eight years have gone by, historical genetics has greatly refined its methods and taxonomy, and several major new studies in Jewish genetic history have been published. What, viewed from their perspective, does Jewish history look like now?

Two new books address this question. One, David B. Goldstein's Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, is the work of a scientist who teaches at Duke University and has been personally involved in much Jewish genetic research.1 The other, Jon Entine's Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, is by a layman and journalist.2 Yet since Entine has done a serious and responsible job of reporting, and Goldstein has written a non-technical survey for the general reader, the difference between them is one more of style than of substance. They agree on most major points, starting with the puzzling disparity in the distribution patterns of Jewish Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA.

The fact of this disparity is now solidly established. There is no doubt that statistically (and only statistically: it is important to keep in mind that any randomly chosen Jewish individual may prove an exception to the rule), Jewish males with antecedents in such widely separated places as Yemen, Georgia, and Bukhara in Central Asia are far more likely to share similar Y-chromosome DNA with one another than with Yemenite, Georgian, or Bukharan non-Jews. Jewish females from the same backgrounds, on the other hand, yield opposite results: their mitochondrial DNA has markedly less resemblance to that of Jewish women from elsewhere than it does to that of non-Jewish women in the countries their families hailed from. The main difference between them and these Gentile women is that their mitochondrial DNA is less varied—that is, they descend from a small number of maternal ancestors. Geneticists call such a phenomenon, in which a sizable population has developed from a very small number of progenitors, a "founder" or "bottleneck" effect. (In "bottlenecks," these few progenitors are survivors of larger groups that were drastically reduced by war, famine, plague, or other calamities.)

This calls for a new understanding of the spread of Jewish settlement in the Diaspora. Until now, it has been assumed that nearly all of the world's Jewish communities began with the migration of cross-sections of older communities, which took their families, institutions, and practices with them and perpetuated their lives in new surroundings. Now, it would seem, as David Goldstein writes, that

[some] Jewish men . . . travel[ed] long distances to establish small Jewish communities [by themselves]. They would settle in new lands and, if unmarried, take local women for wives. The communities might [at a later date] have been augmented by additional male travelers from Jewish source populations. Once they were established, however, the barriers would go up against further input of new mitochondrial DNA, precisely because of female-defined ethnicity [i.e., the halakhic practice of determining Jewishness by the mother]; few [additional] females would be permitted to join. Presumably, these adventurous bachelors setting out (perhaps on business ventures) for far lands could not persuade Jewish women to come with them, or else they traveled to their destinations with no intention of staying there. In the absence of rabbis to perform conversions, they married local women who, while consenting to live as Jews, were not halakhically Jewish. By halakhic standards, therefore, their descendants were not Jewish, either, even though their Jewishness was not challenged by the rabbinical authorities. Although such communities must, in their first generations, have known the truth about themselves, this does not appear to have bothered them or anyone else very much.

Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites
New York Times | September 27, 2003 | Nicholas Wade
Posted on 09/26/2003 8:08:09 PM PDT by Destro
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/990414/posts

The Lemba (The Black Jews Of Southern Africa)
The Free Man Institute | 3-14-2005
Posted on 03/14/2005 6:53:09 PM PST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1362872/posts

The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews
Barzan (Kurdish Newspaper) | 4 May 06 | Kevin Brook
Posted on 05/04/2006 7:03:48 AM PDT by white trash redneck
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1626606/posts

After millennia in India, lost tribe returns to Israel
Asia News | 09-30-2006 | Asia News
Posted on 09/30/2006 2:42:52 PM PDT by Traianus
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1711367/posts

Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital
AFP | Sept. 3, 2008
Posted on 09/03/2008 9:26:26 AM PDT by Alouette
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2073813/posts

So...does this mean they’ll never be able to find the original mtDNA genetic code for Jewish women? Seems like there would be some group of women somewhere who’ve stayed Jewish for a few thousand years since Aaron. I guess the problem would be figuring out which is the “pure” strand and which isn’t.

the purity of Jewish blood is sometimes extremely contentious for some if not many Jews....especially chicken soup mamas who you mess with at yer peril I’ve learned the hard way

i have often found it hypocritical that many Jews obsess with who’s Jewish enough and get really riled over the Khazar claims

but yet, many Jews are at the vanguard of racial mixing and the dilution of anyone else’s heritage....advocacy wise....the anti-pluralist message applied to race and ethnicity

hell, we’re all hypocrites sometimes I reckon...I know I am

I think Jewish pride in their blood heritage staying intact in laudable but it brings up the old goose and gander argument for me anyhow.

I never really noticed this until I lived in NYC, down South it was different with the tribe.

This discipline also ought to establish who is and is not a descendant of King David, and of the tribe of Levi, both very important sub-groups within the Jewish Community. Conceivably, the entire Jewish nation could be sorted into the original 12 tribes. Only wild cards are the mideival Khazar empire of Eastern Europe, whose king and a great number of subjects converted to Judaism in the 11th Century C.E., as well as the aforementioned wandering bachelors and their shiksas.

Indeed. For a group that has been around as long as this one, admixture is a sure thing. I, for one, know this first hand. Although a Jew of European origins, my Y-chromosome is pure Celtic. Who knew? ;-)

Although a Jew of European origins, my Y-chromosome is pure Celtic. Who knew?

The celts migrated to various parts of Europe, including Galicia ("land of the Celts") in southern Poland, which had a large Jewish population for hundreds of years.

I've been meaning to have my DNA tested for years. I have suspected Roma (gypsy) ancestry on the Polish side of my family for some time. If one took a DNA sample of the average Pole, they would probably find Celtic, Semitic, Roma, Armenian (Poland had a sizeable Armenian population that assimilated), Mongolian, and Tatar DNA.

This has come up for discussion with certain elderly Jewish friends of mine who were veterans of the Civil Rights movement. Basically, they will argue that they see no problem with folks marrying "their own kind", but that others should have the freedom to mix if they want to. I share the same attitude (being something of a miscegenatist myself, I have no problem if folks want to "keep it in the tribe" whether that be Chinese, Jewish, or plain old white American).

I can honestly say that blue collar Catholics of Italian/Polish/Irish ancestry were were resistant to both neighborhood integration (due to the parochial constraints of their faith) and interracial dating than any white people outside of the south. You really don't see any interracial couples on Staten Island to this day.

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