text:
"The Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) population has long been viewed as a genetic isolate, yet it is still unclear how population bottlenecks, admixture, or positive selection contribute to its genetic structure. Here we analyzed a large AJ cohort and found higher linkage disequilibrium (LD) and identity-by-descent relative to Europeans, as expected for an isolate. However, paradoxically we also found higher genetic diversity, a sign of an older or more admixed population but not of a long-term isolate. Recent reports have reaffirmed that the AJ population has a common Middle Eastern origin with other Jewish Diaspora populations, but also suggest that the AJ population, compared with other Jews, has had the most European admixture. Our analysis indeed revealed higher European admixture than predicted from previous Y-chromosome analyses. Moreover, we also show that admixture directly correlates with high LD, suggesting that admixture has increased both genetic diversity and LD in the AJ population.
"The higher diversity in the AJ population was paralleled by a lower inbreeding coefficient, F, indicating the AJ population is more outbred than Europeans, not inbred, as has long been assumed (P < 1e-7) (Table 1). The greater genetic variation among the AJ population was further confirmed using a pairwise identity-by-state (IBS) permutation test, which showed that average pairs of AJ individuals have significantly less genomewide IBS sharing than pairs of EA or Euro individuals (empirical P value < 0.05). Thus, our results show that the AJ population is more genetically diverse than Europeans. [...] We removed SNPs in high LD and measured the mean heterozygosity per locus across the combined Middle Eastern populations (Bedouin, Palestinian, and Druze) and found that the AJ population had higher heterozygosity Both analyses show that AJ individuals cluster between Middle Eastern and European populations while also verifying that the Ashkenazi Jews possess a unique genetic signature clearly distinguishing them from the other two regions there is a closer relationship between the AJ and several European populations (Tuscans, Italians, and French) than between the AJ and Middle Eastern populations".
proximity of the AJ and Italian populations
"We used the combined Palestinian and Druze populations to represent the Middle Eastern ancestor.
'We were surprised to find evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have higher heterozygosity than Europeans, contradicting the widely-held presumption that they have been a largely isolated group,' says first author Steven Bray, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Warren's laboratory. [...] High linkage disequilibrium can come either from an isolated population (for example, an island whose residents are all descendents of shipwreck survivors) or the relatively recent mixture of separate populations. Bray and his colleagues did find evidence of elevated linkage disequilibrium in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, but were able to show that this matches signs of interbreeding or 'admixture' between Middle Eastern and European populations. The researchers were able to estimate that between 35 and 55 percent of the modern Ashkenazi genome comes from European descent. [...] He adds that his group's analysis agrees with a recently published study from New York University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and supports estimates of a high level of European admixture, accounting for up to half of the genetic make-up of contemporary Ashkenazi (how'bout if the Europeans are fellow Lost Israelites?).
"For more than a century, Jews and non-Jews alike have tried to define the relatedness of contemporary Jewish people. Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations. However, these and successor studies of monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic markers did not resolve the issues of within and between-group Jewish genetic identity. Here, genome-wide analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi) and comparison with non-Jewish groups demonstrated distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture. Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry.
"The genetic, cultural and religious traditions of contemporary Jewish people originated in the Middle East over three thousand years ago. Since that time, Jewish communities have migrated from the Middle East into Europe, North Africa and across the world. ... This study shows that although Jewish people experienced genetic mixing with surrounding populations, they retained a genetic coherence along with a religious one. 'Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations,' says senior study author, Dr. Harry Ostrer... 'More recent studies of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA have pointed to founder effects of both Middle Eastern and local origin, yet, the issue of how to characterize Jewish people as mere coreligionists or as genetic isolates that may be closely or loosely related remained unresolved. ... Yet the genomes of the Jewish Diaspora groups have distinctive features that are representative of each group's genetic history.' says Dr. Ostrer. 'Our study demonstrated that the studied Jewish populations represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters with genetic threads that weave them together,' added Dr. Gil Atzmon... The researchers identified distinct Jewish population clusters that each exhibited a shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations and variable degrees of European and North African genetic intermingling. ... The two major groups, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, were timed to have diverged from each other approximately 2500 years ago. Southern European populations show the greatest proximity to Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Italian Jews, reflecting the large-scale southern European conversion and admixture known to have occurred over 2,000 years ago during the formation of the European Jewry. An apparent North African ancestry component was also observed as was present in the Sephardic groups potentially reflecting gene flow from Moorish to Jewish populations in Spain from 711 to 1492. ... Dr. Ostrer noted, 'The study supports the idea of a Jewish people linked by a shared genetic history. Yet the admixture with European people explains why so many European and Syrian Jews have blue eyes and blonde hair.'"
Jews worldwide share genetic ties: But analysis also reveals close links to Palestinians and Italians."
"Different communities of Jews around the world share more than just religious or cultural practices -- they also have strong genetic commonalities, according to the largest genetic analysis of Jewish people to date. But the study also found strong genetic ties to non-Jewish groups, with the closest genetic neighbours on the European side being Italians (In times of the Roman empire many Italians [Roman soldiers & others. People from the Italian peninsula] moved to Britain mixing with the native Celts & when the Roman empire fell they stayed. Later when the Anglosaxons invaded they expelled the Celts [including the Roman offspring] to current western & northern areas peopled by Celts: Scottland, Wales, Cornwall... Nowadays in these areas, especially in Wales, you find people with dark hair & eyes like the celebrated Welsh actress Catherine Z. Jones. Nevertheles, many Jewish slaves were brought to Italy. When the Germanic [regarded as Lost Israelites] Longobards, Ostrogoths & Lombards invaded Italy the population input changed even more. Finally many parts of Italy belonged to Spain & many Jews, especially in a concealed Christian form, found refuge in Italy. Northern Italy has a larger Celtic [also regarded as Lost Israelite] & Germanic input, whereas southern Italy has a higher Jewish input), and on the Middle Eastern side the Druze (several people consider them as having Jewish origin, including a Druze parliamentarian), Bedouin and Palestinians (many Bedouins & Palestinians recognize their Jewish-Israelite roots). Researchers in New York and Tel Aviv conducted a genome-wide analysis on 237 individuals from seven well-established Jewish communities around the world, hailing from Iran, Iraq, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and eastern Europe (these nations have large populations regarded as having Jewish or Israelite origin: Druzes, Dönmehs, Alawites, A
Sharon Begley. "The DNA of Abraham's Children." Newsweek Web Exclusive (June 3, 2010). Excerpts:
levis, Bektashis, Zazas, Kurds, Armenians, Yazidis, Mandeans, Shabaks, Kakais...). The team then compared these genetic profiles to those of non-Jews in the same geographic regions based on data from the Human Genome Diversity Project.... The genetic ties identified in the present study... are consistent with the results of previous work, says Sarah Tishkoff, a human geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, 'but this is, I would say, the first study to put everything together into a big picture by looking at a large number of sites in the nuclear genome'. The researchers analysed single-letter differences in the genome called single nucleotide polymorphisms, longer segments of DNA shared between different Jewish groups, as well as deleted or duplicated stretches of DNA called copy-number variants. Although the groups had strong genetic commonalities, the results also showed a varying degree of genetic mixing with nearby non-Jewish populations. The most genetically distinct Jewish communities, compared both to other Jewish groups and to nearby non-Jews, were those from Iran and Iraq. ...one theory proposes that Ashkenazi Jews (of eastern European origin) are largely descended from Khazars in eastern Europe who converted to Judaism, but the genetic closeness between Ashkenazi Jews and other non-European Jews does not support this idea. ...Ostrer says... 'We really see the events of the Jewish diaspora in the genomes of Jewish people.' ... Ostrer says that the researchers are extending their analysis to more Jewish populations. They also hope to apply the findings to medical research..."
"The latest DNA volume weighs in on the controversial, centuries-old (and now revived in a 2008 book) claim that European Jews are all the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic group of the north Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the late eighth and early ninth century. The DNA has spoken: no. ... To sort it out, researchers collected DNA from Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Ashkenazi Jews around New York City; Turkish Sephardic Jews in Seattle; Greek Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki and Athens; and Italian Jews in Rome as part of the Jewish HapMap Project. (All four grandparents of each participant had to have come from the same community.) ... Jewish populations, that is, have retained their genetic coherence just as they have retained their cultural and religious traditions, despite migrations from the Middle East into Europe, North Africa, and beyond over the centuries, says geneticist Harry Ostrer of NYU Langone Medical Center, who led the study. Each Diaspora group has distinctive genetic features 'representative of each group's genetic history,' he says, but each also 'shares a set of common genetic threads' dating back to their common origin in the Middle East. 'Each of the Jewish populations formed its own distinctive cluster, indicating the shared ancestry and relative genetic isolation of the members of each of those groups.' The various Jewish groups were more related to each other than to non-Jews, as well. Within every Jewish group, individuals shared as much of their genome as two fourth or fifth cousins, with Italian, Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi Jews the most inbred, in the sense that they married within the small, close-knit community. In general, the genetic similarity of any two groups was larger the closer they lived to one another, but there was an exception: Turkish and Italian Jews were most closely related genetically, but are quite separated geographically. Historical records suggest that Iranian and Iraqi Jews date from communities that formed in Persia and Babylon, respectively, in the fourth to sixth centuries B.C.E., and the DNA confirms that. The genetic signatures of these groups show that they remained relatively isolated--inbred--for some 3,000 years. The DNA also reveals that these Middle Eastern Jews diverged from the ancestors of today's European Jews about 100 to 150 generations ago, or sometime during the first millennium B.C.E."
"The research, scheduled to appear online today in the American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests all Jewish populations tested fall into a large genetic cluster that contains population-specific sub-groups with different levels of Middle Eastern ancestry and European and North African admixture. 'It's really cool that Jews have maintained this degree of genetic coherence over time,' senior author Harry Ostrer, a human genetics researcher with the New York University School of Medicine, told GenomeWeb Daily News. Within this larger Jewish group, the team found two main sub-groups: one representing Jewish populations in Europe and Syria and another containing Jewish populations from Iran and Iraq. ...studies of most Jewish populations have relied on relatively limited Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA sequence data. For the current study, researchers used the Affymetrix 6.0 microarray platform to genotype 305 Jewish participants... These individuals came from one of seven major Jewish groups, representing Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews from Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and Mizrahi Jews from Iran, Iraq, and Syria. After quality control steps, the team was left with data for 237 Jewish individuals, which they compared with hundreds of non-Jewish samples from the Human Genome Diversity Project... In particular, Ostrer said, the researchers were surprised to see such a high level of genetic relatedness in European Jewry, with Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian, and Syrian Jews clustering more closely to one another than to Jewish populations in Iran and Iraq. The results argue against the notion that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Eastern European groups such as the Slavs or Khazars, Ostrer noted. 'There's just no evidence for that.' Instead, Ashkenazi Jews seem to be more genetically similar to non-Jewish populations in Northern Italy, France, and Sardinia. Meanwhile, Jewish populations in Iran and Iraq tended to cluster closer to non-Jewish Palestinian, Druze, and Bedouin populations than to Europeans. ... Down the road, the team intends to genotype additional populations..."
Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations. ... These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent. ... The Middle Eastern populations included in the study were Bedouin (46), Druze (42), Mozabite (there's no secret regarded the long Berber-Jewish mixture), and Palestinian (46). The European populations were Adygei (17), Basque (24), French (28), Italian (13), Orcadian (15), Russian (25), Sardinian (28), and Tuscan (8). Middle Eastern and European non-Jewish individuals were taken from the H952 subset of the HGDP-CEPH panel [24]. The Jewish samples included Ashkenazi Jews (20), Moroccan Jews (20), Tunisian Jews (20), and Turkish Jews (20). ... Figure 2 illustrates the major clustering solutions for each value of K from 2 to 6. ... For K = 4, the Druze, Bedouins and Palestinians are each largely distinct in cluster membership coefficients; the Jewish populations show somewhat greater similarity to these three Middle Eastern groups than do the European populations other than the Adygei (most peoples in the Caucasus are regarded as Lost Israelites), but they also have greater similarity to the European populations than do the Middle Eastern groups. Among the European populations, the Adygei population, from the Caucasus region, shows some similarity in cluster membership coefficients to the Jewish populations, especially to the Ashkenazi population (this similarity is also observable for K = 2 and K = 3). For K = 5, the new cluster produced contains most Palestinian individuals, as well as sizable components of the four Jewish populations, the Adygei and the Bedouins. For K = 6, this cluster is further subdivided, producing one cluster that corresponds mainly to Palestinians and one cluster that corresponds mainly to the Jewish populations and to a lesser extent, the Adygei and Bedouins. ... French and Palestinians also provide the most similar pair for Moroccan Jews, with coefficients very nearly equal to the values in the case of Turkish Jews (? = 0.45 for French). The most similar pair for Ashkenazi Jews consists of French and Turkish Jews (? = 0.50), whereas for Tunisian Jews the most similar pair consists of Sardinians and Palestinians (? = 0.42 for Sardinians). For all four Jewish populations, many of the ten closest pairs of populations consist of one Middle Eastern population and either one European population or one of the other Jewish populations. ...The Tunisian Jews are located further from the pooled European populations than are any of the other Jewish populations... The plot places the Palestinians closer to the Moroccan and Turkish Jews than to the other Jewish populations... It further suggests that the Tunisian Jews are the most distinctive Jewish population, whereas the Ashkenazi, Turkish, and Moroccan Jewish populations are genetically more similar to each other. ... The Turkish Jews are not easily distinguished from the Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jews in the MDS analysis, and are placed in positions overlapping with the Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jewish individuals. ... While the ultimate fate of the Khazar population remains unknown, the theory has been advanced that a large fraction of the ancestry of eastern European Jews derives from the Khazars [60,62-64]. This theory would predict ancestry for the eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population to be distinct from that of the other Jewish populations in the study. Although we did not observe such a distinct ancestry, it is noteworthy that in some analyses ... we did detect similarity of the Adygei, a north Caucasian group from the area once occupied by the Khazars, to the Jewish populations. ... Among the Jewish populations, the Tunisians were found to be the least variable and most distinctive, and their genotypes could be most easily distinguished from those of the three other Jewish populations. This result suggests a smaller population size and greater degree of genetic isolation for this population compared to the other Jewish groups, or a significant level of admixture with local populations. These explanations are not incompatible, as it is possible that early admixture was followed by a long period of isolation. Some Berber admixture of Tunisian Jews may very well have taken place [61,63], and documentation of rare Mendelian disorders in Tunisian Jews [67-69] supports a view of isolation with relatively few founding individuals. A smaller-scale autosomal study that did not include Tunisian Jews found the neighboring Libyan Jewish population to be distinctive with respect to other Jewish populations [66], and our results concerning the Tunisian Jewish population might reflect a similar phenomenon."
"Data on the Y chromosome indicates that the males originated in the Middle East, while the mothers' mitochondrial DNA seems to indicate a local Diaspora origin in the female community founders....
"The emerging genetic picture is based largely on two studies, one published two years ago and the other this month, that together show that the men and women who founded the Jewish communities had surprisingly different genetic histories.... A new study now shows that the women in nine Jewish communities from Georgia, the former Soviet republic, to Morocco have vastly different genetic histories from the men.... The women's identities, however, are a mystery, because, unlike the case with the men, their genetic signatures are not related to one another or to those of present-day Middle Eastern populations.... The new study, by Dr. David Goldstein, Dr. Mark Thomas and Dr. Neil Bradman of University College in London and other colleagues, appears in The American Journal of Human Genetics this month.... His [Goldstein's] own speculation, he said, is that most Jewish communities were formed by unions between Jewish men and local women, though he notes that the women's origins cannot be genetically determined.... Like the other Jewish communities in the study, the Ashkenazic community of Northern and Central Europe, from which most American Jews are descended, shows less diversity than expected in its mitochondrial DNA, perhaps reflecting the maternal definition of Jewishness. But unlike the other Jewish populations, it does not show signs of having had very few female founders. It is possible, Dr. Goldstein said, that the Ashkenazic community is a mosaic of separate populations formed the same way as the others.... 'The authors are correct in saying the historical origins of most Jewish communities are unknown,' Dr. [Shaye] Cohen [of Harvard University] said. 'Not only the little ones like in India, but even the mainstream Ashkenazic culture from which most American Jews descend.'.... If the founding mothers of most Jewish communities were local, that could explain why Jews in each country tend to resemble their host community physically while the origins of their Jewish founding fathers may explain the aspects the communities have in common (including the Lembas, Igbos, Maggidis, Chinkukis, Qiangs, Maoris, Hata Japanese...), Dr. Cohen said.... The Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA's in today's Jewish communities reflect the ancestry of their male and female founders but say little about the rest of the genome... Noting that the Y chromosome points to a Middle Eastern origin of Jewish communities and the mitochondrial DNA to a possibly local origin, Dr. Goldstein said that the composition of ordinary chromosomes, which carry most of the genes, was impossible to assess. 'My guess,' Dr. Goldstein said, 'is that the rest of the genome will be a mixture of both.'"
Mark G. Thomas, Michael E. Weale, Abigail L. Jones, Martin Richards, Alice Smith, Nicola Redhead, Antonio Torroni, Rosaria Scozzari, Fiona Gratrix, Ayele Tarekegn, James F. Wilson, Cristian Capelli, Neil Bradman, and David B. Goldstein. "Founding Mothers of Jewish Communities: Geographically Separated Jewish Groups Were Independently Founded by Very Few Female Ancestors." The American Journal of Human Genetics 70:6 (June 2002): 1411-1420. The study collected mtDNA from about 600 Jews and non-Jews from around the world, including 78 Ashkenazic Jews and Georgians, Uzbeks, Germans, Berbers, Ethiopians, Arabs, etc. 17.9% of sampled Iraqi Jews have an mtDNA pattern known as U3, compared to 2.6% of Ashkenazic Jews, 0.9% of Moroccan Jews, 1.7% of ethnic Berbers, 1.1% of ethnic Germans, 0.0% of Iranian Jews, 0.0% of Georgian Jews, 0.0% of Bukharian Jews, 0.0% of Yemenite Jews, 0.0% of Ethiopian Jews, 0.0% of Indian Jews, 0.0% of Syrian Arabs, 0.0% of Georgians, 0.0% of Uzbeks, 0.0% of Yemeni Arabs, 0.0% of Ethiopians, 0.0% of Asian Indians, 0.0% of Israeli Arabs. (According to Vincent Macaulay, U3 is found also among some Turks, Iraqis, Caucasus tribes, Alpine Europeans, North Central Europeans, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Eastern Mediterranean Europeans, Central Mediterranean Europeans, Western Mediterranean Europeans, and southeastern Europeans.) Another pattern, called Haplotype I, was found among 12.1% of Bukharan Jews, 2.6% of Ashkenazic Jews, 1.8% of Iraqi Jews, 1.3% of Iranian Jews, 1.1% of ethnic Germans, and 2.4% of ethnic Asian Indians, and none of the other groups among individuals tested. (According to Vincent Macaulay, Haplotype I is found also among some Northeastern Europeans, North Central Europeans, Caucasus tribes, Northwestern Europeans, and Scandinavians.) Yet another pattern, called Haplotype J1, was found among 12.5% of Iraqi Jews, 2.7% of Iranian Jews, 9.2% of Yemenite Jews, and 1.7% of Israeli Arabs, and none of the other groups among individuals tested. (According to Vincent Macaulay, Haplotype J1 is found also among some Iraqi Arabs, Bedouins, Palestinian Arabs, and Azerbaijanis.) To compare with Vincent Macaulay's research on mtDNA, visit Supplementary data from Richards et al. (2000). Abstract:
"We have analyzed the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from each of nine geographically separated Jewish groups, eight non-Jewish host populations, and an Israeli Arab/Palestinian population, and we have compared the differences found in Jews and non-Jews with those found using Y-chromosome data that were obtained, in most cases, from the same population samples. The results suggest that most Jewish communities were founded by relatively few women, that the founding process was independent in different geographic areas, and that subsequent genetic input from surrounding populations was limited on the female side. In sharp contrast to this, the paternally inherited Y chromosome shows diversity similar to that of neighboring populations and shows no evidence of founder effects.
"Unfortunately, in many cases, it is not possible to infer the geographic origin of the founding mtDNAs within the different Jewish groups with any confidence.... || In two cases, however, comparison [of Jewish mtDNA] with the published data does provide some indication of the possible geographic origins of the modal types. The modal type in the Bene Israel is a one-step mutational neighbor of a haplotype present in the Indian sample, as well as being a one-step neighbor of a type previously identified in India. Similarly, the commmonest type in the Ethiopian Jewish sample is also present in the non-Jewish Ethiopian sample and occurs in the worldwide mtDNA database only in Somalia. Other high-frequency haplotypes in the Ethiopian Jewish sample are also found almost entirely in Africa (data not shown). The lack of an indication of a Middle Eastern origin for these haplotypes, on the basis of the Richards database, makes local recruitment a more reasonable explanation in these two cases." (pp. 1415, 1417)
"Studies of human genetic diversity have barely begun. Yet the fashion for genetic ancestry testing is booming.... Buoyed by the hype, the private sector has been moving in. Other groups, such as Jews, are now being targeted. This despite the fact that Jewish communities have little in common on their mitochondrial side - the maternal line down which Judaism is traditionally inherited. It's the male side that shows common ancestry between different Jewish communities - so, of course, that's what the geneticists focus on."
levis, Bektashis, Zazas, Kurds, Armenians, Yazidis, Mandeans, Shabaks, Kakais...). The team then compared these genetic profiles to those of non-Jews in the same geographic regions based on data from the Human Genome Diversity Project.... The genetic ties identified in the present study... are consistent with the results of previous work, says Sarah Tishkoff, a human geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, 'but this is, I would say, the first study to put everything together into a big picture by looking at a large number of sites in the nuclear genome'. The researchers analysed single-letter differences in the genome called single nucleotide polymorphisms, longer segments of DNA shared between different Jewish groups, as well as deleted or duplicated stretches of DNA called copy-number variants. Although the groups had strong genetic commonalities, the results also showed a varying degree of genetic mixing with nearby non-Jewish populations. The most genetically distinct Jewish communities, compared both to other Jewish groups and to nearby non-Jews, were those from Iran and Iraq. ...one theory proposes that Ashkenazi Jews (of eastern European origin) are largely descended from Khazars in eastern Europe who converted to Judaism, but the genetic closeness between Ashkenazi Jews and other non-European Jews does not support this idea. ...Ostrer says... 'We really see the events of the Jewish diaspora in the genomes of Jewish people.' ... Ostrer says that the researchers are extending their analysis to more Jewish populations. They also hope to apply the findings to medical research..."
Ariella Oppenheim's study, 2001
"A sample of 526 Y chromosomes representing six Middle Eastern populations (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Kurdish Jews from Israel; Muslim Kurds; Muslim Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area; and Bedouin from the Negev) was analyzed for 13 binary polymorphisms and six microsatellite loci. The investigation of the genetic relationship among three Jewish communities revealed that Kurdish and Sephardic Jews were indistinguishable from one another, whereas both differed slightly, yet significantly, from Ashkenazi Jews. The differences among Ashkenazim may be a result of low-level gene flow from European populations and/or genetic drift during isolation. Admixture between Kurdish Jews and their former Muslim host population in Kurdistan appeared to be negligible. 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. The two haplogroups Eu 9 and Eu 10 constitute a major part of the Y chromosome pool in the analyzed sample. Our data suggest that Eu 9 originated in the northern part, and Eu 10 in the southern part of the Fertile Crescent... Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin differed from the other Middle Eastern populations studied here, mainly in specific high-frequency Eu 10 haplotypes not found in the non-Arab groups. These chromosomes might have been introduced through migrations from the Arabian Peninsula during the last two millennia..."
"The most-frequent haplotype in all three Jewish groups (the CMH [haplotype 159 in the Appendix]) segregated on a Eu 10 background, together with the three modal haplotypes in Palestinians and Bedouin (haplotypes 144, 151, and 166). The dominant haplotype of the Muslim Kurds (haplotype 114) was only one microsatellite-mutation step apart from the CMH and the modal haplotype of the Bedouin, but it belonged to haplogroup Eu 9. .... Previous studies of Y chromosome polymorphisms reported a small European contribution to the Ashkenazi paternal gene pool (Santachiara-Benerecetti et al. 1993; Hammer et al. 2000). 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 A.D. (Dunlop 1954)."Page 1104: "It is worth mentioning that, on the basis of protein polymorphisms [which are not to be confused with Y chromosome polymorphisms], most Jewish populations cluster very closely with Iraqis (Livshits et al. 1991) that the latter, in turn, cluster very closely with Kurds (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994)."
At Table 1: Y Chromosome Haplogroup Distribution, it is indicated that 11.6 percent of Muslim Kurds and 9.4 percent of Bedouins also have Eu 19 chromosomes; hence, genetic drift rather than admixture with East Europeans may theoretically explain Eu 19's presence among Ashkenazi Jews. On the other hand, the origin of Eu 19 (now known as R1a1) is from eastern Europe thousands of years ago, perhaps the kurgan culture, and is found in much higher quantities among Slavs (like Sorbs, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Poles) than any Middle Eastern tribe.
In Figure 3 of Nebel et al.'s 2001 paper, it can be seen that while some Muslim Kurds possess the Cohen Modal Haplotype (at a frequency of 0.011), and even some Palestinian Arabs do (at a frequency of 0.021), more Muslim Kurds (0.095) have a haplotype that is a different Y DNA lineage, with a different allele number in one of the six microsatellite locis. Figure 3 is also interesting since it shows that 0.021 of Palestinian Arabs have the Cohen Modal Haplotype.
Judy Siegel. "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." Jerusalem Post (November 20, 2001). Excerpts:
"Despite being separated for over 1,000 years, Sephardi Jews of North African origin are genetically indistinguishable from their brethren from Iraq, according to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They also proved that Sephardi Jews are very close genetically to the Jews of Kurdistan, and only slight differences exist between these two groups and Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. These conclusions are reached in an article published recently in the American Journal of Human Genetics and written by Prof. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University (HU) and Hadassah-University Hospital in Ein Kerem. Others involved are German doctoral student Almut Nebel, Dr. Marina Faerman of HU, Dr. Dvora Filon of Hadassah-University Hospital, and other colleagues from Germany and India. The researchers conducted blood tests of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Kurdish Jews and examined their Y chromosomes, which are carried only by males. They then compared them with those of various Arab groups - Palestinians, Beduins, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese - as well as to non-Arab populations from Transcaucasia - Turks, Armenians and Moslem Kurds. The study is based on 526 Y chromosomes typed by the Israeli team and additional data on 1,321 individuals from 12 populations... 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."
"Sephardic North African Jews are genetic twins of their Iraq brethren, says a study by researchers [Nebel, Faerman, et al.] at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.... Although the genetic affinity of Jews to the ancient, Middle Eastern non-Arab populations is greater than to Arabs (as shown in the present study), a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and Palestinian Muslim Arabs (50%) belong to the same chromosome pool. An additional 30% of the Muslim Arab chromosomes belong to a very closely related lineage... [because] part - or perhaps the majority - of Muslim Arabs in the Land of Israel descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest of the 7th century A.D."
"The people closest to the Jews from a genetic point of view may be the Kurds (because the Kurds are Lost Israelites), according to results of a new study at the Hebrew University. Scientists who participated in the research said the findings seem to indicate both peoples had common ancestors who lived in the northern half of the fertile crescent, where northern Iraq and Turkey are today. Some of them, it is assumed, wandered south in pre-historic times and settled on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Professor Ariella Oppenheim and Dr. Marina Feirman [sic: Faerman], who carried out the research at the Hebrew University, said they were surprised to find a closer genetic connection between the Jews and the populations of the fertile crescent than between the Jews and their Arab neighbors... The present study, however, involved more detailed and thorough examinations than previous research. In addition, this was the first comparison of the DNA of Jews and Kurds... The researchers used the DNA of 1,847 Jewish men of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Kurdish descent; Muslims and Christians of Kurdish, Turkish and Armenian descent; various Arab populations; and Russians, Poles and residents of Belarus."
"A new study by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem reveals: the Kurds are the people closest to the Jews genetically. Scientists who carried out the study, including Prof. Ariella Friedman [sic: Oppenheim] and Dr. Marina Fireman [sic: Faerman], say that according to the findings, the Jews and the Kurds share common ancient forefathers, who lived in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent (a part of contemporary Iraq and Syria). Some moved southward in pre-historic times and settled along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. The researchers say that they were surprised to find that the Jews were closer genetically to the Kurds (and to the Turks) than to their Arab neighbors. The findings of the study, which for the first time included a comparison between DNA samples from Jews and DNA samples from Muslim Kurds, also surprised historians such as Prof. Bezalel Bar-Kochba of Tel-Aviv University and Dr. Gunner Lehman of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, who said: "`It is difficult to explain the findings within the context of the knowledge we have about material and historic culture.'"
"Professor Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University, a geneticist of mixed Ashkenazic and Sephardic descent and one of six scientists who authored the study, called the results surprising. 'I expected a few more admixtures,' Oppenheim told the Forward. Almost all the researchers expected to see a greater link between Ashkenazic Jews and non-Jewish Eastern Europeans. They thought they would see in the bloodlines the results of Eastern European pogroms, when many Jewish women were raped, producing offspring whose biological fathers were not Jewish.... 'It had an effect,' Oppenheim said, but it didn't significantly alter the gene pool. Ashkenazic Jews are still closer, genetically, to Sephardic and Kurdish Jews than to any other population.... 'Part of [the study] was financed by [the government of] India,' Oppenheim said.... The scientists looked at Y-chromosomes, which come from the male, 'Mostly because [they] give us a bit of a simpler picture,' Oppenheim said. Oppenheim said that a more thorough study, involving mitochondrial DNA, which comes from the female, will soon get under way."
Ariella Oppenheim's study, 2000
"High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews."
High-resolution Y chromosome haplotype analysis was performed in 143 paternally unrelated Israeli and Palestinian Moslem Arabs (I&P Arabs) by screening for 11 binary polymorphisms and six microsatellite loci. At the haplogroup level, defined by the binary polymorphisms only, the Y chromosome distribution in Arabs and Jews was similar but not identical. At the haplotype level, determined by both binary and microsatellite markers, a more detailed pattern was observed. Single-step micro-satellite networks of Arabs and Jewish haplotypes revealed a common pool for a large portion of Y chromosomes, suggesting a relatively recent common ancestry. The two modal haplotypes in the I&P Arabs were closely related to the most frequent haplotype of Jews (the Cohen modal haplotype). However, the I&P Arab clade that includes the two Arab modal haplotypes (and makes up 32% of Arab chromosomes) is found at only very low frequency among Jews, reflecting divergence and/or admixture from other populations.
"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."
Judy Siegel. "Experts find genetic Jewish-Arab link." Jerusalem Post (November 6, 2000). Despite its merits, this study uses a small sample size and an improbable set of test subjects. It is puzzling that the Northern Welsh were tested, because it's obvious that they are farther away from European Jews than Arabs.
"DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related. Over seven out of 10 Jewish men and half of Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors - who lived in the Middle East in the Neolithic period in prehistoric times. The research, to be published soon in the journal Human Genetics... was carried out by Prof. Ariella Oppenheim, a senior geneticist in the Hebrew University's hematology department. Dr. Marina Faerman, Dr. Dvora Filon of the Hadassah-University Hospital in Jerusalem, HU doctoral student Almut Nebel, and Mark Thomas and others at the British university assisted. The work was also reported last week in the journal Science. Oppenheim and her colleagues tested blood from 143 Israeli and Palestinian Moslem Arabs whose great-grandfathers were not related. Chromosome set data were compared with that of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and to that of non-Jewish residents of northern Wales. The researchers found that the Arabs are more closely related to Jews than they are to the Welsh, indicating a more recent common ancestry. Arabs and Jews had about 18 percent of all their chromosomes in common... 'Our findings are in good agreement with historical evidence and suggest genetic continuity in both populations despite their long separation and the wide geographic dispersal of Jews,' Oppenheim wrote."
"Analysis of the Y chromosome has already yielded interesting results. Dr. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said she had found considerable similarity between Jews and Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, as if the Y chromosomes of both groups had been drawn from a common population that began to expand 7,800 years ago."
Tamara Traubman. "A new study shows that the genetic makeup of Jews and Arabs is almost identical, and that both groups share common prehistoric ancestors." Ha'aretz (2000). Excerpts:
"About two-thirds of Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the territories and a similar proportion of Israeli Jews are the descendents of at least three common prehistoric ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the Neolithic period, about 8,000 years ago. This is the finding of a new study conducted by an international team of scholars headed by Prof. Ariella Oppenheim, a senior geneticist in the Hebrew University's hematology department and at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. In the study, soon to be published in the scientific journal 'Human Genetics,' the researchers probed the history of Jewish and Arab men by analyzing the genetic changes in the Y chromosome... The study was conducted by doctoral student Almut Nebel, with the participation of Dr. Dvora Filon and Dr. Marina Faerman of the Hebrew University and Dr. Mark Thomas of the University College of London. The results of the study, says Prof. Oppenheim, 'support the historical documentation according to which the Arabs are descendents of an ancient population of the country and that a large proportion of them were Jews who converted to Islam after Islam reached Eretz Israel in the seventh century CE.'... They examined 134 Palestinians from Israel and the Palestinian Authority and 119 Ashkenazi and Sepharadi Jews. Unlike the previous study, they also traced changes in DNA that occur more frequently, at a rate of about once in 1,000 generations. In this way, they discovered that Jews and Arabs have common prehistoric ancestors who lived here until just the last few thousand years.... In view of the small geographical area of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the researchers were surprised to discover that some Palestinians on the West Bank have a unique genetic trait that is reflected in a relatively high frequency of certain genetic signs. This fact indicates that they are the descendents of people who have lived here for a few hundred years at least. The unique genetic feature of the Palestinians from the West Bank became even more explicit when the researchers studied a genetic defect that may cause a blood disease known as thalassemia. There are many genetic defects that can cause thalassemia, but 50 percent of the mountain dwellers examined carried the identical defect, compared to only 10 percent of Galilee dwellers and 15 percent of Gaza residents. Dr. Filon says that the unique genetic trait is characteristic of a population that has lived in the same place for many generations."
"...As the fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of a woman who looks more Nordic than Jewish, I always wondered if I was really Semitic. My siblings and I didn't look much like most other Jews - Ashkenazic or Sefardic... As a child, I blamed our looks on Cossack rapes. When I read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, I bought his theory that Ashkenazim were descended from the Khazars, a Caucasian people who had converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. The search for genetic knowledge strikes a deep chord among Jews. Last year, through my local genealogy society, I met Dr. Harry Ostrer, head of the Human Genetics Program at the New York University School of Medicine... The study of evolutionary and genetic history through DNA analysis is transforming what we know about ourselves... In 1997, Karl Skorecki in Haifa, Michael Hammer in Tucson and several London researchers surprised everyone by finding evidence of the Jewish priestly line of males, the Kohanim. Half of Ashkenazic men and slightly more than half of Sefardic men who claimed to be Kohanim were found to have a distinctive set of genetic markers on their Y chromosome, making it highly possible that they are descendants of a single male or group of related males who lived between 1180 and 650 B.C.E., about the time of Moses and Aaron. The Kohen marker is but a fragment of the information gleaned from DNA analysis... A study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science looked at the Y chromosomes of 1,371 males from seven Jewish population groups and came up with a profile of Jewish genes. They found 13 major Y-chromosome patterns or signatures, called haplotypes. 'The haplotypes of all but Ethiopian Jews shared a similar pattern,' says Ostrer, a member of the study team led by Hammer and Batsheva Bonne-Tamir of Tel-Aviv University. 'This means we are not descended from one person or 12 tribes but 13 founder males' (if we count the two Josephite tribes of Ephraim & Manassah, there were thirteen tribes). The same 13 haplotypes, by the way, are common among Middle Eastern Arabs including Palestinians and Syrians. They also show up in Greeks and other ancient Mediterranean lines, who may date from the time before Jews emerged as a people... 'We are definitely Jews,' says Ostrer. 'We share Jewish haplotype patterns.' Ostrer estimates the European admixture over 80 generations is an extremely low 0.5 percent. The study also found that male Jews of Russian and Polish ancestry do not have a chromosome profile similar to Russian and Polish non-Jews. Haplotypes have also helped the identity seekers to retrace the path of the wandering Ashkenazic Jew. We who hail from East Europe most likely migrated there from Alsace and Rhineland, says Ostrer, as confirmed by Yiddish, a form of low German. Based on his study of Roman Jews, Ostrer concludes that Ashkenazim lived in Italy for a thousand years before they migrated into Alsace and Rhineland. 'There's no genetic difference between Ashkenazic and Roman Jews, who say they have lived in Italy for 2,000 years,' he observes. Ostrer and Hammer are now conducting the largest study of Jewish genetics so far, trying to determine how we are all related, and tracing the migrations that formed communities during the 2,000 years of diaspora... 'Being Jewish is a spiritual, metaphysical state and DNA is a physical characteristic, like nose size,' said Skorecki in an interview in The Jerusalem Report. 'But we wouldn't dare go around saying we're going to determine who is Jewish by the length of their nose. Similarly we're not going to determine who is Jewish by the sequence of their DNA.'... And so for me, the positives of Y-chromosome analysis far outweigh the possible negatives. We are an ancient group of clans descended from 13 polygamous men, and our genetic history is part of the redefinition of humanity... 'Blonde genes occur in Middle Eastern groups as well,' he [Ostrer] explains. 'There is no evidence that white skin and blue eyes originated in northern Europe. That is a Nordic myth. Semitic people had the whole range.'... Researchers have only begun to study the mitochondria of Jewish women... Mitochondria will likely reveal different data: Women were more likely than men to relocate and convert due to marriage... My father and brother are descendants of the clan known as Haplotype Four, the second largest group of Ashkenazim, and common among Middle Eastern and southern European populations. My son is descended from a clan that is part of Haplotype One, which has a Y-chromosome pattern common in central and western Asian populations... 'These clans were formed a long time ago,' says Ostrer. 'They all ended up in the Middle East and landed in Ur where Abraham lived. He convinced some of them to adopt [the God of Israel] and when they did, they brought their Y chromosomes with them. Their next-door neighbors waited for Allah. They brought their chromosomes with them, too.'"The assertion of Ostrer that Yiddish comes from Alsace and Rhineland has been debunked by solid research showing that Yiddish derives from Bavaria. Yiddish is clearly a form of High German, too, and not Low German. Epstein's article demonstrates a lack of linguistic knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens. "The Part-Jewish Question: Double the Pleasure or Twice the Pain? Of 'Semi-Semites' and Those Who Fear Them." Forward (January 26, 2001). Excerpts:
"Recent advances in DNA testing have either simplified or complicated the claims of holy books and founding texts. A riveting recent essay in Commentary described the results of a match-up between the genetic database of the Kohanim - those whose Jewish ancestry is supposedly the strongest and best-attested - and that of a "lost tribe" in Namibia that has long claimed Jewish descent. The fit was amazingly close. So it is with other groups in the Asian diaspora, many of whose folk stories had been thought to be merely legendary. It also turns out that there is a close DNA affinity between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs... How long before we can codify Khazar DNA and find out if Koestler was right or if the Ashkenazim have any genetic claim to Gaza? (The learned author of the Commentary article, eventually concluded that enough was enough already, and that better uses could be found for the research money than the infinite theoretical expansion of the prolific seed of Abraham.)"
"Finally, published in last June's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science were the results of a study conducted by an international team of scientists led by Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona and Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of Tel Aviv University... Based on genetic samples from 1,371 males... its main conclusions are: 1. With the exception of Ethiopian Jews, all Jewish samples show a high genetic correlation... 3. In descending order after these Middle Easterners, Ashkenazi Jews correlate best with Greeks and Turks; then with Italians; then with Spaniards; then with Germans; then with Austrians; and least of all with Russians... And on the other hand again: whereas the traditional explanation of East European Jewish origins was that most Ashkenazi Jews reached Poland and Russia from... the Rhineland; Rhineland from northern France... this version has come under increasing challenge in recent years on both demographic and linguistic grounds. Most Jews, the challengers maintain, must have arrived in Eastern Europe not from the west and southwest but from the south and east - that is, via northern Italy and the Balkans; Asia Minor and the Greek Byzantine empire; the Volga kingdom of the Khazars...; or a combination of all three. Now comes the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science report, which appears to bear out the newer version of events. Ashkenazi Jews, it informs us, have a more significant admixture of Italian, Greek, and Turkish genes than of Spanish, German, or even Austrian ones. Of course, things are not so simple. Even without questioning the study's highly technical procedures, different interpretations could be put on them. It could be argued, for example, that the resemblance of Jewish to Greek and Italian Y chromosomes is traceable to proselytization in the Mediterranean world during the period of the Roman Empire...(or because, as it's believed, many Italians descend from Jewish slaves that were brought to Italy, while many local Romans stayed in their deployment areas. Many Greeks, especially the ancient Spartans, are believed to have Israelite ancestry.) What must also be remembered is that Y chromosomes tell us only about males. But we know that in most societies, women are more likely to convert to their husband's religion than vice-versa... If true, this might also explain a number of differences between the Hammer/Bonné-Tamir study and earlier research on the geographical distribution of specific Jewish diseases, blood types, enzymes, and mitochondrial DNA... a predominance of female converts might provide the answer. It might also explain opposed findings on Jews from Yemen, who in earlier tests matched poorly with other Jews. This particular result was understood to support the theory that Yemenite Jewry originated in the widespread conversion of non-Jews under the Himyarite kings of southern Arabia in the first centuries of the Common Era. But now the Hammer/Bonné-Tamir report shows that the Y chromosomes of Yemenite Jews have typically Jewish haplotypes. The contradiction could be resolved by positing that Jewish men... reached Yemen... married local women..."
"Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes".
This study alleges that Jews around the world, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews tested in the study, and that converts and intermarriages played little role in Jewish population history. But the study does not test peoples who are at all related to the Khazars, so the genetic distance between European Jews and Khazars was left untested, and the focus is on paternal rather than on maternal lines.According to Mark Jobling, "Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians".
Some revealing comments from the study's geneticists: Dina Kraft's May 9, 2000 article in the Associated Press quotes Hebrew University geneticist Howard Cedar who "said even though Y chromosomes are considered the best tool for tracing genetic heritage, researchers still don't know what the history is behind the variations. As a result, it is difficult to draw conclusions about genetic affinity.."
"'Our work definitely refutes a lot of that discussion of alternate origins for Jewish populations,' Hammer says. 'It shows that we really are a single ethnic group coming from the Middle East. Even if you look like another European with blue eyes and light skin, your genes are telling that you're from the Middle East.'.... Hammer says one reason he began the research was his curiosity about his own Jewish roots."
Ivan Oransky. "Tracing Mideast Roots Back to Isaac and Ishmael: Study of Y Chromosome Suggests a Common Ancestry for Jews and Arabs."
"The study also found the degree of intermarriage by the Askenazi Jewish population over the past 2000 years to be remarkably small. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer and colleagues from Italy, Israel, England and America, refutes some earlier studies which suggested that modern Jews were mainly descendants of converts -- paticularly the Turkish Khazars -- with high rates of intermarriage.... The director of the human genetics program at the New York University School of Medicine and a co-author of the paper, Harry Ostrer, told The Forward that... the story provides a useful allegory for the roots of Jews and Arabs. `We're the children of a discrete number of founders who lived in the Middle East, where these Y chromosomes originated and became concentrated.', Dr. Ostrer said.... Dr. [Arno] Motulsky, who was not involved with the study, said that the results suggest that genes from non-Jewish males have not entered the Jewish population to any great extent.... The study could raise important questions about who is a Jew. For example, the results suggest that Ethiopian Jews, thought to be long separated from other Jewish groups, may be more closely related to North African non-Jews than to other Jews. Follow-up studies are already being planned. Dr. Ostrer is hoping to collect genetic information from 1000 Askenazi Jews to study migrational patterns across Europe. Dr. Hammer said he will study the DNA for mitrochondria... This will shed light onto the rate than which women intermarried into Jewish communities, since these genes are strictly passed by the mother."
"Genetic Link Established Between Jews and Arabs".
"The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. These signatures were significantly different from non-Jewish men outside of the Middle East. This means Jews and Arabs have more in common with each other, genetically speaking, than they do with any of the wider communities in which they might live. Dr Mark Jobling of Leicester University, UK, one of the authors of the new study, told the BBC: 'The kind of DNA we have used to analyse this question is the human Y chromosome. This represents only 2% of our genetic material and it is passed down from father to son... The fact that we don't see it [signals of genetic mixture between Jews and non-Jews] suggests that after the Diaspora these populations really have managed to maintain their Jewish heritage."
"The analysis provides genetic witness that these communities have, to a remarkable extent, retained their biological identity separate from their host populations, evidence of relatively little intermarriage or conversion into Judaism over the centuries.... The results accord with Jewish history and tradition and refute theories like those holding that Jewish communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, or that they are descended from the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe that adopted Judaism.... But present-day Ethiopian Jews lack some of the other lineages found in Jewish communities, and overall are more like non-Jewish Ethiopians than other Jewish populations, at least in terms of their Y chromosome lineage pattern.... Roman Jews have a pattern quite similar to that of Ashkenazis, the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. Dr. Hammer said the finding accorded with the hypothesis that Roman Jews were the ancestors of the Ashkenazis. Despite the Ashkenazi Jews' long residence in Europe, their Y signature has remained distinct from that of non-Jewish Europeans."
"Jews, Arabs share ancestral link, study says." "The Genetics of Modern Assyrians and their Relationship to Other People of the Middle East."
"Based on earlier studies using classical genetic methods7, Cavalli-Sforza et al. came to the conclusion 'that Jews have maintained considerable genetic similarity among themselves and with people from the Middle East, with whom they have common origins.' Evidence for the latter concept was very convincingly made and extended by an international team of scientists [Hammer et al.] in a very recent research article8, widely reported in the press, in which the genetics of different Middle Eastern populations were studied using a completely different method than the classical methods that form the great majority of papers in the Cavalli-Sforza et al book. The research involved direct DNA analysis of the Y chromosome, which is found only in males and is passed down from father to son. Seven different Jewish groups from communities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East were compared to various non-Jewish populations from those areas. The results showed, first of all, that 'Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.' Furthermore, the genetic characteristics of Jews were shown to be distinctly different from (non-Jewish) Europeans, suggesting that very little admixture occurred between Jews and Europeans, even after about 80 generations of Jews in Europe.... In fact, the Palestinians and Syrians were so close to the Jews in genetic characteristics that they 'mapped within the central cluster of Jewish populations.'"
Doron Behar's study, 2010
"The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people." Among the tested populations were Ashkenazic Jews from eastern Europe, Sephardic Jews from Bulgaria and Turkey, Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, Jews of India, Ethiopian Jews, and Yemenite Jews. They were compared to peoples such as Italians from Tuscany and Sardinia, Russians, Chuvashes, Lithuanians, Adygeis, Lezgins, Georgians, Armenians, Basques, French, Romanians, Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Turks, Cypriots, and several others.
Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora. This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people. Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers, genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.
"'We found evidence that Jewish communities originated in the Near East,' said molecular scientist Doron Behar of the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, who led an investigation gathering experts in eight countries. 'Our genetic findings are concordant with historical records.'"
"...the study showed that all of the Jewish communities share some common genetic features, and for the most part, the Jewish groups are more similar to each other than to the non-Jews in the same regions. 'These two studies are the first pair of genome-wide studies of SNP variations in collections of multiple Jewish populations,' says Noah Rosenberg, a population geneticist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in either study. ... Because of their large panel of populations, the researchers were able to dive more deeply than ever before into fine scale relationships between different populations. The closest genetic clustering, both among Jewish and non-Jewish groups, is seen in the eastern Mediterranean area known as the Levant, including Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and surrounding regions, the study finds."
"Ashkenazi Jews are roughly between European and Middle Eastern populations, as one would expect if they were in some sense an admixture between the groups. ... This paper seems to confirm the east-west division evident in the earlier paper [by Ostrer et al.], whereby Ashkenazi & Sephardic groups form a natural cluster, as do the Mizrahi Jews of Iraq and Iran. ... The Yemeni Jews... seem to shake out as just another Middle Eastern population. They're a subset of the Saudis in both plots. ... From this figure it looks as if the Moroccan Jews are fundamentally distinctive in some way from the non-Jewish population of Morocco. ... What likely occurred in India was that generations of admixture between Jews and non-Jews resulted in the elision of differences between the two groups, despite the persistence of a cultural distinction. ... Non-Jews could, and did, move into the Indian Jewish community, while this was taboo in the Islamic or Christian world."
Doron Behar's study, 2008
1142 mtDNA samples were gathered from Jews of non-Ashkenazi origin (including Georgian Jews, Indian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Tunisian Jews, Bulgarian Jews, and others) plus 253 samples from Near Eastern non-Jews. These data were compared with data from 583 Ashkenazi Jews.
The history of the Jewish Diaspora dates back to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests in the Levant, followed by complex demographic and migratory trajectories over the ensuing millennia which pose a serious challenge to unraveling population genetic patterns. Here we ask whether phylogenetic analysis, based on highly resolved mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) phylogenies can discern among maternal ancestries of the Diaspora. Accordingly, 1,142 samples from 14 different non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities were analyzed. A list of complete mtDNA sequences was established for all variants present at high frequency in the communities studied, along with high-resolution genotyping of all samples. Unlike the previously reported pattern observed among Ashkenazi Jews, the numerically major portion of the non-Ashkenazi Jews, currently estimated at 5 million people and comprised of the Moroccan, Iraqi, Iranian and Iberian Exile Jewish communities showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect, which did however characterize the smaller and more remote Belmonte, Indian and the two Caucasus communities. The Indian and Ethiopian Jewish sample sets suggested local female introgression, while mtDNAs in all other communities studied belong to a well-characterized West Eurasian pool of maternal lineages. Absence of sub-Saharan African mtDNA lineages among the North African Jewish communities suggests negligible or low level of admixture with females of the host populations among whom the African haplogroup (Hg) L0-L3 sub-clades variants are common. In contrast, the North African and Iberian Exile Jewish communities show influence of putative Iberian admixture as documented by mtDNA Hg HV0 variants. These findings highlight striking differences in the demographic history of the widespread Jewish Diaspora.
"It is now possible to address the question of the matrilineal origin of these [non-Ashkenazi] communities using phylogenetic resolution at maximum depth, and also to extend phylogeographic comparisons with a much wider range of reference populations.
... The Jewish community of the Caucasus also known as Mountain Jews is believed to have been established during the 8th century C.E. in the region corresponding to Dagestan and the current state of Azerbaijan as a result of a movement of Jews from Iran. Indeed, this community shows a striking maternal founding event, with 58.6% of their total mtDNA genetic variation tracing back to only one woman carrying an mtDNA lineage within Hg J2b. ... The Georgian Jewish community, considered to have been established in the 6th century C.E., similarly shows a founding event with 58.1% of its total mtDNA variation tracing back to one woman. ... Multiple theories exist regarding the establishment of the Ethiopian Beta Israel community... The four most frequent lineages belonged to Hgs R0a1b, L3h1a2a1, L5a1a and M1a1c (Table 2) all frequent in the region suggesting East Africa and not the Levant as their likely geographic origin. The Indian Jewish community of Mumbai (known as B'nei Israel) oral history claim to have descended from Jews who reached the shores of India in the 2nd century C.E. MtDNA analysis for this community shows a strong maternal founding event, with 41.2% of its total mtDNA genetic variation tracing back to one woman and 67.6% tracking back to four women (Table 2). The Indian Jewish community of Cochin myth claims the community to have emanated in the times of King Solomon and has had no documented contact with the B'nei Israel of Mumbai. This community also shows a strong maternal founding event, with 44.4% of its total mtDNA genetic variation tracing back to two women (Table 2). In both Indian Jewish communities, their mtDNA gene pool is dominated by Hg M sub-branches specific for the subcontinent, and therefore appears to be of clearly local origin. It is important to note that in agreement with an oral tradition of the two independent founding events for the respective communities, the prevailing sub-branches among B'nei Israel Hg M samples belong to Hgs M39a1 and M30c1a1, while the Cochin Hg M sub-branches belong to Hgs M5a1 and M50 (Table 2). ... The Libyan and Tunisian Jewish communities share, as their two most frequent mtDNA variants, lineages in Hgs X2e1a1a and H30 (Table S4). It is important to note that the Hg H30 is split by the coding region information into 2 sub-lineages, one restricted to Libyan Jews and one primarily to Tunisian Jews. ... The Yemenite Jewish community is thought to have been established in the second century CE. Here we found that 42.0% of the mtDNA variation in this community can be attributed to 5 women carrying mtDNAs that belong to sub-branches of Hgs R0a1c, R2a, HV1b, L3x1a and U1a2. While these Hgs, except L3x1a, can be considered as a part of the general West Asian mtDNA genetic pool, they have higher frequencies in East Africa and Yemen [10]. ... The Libyan and Tunisian Jewish communities shared among them an X2e1a1a lineage as the most frequent. We examined the two Libyan-Tunisian Jewish lineage-specific coding region mutations 9380 and 13789... Position 13789 appears uninformative, while 9380 was shared among Hg X samples from the Near East and Africa, but not from Europe, suggesting Near Eastern/ North African origin of the particular founder lineage. ... The Iranian Jewish mtDNA is particularly rich in Hg H (30.5%, see Tables S1 and Table S3)-the variant of maternal lineages that constitutes on average more than 40% of the mtDNA variation in Europe. Hg H is also well represented in the Iraqi Jewish community with an overall frequency of 11.8% (Tables S1 and Table S3). Meanwhile, Hg H frequency in Ashkenazi Jews of recent European ancestry is 20.4% [4]. This raises an interesting question regarding the possible source of Hg H lineages among the various Jewish communities. Recent progress in the understanding of mtDNA variation in East and West Europe [16]-[18], as well as in the Near East [12] fits with the inference that at least three quarters of Iranian and Iraqi Jewish Hg H genomes belong to sub-Hgs H6, H13 and H14, characteristic of the Near Eastern-Central Asian variants of Hg H. In view of the historical records claiming the establishment of the North African Jewish communities from the Near Eastern Jewish communities, it is noteworthy that the communities do not share their respective major founding lineages.
... African-specific Hgs-variants of largely sub-Saharan Hg L(xM,N)-as well as more northern and eastern Hgs M1 and U6, do occur within the gene pools of some, though not all non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities (Table S3). ...they were found in Ethiopian and Yemenite Jews (Tables S1 and Table S3), perhaps reflecting the mtDNA population structure of the host countries. In contrast, it is intriguing to find that the North African Jews (Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan) possess only a very small fraction of Hg L(xM,N) lineages (2.2%) and, even more unexpectadly, seem to lack typically North African Hg M1 and U6 mtDNAs (Tables S1 and Table S3). In striking contrast, sub-Saharan L lineages are prevalent in North African Arab and Berber populations at frequencies around 20-25% (25.5% in Moroccans, 24.9% in Tunisians, 30.2% in Libyans; our unpublished data), yielding a difference exceeding an order of magnitude. Curiously, the Ashkenazi mtDNA pool of recent European descent includes Hg L(xM,N) at a frequency comparable to that among North African Jewry [4], [5]. Hence, the lack of U6 and M1 chromosomes among the North African Jews and the low frequency of Hg L(xM,N) lineages, renders the possibilty of significant admixture between the local Arab and Berber populations with Jews unlikely, consistent with social restrictions imposed by religious restrictions. ... The second [case study] example highlighted the Georgian Jewish HV1a1a1 haplotype (Table 4, Figure 2b) and showed that it existed only in Georgian Jews. While it is clear that the ancestry of this lineage can be traced to the broad geographic swathe encompassing the Near and Middle East as well as the Caucasus region, even the level of resolution generated from the complete mtDNA analysis could not provide greater phylogeographic specificity, since equidistant ancestral lineages could be found in each of the three geographic locations. The third case study addresses the shared Libyan-Tunisian X2e1a1a haplotype. Again, it became clear that the ancestry of this lineage can be similarly attributed to the broad geographic region encompassing the Near and Middle East and the Caucasus region (Table 5, Figure 2c), but unlike the Georgian case study, the particular haplotype was shared with non-Jewish Tunisians, encompassing 0.8% to the overall Tunisian mtDNA pool. In addition, no HVS-I variation was observed in non-Jewish Tunisians, while such variation was clearly observed in Jews, suggesting the possibility of gene flow into the host population from Jews."
Martin Richards's study, 2013
Marta D. Costa, Joana B. Pereira, Maria Pala, Verónica Fernandes, Anna Olivieri, Alessandro Achilli, Ugo A. Perego, Sergei Rychkov, Oksana Naumova, Jiři Hatina, Scott R. Woodward, Ken Khong Eng, Vincent Macaulay, Martin Carr, Pedro Soares, Luísa Pereira, and Martin B. Richards. "A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages." Nature Communications 4 (October 8, 2013): article number 2543. The researchers sequenced 74 mitochondrial genomes and looked at the mitochondrial genomes of over 3,500 individuals of various ethnic groups from Europe, the Caucasus, and Western Asia. The specific Ashkenazi mtDNA origin frequencies are stated to be 81% European, 8.3% Near Eastern, 1.1% Asian (not including Western Asia), and 9.9% Unassigned. The Supplementary Figures document's written analysis says there's "very little case to be made for any assimilation into Ashkenazi communities" from peoples of the North Caucasus and Chuvashia. Figure 10 details the frequencies they found for European-specific mtDNA lineages in Ashkenazim: 20.5% H, 4.1% HV0, 1.3% I, 6.3% J, 31.8% K, 0.7% M1, 9.2% N1b, 3% T, 0.2% U, 2% U5, and 1.6% W. They didn't find haplogroups K, N1b, H, or J among Samaritans but did find they have "several [haplogroups] that are in fact closely related to minor Ashkenazi lineages of putative Near Eastern origin (U6a, R0a)." Excerpts from the Abstract:
"[...] Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe. [...]"
Excerpts from the body of the article:
"If we allow for the possibility that K1a9 and N1b2 might have a Near Eastern source, then we can estimate the overall fraction of European maternal ancestry at ~65%. Given the strength of the case for even these founders having a European source, however, our best estimate is to assign ~81% of Ashkenazi lineages to a European source, ~8% to the Near East and ~1% further to the east in Asia, with ~10% remaining ambiguous [...]. Thus at least two-thirds and most likely more than four-fifths of Ashkenazi maternal lineages have a European ancestry."
Martin Richards. "New information is discovered about the ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews." Press release released October 8, 2013. Excerpts:
"[...] Y-chromosome studies have shown that the male line of [Ashkenazi] descent does indeed seem to trace back to the Middle East. But the female line, which can be illuminated by studies of mitochondrial DNA has until now proved more difficult to interpret. [...] We have settled this issue by looking at large numbers of whole mitochondrial genomes - sequencing the full 16,568 bases of the molecule - in many people from across Europe, the Caucasus and the Middle East. We have found that, in the vast majority of cases, Ashkenazi lineages are most closely related to southern and western European lineages - and that these lineages have been present in Europe for many thousands of years. This means that, even though Jewish men may indeed have migrated into Europe from Palestine around 2000 years ago, they brought few or no wives with them. They seem to have married with European women, firstly along the Mediterranean, especially in Italy, and later (but probably to a lesser extent) in western and central Europe. This suggests that, in the early years of the Diaspora, Judaism took in many converts from amongst the European population, but they were mainly recruited from amongst women. [...]"
Nicholas Wade. "Genes Suggest European Women at Root of Ashkenazi Family Tree." The New York Times (October 9, 2013). Excerpts:
"A new genetic analysis [...] establishes that the women who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Europe were not from the Near East, as previously supposed, and reinforces the idea that many Jewish communities outside Israel were founded by single men who married and converted local women. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, is based on a genetic analysis of maternal lineages. A team led by Martin B. Richards of the University of Huddersfield in England took a fresh look at Ashkenazi lineages by decoding the entire mitochondrial genomes of people from Europe and the Near East. [...] With the entire mitochondrial genome in hand, Dr. Richards could draw up family trees with a much finer resolution than before. His trees show that the four major Ashkenazi [maternal-line] lineages in fact form clusters within descent lines that were established in Europe some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. The same is true of most of the minor lineages. [...] Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent from the Near East, with the rest uncertain, the researchers estimate. Dr. Richards estimates that the four major lineages became incorporated into the Ashkenazi community at least 2,000 years ago. A large Jewish community flourished in Rome at this time and included many converts. This community could have been the source of both the Ashkenazim of Europe and the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal, given that the two groups have considerable genetic commonality, Dr. Richards said."
Jon Entine. "Ashkenazi Jewish Women Descended Mostly from Italian Converts, New Study Asserts." Genetic Literacy Project (October 8, 2013). Excerpts:
"[...] Professor Martin Richards, who heads the University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group (and who participated in the 2002 study), and colleagues sequenced 74 mitochondrial genomes and analyzed more than 3,500 mitochondrial genomes - far more data than the 2006 survey, which reviewed only a short length of the mitochondrial DNA, containing just 1,000 or so of its 16,600 DNA units, in all their subjects. [...] According to Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, Doron Behar, one of the key authors of the 2006 analysis, said he disagreed with the conclusions, but has provided no detailed critique as yet. Wade also talked to David Goldstein, who said he believed the estimate that 80 percent of Ashkenazi Jewry originated in Europe was too high considering the unpredictability of mitochondrial DNA data. [...]"
Kate Yandell. "Genetic Roots of the Ashkenazi Jews." The Scientist Magazine (October 8, 2013). Excerpts:
"[...] 'While it is clear that Ashkenazi maternal ancestry includes both Levantine [Near Eastern] and European origins--the assignment of several of the major Ashkenazi lineages to pre-historic European origin in the current study is incorrect in our view,' physician-geneticists Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki [...] wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist. They argue that the mitochondrial DNA data used in the new study did not represent the full spectrum of mitochondrial diversity. [...] David Goldstein, [...] said that the questions of whether there was a Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi Jews' lineage, or exactly what percentage of mitochondrial variants emanate from Europe, cannot be answered with certainty using present genetic and geographical data. Even if a set of variants are present in a specific region today, that doesn't mean that the region always had that set of variants. Some variants could have been lost due to drift, or perhaps migration altered the balance of variants present in the population. [...]"
Eva Fernández, Alejandro Pérez-Pérez, Cristina Gamba, Eva Prats, Pedro Cuesta, Josep Anfruns, Miquel Molist, Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo, and Daniel Turbón. "Ancient DNA Analysis of 8000 B.C. Near Eastern Farmers Supports an Early Neolithic Pioneer Maritime Colonization of Mainland Europe through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands." PLoS Genetics 10:6 (June 5, 2014): e1004401. Some ancient skeletons from the "Pre-Pottery Neolithic B" ("PPNB") sites at Tell Halula and Tell Ramad in what's now Syria had the "K" mtDNA haplogroup. This PPNB population genetically clusters with the modern-day Ashkenazi Jews, Csángó people, and the population of Cyprus, who all have high frequencies of "K". (Modern Syrians are in a different cluster.) The evidence weighs against Costa et al.'s interpretation that the "K" haplogroups that Ashkenazim possess reflect European ancestors rather than Middle Eastern ones. Fernández et al. wrote:
"Another interesting case are the Ashkenazi Jews, who display a frequency of haplogroup K similar to the PPNB sample together with low non-significant pairwise Fst values, which taken together suggests an ancient Near Eastern origin. This observation clearly contradicts the results of a recent study, where a detailed phylogeographical analysis of mtDNA lineages has suggested a predominantly European origin for the Ashkenazi communities [Costa et al.] [...] Moreover, in the light of the evidence presented here of a loss of lineages in the Near East since Neolithic times, the absence of Ashkenazi mtDNA founder clades in the Near East should not be taken as a definitive argument for its absence in the past."
Miscellaneous studies
"[...] For the analysis of the AJ, we included surrogate Middle Eastern, Italian, French, Russian, and Caucasus subgroups to represent the ancestral populations. [...] For the AJ, we estimated mean ancestral proportions of 0.380, 0.305, 0.113, 0.041 and 0.148 for Middle Eastern, Italian, French, Russian and Caucasus ancestry, respectively. [...] We also noted considerably less variation in the individual admixture proportions for the AJ (s.d. = .02 to .05) compared to the AA [African American] (s.d. = .15), consistent with an older age of admixture for the former. [...]"
Shai Carmi, Ethan Kochav, Ken Y. Hui, Xinmin Liu, James Xue, Fillan Grady, Saurav Guha, Kinnari Upadhyay, Semanti Mukherjee, B. Monica Bowen, Joseph Vijai, Ariel Darvasi, Kenneth Offit, Laurie J. Ozelius, Inga Peter, Judy H. Cho, Harry Ostrer, Gil Atzmon, Lorraine N. Clark, Todd Lencz, and Itsik Pe'er. "The Ashkenazi Jewish Genome." A paper presented at the annual meeting of The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in October 22-26, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. The researchers sequenced 128 complete genomes from Ashkenazi Jews. From their results they estimate that about 55 percent plus or minus 2 percentage points of Ashkenazi ancestry derives from European peoples.
Shai Carmi, Ken Y. Hui, Ethan Kochav, Xinmin Liu, James Xue, Fillan Grady, Saurav Guha, Kinnari Upadhyay, Dan Ben-Avraham, Semanti Mukherjee, B. Monica Bowen, Tinu Thomas, Joseph Vijai, Marc Cruts, Guy Froyen, Diether Lambrechts, Stéphane Plaisance, Christine Van Broeckhoven, Philip Van Damme, Herwig Van Marck, Nir Barzilai, Ariel Darvasi, Kenneth Offit, Susan Bressman, Laurie J. Ozelius, Inga Peter, Judy H. Cho, Harry Ostrer, Gil Atzmon, Lorraine N. Clark, Todd Lencz, and Itsik Pe'er. "Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins." Nature Communications 5 (September 9, 2014): article number 4835. The complete genomes of 128 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals were examined. Based on their analysis, the authors estimate that Ashkenazi Jews are about 46-50% of European origin, sharing ancestry with Western Europeans like the Flemish, who were also sampled in this study. The authors state that the other contributing population to Ashkenazic genetics are Middle Easterners. Their model suggests the present Ashkenazic population was founded after a bottleneck that occurred 25 to 32 generations ago, that is about "600-800 years" ago. The Ashkenazim have higher heterozygosity than non-Jewish Europeans yet descend from "a recent bottleneck of merely ~350 individuals." Page 63 of their"Supplementary Information" under "Reasons for increased heterozygosity" asserts "Additionally, AJ genomes were shown to have ~3% West-African ancestry." This is highly questionable as the authors cite not their own data to support this claim, but rather the methodologically-flawed study "The history of African gene flow into Southern Europeans, Levantines, and Jews" by Moorjani et al. that appeared inPLoS Genetics 7 in 2011. Most other admixture tests have shown zero or at most 0.1% Sub-Saharan West African/Negroid) ancestry in Ashkenazi individuals, and only tiny amounts of East African as well. Neither the Supplementary Information provided by Carmi et al. nor their main article discuss the evidence for small amounts of East Asian and Slavic ancestry in Eastern Ashkenazi Jews. Excerpt from the Abstract:
[...] Modelling of ancient histories for AJ and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines AJ to be an even admixture of European and likely Middle Eastern origins. [...]
Karen Kaplan. "DNA ties Ashkenazi Jews to group of just 330 people from Middle Ages." Los Angeles Times (September 9, 2014). Excerpts:
"[...] An international team of scientists sequenced the complete genomes of 128 healthy Ashkenazi Jews and compared each of those sequences with the others, as well as with with the DNA of 26 Flemish people from Belgium. [...] Despite their close ties with Europe, no more than half of their DNA comes from ancient Europeans, the researchers found. Only 46% to 50% of the DNA in the 128 samples originated with the group of people who were also the ancestors of the Flemish people in the study. Those ancient people split off from the ancestors of today's Middle Easterners more than 20,000 years ago, with a founding group of about 3,500 to 3,900 people, according to the study. The rest of the Ashkenazi genome comes from the Middle East, the researchers reported. [...]"
Jesse Emspak. "Oy Vey! European Jews Are All 30th Cousins, Study Finds." LiveScience (September 9, 2014). Excerpts:
"[...] The findings bolster the mainstream view that the ancestors of European Jews were people from the Levant and local Europeans. An earlier, 19th-century theory posited that the core of the Ashkenazi Jewish population is descended from Khazars, from the Russian steppes, but the genetic evidence makes that even less likely, said study researcher Itsik Pe'er, [...] '[Among Ashkenazi Jews] everyone is a 30th cousin,' Pe'er said. 'They have a stretch of the genome that is identical.' [...]"
"Discerning the Ancestry of European Americans in Genetic Association Studies." Public Library of Science Genetics (PLoS Genetics) (January 2008). Sampled Southern Italians (Sicilians as well as those on the mainland), and other Europeans.
"Important work has already shown that northwest and southeast Europeans can be distinguished using as few as 800-1,200 ancestry-informative markers mined from datasets of 6,000-10,000 markers. Here we mine much larger datasets (more markers and more samples) to identify a panel of 300 highly ancestry-informative markers which accurately distinguish not just northwest and southeast European, but also Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. [...] Our results are consistent with a previous study in which Ashkenazi Jewish and southeast European samples occupied similar positions on the northwest-southeast axis, although there was insufficient data in that study to separate these two populations[7]. A historical interpretation of this finding is that both Ashkenazi Jewish and southeast European ancestries are derived from migrations/expansions from the Middle East and subsequent admixture with existing European populations [12,13]."
"The current study extends the analysis of European population genetic structure to include additional southern European groups and Arab populations. Even within Italy, the relative position of northern Italians compared with subjects from Tuscany is consistent with the general geographic correspondence of PCA results. Interestingly, the majority of Italian Americans (NYCP four grandparents defined) appear to derive from southern Italy and overlap with subjects of Greek heritage. Both of these observations are consistent with previous historical information. Possible exceptions to this observation of geographic correspondence include the Ashkenazi Jewish population. While the Ashkenazi are clearly of southern origin based on both PCA and STRUCTURE studies, in our analyses of diverse European populations, this group appears to have a unique genotypic pattern that may not reflect geographic origins."
"European population genetic substructure was examined in a diverse set of >1,000 individuals of European descent, each genotyped with >300 K SNPs. Both STRUCTURE and principal component analyses (PCA) showed the largest division/principal component (PC) differentiated northern from southern European ancestry. A second PC further separated Italian, Spanish, and Greek individuals from those of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry as well as distinguishing among northern European populations. In separate analyses of northern European participants other substructure relationships were discerned showing a west to east gradient."
Michael F. Seldin, Russell Shigeta, Pablo Villoslada, Carlo Selmi, Jaakko Tuomilehto, Gabriel Silva, John W. Belmont, Lars Klareskog, and Peter K. Gregersen. "European Population Substructure: Clustering of Northern and Southern Populations." Public Library of Science Genetics (PLoS Genetics) 2(9) (September 2006). Abstract:
Using a genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panel, we observed population structure in a diverse group of Europeans and European Americans. Under a variety of conditions and tests, there is a consistent and reproducible distinction between "northern" and "southern" European population groups: most individual participants with southern European ancestry (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek) have >85% membership in the "southern" population; and most northern, western, eastern, and central Europeans have >90% in the "northern" population group.Ashkenazi Jewish as well as Sephardic Jewish origin also showed >85% membership in the "southern" population, consistent with a later Mediterranean origin of these ethnic groups.
"One Big, Happy Family: Litvaks and Galitzianers, Lay Down Your Arms; Science Finds Unity in the Jewish Gene Pool."
"... A year ago, Michael Seldin, a geneticist at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, and his research team made a remarkable discovery: Studying how Europeans grouped genetically, they found that Ashkenazic Jews formed their own distinct subgroup. Northern and Southern Europeans fell into two clearly separable genetic cohorts, and although the Ashkenazic Jews had more in common with the Southern Europeans, they formed a recognizable, relatively homogenous group of their own. ... Through a series of collaborations with labs around the world, Seldin and his lab began exploring something called 'ancestry informative markers,' specific areas of a person's genetic code that reveal which part of the globe most of his ancestors came from. The study on those of European ancestry, which looked at both Europeans and European Americans, was also an international collaboration. In September 2006, it was published in the Public Library of Science Genetics journal. Since then, Seldin said, he has pursued a second study of an even larger sample of the genetic code, and his original findings for Ashkenazic Jews have only been confirmed. Seldin's work is emblematic of a rapidly expanding phenomenon within genetics: research of the genetic roots of diseases that end up revealing something about the history of a particular population."
"We also included Palestinian (n = 46), Druze (n = 42) and Bedouin (n = 45) samples as groups that might be similar to ancestral Jewish 'source' populations [10]. We found that the Middle Eastern populations clustered separately from the European and European-American populations, as expected, and the subjects with four Jewish grandparents clustered close to (but separate from) the Adygei and lay between the Middle Eastern and the European and European-American populations (Figure 3). This is an important finding for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Jewish subjects remain in a separate cluster when mixed with both European and Middle Eastern populations... Secondly, the Jewish cluster lies approximately midway between the European and the Middle Eastern clusters, implying that the Ashkenazi Jews may contain mixed ancestry from these two regions. This is consistent with the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA genetic evidence that has been interpreted by some to suggest a stronger paternal genetic heritage of Jewish populations from the Middle East and stronger maternal genetic heritage from the host populations of the Diaspora [10]. Finally, the proximity of the Jewish cluster to the Adygei is of interest, but the small sample size of the Adygei and sparse availability of Central Asian populations makes interpretation of this proximity difficult."
"Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture." Participants in this study about the Levant region of West Asia included Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Palestinians, Lebanese Christians, Lebanese Druze, Lebanese Muslims, Syrians, Jordanians, Bedouins, Cypriots, Armenians, Saudis, Yemenis, Iranians, and multiple European, East/South/Central Asian, and African populations. Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardi Jews were found to be closely related to each other and more closely related to Lebanese than Palestinians are. Excerpts:
"[...] The population tree (Figure 3A) splits Levantine populations in two branches: one leading to Europeans and Central Asians that includes Lebanese, Armenians, Cypriots, Druze and Jews, as well as Turks, Iranians and Caucasian populations; and a second branch composed of Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, as well as North Africans, Ethiopians, Saudis, and Bedouins. [...] The tree shows a correlation between religion and the population structures in the Levant: all Jews (Sephardi and Ashkenazi) cluster in one branch; Druze from Mount Lebanon and Druze from Mount Carmel are depicted on a private branch; and Lebanese Christians form a private branch with the Christian populations of Armenia and Cyprus placing the Lebanese Muslims as an outer group. The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen. [...] [Also,] an MDS (Figure 2) and a normalized principle component analysis (PCA) (Figure S2) plots [...] were built. [...] The plots reveal a Levantine structure not reported previously: Lebanese Christians and all Druze cluster together, and Lebanese Muslims are extended towards Syrians, Palestinians, and Jordanians, which are close to Saudis and Bedouins. Ashkenazi Jews are drawn towards the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, reflecting historical admixture events with Europeans, while Sephardi Jews cluster tightly with the Levantine groups. These results are consistent with previous studies reporting higher European genome-wide admixture in Ashkenazi Jews compared with other Jews [...]"
Doron M. Behar, Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, Antonio Amorim, Lluís Quintana-Murci, Kari Majamaa, Corinna Herrnstadt, Neil Howell, Oleg Balanovsky, Ildus A. Kutuev, Andrey Pshenichnov, David Gurwitz, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, Antonio Torroni, Richard Villems, and Karl Skorecki. "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event." American Journal of Human Genetics 78 (2006): 487-497. Abstract:
"Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium."
"...four Jewish "founding mothers" who lived in Europe 1,000 years ago have been credited with being the ancestors of nearly half of all Ashkenazi Jews... ...40 percent of Ashkenazi Jews currently alive - are descended from these matriarchs, who were among a small group, probably after migrating from the Middle East, according to the Israeli researchers, who also provide evidence of shared maternal ancestry between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi (Sephardi and Oriental) Jews. The studies that led to these findings were performed by Dr. Doron Behar as part of his doctoral thesis, and were done under the supervision of Prof. Karl Skorecki of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. ... Researchers from universities in Italy, Estonia, Portugal, France, the US and Russia contributed to the important study, which was published on-line by the prestigious American Journal of Human Genetics on Thursday and will appear in print in the March. ... The researchers' conclusions are based on detailed comparative analysis of DNA sequence variation in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) region of the human genome. ... Non-Ashkenazi Jews also carry low frequencies of these distinct mtDNA types, thus providing evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews. This is consistent with previous findings based on studies of the Y-chromosome, pointing to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of global Jewish populations, originating in the Middle East. The researchers concluded that the four founding mtDNA - likely of Middle Eastern origin - underwent a major overall expansion in Europe during the last millennium."
"Until now, it had been widely assumed by geneticists that the Ashkenazi communities of Northern and Central Europe were founded by men who came from the Middle East, perhaps as traders, and by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism. But the new study, published online this week in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that the men and their wives migrated to Europe together. The researchers, Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, and colleagues elsewhere, report that just four women, who may have lived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, are the ancestors of 40 percent of Ashkenazis alive today. The Technion team's analysis was based on mitochondrial DNA... inherited only through the female line. ... Looking at other populations, the Technion team found that some people in Egypt, Arabia and the Levant also carried the set of mutations that defines one of the four women. They argue that all four probably lived originally in the Middle East. ... David Goldstein, now of Duke University, reported in 2002 that the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world did not seem to be Middle Eastern, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. But in some cases the mitochondrial DNA was closely related to that of the host community. Dr. Goldstein and his colleagues suggested that the genesis of each Jewish community, including the Ashkenazis, was that Jewish men had arrived from the Middle East, taken wives from the host population and converted them to Judaism, after which there was no further intermarriage with non-Jews. The Technion team suggests a different origin for the Ashkenazi community: if the women too are Middle Eastern in origin, they would presumably have accompanied their husbands. ... Dr. Hammer said the new study "moves us forward in trying to understand Jewish population history." His own recent research, he said, suggests that the Ashkenazi population expanded through a series of bottlenecks - events that squeeze a population down to small numbers... But Dr. Goldstein said the new report did not alter his previous conclusion. The mitochondrial DNA's of a small, isolated population tend to change rapidly as some lineages fall extinct and others become more common, a process known as genetic drift. In his view, the Technion team has confirmed that genetic drift has played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA. But the linkage with Middle Eastern populations is not statistically significant, he said. Because of genetic drift, Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA's have developed their own pattern, which makes it very hard to tell their source. This differs from the patrilineal case, Dr. Goldstein said, where there is no question of a Middle Eastern origin."
"Study finds why Jewish mothers are so important."
"Four Jewish mothers who lived 1,000 years ago in Europe are the ancestors of 40 percent of all Ashkenazi Jews alive Friday, an international team of researchers reported Friday. The genetic study of DNA paints a vivid picture of human evolution and survival, and correlates with the well-established written and oral histories of Jewish migrations, said Dr. Doron Behar of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who worked on the study. ... For their study, Behar and geneticist Karl Skorecki, with collaborators in Finland, France, Estonia, Finland, Portugal, Russia and the United States sampled DNA from 11,452 people from 67 populations. ... "I think there was some kind of genetic pool that was in the Near East," Behar said in a telephone interview. "Among this genetic pool there were four maternal lineages, four real women, that carried the exact specific mitochondrial DNA markers that we can find in mitochondrial DNA today." They, or their direct descendants, moved into Europe. "Then at a certain period, most probably in the 13th century, simply by demographic matters, they started to expand dramatically," Behar said. "Maybe it was because of Jewish tradition, the structure of the family that might have been characterized by a high number of children." But these four families gave rise to much of the population of European Jews - which exploded from 30,000 people in the 13th century to "something like 9 million just prior to World War II," Behar said. ... Behar said as they sampled people from Ashkenazi communities around the world, the same mitochondrial genetic markers kept popping up. They did not find the markers in most of the non-Jewish people they sampled, and only a very few were shared with Jews of other origin."
"The Ashkenazis moved from the Mid-East to Italy and then to Eastern Europe, where their population exploded in the 13th Century, the scientists say. ... The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago but they may not have lived anywhere near [an]other, according to the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. However, they bequeathed genetic signatures to their descendents, which do not appear in non-Jews and are rare in Jews not of Ashkenazi origin."
"Early studies of mitochondrial DNA reported that Jewish women, unlike Jewish men, did not correlate well with one another globally. ...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. ... In the absence of rabbis to perform conversions, they [Jewish immigrants to new lands] married local women who, while consenting to live as Jews, were not halakhically Jewish. ... In a class by itself is the mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi women. It does not correlate closely with the DNA of non-Jewish women in Western, Central, or Eastern Europe and it has a large Middle Eastern component. ...the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi Jews have more in common with those of Italians and Greeks than with those of West Europeans. ... An 11.5-percent incidence of R-M117 among Ashkenazi Jews in general is easily explainable: the mutation could have entered the Jewish gene pool slowly, in small increments in every generation, during the thousand years of Ashkenazi Jewry's existence. ... But the 52-percent rate among Levites is something else. Here we are dealing not with a gradual, long-term process (for no imaginable process could have produced such results), but with a one-time event of some sort. ... Both of our studies, therefore, raise the possibility that the original R-M117 Levites were Khazarian Jews who migrated westward upon the fall of the Khazar kingdom. ... Analyzing the data, the American-Israeli-British study concludes that the number of R-M117 Levites absorbed by Ashkenazi Jewry ranged from one to fifty individuals. ... Nor do we know the percentage of Khazars possessing M117, which is found in 12 or 13 percent of Russian and Ukrainian males today. If these were also its proportions among the Khazars, there would have been seven non-M117 Khazars joining or founding Ashkenazi Jewry for every Khazar who had the mutation. In sum, even if the R-M117 Levites are traceable to Khazaria, the total flow of Khazarians into the East European Jewish population could have been anywhere from a single person to many thousands. If it was the latter, the Khazar input was significant, as David Goldstein suspects it was; if the former, it was trivial, as Jon Entine believes. ... I myself have long suspected, starting far before I knew anything of historical genetics or Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, that I have Khazar blood in me. One of my father's sisters had distinctly slanty eyes. In one of her daughters, these are even more pronounced. The daughter's daughter has features that could come straight from the steppes of Asia."
"... We have learned that Jewish populations from around the world -- with a few exceptions -- have a remarkable degree of genetic connectedness with each other and with the Near East. ... But many unknowns about Jewish history remain, leaving geneticists with an interest in Jewish origins with plenty of sleuthing work to do. ... A recent study looking at hundreds of thousands of variable sites in the genome revealed a clear genetic signature for Jewish ancestry among randomly selected university students in America. When this Jewish signature was compared with the genetic makeup of other populations, it became clear that Ashkenazic Jews have a genetic makeup more similar to Near Eastern populations than do other Northern European populations. Yet despite sharing an origin point in the Near East, individual Jews today tend to look markedly different from one another in terms of their physical appearance, depending upon which part of the world their ancestors resided in during recent centuries. Clearly, this diversity of physical appearance is the result of a degree of intermingling with the populations among which Jews have lived. But we don't know precisely when or how this intermingling took place. Did large numbers of gentiles join the Jewish population through mass conversion in the ancient world? Was there a steady trickle of intermarriage? Was there some combination of these? ... One hint we do have is that research shows -- in multiple Jewish groups from Ashkenazic Jews to Georgian Jews -- more genetic continuity with Near Eastern populations on the paternal side (indicated by the Y chromosome) than on the maternal side (indicated by mitochondrial DNA). ... And findings by genetic researchers of significant Near Eastern ancestry among Ashkenazic Jews put to rest the notion that this population originated with or is predominantly descended from the Khazars. Be that as it may, there is one odd and tantalizing feature of Ashkenazic Jewish Y chromosomes that may lead us back to Khazaria. ... There is no Y chromosome link that unites Ashkenazic and Sephardic Levites. Among the Ashkenazic Levites, however, there is a particularly common Y chromosome type that is not often found in other Jewish groups. But it is found among people who now live where the Khazars once did. ... One way to answer this question might be to try to develop a fuller picture of the genetics of the Turkic-speaking peoples, particularly modern-day speakers of Chuvash, a Turkic language related to that spoken by the Khazars. Then we could compare their genes to the Ashkenazic genes we suspect may be of Khazar origin."
An observer who read the study indicates that the study shows that approximately 60 percent of European Jewish maternal roots come from European sources, with the other 40 percent from Middle Eastern or Asian roots.
"The Caucasus as an asymmetric semipermeable barrier to ancient human migrations." Molecular Biology and Evolution For future print publication. First published online on September 13, 2011. Among many other peoples of the Caucasus, 10 Mountain Jews were sampled to evaluate their haplogroups. These Mountain Jews' Y-DNA haplogroups were as follows: 3 belonged to haplogroup J1e*, 4 to J2a*, 1 to J2a2*, and 2 to L2. These haplogroups suggest overwhelmingly Near Eastern ancestry for the Mountain Jews' paternal lineages (represented by the J haplogroups) and a smaller South Asian element (represented by the L haplogroup).
"Y Chromosome Haplotypes Among Members of the Caucasus Jewish Communities."
"...buccal swab genomic DNA samples were collected from 51 unrelated males from the Mountain Jewish community and from 55 unrelated males from the Georgian Jewish community... Corresponding haplotype frequencies in other Jewish communities and among neighboring non-Jewish populations were derived from the literature. Based on a variety of genetic distance and admixture measures we found that majority of Kavkazi Jewish haplotypes were shared with other Jewish communities and were consistent with a Mediterranean origin. This result strengthens previous reports, which indicated a shared ancestral pool of genetic haplotypes for most contemporary Jewish communities. In the case of the Georgian Jewish samples, both Mediterranean and European haplotypes were found. This could indicate either a Mediterranean origin with a European genetic contribution or a European source with a Mediterranean contribution. Generally, Georgian Jews were found to be closer to European populations than to Mediterranean populations. Despite their geographic proximity, there was a significant genetic distance between the Mountain and Georgian Jewish communities, at least based on Y-haplotype analysis..."
Stefania Bertoncini, Kazima Bulayeva, Gianmarco Ferri, Luca Pagani, Laura Caciagli, Luca Taglioli, Igor Semyonov, Oleg Bulayev, Giorgio Paoli, and Sergio Tofanelli. "The Dual Origin of Tati-Speakers from Dagestan as Written in the Genealogy of Uniparental Variants." American Journal of Human Biology 24:4 (July/August 2012): pages 391-399. First published online on January 24, 2012. They genetically tested the Y-DNA and mtDNA of two Tat-speaking peoples who live in Daghestan in southern Russia: the Mountain Jews (also called Juhurim) and Muslim Tats. The two communities speak different dialects of the Tat language. The genetics of the Jewish and Muslim Tat speakers were found to be quite different, with the authors saying that they "do not reflect a common ancestry." The Mountain Jews were shown to be "a group with tight matrilineal genetic legacy who separated early from other Jewish communities." In the section "Analysis of paternal lineages", the authors indicate that the dominant Y-DNA haplogroup in Mountain Jews is G-M201 (3M285, P15, and M287), representing 36.8% of their total paternal lineages. The Mountain Jews' branch of G doesn't match the G sublineages of "two major Caucasian linguistic domains" nor does their branch cluster with the G STR Y-DNA haplotypes of Ashkenazim that were reported in Behar et al. 2004 and Hammer et al. 2009. The researchers were surprised that the Mountain Jews' kinds of G "can be separated into at least two divergent clades falling many mutational steps away from any G haplotype ever published before [...] One of these clades is defined by a very peculiar incomplete allele, DYS448*17.4, most likely the results of a deletion external to the repeat units." They also make this observation: "In the MJ [Mountain Jews], the highest level of haplotype sharing (lowest DHS values at the nine-locus level of analysis) was observed with autochthonous groups from Dagestan (Tabasarans, Kubachians, and Laks) and the Jews from Afghanistan". The Y-DNA haplogroup that Mountain Jews share with Tabasarans, called J1*-M267, isn't the same haplogroup that's shared between Muslim Tats and Tabarasans; the two lineages are not even close.
"Studies Show Jews' Genetic Similarity".
"Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources... Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with most of the rest from the Middle East, the two surveys find. The two communities seem very similar to each other genetically... One explanation is that they come from the same Jewish source population in Europe. The Atzmon-Ostrer team found that the genomic signature of Ashkenazim and Sephardim was very similar to that of Italian Jews, suggesting that an ancient population in northern Italy of Jews intermarried with Italians could have been the common origin. The Ashkenazim first appear in Northern Europe around A.D. 800, but historians suspect that they arrived there from Italy. ... The genetics confirms a trend noticed by historians: that there was more contact between Ashkenazim and Sephardim than suspected, with Italy as the linchpin of interchange, said Aron Rodrigue, a Stanford University historian. A common surname among Italian Jews is Morpurgo, meaning someone from Marburg in Germany. Also, Dr. Rodrigue said, one of the most common names among the Sephardim who settled in the Ottoman Empire is Eskenazi, indicating that many Ashkenazim had joined the Sephardic community there. The two genetic surveys indicate 'that there may be common origins shared by the two groups, but also that there were extensive contacts and settlements,' Dr. Rodrigue said."
"'The debate is over,' said Dr. Edward R. Burns, one of the lead authors of the study. 'The Jewish people are one people with a common genetic thread that evolved in the second or third century BC.' The study, 'Abraham's Children in the Genome Era,' compared the genetic analyses of 237 Jews, including Sephardic (Middle Eastern) and Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews - as well as an analysis of 418 non-Jews worldwide, and found that the Jews were more closely related to each other than to their fellow countrymen. Past studies have reached similar conclusions, but they looked at smaller populations and considered only blood groups, mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA passed down by mothers) or Y chromosomes (passed down by fathers). ... The study - and a second genetic study published Friday in the journal Nature - scientifically undermines arguments made by those who challenge Jews' historical relationship to Israel... 'It seems that most Jewish populations, and therefore most Jewish individuals, are closer to each other [at the genetic level], and closer to the Middle Eastern populations, than to their traditional host population in the Diaspora,' Israeli geneticist Doron Behar, author of the Nature study, told the BBC. ... That the new data also seemed to follow the Jews' historical and Biblical narrative was particularly exciting to Burns, who is Jewish. 'I, along with my co-authors, went to these different populations, Iraqis, Iranians, etc. We talked to these people, and they had a certain hopefulness that the genetic analysis would establish for them a type of universal Jewish pride,' he said. 'My own personal feeling is that (among Jews) differences in culture and geography become meaningless because we're all sisters and brothers.' ... 'My sister-in-law is Filipino. She practices Judaism - which is more than I do - but I can't call her a fellow Jew in that same sense,' said Sandy Malek, president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles... 'There is a peoplehood for Jewish people that is separate from the religion.' While the new research says much about Jews, it doesn't have any bearing on Judaism, said David Wolpe, the rabbi, who explained that he is 'not moved' by the effort to scientifically link and define Jews. 'Spiritually this is a pleasant and welcome reinforcement of what I already knew, but the bottom line is Torah trumps genome,' said David Wolpe, the rabbi. The analysis by Burns and his colleagues provides the first detailed genetic map of the major Jewish groups, information that can be used as a kind of dictionary to study the genetic origins of commonly acquired diseases such as cancer and heart disease. This information can benefit not only Jews, but the population as a whole, as researchers use the data better understand possible genetic components of diseases, researchers said. The study could also yield valuable information for a host of conditions already thought to have a genetic component, from near-sightedness to breast cancer - just don't call any of those diseases 'Jewish.' Even the host of ailments that are considered 'Jewish genetic diseases,' including Tay-Sachs Disease and Bloom's Disease, occur in the general population, said Paul Wolpe, the bioethicist, who is also on the board of the Victor Centers for Jewish Genetic Diseases."
"Is Being Jewish All in the Genes?"
"The studies of the past several years have provided fascinating insights into Jewish history, but they've hardly closed the book on the question of modern Jews' ancestry. Right now, two separate research groups are taking a more in-depth look at the origins and migration patterns of Eastern European Jews. Michael Hammer and Harry Ostrer are leading one study; Dr. Vivian Moses and Dr. Neil || Bradman are conducting the other at the Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College-London. Vivian Moses suggests that the results of his study might diverge somewhat from what Hammer and his colleagues presented last June. 'I think perhaps we are using more DNA markers than they did,' he says, 'and therefore the results might not be exactly the same. We already have some preliminary indications of a link between [Eastern European Jews and] Slavs.'"
"My Blood Brother in Samarkand". Nathaniel Pearson, a scientist who has studied at Stanford University and the University of Chicago, conducted research on genetics as part of the Human Genome Project. He traveled to Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East collecting genetic data using blood samples and cheek swabs. Some of his test subjects were North Caucasians, Turks, and Sino-Tibetans. (However, it needs to be noted that the haplotype Pearson describes has also been found among Moroccan Jews, and thus not only among Jews, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Indians. So the origin of the haplotype remains mysterious.)
"As population geneticists, Spencer Wells and I were working with Stanford emeritus professor Luca Cavalli-Sforza and others to study DNA variation among different groups... Our expedition eventually took us through the forests, steppes and deserts between the Black Sea and Central Asia's Altai Mountains. We collected hundreds of samples from people whose ancestors included nomads, farmers, sultans and serfs and whose genetic makeup had been shaped for millennia by waves of conquest and trade in this region of the Silk Road... [O]ur expedition rolled into the old oasis city of Samarkand... Back at Stanford, my labmates and I had compared hundreds of DNA samples from men around the world, focusing on about a dozen sites along the Y chromosome... Out of curiosity, I submitted my own sample to the database -- and discovered that I matched with four other donors. One was a Turkic-speaking man in western Uzbekistan, two lived in New Delhi, and one was a Tajik living in Samarkand... Sharif's Tajiks are Persian-speakers who moved east to Samarkand well before the arrival of Islam there about 1,300 years ago and the heyday of overland trade. They mixed with people already there and, later, with Turkic immigrants and others. My recent ancestors were Ashkenazi Jews in Ukraine; that population likely moved by several routes from the Middle East to Eastern Europe over the past couple of thousand years, mixing with Indo-European and Turkic people along the way. The common influence of Indo-European, Semitic and Turkic ancestry is one clue to how we might share a recent ancestor. That both Jews and Tajiks plied the Silk Road about a thousand years ago is another."
"Afghanistan from a Y-chromosome perspective". An analysis of the Y-chromosomes of 168 Pathan males from Afghanistan.
"Central Asia has served as a corridor for human migrations providing trading routes since ancient times. [...] Our study demonstrates genetic similarities between Pathans from Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are characterized by the predominance of haplogroup R1a1a*-M198 (>50%) and the sharing of the same modal haplotype. Furthermore, the high frequencies of R1a1a-M198 and the presence of G2c-M377 chromosomes in Pathans might represent phylogenetic signals from Khazars, a common link between Pathans and Ashkenazi groups, [...]"
"The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses."
"[...] We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe major difference among Caucasus populations explained by early presence of Judeans in the Southern and Central Caucasus. [...]"
An excerpt from the body of the article:
"Central and Eastern European Jews differ mostly in their Middle Eastern (30% and 25%, respectively) and Eastern European ancestries (3% and 12%, respectively), probably due to late admixture. [...] The close genetic distance between Central European Jews and Southern European populations can be attributed to a late admixture."
"The Origin of Palestinians and Their Generic Relatedness With Other Mediterranean Populations."
"The genetic profile of Palestinians has, for the first time, been studied by using human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variability and haplotypes. The comparison with other Mediterranean populations by using neighbor-joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses reveal that Palestinians are genetically very close to Jews and other Middle East populations, including Turks (Anatolians), Lebanese, Egyptians, Armenians and Iranians. Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian and Anatolian peoples in ancient times..."
"Both Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool (Table 3, Figures 4, 5 and 6) that support a common ancient Canaanite origin.... Jews, Cretans, Egyptians, Iranians, Turks and Armenians are probably the closest relatives to Palestinians..." (p. 897)
Harry Ostrer. "A genetic profile of contemporary Jewish populations." Nature Reviews Genetics 2(11) (November 2001): 891-898. Excerpt:
"Studies of Y-chromosal markers have provided an opportunity to assess gene flow into Jewish populations from non-Jewish males. Contemporary Jews and Middle Eastern Arabs have 13 common Y-chromosomal haplotypes that are shared both within and across groups, indicating that the original Jews might have arisen from local peoples [Canaanites, Sumerians, etc.] and are not the offspring of a single patriarch [Abraham]. The most common Y-chromosomal haplotypes are thought to be of Middle Eastern and North African origin, and the less common haplotypes of Asian origin, indicating that gene flow had a role in the formation of the Jewish people."
Carole Oddoux, Encarnacion Guillen-Navarro, C. M. Clayton, H. Nelson, H. Peretz, U. Seligsohn, L. Luzzatto, M. Nardi, M. Karpatkin, C. DiTivoli, E. DiCave, Felicia Axelrod, and Harry Ostrer. "Genetic Evidence for a Common Origin among Roman Jews and Ashkenazi Jews." American Journal of Human Genetics 61:4 (1997): A207. Abstract excerpts:
"The present Ashkenazi Jewish population is believed to be derived from an initial group of 10,000 founders who moved to Eastern Europe 1000 years ago, possibly from Rome. In order to test the hypothesis that these two populations originated from a common founder population we collected samples from a group of 107 Roman Jews representing 176 unique chromosomes and analyzed them for specific mutations known to be prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews.... The FXI type III mutation has previously been observed exclusively among Ashkenazi Jewish populations suggesting a common origin for the Roman and the Ashkenazi Jews and dating the mutation to between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago."
"Genetic Road May Lead to Rome: Scientists Discover Ties Between Ashkenazim and Roman Jews." Forward (August 29, 1997): v. C1, p. 22.
Steve Sailer. "Q&A: Tracing Jewish history through genes." (UPI, May 15, 2003). Published in that day's edition of The Washington Times. Excerpts:
"From a historical perspective, however, this current era of Jews marrying gentiles is not unique, according to author Jon Entine. While other peoples have come and gone over the millennia, the world Jewish community has survived both through eras of horrific persecution and eras of high rates of intermarriage. ... Entine said: 'Biblical literalists have long contended that Jews are a 'race apart,' citing Deuteronomic Law: 'You shall not intermarry with them (non-Jews).' As a result, some Jewish populations, such as the Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe, are among the more genetically distinct in the world... Under the Roman Empire, the Jewish community in Italy was quite sizable for a time, with lots of flow in and out. During the early Christian period in the Roman Empire, Jewish males who had left the Mideast often took on Gentile wives. Their offspring probably became the core of Ashkenazi Jewry. However, some time around the fall of Rome is when the taboos on intermarriage (imposed by both Jews and Gentiles) became stringent. The real end to Ashkenazi Jewish out-marrying did not come until the Middle Ages as the economic and social position of Jews worsened considerably. This historical trend is reflected in the genetic data, which suggests that the genetic core of modern Ashkenazi Jewry was not formed until this period. The core consisted mostly of Jewish men with Middle Eastern roots marrying a high percentage of local Gentile women, then forming Jewish communities.'"
"In his new book, 'Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,' Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not just skin deep. Jews exhibit, he writes, a distinctive genetic signature. [...] Ostrer bolsters his analysis with volumes of genetic data, [...] threads of Jewish ancestry link the sizable Jewish communities of North America and Europe to Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews who have relocated to Israel, as well as to the black Lemba of southern Africa and to India's Cochin Jews. But, in a twist, the links include neither the Bene Israel of India nor Ethiopian Jews. Genetic tests show that both groups are converts, contradicting their founding myths. [...] About 80% of [the lineages of] Jewish males and 50% of Jewish females trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. The rest entered the 'Jewish gene pool' through conversion or intermarriage. [...]"
One Y-specific DNA polymorphism (p49/Taq I) was studied in 54 Lebanese and 69 Palestinian males, and compared with the results found in 693 Jews from three communities (Oriental, Sephardic, and Ashkenazic). Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic Jews seem to be similar in their Y-haplotype patterns, both with regard to the haplotype distributions and the ancestral haplotype VIII frequencies. The haplotype distribution in Oriental Jews is characterized by a significantly higher frequency of haplotype VIII. These results confirm similarities in the Y-haplotype frequencies in Lebanese, Palestinian, and Sephardic Jewish men, three Near-Eastern populations sharing a common geographic origin.
"DNA samples from Falasha Jews and Ethiopians were studied with the Y-chromosome-specific DNA probe p49a to screen for TaqI restriction polymorphisms and haplotypes. Two haplotypes (V and XI) are the most widespread in Falashas and Ethiopians, representing about 70% of the total number of haplotypes in Ethiopia. Because the Jewish haplotypes VII and VIII are not represented in the Falasha population, we conclude that the Falasha people descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia who converted to Judaism."
A. Amar, O. J. Kwon, U. Motro, C. S. Witt, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, R. Gabison, and C. Brautbar. "Molecular analysis of HLA class II polymorphisms among different ethnic groups in Israel." Human Immunology 60(8) (August 1999): 723-730. This study failed to study Slavic populations, yet the study apparently showed that Israeli Arabs are closer to Sephardic Jews than either group is to Ashkenazi Jews. Excerpts:
"Genetic studies classify the Israeli Jewish population into two major groups: Ashkenazi from Central and Eastern Europe and Sephardic or non Ashkenazi, from the Mediterranean and North Africa... Ethiopian Jews were found to be closer to the Blacks than to any of the Israeli Jewish groups. We have shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common ancestry. A certain degree of admixture with their pre-immigration neighbors exists despite the cultural and religious constraints against intermarriage."
J. Martinez-Laso, E. Gazit, E. Gomez-Casado, P. Morales, N. Martinez-Quiles, M. Alvarez, J. M. Martin-Villa, V. Fernandez, and A. Arnaiz-Villena. "HLA DR and DQ polymorphism in Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews: comparison with other Mediterraneans." Tissue Antigens 47(1) (January 1996): 63-71. Excerpts:
"HLA-DR and DQ alleles have been detected by DNA typing in Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews from Israel. Allele frequencies, characteristic DR/DQ linkage disequilibria, population distances and their corresponding dendrogram by using the Neighbor-Joining method were used to study relatedness between Jewish and other Mediterranean and non Mediterranean populations. Closest relatedness is observed between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews, and, in decreasing order, also with Algerians, Spaniards (including Spanish-Basques), French and Italians. Also, particular characteristic Central European alleles are observed in Ashkenazi Jews and Mediterranean/African alleles in non-Ashkenazi Jews. This is consistent with historical data, Jews being an ancient Mediterranean population, who have had a certain degree of admixture with their 2000-3000 years old neighbors in spite of cultural and religious traditions which have preserved identity outside Israel."
"...the Jews... in Poland... employed local Slavic slaves who aided them in developing their enterprises. The Jews were mostly single men, from Jewish centers in western and southern Europe... As by Jewish law, after seven years they were required to free their slaves, often, the owner, when his female slave continued working with him after her release, proposed that she remain with him as his wife, and undertake the management of the household as an equal partner, all on condition that she convert to Judaism. This could also explain the Slavic cast which often manifests itself on the faces of Jews from this region."
"Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European samples differentiate along the second axis of the multivariate analysis. The Sephardim Jews, the Ashkenazim Jews, the Turks, and the Lebanese samples are genetically located at the intersection of these two linguistic groups, the Ashkenazim samples being somewhat closer to Indo-Europeans.... Although the overall pattern of population differentiation globally appears to be very similar for male- and female-transmitted markers (fig. 3), some populations clearly show different affinities for their maternal and paternal genetic components, as already noticed for Ethiopian Jews, Arab tribal groups in the Sinai Peninsula, Finns, and Basques (as discussed above)."
"Who Are the Jews?"
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". 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. "G6PD deficiency" genetics is common to Ashkenazim, Russians, and Germans. "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".
"India's children of Israel find their roots".
"More than 2,000 years after they first claimed to have set foot in India, the mystery of the world's most obscure Jewish community - the Marathi-speaking Bene Israel - may finally have been solved with genetic carbon-dating revealing they carry the unusual Moses gene that would make them, literally, the original children of Israel. Four years of DNA tests on the 4,000-strong Bene Israel, now mainly based in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Ahmedabad, indicates they are probable descendants of a small group of hereditary Israelite priests or Cohanim, according to new results exclusively made available to the Sunday Times of India.... [Tudor] Parfitt, who initiated and led the research, says this is the first concrete proof that 'exiles from Palestine made it as far as India and managed to maintain Judaism in the sea of Hinduism and Islam'... Aharon Daniel expressed doubt about the new findings. 'Many scientists have claimed to have found Israeli or Cohenim genes in tribes in black Africa and other communities around the world and many here were sceptical about this,' he told STOI.... By studying certain genetic markers on the DNA chain, found only in male descendants of Aaron, Moses' elder brother, who founded the line of Jewish priests, the Bene Israel could well claim to be the purest of the pure."
"The news that recent DNA tests have linked India's Bene Israel Jewish community to the patriarch Moses has delighted the small Jewish community in Thane. For hundreds of years, the Bene Israel (meaning Children of Israel), now largely concentrated in and around Thane had fought Western prejudice that denied them their claim as descendants of one of Israel's 12 lost tribes. Now the Jews of Thane, home to 2,000 or 40 per cent of India's Jewry, can hold their head high among the rest of the Jewish community. '...Now science has proved that we are descendants of the Cohanim or hereditary priests. This will improve our status in the Jewish community,' says Ezra Moses, honorary secretary and trustee of Thane's Shaar Hashamaim or Gate of Heaven synagogue.... '...Now the DNA tests have confirmed our claims,' says Rachel Gadkar, a retired schoolteacher who recently published a book in Marathi called 'Bharatiya Bene Israel', that traces the origins of her community.... The current finding that the Bene Israel carry Moses's genes is the result of a research project that started seven years ago.... Sixty-six-year old Phinas Bamnolkar, the hazan or cantor at the Thane synagogue says, 'It was always our claim that we are descendants of Moses. Our claim has now been scientifically proved.'"
"Extensive DNA testing has found the Bene Israelis, clustered in and around the western city of Bombay, are direct descendants of a hereditary Israelite priesthood that can be traced back 3,000 years to Moses' brother, Aaron."
"It has been known for over a decade that a majority of men who self report as members of the Jewish priesthood (Cohanim) carry a characteristic Y chromosome haplotype termed the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH). The CMH has since been used to trace putative Jewish ancestral origins of various populations. However, the limited number of binary and STR Y chromosome markers used previously did not provide the phylogenetic resolution needed to infer the number of independent paternal lineages that are encompassed within the Cohanim or their coalescence times. Accordingly, we have genotyped 75 binary markers and 12 Y-STRs in a sample of 215 Cohanim from diverse Jewish communities, 1,575 Jewish men from across the range of the Jewish Diaspora, and 2,099 non-Jewish men from the Near East, Europe, Central Asia, and India. While Cohanim from diverse backgrounds carry a total of 21 Y chromosome haplogroups, 5 haplogroups account for 79.5% of Cohanim Y chromosomes. The most frequent Cohanim lineage (46.1%) is marked by the recently reported P58 T–>C mutation, which is prevalent in the Near East. Based on genotypes at 12 Y-STRs, we identify an extended CMH on the J-P58* background that predominates in both Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Cohanim and is remarkably absent in non-Jews. The estimated divergence time of this lineage based on 17 STRs is 3,190 ± 1,090 years. Notably, the second most frequent Cohanim lineage (J-M410*, 14.4%) contains an extended modal haplotype that is also limited to Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Cohanim and is estimated to be 4.2 ± 1.3 ky old. These results support the hypothesis of a common origin of the CMH in the Near East well before the dispersion of the Jewish people into separate communities, and indicate that the majority of contemporary Jewish priests descend from a limited number of paternal lineages."
"But the most remarkable application of Y-chromosome markers is to Jewish populations in the Middle East and beyond... Aaron thus became the first Jewish priest, or cohen, a tradition that has since been handed down from father to son. [Michael] Hammer, Karl Skorecki, David Goldstein, and colleagues studied Y markers from three hundred Jews, including more than one hundred cohanim, and found that half of the Jewish priests shared the same genetic signature, compared to less than 5 percent in the lay Jewish population.... The results of the DNA studies [of the Lemba people of South Africa] were stunning: a significant portion of the Lemba Y chromosomes exhibit the characteristic genetic signature found in the cohanim, including more than 50 percent of the Buba, one of the 12 Lemba clans. These markers have also turned up in the Bene Israel, the oldest Jewish community in India..." (excerpts from pages 182-183)
"On the Internet, Carvin located Family Tree DNA, a small Houston firm created to answer such questions. He mailed in a sample of his DNA, gathered by swabbing the inside of his cheek, and waited. In late October, he got a call from Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA. Not only did his Y chromosome have the cohanim markers-small genetic variations-but other markers matched with those of another man in the database, making it likely that they share a forefather within the past 250 years... Since then, other researchers have used the cohanim markers to ascertain that the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people in Southern Africa who have traditionally claimed Jewish ancestry, do indeed have Semitic roots. And last June, Hammer published results showing that although Palestinian and Jewish men may be political foes, they are also brethren, so closely related as to be genetically indistinguishable."The branch of the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a found in Ashkenazic populations, particularly Ashkenazic Levites, doesn't come from an East European or Central Asian Turkic source, as previously suggested, but from an Iranian source population that intermixed with Israelite Jews in the Middle East in ancient times. While some Ukrainians, Karachays, and other peoples of Europe and the Caucasus have varieties of R1a, they are different varieties than the Ashkenazic one. An exception was one Nogay of the Caucasus who has the R1a-M582, but his STR haplotype "lies outside of the Levite cluster" according to the authors. The evidence goes against the hypothesis that a prominent Turkic Khazar family that converted to Judaism artificially adopted the status of Levites in Khazaria and then moved to Kievan Rus. Excerpts from the article:
"[...] R1a-M582 was identified in various populations, with the highest frequency occurring within Iranians collected from the southeastern Kerman population who self-identified as Persians, northwestern Iranian Azeri and in Cilician Anatolian Kurds, at 2.86%, 2.50% and 2.83%, respectively (Table 1). [...] In summary, we have circumscribed the geography of marker M582 within the broad distribution zone of R1a-M198* lineages. We have shown it to be a minor haplogroup that is primarily shared among Iranian Kerman, Iranian Azeri, Kurds, Ashkenazi Jews and non-Ashkenazi Jews, and that it is virtually absent in the Caucasus region, Europe, South Asia, and southern Siberia.""Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries."
"...[T]he Levites, another paternally inherited Jewish caste, display evidence for multiple recent origins, with Ashkenazi Levites having a high frequency of a distinctive, non-Near Eastern haplogroup. Here, we show that the Ashkenazi Levite microsatellite haplotypes within this haplogroup are extremely tightly clustered, with an inferred common ancestor within the past 2,000 years. Comparisons with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups suggest that a founding event, probably involving one or very few European men occurring at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashkenazi community, is the most likely explanation for the presence of this distinctive haplogroup found today in >50% of Ashkenazi Levites."
"If a European origin for the Ashkenazi Levite haplogroup R1a1 component is accepted as a reasonable possibility, it is of interest to speculate further on the possible timing, location, and mechanism of this event. Because the modal haplotype of haplogroup R1a1 found in the Ashkenazi Levites is found at reasonably high frequency throughout the eastern European region, it is not possible to use genetic information to pinpoint the exact origin of any putative founder from the currently available data sets. ... One attractive source would be the Khazarian Kingdom, whose ruling class is though tto have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century (Dunlop 1967). ... It extended from northern Georgia in the south to Bulgar on the Volga River in the north and from the Aral Sea in the east to the Dnieper River in the west -- an area that falls within a region in which haplogroup R1a1 NRYs are found at high frequency".
Approximately 38 percent of Ashkenazi Levites share a particular haplotype that is also found among about 11 percent of Sorbs and about 8.5 percent of Belarusians. (Sorbs and Belarusians are both Slavic peoples.) In The Ashkenazic Jews (1993), Paul Wexler had proposed that Ashkenazi Jews are related to Sorbs, but this was unable to be substantiated using non-genetic data. The DNA affinity with Sorbs may be significant but may not be the only explanation.
The study emphasizes that Ashkenazi non-Levite Jews in general do not have a major Khazar or European origin in their Y-DNA.
"The Y chromosomes of Ashkenazic and Sephardic levites show no particular similarity. ... There is, however, a strong genetic signature common to 52% of Ashkenazic levites. It is a set of genetic variations belonging to a branch of the world Y chromosome tree known as R1a1. To judge by the amount of variation on these levite R1a1 chromosomes, the original ancestor seems to have entered the Jewish community about 1,000 years ago, roughly the time when Jewish settlement in northwest Europe began, in other words at the founding of the Ashkenazic community (scholars admite that many of the peoples of the area have Israelite ancestry without necessarily attributing it to Khazar ancestry). The geneticists who discovered the R1a1 signature among the levites, a team that included Skorecki, Hammer and Goldstein, note that outside the Jewish community the R1a1 chromosome is relatively common in the region north of Georgia, in the Caucasus, that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom (this confirms what was said in the previous brackets)."Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites."
"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 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... 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... They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia (where part of the lost ten tribes were dwelling), 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 (who were Turkish speaking Israelites, not Turks), 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 present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. ... If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been followed as tradition describes, then... all Levites [should be descended] from Levi, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. ... 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. ... The paternal ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the Cohanim from the two branches..."
"...Levite haplotype distributions were compared with distributions in Israelite Jews and candidate source populations (north Germans and two groups of Slavonic language speakers). The Ashkenazic Levites were most similar to the Sorbians, the most westerly Slavonic speaking group... Comparisons of the Ashkenazic Levite dataset with the other groups studied suggest that Y chromosome haplotypes, present at high frequency in Ashkenazic Levites, are most likely to have an east European or west Asian origin and not to have originated in the Middle East."The haplotype Z93 is found among peoples of Central Asia, South Asia, and Southwest Asia including Persians, Arabs, Indians, and Tatars (these are some of the areas where the Israelites have dwelled leaving their genes & many local people claim rightfully this origin).
Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan (Yerevan, Armenia), Head of the Institute of Man and President of the Armenian Anthropological Society:
"Indeed there are some evidences of genetic relation between Armenians and Jews. Jewish population could preserve 'genetic signature' of their ancient ancestors in male Y chromosome - in genetically isolated communities of Cohanim. It is so called 'Cohanim modal haplotype' - CMH. We found the presence of CMH in modern Armenians as well. This is a strong evidence of ancient genetic contacts between Armenians and Hebrews" (both are regarded as being the offspring of Israelites).
"Among Jews, there are common genetic markers, including some found in about half the Jewish men named Cohen. But this isn't exactly a Jewish gene: The same marker is also found in Arabs" (of course there's a Jewish gene, but many arabs have it because many Jews living in Arab lands were forced to accept Islam mingling with the Arab popualation).
"Gene From Mideast Ancestor May Link 4 Disparate Peoples"
"...there lived a person who bequeathed a particular gene to many present-day descendants... They include Jews, Arabs, [Anatolian] Turks and Armenians. The gene, a variant of a gene that controls fever, has come to light because it causes an unusual disease called familial Mediterranean fever in individuals who inherit a copy from both parents. For example, the variant form of the gene found in North African Jews, Iraqi Jews and Armenians is the same, carrying both the same mutation and a pattern of 11 other genetic changes, all harmless... A second variant form of the gene, according to the American team, is shared by Iraqi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, the Moslem Druze sect and Armenians.
"Common ancestral origin of pemphigus vulgaris in Jews and Spaniards: a study using microsatellite markers."
Studies showed that the associated HLA haplotype in Jewish pemphigus vulgaris (PV) patients is HLA-B38, DRB1*0402, and DQB1*0302; or HLA-B35, DRB1*0402, and DQB1*0302. Similar associations with class II genes were found in Spanish non-Jewish PV patients. As Jews lived in Spain for hundreds of years and many converted to Christianity, the presence of the same HLA haplotype in the Jewish and Spanish PV suggests that they may share the same founder (among Portuguese & Spanish there are many people Crypto-Jewish roots) ... The distance between the two PV cohorts is relatively short, but the distance between the Jewish patients and the Jewish controls is greater compared to the distance between Spanish patients and Spanish controls. In both PV populations, the same microsatellite haplotypes in addition to a common class II haplotype were found, suggesting that both patient populations originated from the same genetic stock and, therefore, share the same ancestral disease gene."
"Non-Jews hit by 'Jewish' diseases fall through the cracks of genetic screening." The Forward (August 12, 2013). Notes that besides Ashkenazi Jews, other ethnic groups that are at an elevated risk for Tay-Sachs include "French-Canadians, Irish and Cajuns" (Cajuns have Jewish origins & the other two are regarded as Israelites).N. Mobini, E.J. Yunis, C.A. Alper, J.J. Yunis, J.C. Delgado, D.E. Yunis, A. Firooz, Y. Dowlati, K. Bahar, P.K. Gregersen, A.R. Ahmed. "Identical MHC markers in non-Jewish Iranian and Ashkenazi Jewish patients with pemphigus vulgaris: possible common central Asian ancestral origin." Human Immunology 57:1 (September 15, 1997): 62-67. Abstract:
"Previous studies showed that almost all Ashkenazi Jewish patients with pemphigus vulgaris carried the extended haplotype [HLA-B38, SC21, DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302] or [HLA-B35, SC31, DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302] or class II fragments of them. Non-Jewish patients carried [HLA-B55, SB45, DRB1*1401, DQB1*0503] or its class II fragments. In the present study of 20 Iranian patients with pemphigus vulgaris, 17 were found to carry DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302 haplotypes, also found among normal Iranian haplotypes and the same as that of the Jews. These findings suggest that the pemphigus MHC susceptibility gene among Iranians derived from the same ancestor as that in the Ashkenazim. The ancient Jews were under Persian domination from 500 B.C. until 300 B.C. and in the 8th century A.D., a Tataric people living in the kingdom of Khazar on the Western shore of the Caspian Sea and the Northern shore of the Black Sea, near Persia, converted to Judaism, providing possible opportunities for gene mixing in two populations that are distinct and separate today."The 5-Minute Neurology Consult
"Canavan disease affects all ethnic groups but is especially prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews and Saudi Arabians" (there are some Crypto-Jews in saudi Arabia)
"[...] hereditary inclusion body myopathy, a rare, recessive genetic disease that causes late-onset muscle degeneration. The carrier rate in the Persian Jewish community is 1 in 15 -- more common than Tay-Sachs is for Ashkenazi Jews. Cases of HIBM have also been documented among non-Jews, including Japanese, Caucasian Americans, Asian Indians and Kurdish Iranians. [...]
"Based on the close relationship of the Samaritan haplogroup J six-microsatellite haplotypes with the Cohen modal haplotype, we speculate that the Samaritan M304 Y-chromosome lineages present a subgroup of the original Jewish Cohanim priesthood that did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 BC, but married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands, which was a typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities. This is in line with biblical texts that emphasize a common heritage of Jews and Samaritans, but also record the negative attitude of Jews towards the Samaritans because of their association with people that were not Jewish. Such a scenario could explain why Samaritan Y-chromosome lineages cluster tightly with Jewish Y-lineages (Fig. 2A), while their mitochrondrial lineages are closest to Iraqi Jewish and Palestinian mtDNA sequences (Fig. 2B)."It should also be noted that some Palestinian Arabs who live in the city of Nablus and nearby villages paternally descend from Samaritans who converted to Islam. Their family names include Buwarda, Kasem, Muslimani, Shakshir, Yaish, among others.
"[...] The Iberian Peninsula provides a suitable region for examination of the demographic impact of such recent events, because its complex recent history has involved the long-term residence of two very different populations with distinct geographical origins and their own particular cultural and religious characteristics-North African Muslims and Sephardic Jews. To address this issue, we analyzed Y chromosome haplotypes, which provide the necessary phylogeographic resolution, in 1140 males from the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands. Admixture analysis based on binary and Y-STR haplotypes indicates a high mean proportion of ancestry from North African (10.6%) and Sephardic Jewish (19.8%) sources. Despite alternative possible sources for lineages ascribed a Sephardic Jewish origin, these proportions attest to a high level of religious conversion (whether voluntary or enforced), driven by historical episodes of social and religious intolerance, that ultimately led to the integration of descendants. [...]"
"About 20 percent of the current population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent bear Moorish DNA signatures, a team of geneticists reports. The genetic signatures reflect the forced conversions to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control. ... The genetic study, based on an analysis of Y chromosomes, was conducted by a team of biologists led by Mark Jobling of the University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. The biologists developed a Y chromosome signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in the years from 1492 to 1496. They also characterized the Y chromosomes of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in 711 A.D. from data on people now living in Morocco and Western Sahara. ... The genetic study, reported online Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates there was a high level of conversion among Jews (as it was suspected before these studies) ... The issue is one that has confronted Calafell, an author of the study. His own Y chromosome is probably of Sephardic ancestry - the test is not definitive for individuals - and his surname is from a town in Catalonia; Jews undergoing conversion often took surnames from place names."
"El doctor Calafell matiza que [...] los marcadores genéticos usados para distinguir a la población con ancestros sefardíes pueden producir distorsiones. En realidad, la pista genética usada en este caso también es compartida por pueblos de Oriente Medio desde Turquía hasta Líbano, con lo que en realidad, ese 20% de españoles que el estudio señala como descendientes de sefardíes podrían haber heredado ese rasgo de movimiento más antiguos, como el de los fenicios (considerados Israelitas en gran medida) o, incluso, primeros pobladores neolíticos hace miles de años (también considerados, los íberos, Hebreos)" (Translation: "Dr. Calafell clarifies that [...] the genetic markers used to distinguish the population with Sephardic ancestry may produce distortions. In reality, the genetic marker used in this case is also a component of peoples of the Middle East from Turkey to Lebanon, with the reality being that the 20% of Spaniards who are identified as having Sephardic ancestry in the study could have inherited that same marker from older migrations like those of the Phoenicians, or even the first Neolithic settlers thousands of years ago.")"Spanish Inquisition couldn't quash Moorish, Jewish genes."
"'The genetic makeup of Sephardic Jews is probably common to other Middle Eastern populations, such as the Phoenicians, that also settled the Iberian Peninsula,' Calafell says. 'In our study, that would have all fallen under the Jewish label. The 20% of Spaniards that are identified as having Sephardim ancestry in the study could have inherited that same marker from older movements like the Phoenicians, or even the first Neolithic settlers thousands of years ago.'"
Latinos, including those with traditions of Spanish Jewish ancestry
"[...] Here, we analyzed DNA collected from two well-established communities in Colorado (33 unrelated individuals) and Ecuador (20 unrelated individuals) with a measurable prevalence of the BRCA1 c.185delAG and the GHR c.E180 mutations, respectively, using Affymetrix Genome-wide Human SNP 6.0 arrays to identify their ancestry. These mutations are thought to have been brought to these communities by Sephardic Jewish progenitors. Principal component analysis and clustering methods were employed to determine the genome-wide patterns of continental ancestry within both populations using single nucleotide polymorphisms, complemented by determination of Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA haplotypes. When examining the presumed European component of these two communities, we demonstrate enrichment for Sephardic Jewish ancestry not only for these mutations, but also for other segments as well. Although comparison of both groups to a reference Hispanic/Latino population of Mexicans demonstrated proximity and similarity to other modern day communities derived from a European and Native American two-way admixture, identity-by-descent and Y-chromosome mapping demonstrated signatures of Sephardim in both communities. [...]""New genetic evidence links Spanish Americans of Southwest to Jews."
"In 1995, Demetrio Valdez, his wife, Olive, and some of their neighbors in Conejos County, Colo., started a kosher food co-op. ... Since childhood he had heard rumors that his family had Jewish ancestors dating back to colonial New Spain when, as historical records show, a good number of Converso Jews -- Jews and their descendants forcibly converted during the Spanish Inquisition -- came to the New World. Many of the Conversos who had made the trek over had become Catholics in name only. ... Now a new study in the Journal of Human Genetics has turned up fresh scientific evidence that the Spanish Americans of the Southwest must have had some Jewish forbears. A group of researchers in the United States and Ecuador analyzed DNA from two communities who trace back to Spanish colonial times: one in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, which includes Conejos County, and one in the Loja Province of southern Ecuador. The study found 'observable Sephardic ancestry' in both communities and calculated Jewish ancestry among the Lojanos at about 5 to 10 percent and among the Spanish Americans, also called Hispanos, at about 1 to 5 percent. 'This study provides firmer evidence for what people have been conjecturing for up to 20 years now,' said the study's director, Dr. Harry Ostrer...""DNA Clears the Fog Over Latino Links to Judaism in New Mexico."
"He [Father William Sanchez launched a DNA project to test his relatives, along with some of the parishioners at Albuquerque's St. Edwin's Church, where he works. As word got out, others in the community began contacting him. So Sanchez expanded the effort to include Latinos throughout the state. Of the 78 people tested, 30 are positive for the marker of the Cohanim, whose genetic line remains strong because they rarely married non-Jews throughout a history spanning up to 4,000 years. Fewer than 1% of non-Jews possessed this marker. That fact - along with the traditions in many of these families - makes it likely that they are Jewish, he said. ... It also explained practices that had baffled many folks here for years: the special knives used to butcher sheep in line with Jewish kosher tradition, the refusal to work on Saturdays to honor the Sabbath, the menorahs that had been hidden away. In some families, isolated rituals are all that remain of a once-vibrant religious tradition diluted by time and fears of persecution. ... 'We believe a fairly high percentage of first families [arriving] in New Mexico were nominally Catholic, but their secret religion was Judaism,' he [Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA] said. "We are finding between 10% and 15% of men living in New Mexico or south Texas or northern Mexico have a Y chromosome that tracks back to the Middle East.' They are not all Cohanim, and there's a slight chance some could be of African Muslim descent. But Greenspan said the DNA of the men is typical of Jews from the eastern Mediterranean."
"Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, Danny Villarreal had heard the stories from his grandparents. His ancestors, it was whispered, had come to Mexico from Spain under something of a cloud. Apparently, they were not purebred Castilian Spaniards, but members of a persecuted minority -- namely, Jews who had converted to Catholicism on pain of death at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. ... FTDNA sent the test off to a genetics lab at the University of Arizona, and a few weeks later Villarreal got his results back.
"When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre. Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him... Ms. Gonzalez started researching her family history and concluded that her ancestors were Marranos, or Sephardic Jews, who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and in Mexico more than four centuries ago. Though raised in the Roman Catholic faith, Ms. Gonzalez felt a need to reconnect to her Jewish roots, so she converted to Judaism three years ago. ... These conversions are the latest chapter in the story of the crypto-Jews, or hidden Jews, of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, who are thought to be descended from the Sephardic Jews who began fleeing Spain more than 500 years ago. The story is being bolstered by recent historical research and advances in DNA testing that are said to reveal a prominent role played by crypto-Jews and their descendants in Spain's colonization of the Southwest. ... Family Tree DNA, a Houston company that offers a Cohanim test to its male clients, gets about one inquiry a day from Hispanics interested in exploring the possibility of Jewish ancestry, said Bennett Greenspan, its founder and chief executive. Mr. Greenspan said about one in 10 of the Hispanic men tested by his company showed Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish background. (Another divergent possibility is that the test might suggest North African Muslim ancestry.)"
Mexican-American Indians
"[...] Weitzel's discovery of the BRCA1 mutation in these Hispanics led him to suspect that there was a genetic connection between them and European Jews, [...] The mutation was also found in a group of Mexican Indians who had immigrated from Mexico to the United States over the past 200 years and settled in western Colorado. [...] all had a common ancestor: A Jew who immigrated from Europe to South America up to 600 years ago, [...] the mutation found in the Colorado Indians was found to be identical to that of Ashkenazi Jews, [...]"
Portuguese who descend from Jews who converted to Christianity
"It is part of a national trend: The turning toward Judaism of thousands of Portuguese who believe they are descended from Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity hundreds of years ago. ... Many became crypto-Jews, practicing secretly. ... Recent genetic studies show that some 30 percent of Portugal's population has Jewish blood."
Italians who descend from Jews who converted to Christianity
"Who am I and where do I come from? [...] my ethnic background: 'Italian,' or more specifically, 'Calabrese and Sicilian.' [...] It turns out, forgotten Jewish ancestry among Southern Italian isn't so far-fetched. [...] 'Serrastretta was founded by Jews escaping persecution, because of its remote, mountain location,' she [Rabbi Barbara Aiello] said, intimating that there are still many Jews in the area and elsewhere in the Italian south, [...] Most southern Italian Jewish converts to Christianity eventually lost their faith, but many have passed down traditions, the meaning of which has been lost over time. 'I've met many southern Italians [...] who have what they consider quirky family traditions that are actually Jewish traditions,' says Aiello. She recites a long list of activities: lighting candles on Fridays (marking the Sabbath); throwing out an egg if there's a spot of blood in it, avoiding pork and shellfish, or meat mixed with dairy products (to keep kosher); and hanging a red string over a baby's crib, or tying it to their wrist (a kabbalah ritual). [...] My autosomal DNA revealed a wide variety of origins, including Iberian, Germanic, North African, Arabian, Central Asian, and of all things, Melanesian. It explains why some of my family members look Middle Eastern, while others could pass for northern European, and others have the almond-shaped eyes usually only found in Asia. Although there were no strong indicators of Jewish ancestry here either, the hodgepodge that is my genetic profile actually had more in common with Ashkenazi Jews than Italians! [...] it also explained how another Italian-American cousin of his [Enrico Mascaro's] could have a genetic illness that usually only afflicts Jews."
On the one hand, no connection was found on the male side of the genetic chain (the Y chromosome) between the genetic profile of the Kuki and the Jewish profile, or the profile of Middle Eastern peoples in general. However, on the female side of the profile (what scientists call mitochondrial DNA) there is a certain resemblance to the genetic profile of Middle Eastern peoples and to that of the Jews of Uzbekistan (who also have a tradition of belonging to the 10 tribes) - a closeness that distinguishes the Kuki from the members of other tribes that live nearby. ...
"To add another element to the 'Jewish' connection of the Kuki, [Hillel] Halkin is helping with plans to carry out genetic testing. This is slated to be performed in the near future by a group headed by Prof. Karl Skorecki of the Technion, who for several years now has specialized in research into Jewish genetics. The team will compare genetic findings from the Kuki with those of the Jews and thus attempt to examine common genetic roots. However, Halkin stresses in advance that 'even if a genetic match is not found, this would not refute my belief in this connection. The textual findings are simply too strong.'"
"Tests have shown that the Lemba possess the 'Kohen gene,' extremely rare among non-Jews, in a proportion similar to that of Jews... [T]here are now efforts - from the Lemba and from Jewish outreach groups - to expose them to Judaism... As much as they needed someone like Parfitt to study them, they may also need someone to champion their integration. That person may be Rufina Bernadetti Silva Mausenbaum, a descendant of Portuguese Crypto-Jews who made her way back to the Jewish fold. Living in Johannesburg, she is a representative of Kulanu, an America-based Jewish outreach organization..."
"For years the outside world dismissed the Lemba's claims as sheer fantasy. That changed in 1999, when geneticists from the United States, Great Britain and Israel discovered some backing for the claims. The researchers found that Lemba men carried a DNA signature on their Y chromosome that is believed unique to the relatively small number of Jews known as the Cohanim, who trace their ancestry to the priests of the ancient Jewish Temple and, ultimately, to Aaron, brother of Moses. ... After the discovery, Kulanu and other Jewish organizations ventured to Lemba villages to understand the Lemba's history and practices and introduce the Lemba to mainstream Jewish beliefs and practices. Some Lemba began learning Hebrew and visited Israel; some renounced Christian beliefs. Others recast their traditional Lemba ceremonies as counterparts to traditional Jewish holidays... Still, the community as a whole appears to be at a crossroads. Some Lemba consider themselves Jewish while continuing to embrace Christian services and African rituals. ...
"There is one [non-Jewish] group, however, for whom DNA analysis has provided a direct link to the Jews of biblical times. These are the Lemba, a southern African tribe who inhabit present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe. ... The Lemba believe they are descended from an ancient group of Jews who were led out of Israel by a prophet named Buba."Clans of the Levites & the Cohen genes
Lewis, Luis, Louis... could be other forms of Levi. Lewis is considered to be in fact, so the other too would be as well.
The Kohathites were one of the four main divisions among the Levites in Biblical times. The Bible claims that the Kohathites were all descended from the eponymous Kohath, a son of Levi, although some biblical scholars regard this as a postdictional metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the clan to others in the Israelite confederation; according to some Jewish scholars, Levite was originally just a job title, deriving from the Minaean word lawi'u meaning priest, rather than having been the name of a tribe.
The Bible ascribes a specific religious function to the Kohathites, namely care of the vessels and objects within the sanctuary - the Ark of the Covenant, Menorah, Table of Shewbread, etc. This differentiation of religious activity between the Kohathites and other Levites, even the Aaronids, is found only in the Priestly Code, and not in passages that textual scholars attribute to other authors.
According to the Book of Joshua, rather than possessing a continuous territory, the Kohathites possessed several cities scattered throughout the geographic region in the Kingdom of Israel south of the Jezreel Valley, and in the region north of the Galilee, the latter being an extremely large distance apart from the former: in the territory of Ephraim: Shechem, Gezer, Kibzaim, and Beth-horon in the territory of Manasseh: Taanach, Gat Rimon in the territory of Dan: Eltekeh, Gibbethon, Aijalon, and Gath-rimmon
The narrative in Joshua argues that the territory was taken by the Levites right after Joshua's conquest of Canaan, but this cannot be correct, as it is contradicted not only by archaeological evidence, but also by narratives in the Book of Judges, Books of Samuel, and Books of Kings; Gezer, for example, is portrayed in the narrative of the Book of Kings as only coming into the possession of the Levites during the reign of Solomon, and archaeological excavation of the site has shown that shortly prior to the Babylonian captivity it was still the site of a large temple to the Canaanite deity Astarte. The conclusion of most biblical scholars is thus that the whole system of Levite cities, in the Torah and deuteronomic history, is an attempt to explain the fact that important early sanctuaries existed at these locations, and thus were places where members of the priesthood naturally came to reside in large numbers; scholars believe that the priesthood was originally open to any tribe, but gradually became seen as a distinct tribe to themselves - the Levites.
The Gershonites were one of the four main divisions among the Levites in Biblical times. The Bible claims that the Gershonites were all descended from the eponymous Gershon, a son of Levi, although biblical scholars regard this as a postdictional metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the clan to others in the Israelite confederation; according to biblical scholars, Levite was originally just a job title, deriving from the Minaean word lawi'u meaning priest, rather than having been the name of a tribe.
The Bible ascribes a specific religious function to the Gershonites, namely care of the curtains, hangings, and ropes, of the sanctuary. This differentiation of religious activity between the Gershonites and other Levites, in particular the Aaronids, is found only in the Priestly Code, and not in passages that textual scholars attribute to other authors.
Cohanim DNA migration
According to the Book of Joshua, rather than possessing a continuous territory, the Gershonites possessed several cities scattered throughout the geographic regions of Galilee and Bashan: in the territory of Manasseh: Golan, and Beeshterah, in the territory of Issachar: Kishon, Dabareh, Jarmuth, and En-gannim, in the territory of Asher: Mishal, Abdon, Helkath, and Rehob, in the territory of Naphtali: Kedesh, Hammoth-dor, and Kartan.
The Merarites were one of the four main divisions among the Levites in Biblical times. The Bible claims that the Merarites were all descended from the eponymous Merari, a son of Levi, although some biblical scholars regard this as a postdictional metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the clan to others in the Israelite confederation; according to the Jewish encyclopedia Levite was originally just a job title, deriving from the Minaean word lawi'u meaning priest, rather than having been the name of a tribe.
The Bible ascribes a specific religious function to the Merarites, namely care of the framework - posts, crossbars, courtyard, tent pegs, etc. - of the sanctuary. This differentiation of religious activity between the Merarites and other Levites, in particular the Aaronids, is found only in the Priestly Code, and not in passages that textual scholars attribute to other authors.
According to the Book of Joshua, rather than possessing a continuous territory, the Merarites possessed several cities scattered throughout the geographic region of Gilead, as well as in the south of the Galilee, the latter being quite unrealistically distant from the former: in the territory of Reuben: Bezer, Jahazah, Kedemoth, and Mephaath in the territory of Gad: Ramoth (in Gilead), Mahanaim, Heshbon, and Jazer in the territory of Zebulun: Jokneam, Kartah, Dimnah, and Nahalal.
Here's a list of some Cohen priestly last names: Cohen, Kahan, Mazer, Kaplan, Katz, Cowan, Coyne, HaKohen, CohenPereira, CohenRodrigues, CohenMachado, Shapiro, Ben Ezra, Levy, Pereira Cunha, Garfinkel, Kagan, Kogen, Kovacs, Kohn, Kohen, Kunha. (We should include the Lemba clan named Buba, which is the priestly clan).
The J2 Kohanim haplotype tree
The narrative in Joshua argues that the territory was taken by the Levites right after Joshua's conquest of Canaan, but this cannot be correct, as it is contradicted not only by archaeological evidence, but also by narratives in the Book of Judges, Books of Samuel, and Books of Kings. The conclusion of most biblical scholars is thus that the whole system of Levite cities, in the Torah and deuteronomic history, is an attempt to explain the fact that important early sanctuaries existed at these locations, and thus were places where members of the priesthood naturally came to reside in large numbers; scholars believe that the priesthood was originally open to any tribe, but gradually became seen as a distinct tribe to themselves - the Levites
Merari, Merarites
(bitter, unhappy ), third son of Levi and head of the third great division of the Levites, the Merarites. (Genesis 46:8 Genesis 46:11 ) At the time of the exodus and the numbering in the wilderness, the Merarites consisted of two families, the Mahlites and the Mushites, Mahli and Mushi being either the two sons of the son and grandson of Merari. ( 1 Chronicles 6:19 1 Chronicles 6:47 ) Their chief at that time was Zuriel. Their charge was the cords of the tabernacle and the court, and all the tools connected with setting them up. In the division of the land by Joshua, the merarites had twelve cities assigned to them, out of Reuben, Gad and Zebulun. ( Joshua 21:7 ; 34-40 ; 1 Chronicles 6:63 ; 77-81 ) In the days of Hezekiah the Merarites were still flourishing. ( 2 Chronicles 29:12 2 Chronicles 29:15 ) http://www.bible.ca/maps
A research demonstrates that 46.1% of Kohanim carry Y chromosomes belonging to a single paternal lineage (J-P58) that likely originated in the Near East well before the dispersal of Jewish groups in the Diaspora. Support for a Near Eastern origin of this lineage comes from its high frequency in our sample of Bedouins, Yemenis (67%), and Jordanians (55%) and its precipitous drop in frequency as one moves away from Saudi Arabia and the Near East. Moreover, there is a striking contrast between the relatively high frequency of J-58 in Jewish populations (»20%) and Kohanim (»46%) and its vanishingly low frequency in our sample of non- Jewish populations that hosted Jewish diaspora communities outside of the Near East.
News of 6/6 matches in the Lemba of Southern Africa were seen as confirming a possible Jewish lineage; possible links were discussed between the Jews and the Kurds; & some suggested that 4/4 matches in non-Jewish Italians might be a genetic inheritance from Jewish slaves, deported by Emperor Titus in large numbers after the fall of the Temple in AD 70, some of whom were put to work building the Colisseum in Rome.
Despite two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple, and the spread of the Jewish population into the Diaspora, the deadly Crusades, Kohanim families managed to survive the persecutions and kept their lineages intact, imprinted in their Y Chromosomes as a unique and common signature. This signature, distinctly reflecting the Kohanim ancestral haplotype, visibly identifies today and recognizes these 21 Jewish priest families, directly related to one common Kohanim ancestor who by some estimates lived 2400 ± 300 years ago. This is because both Askenazi and Sephardic Kohanim for thousands of years preserved their genealogical lineages since the Temple period. As a result this is exactly what the haplotype tree shows. Families with haplotypes sit on the tree next to each other on flat branches live (or lived) in close territories and more likely share a recent common ancestor, as the tree shows. The Kohanim Tree places the correspondent families in the branches based on respective mutations. DNA results confirmed, by positioning the families in their respective places of origin, that the geographical location is correctly connected in genetics according to the Jewish tradition and records found in each one of these 21 different Kohanim families.[citation needed] It formed two branches, Askenazi and Sephardic. The Sephardic Kohanim is the older lineage compared to Ashkenazi, though both of them are derived from the same common ancestor. The Shapiro family from Morocco presented the oldest signature among all, passing from the Sephardi branch in Spain, Portugal, and Netherlands and from there moving to Northern East Europe to Central and reaching Southern East Europe. As the history and records tells, correctly confirmed by DNA, Kohanim fled the Romans after the destruction of the Temple and went to Morocco, Spain/Portugal, to England, France, and Germany. In the 14th century many fled to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia.
Y-chromosomal Levi
A similar investigation was made with men who consider themselves Levites. Whereas the priestly Kohanim are considered by those who believe in the historicity of Aaron to be descendants of Aaron, who in turn was a descendant of Levi, son of Jacob, the Levites (a lower rank of the Temple) are considered descendants of Levi through other lineages. Levites should also therefore share common Y-chromosomal DNA. The E1b1b1 haplogroup (formerly known as E3b1) has been observed in all Jewish groups worldwide. It is considered to be the second most prevalent haplogroup among the Jewish population outside of the J haplogroups. According to one non-peer reviewed paper it has also been observed in moderate numbers among individuals from Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Samaritan communities having traditions of descending from the tribe of Levi, suggesting that the E1b1b1 men claiming to be Levites may have existed in Israel before the Diaspora of 70 CE.
Samaritan Kohanim
The Samaritan community in the Middle East survives as a distinct religious and cultural sect and constitutes one of the oldest and smallest ethnic minorities in the world, numbering just less than 700 members. As a religious sect, reportedly, the Samaritans broke away from the mainstream Judaism around the fifth century BCE but according to Samaritan accounts it was the southern tribes that left the original worship set forth by Joshua. The Samaritans have maintained their religion and history to this day. Samaritans claim to descend from the Biblical Israelite tribes of Ephraim, Menashe and Levi.
Since the Samaritans maintain extensive and detailed genealogical records for the past 13–15 generations (approximately 400 years) and further back, it is possible to construct accurate pedigrees and specific maternal and paternal lineages. Y-Chromosome studies have shown that the majority of Samaritans belong to haplogroups J1 and J2, while the Samaritan Kohanim belong to haplogroup E1b1b1a (formerly known as E3b1a). However, the last member of the Samaritan High-Priestly family, which claimed descent from Eleazar, the son of Aaron, died in 1623 or 1624. There was a time in later periods like the 17-18th centuries that Samaritan sages by mistake wrote to European scholars that their priests are from Uziel b. Kehat. But Samaritan sources, chronicles and lists of lineage connecting the Samaritan Priests of the last 387 years since 1624 [The year that the Priestly Family from Phinhas was ceased] to Itamar b. Aaron the nephew of Moses, meaning that they are all from Aaronic origin. All Samaritan Priests of the present are linked to the father of the family that lived in the 14th century 'Abed Ela b. Shalma that was the House of 'Abtaa from Itamar, son of Aaron. Since that date the priest has called himself "Ha-Kohen Ha-Lewi", which means the Priest-Levite, instead of "Ha-Kohen Ha-Gadol", a title which referred to the High-Priest as in previous times.
Samaritans marking Passover on Mount Gerizim, West Bank
The biblical tradition of the Cohen family living among the Samaritans is found in 2 Kings 17:27–28, where it indicates that only one Israelite Cohen was sent back from exile from Assyria by the King of Assyria to teach those living in the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria). This suggests why some Samaritans may claim association of haplogroup E3b1a with the biblical Kohanim. In the same period only 27,290 (Annals of Sargon)of the ten Northern Tribes were exiled to Assyria, the Assyrians relocated those non-Israelites to the region around Samaria, explaining why those claiming to be Leviim or Kohanim were actually Syrians, who appointed other non-Israelites as priests ("Kohanim") from their own people.
Thus far, no claims of ancestry of coming from the Levite tribe for male haplogroups outside of the "J" series can be scientifically substantiated because the mutation of haplogroups is so slow that no one coming from the family of Levi could have another haplogroup.

subset: commoncrawl