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Litvaks and Galitzianers, Lay Down Your Arms; Science Finds Unity in the Jewish Gene Pool
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More in GeneticsHistorically speaking, Jews have hardly been strangers to the art of drawing sharp distinctions among themselves. But according to a mounting body of scientific evidence, Jews — genetically speaking, at least — may have more in common than anyone previously suspected.
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.
This finding was particularly striking, as the place of origin for an individual Ashkenazic Jew’s grandparents turned out to be completely irrelevant. “There is no correspondence to the grandparental country of origin,” Seldin remarked: “We see differences in other European populations when, for example, someone says she has four grandparents from Italy versus someone who says he has three grandparents from Italy and one from Germany. But for Ashkenazic Jews, it doesn’t matter if their grandparents are from England or Hungary or Russia or Italy. The only thing that matters is that they’re Ashkenazic Jewish.”
Seldin has been studying the genetics of autoimmune disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, for years. About five years ago, spurred on by recent advances in genetic research and a large reduction in the cost of genetic population studies, Seldin turned to researching the distribution among different populations of the genes causing the diseases he was studying. This sort of information would help researchers understand how the same disease might be expressed differently across different groups, and the information ultimately could lead to more individualized and effective treatment.
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.
Population genetics, the study of human migration and community growth through a genetic lens, has been going on for half a century now, but since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000, the pace of new findings has accelerated. “It’s an interesting time,” noted Harry Ostrer, director of the human genetics program at the New York University School of Medicine. “There is so much happening, and we are on the verge of so much more.”
Jews are particularly attractive to population geneticists, noted Michael Hammer, a University of Arizona geneticist and a pioneer in Jewish population genetics, because they present an “unusual group.” Despite their widespread wanderings, Jews have remained isolated genetically. At the same time, they have kept extensive medical and historical records. Whereas other populations, such as the Finns or the Amish, have also remained quite isolated over the centuries, “there are not many that you could study so far back,” because of a lack of historical records, Hammer observed. “The genetic record itself is not enough. You need archeology, historical records and medical records. You need to put it all together to get the picture.”
The expanding study of ancestry through genetics, then, is bound to have a particularly strong impact on the understanding of Jewish ancestry — as indeed it already has. Over the past year, two other disease-related studies besides Seldin’s have turned up findings related to Jewish history.
The first, published in this year’s March issue of Blood Coagulation and Fibrinolysis, found a genetic trace of the link between Iranian and Moroccan Jews. Six researchers in Israel dated a mutation — or mistake in the genetic code — for a rare bleeding disorder common to both Iranian and Moroccan Jews to some 2,600 years ago. Researchers had previously found that a second disorder, a rare form of jaundice that is also common to both populations is, however, derived from two distinct mutations. When they dated the mutation common to Moroccan Jews, it went back only 1,500 years — after the Moroccan community had branched off from the Iranian one.
A second study grew out of research on Parkinson’s disease. About a year ago, researchers at several American labs noticed that one particular mutation for Parkinson’s — a disease associated with various mutations — was much more common among Ashkenazic Jews. Meanwhile, a group of researchers in France had discovered that North African Arabs carried the same mutation. Moreover, in both the Ashkenazic Jews and the North Africans, the mutation was linked to an identical set of genetic markers “that is very, very rare, so we are confident that it came from a common founder,” or ancestor, said Dr. Cyrus Zabetian, who in addition to serving as assistant professor of neurology at the University of Washington is the lead author of the study, which appeared in The American Journal of Human Genetics in October 2006. When researchers dated these genetic markers, they found they originated some 2,000 years ago — before the founding of Ashkenazic Jewry.
A group of closely linked genetic markers located on one chromosome and inherited together is called a haplotype. About 99.9% of the genetic code is identical in every human being. The .1% that varies from person to person is what gives rise to disease susceptibility and other differences between people. And it is also among this remaining .1% that common patterns of linked genetic material can be found, indicating ancestry. The most common haplotype among Jews is called Med, so named because it is commonly found among most Mediterranean populations. The second most common Jewish haplotype is one that researchers speculate arose in East Africa.
One of the earliest researchers to establish a clear genetic link between Jews and Mediterranean populations was Hammer. He did so by studying the Y chromosome, the chromosome that determines maleness. The Y chromosome is unique because it has no matching paired chromosome, and only sons inherit it. Therefore, it can reveal much about the paternal lineage. The Y chromosome is also quite short, so sequencing its code is relatively easy. It was by studying the Y chromosome that Hammer and some of his colleagues made the much publicized discovery, in 1997, of a Cohen haplotype shared by almost all Cohanim and derived from one male ancestor, or two or three closely related ones.
Another short strand of DNA, called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), is located outside the cell’s nucleus (where all the chromosomes are). MtDNA is inherited from the mother only, and therefore it is very useful in tracing maternal lineages. By studying it, two other Jewish population geneticists, Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki, made another key discovery in 2005. They found that 40% of Ashkenazic Jews were descendant from just four women who lived in Europe some 1,000 years ago. These were four “honest to goodness women, actual mothers,” said Skorecki, who is professor of medicine and director of the Rapport Institute at Israel’s Technion Institute. Among the remaining 60%, Skorecki added, “there isn’t a lot of heterogeneity” either, but since his study on this has not yet been released, he could not elaborate.
Although researchers have gotten, and continue to receive, a great deal of insight into male and female ancestral lines via the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, their picture of ancestry this genetic material offers is incomplete, since the information leaves out the other 22 matched pairs — or autosomal — chromosomes. Isolated studies on the autosomes that have revealed ancestral information have existed for several decades, of course. (An important example is a study of a hemophilia-like blood disorder, called Factor XI deficiency, that is conducted by Uri Seligsohn of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel. The study found that Ashkenazic Jews shared a common ancestor with Iraqi Jews, one of the oldest Diaspora communities.) But the mapping from the Human Genome Project paved the way for finding many more haplotypes, located on the autosomes.
In 2002, the International HapMap Project was launched to create a map of all human haplotypes. Scientists started by examining the genetic makeup of Europeans, East Asians from China and Japan, and the Yoruba from West Africa.
A Jewish HapMap Project was launched just last spring, under the umbrella of the human genetics program at NYU’s medical school and in collaboration with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Headed by Ostrer, the project will examine DNA samples, including the Y chromosome and mtDNA, from Jews across the three major Jewish groupings: Ashkenazic (descendant from Central and Eastern Europe Jews), Sephardic (descendant from the Jews of Spain) and Mizrachic (descendant from the ancient Jewish communities of the Middle East). The aim — with potentially far-reaching implications — is to understand Jewish migration and community formation. In addition, Ostrer said, the project’s findings will lead to a better picture of disease susceptibility and treatment.
“It’s surprising the extent to which the populations must have been isolated to see these patterns,” Hammer remarked about Jewish communities. Rapid population growth, he added, has also contributed to the genetic patterns visible among Jews. “Most of us assume that Jews from Europe don’t look like those from the Middle East, because there was much more genetic mixture, but this just wasn’t the case,” added Lawrence Schiffman, professor of history and chairman of NYU’s department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
Amid all the interest in Jewish population genetics, scientists and historians alike sound a strong note of caution. “There are a lot of things that research like this should never establish, such as who is a Jew,” Schiffman remarked. “Determining identity of an individual or a community by genes is wrong,” Skorecki elaborated. “Whether you are Jewish or not is within the realm of law and custom.” Conversely, researchers are wary that the data not be used to separate populations for political or social purposes. “Eighty-five percent of variation among humans occurs within the same population,” Skorecki stressed. “The 99.9% of identical DNA means we are all members of a recently established family called humanity.”
Since his study has been published, Seldin said, he has received some e-mails from “laypeople looking to support their own hatreds.” As a consequence, he screens his e-mail carefully. Nevertheless, he argued that the benefits of doing genetic research far outweigh the drawbacks. “This information is useful for doing studies on diseases,” he concluded. “Can it be used to discriminate against people? Yes. But it is possible to use any sort of information to do this.”
Comments
Even without genetics, it's clear that Ashkenazi Jewry is not from Khazaria. The Yiddish language is made up of words that tell the itinerary of European Jews: Hebrew-Aramaic, La'az (Rashi's romance language), German and finally Slavic influence - but not Turkish, the language of the Khazars. A book by Arthur Koestler entitled "The Thirteenth Tribe" raised the possibility that the Jews of Europe were from Khazaria - and then of course all those anti-Israel circles grabbed the book as if it were the word of God at Sinai, exclaiming: "You see - today's Israelis are not the descendants of ancient Israel" (as if an Israelite pedigree would suddenly convince them of our legitimacy, and the conflict would end)!
All in all, the Jewish story is one of identity and creativity - not a story of DNA. However, it was nice to read that indeed the Jewish narrative - telling of the founding of Jewish communities by people who shared common origins in and memories of ancient Eretz Yisrael - can also be investigated in the laboratory.
Ashkenazi Jews have been so dazzled or frightened by the recent upsurge of outmarriage in Europe and the USA in the past couple of generations that they assume it was happening all the way from European emancipation, 200 or so years back.
Thus we hear them saying "Jews aren't a race/ethnicity/population group, they're a culture/peoplehood/state of mind"... and suchlike fuzzy attempts to have it every which way and avoid the tag of racism.
The truth DNA analysis is confirming is that Jewry has been a discrete Asiatic sub-subspecies of homo sapiens for a very long time, 100 or more generations: kept so by more consciously restrictive ways of inhibiting outbreeding than most such sub-subspecies have maintained. Only recently has this been modified (more for Ashkenazis than for Sephardis) by contact with goyim.
But cultural and religious Judaism are underpinned by biology. It is colloquial but scientifically incorrect to call Jews a race, but they sure are a distinct tribe-- not just culturally, religiously and diet-wise, but in their genes, which do so much to make us what we are whether we pride ourselves on rising above our ancestries or not. And Jews by this reckoning remain a lot closer to Arabs than to Swedes or Spaniards.
It is not necessary to exaggerate the pace of exogamy, as some alarmist American rabbis have done, to see that something very special fades away after a rich Jew marries a blonde and begets offspring. Biodiversity isn't just for weeds and bugs.
These genetic tests can be easily manipulated and misinterpreted to fit a political agenda. There is a clear proof that East European Jews are part Khazars and part German Jews. What's wrong with that? Those who insist that all Jews are Semites are some kind of racists.
A scientist working on the human genotype traced humanity out of East Africa and into Europe.(I'm sorry but I don't have the name of the scientist, but he was on [of all places] the Steven Colbert show last Tuesday) and he stated that the migration broke into four haplotypes. Then he stated something very startling. Three of the four haplotypes, the scientist stated, started with Ashkenazi Jewish women, meaning that Europeans have a three out of four chances of being of Jewish origin.
Apparently, assimilation is not merely a product of modernity.
I have strong doubts about the scientific validity of these tests. You can look at these genes and see whatever you want to see in them, it's like looking at the Rorshach test. But I have strong doubts that dark-skinned Moroccan Jews are more related to white Polish Jews than to Arabs. I personally consider only East European Jews to be my people, not anybody else - no matter what some professors say.
In the Jewish TRIBE, "membership" has been strictly defined since the time of Ezra, to one whose mother was a Jew at his or her birth, or one who has been allowed into the tribe after going through a very arduous ordeal given by the orthodox rabbinate designed mainly to keep outsiders out. And such is the strict definition accepted by the Rabbinate in Israel, and it is the "official church" of Israel and which defines "who is a Jew." And so, the offspring of Jewish males who married gentile women were not, and are not, considered part of the tribe, and either had to convert back into Judaism, or get lost. It did not matter who the father was; the child's tribal identity was strictly matrilineal. However, if the mother had been an accepted convert, as in the case of Ruth the Moabitess, the children were thenceforth Jewish. Geneticists now believe that most Ashkenazic Jews are descendent of some four mothers. Probably gentile woman who had converted to marry Jewish tradesmen along the Rhine.
And so, besides the persecutions, this has been major reason why Jewish numbers are so small, considering that Jews once constituted some 7-10% of the ROman Empire. Many Italians and Spaniards today are actually of JEwish descent, but don't know it. The Jewish tribal system was designed to weed out those who don't belong in accordance to tribal law (Halacha), as opposed to bringing outsiders in, as is the case with Judaism's universal offshoot relgions, Christianity and Islam. Judaism is a tribal religion of a distinct tribe, and not a universal faith promising "salvation to all comers. It is not strictly a race or a faith, but a tribe with a tribal identity colored by what was once a unique, monotheistic faith.
By contrast, in Islam, membership in the UMMAH flows from the patriarch, not the matriarch. It was designed to rapidly expand as, technically, no one leaves it alive.
Before The Forward publishes this study it should make sure it was checked by an independent group of scientists. This genetic study looks to me too much like one of those "biblical" science projects in which scientists are trying to prove that the Bible is correct - in this case it's the biblical claim that all of today's Jews, no matter what race or color, come from the Land of Israel and are the descendants of Abraham.
"Skorecki elaborated. “Whether you are Jewish or not is within the realm of law and custom.” Conversely, researchers are wary that the data not be used to separate populations for political or social purposes. “Eighty-five percent of variation among humans occurs within the same population,”"
Of course the information will be used to discriminate against Jews at some point. You can count on it.
Leo Kagan said: "Before The Forward publishes this study it should make sure it was checked by an independent group of scientists. This genetic study looks to me too much like one of those "biblical" science projects in which scientists are trying to prove that the Bible is correct - in this case it's the biblical claim that all of today's Jews, no matter what race or color, come from the Land of Israel and are the descendants of Abraham."
So and what if we are all "descendants of Abaraham" or a single ancestor, what would that prove, Kagan?
The Bible may have gotten some details right but it doesn't mean that God exists, does it, now?
All I know is that white Jews are geneticaly closer to other whites than to non-white Jews. For example, you can transplant the bone marrow from white non-Jews to white Jews but not from non-white Jews to white Jews.
Leo Kagan:
"All I know is that white Jews are geneticaly closer to other whites than to non-white Jews. For example, you can transplant the bone marrow from white non-Jews to white Jews but not from non-white Jews to white Jews."
No one disputes that.
North Africans btw who closer to Jews genetically are probably the descendants of the Phoenicians a Hebrew speaking people who settled there from what is now Lebanon.
Check out ancient Hebrew history and the history of the Phoenecians:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia
Phoenicians is what the Greeks called the ancient Kananites,
In Hebrew they were known as bani kan'an "Children of Canaan."
These Hebrew speaking people were great mariners and traders who founded colonies in what is today Lybia and even in Spain (Cartagena is city founded by these traders.) The name Spain, btw, is derived from a Hebrew- Kaananite word meaning Rabbit.
The word for rabbit in Hebrew is שָׁפָן (Shapan).
It will not be just Jew-haters who use these findings badly, either. Already I see people who are ignoring everything that Judaism teaches in order to bolster their own... non-traditional opinions.
I would like to point out some glaring historical facts which have either been overlooked or ignored by the author. At the beginning of the last century--almost one hundred years ago, not fifty--various people formed "scientific" organizations to study human eugenics. The name was only changed, or sanitized to "genetics" after WWII.
Funded largely By the Rockerfellers and a couple of other extremely wealthy corporate interests, research was originally conducted in both America and then in the 1920s in Germany. There isn't enough space to go into details here, but it seems for decades scientists have been very curious about exactly what makes us Jews unique, all the way down to our DNA. The original reasons for studying human genetics were far from benign and the study was taken up by Hilter, and greatly expanded. To do a little research on your own, just type in Eugenics Rockerfeller" on your favorite browser search engine.
THERE IS NO PROFF OF MIGRATION TO EAST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES IN THE EXTENT OF JUSTIFYING DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES THAT RESULTED IN TURNING ASHKENAZI JEWS TO A MAJORITY OF 90 PER CENT OF WORLD JWERRY. SO MY CONCLUSION IS THAT KASRIAN CONVERSION IS THE REASON /
It would be interesting to see the results of genetic comparisons between Ashkenazi and other Jewish population groups, and the Yoruba (who supposèdly had 200k Jewish adherents as recently as 200 years ago)...the question arises, however, in light of recent claims being made in Nigeria, why the Yoruba, and not the I[g]bo? And why have no such studies included other groups such as the Pathans or "Bnei Menashe"?
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JackGarbuzj said: [paraphrasing] Tribal identity flows from the mother. Not so. Tribal affiliation comes from the father. _NATIONAL_ identity, as a Jew, comes from the mother.
Leo Kagan said: {a bunch of rubbish} There is no clear proof whatsoever that E. European Jews are "part Khazars and part German Jews". There's nothing wrong with such an assertion, if it were factual...after all, Halakha says, a convert is a Jew, as are a convert's descendants. The problem is, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that Ashkenazim, "Eastern" or otherwise, are culturally, linguistically, ethnically, nor biologically, descended from Khazars.
The idea that assertions made that Ashkenazim are "Semites" is indeed racist...but only made by people who don't realize that there is not, nor has there ever been, such a thing as a "Semitic race". "Semitic" has only _ever_ been a classification of _languages_, never of human physiology. There is no "Semitic genotype", nor anything even remotely approaching such a fantasy, except in the minds of uneducated racists. So, it seems to me at least, that saying Ashkenazim are "Semites" is a strawman invented by opponents saying Ashkenazim are _not_ "Semites".
Leo Kagan further elaborates, saying that "white Jews are geneticaly [sic] closer to other whites than to non-white Jews", never bothering to clarify what "white" and "non-white" mean, nor bothering to cite any source to support his obsequious [and unsupportable, for that matter] assertion.
He goes on, however, to assert as proof, some nonsense about bone marrow transplants, which anyone who knows anything about bone marrow transplants will recognize immediately as unmittigated nonsense.
Eunice Farmilant makes some interesting observations, but stops short of pointing out some of America's Eugenics Milestones... The greatest of American Eugenicists were two people granted honors by Hitler, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood, an organization supported by way too many Jews...even 1 Jew is way too many, but that aside... who called American Blacks and poor Whites "useless eaters"), and Henry Ford, author of a lovely little tract called "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem". Two American heroes, no doubt. Kill the Jew, Kill the unworthy unborn baby. What a pair. Hitler endorsed both of their ideologies, being the first to legalize both the sanctioned killing of Jews and legalizing abortion for the "lesser races". It's a travesty that Hitler and Sanger have so man bloodthirsty acolytes among today's Jewish spokespeople who prey on the unborn.
Moni Yakim says there is no "proff" [sic] that Jewish migration to E. Europe resulted in the Ashkenazim coming to comprise 90% of the Jewish population. He's right, but only in the same context as an idiot saying there's no proof that the steam engine caused New York to become the global financial capital. I.e., the two have nothing to do with each other [for those of you who are kind of slow...]...
Ashkenazi Jews began to immigrate to Poland in large numbers, at the invitation of the Crown, in the 16th Century. Prior thereto, Jews were barely tolerated in Poland, and _forbidden to live further east, in Russia_. The idea that Ashkenazi Jews, in their great numbers, are a result of descendants of Khazar converts, is ludicrous, as the area in which the Khazar converts supposèdly lived _forbade_ Jews from living for over 600 years between the fall of the Khazar Khaganate and the time when the extreme westernmost parts thereof fell under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The "link" is geographically plausible, but historically ludicrous in the extreme. If there are any descendants of the Khazar converts to Judaism extant today, it is the Karaim of the Krimea and Lithuania, and the Krymchak Jews. To posit that Ashkenazim are partially descended from the Khazar converts is nearly laughable, to say nothing of completely unprovable...to say that a majority thereof, or _all_ of them are descendants of that group, is nothing short of willful and shameful [and deliberate] intellectual dishonesty.
The Khazars were certainly a mighty and forbidable nation at one time, but their influence had passed beneath the sands of time _centuries_ before the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews in the lands they had once occupied. (In fact, it was not until the 1917 abolition of the Pale of Settlement, that Jews were allowed to live in the lands that once comprised the Khazars' Khaganate.) Nonetheless, gullible people will doubtless continue to blither on about this supposèd "link" for centuries to come.
All that clearly shows that the Jews, dispite being dispersed all over the world, are indeed ONE people. And, the Jews in different countries are much closer to Jews in other countries that to their non-Jewish neighbors. The German Jews were found to be closest to the Yemanite Jews. All that shows that the Ashkenazi Jews did not descend from the Khazars.