[hlmencken3]

Why would you think 'Jewish biologists' denounced the study?

This is a continuing story and widely publicized, and a wildly popular subject in the Jewish world. see the work of orthodox Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman, for example.

A good collection of resources is found at:

http://tarkus.pha.jhu.edu/~ethan/jFAQ.html

see also

http://www.aish.com/societyWork/sciencenature/Abrahams_Chromosomes$.asp

http://www.aish.com/societywork/sciencenature/Jewish_Genes.asp

These [widely scattered] Jewish communities are more closely related to each other and to other Middle Eastern Semitic populations -- Palestinians, Syrians, and Druze -- than to their neighboring non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora.

http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html

At the present time, it is known that Eastern European Jews have a significant Eastern Mediterranean element which manifests itself in a close relationship with Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian Arab, Lebanese, Syrian, and Anatolian Turkish peoples.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=96990
http://www.judaism.com/display.asp?type=newbook&etn=BCBEG
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010309/sbaychrom.shtml

[spinestein]

I don't pretend to know the why of it from any personal understanding, but I would guess it has something to do with the "My tribe is better than your tribe" idea that makes up a part of our primate brains.

Something I found interesting from the site you linked to in your post
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010309/sbaychrom.shtml
that I think has a bearing on this topic.

" "The Middle East is a complex region genetically, but it's also very united," he said. "Geopolitical boundaries, even religion, are very recent in terms of the time scale we're looking at." "

On the time scale of our common ancestry in East Africa about 60,000 years ago all the discussion about what happened to us genetically 500 years ago seems trivial.