June 11, 2010--Jewish Genes
There are further developments on the Jewish DNA front.
Back in January 2006 I reported here about genetic studies which revealed that all Ashkenazi Jews (me included), those of Eastern Europe lineage, are descended from four women. At the time I wrote:
Now, also reported in the Times (linked below), there is emerging evidence that all Jews--the Ashkenazi as well as the Sephardim--are genetically related. This is new since these two groups for many centuries lived very much apart and it had been thought that there was little cohabitation before they went their separate ways.
Many thus believed that Jews in the Diaspora were not necessarily of the same people, the same genetic stock, but rather through the ages became Jews through conversion rather than birth. Sephardic Jews in Spain, this would mean, were not descended from other Jews who once lived in the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) but became Jews by marrying, say, local Christians or otherwise converted to Judaism.
But very early on there apparently was, in the biblical sense, a lot of getting to know one among the ancestors of these two Jewish communities.
And where did this DNA-sharing occur? It appears in what is now northern Italy.
From science, here then is the real story. Or at least what geneticists and anthropologists think happened--
The First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. and the Jews as a result went into exile. Mainly to his capital at Babylon in today's Iraq. Subsequently these Babylonian Jews began to wander. It seems a good number to what is today northern Italy and the people who later became Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews genetically were in effect one people while there. So that later when one group went west toward Spain and the other toward Eastern Europe, they carried their common DNA along with them. So much so that now Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly a 30 percent common European ancestry.
Again, this the result of their time in Italy.
And so, in addition to the evidence about common ancestry, is it any wonder that there are so many Italian restaurants in Jewish neighborhoods all over my boyhood Brooklyn? And, come tho think of it, so many Chinese ones as well. Obviously further genetic testing is required to figure that out.
Back in January 2006 I reported here about genetic studies which revealed that all Ashkenazi Jews (me included), those of Eastern Europe lineage, are descended from four women. At the time I wrote:
I am not at all surprised to learn from a piece in the New York Times that recent research reveals that at least half of us (4.0 of 8.0 million) are direct descendents of just four women who accompanied their husbands (assuming they were in fact married) a few thousand years ago when they left the Middle East for points north and west.
You see, if you, like I, grew up with Aunt Bertha, Aunt Tanna, Aunt Fannie, and Aunt Gussie, you would have known all along that all eight million actually descended from the four of them. So it was no surprise to find scientists using the latest DNA evidence coming to the same conclusion.
Now, also reported in the Times (linked below), there is emerging evidence that all Jews--the Ashkenazi as well as the Sephardim--are genetically related. This is new since these two groups for many centuries lived very much apart and it had been thought that there was little cohabitation before they went their separate ways.
Many thus believed that Jews in the Diaspora were not necessarily of the same people, the same genetic stock, but rather through the ages became Jews through conversion rather than birth. Sephardic Jews in Spain, this would mean, were not descended from other Jews who once lived in the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) but became Jews by marrying, say, local Christians or otherwise converted to Judaism.
But very early on there apparently was, in the biblical sense, a lot of getting to know one among the ancestors of these two Jewish communities.
And where did this DNA-sharing occur? It appears in what is now northern Italy.
From science, here then is the real story. Or at least what geneticists and anthropologists think happened--
The First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. and the Jews as a result went into exile. Mainly to his capital at Babylon in today's Iraq. Subsequently these Babylonian Jews began to wander. It seems a good number to what is today northern Italy and the people who later became Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews genetically were in effect one people while there. So that later when one group went west toward Spain and the other toward Eastern Europe, they carried their common DNA along with them. So much so that now Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly a 30 percent common European ancestry.
Again, this the result of their time in Italy.
And so, in addition to the evidence about common ancestry, is it any wonder that there are so many Italian restaurants in Jewish neighborhoods all over my boyhood Brooklyn? And, come tho think of it, so many Chinese ones as well. Obviously further genetic testing is required to figure that out.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:42 AM
1 Comments:
THE MYTH OF JEWISH GENETICS.
You have made some good points, but the whole issue of Jewish genetics should be taken with a pinch of salt.
It is a common practice to announce research purporting to proving Jewish interrelatedness every so often. It gets printed ad nauseum in the mass media. The ulterior purpose appears to be for the Judaists (people who believe they are "Jews") to deceive themselves and the public that the Jewish people are unique and different from the other, the goyim. Few people understand genetics and even fewer understand statistics to realize that these studies are seriouly flawed and prove no such thing.
Using common sense and reading the Old Testament and Jewish history, this much is obvious: The original Jews as described in the Old Testament were black, given the Egyptian and African nature of its places, people and myth. The fair-skinned Ashkenazim must have converted to Judaism sometime later. Due to Jewish tradition of intermarriage, the White Ashkenazi genes intermixed with their middle-eastern counterparts.
Unable to find a single gene unique to all Jewish people and absent in others and having failed in proving much using Y-chromosome haplogroups, these newer studies use autosomes and convoluted mathematical models that lose their basis in reality. At most, they have proven what common sense already tells us--that Judaism started in the Middle East, Whites (Ashkenazim) converted and endogamy is common. They have told us no more.
Most of these hyped-up studies newer studies are seriously flawed and prove little, if any, of the tall claims made in the news. First of all, they ignore the black Jews, the people who can most claim to be the real "Jews." That itself invalidates most studies. Then they use other tactics. For eg., one well-known study had a strong selection bias as it took Judaists whose all 4 grandparents were from the same community! In the old days, people did not travel far, married locally and so people from the same were more likely be somewhat related already! Another study ignored data that did not fit, claiming it was an "outlier." Another study was reported in the media as showing a small "genetic distance" (an ill-defined concept) between different Jews compared to host populations, but on reading the data, there was no difference!
Use of chromosomes other than Y-chromosomes and MT-DNA in population genetics is not generally valid. PCA analysis for genetic studies is also flawed. Genes are literal data, not numerical data. These Jewish researchers assign different numbers to literal data, without biological basis, and when they find one the computer spits a nice picture with, pick that as their variable and announce that they have "found" what their rich Jewish sponsors asked them to prove--that Judaists are related to each other and unrelated to non-jews.
As stated on the site that follows, "the different methods of extracting out useful patterns give somewhat different results, and these results themselves are to a great extent human constructions which map only approximately onto the shape of reality."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/genetics-the-jews-its-still-complicated/
Even if a study happens to prove that many Jews have a certain genetic pattern and other groups have other genetic patterns, so what? The Arabs, the Basque, the Druids, the Kurds, etc. have their own genetic patterns due to intermarriage, so what is so unique about Jewish ones? Nothing. And neither does it prove that all "Jews" are "related" to each other only and unrelated to all others.
Also See:
"The Fallacy of Biological Judaism", By Robert Pollack, on:
http://www.forward.com/articles/9406/
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