If Israel is overcome, the world will lose an historic tribe of greatness, how could the US not save that.
Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East
Posted by Kevin Brook to Kulanu's listserv in November and December 2001
A new study of interest has been published in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics (volume 69, number 5) on pages 1095-1112. Entitled "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East" and authored by Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Bernd Brinkmann, Partha P. Majumder, Marina Faerman, and Ariella Oppenheim, the article discusses the results of a new genetic test on 526 persons (from the Ashkenazic Jewish, Sephardic Jewish, Kurdish Jewish, Muslim Kurdish, Jordanian Arab, Syrian Arab, Lebanese Arab, Israeli Arab, Palestinian Arab, and Negev Bedouin populations). The results were as follows:
* Kurdish Jews and North African Jews are very closely related in their paternal lineages.
* Kurdish Jews and North African Jews are less related to Ashkenazic Jews; the differences between the Sephardic/Oriental and Ashkenazic Jewish groups are described in the abstract as slight yet significant.
* Ashkenazic Jews, while related to other Jewish groups, might also have a certain amount of European ancestry.
* Jews are more closely related to Armenians, Kurds, and Anatolian Turks than to their Arab neighbors.
* The haplogroup Eu 9 derived from northern Middle Easterners, while the haplogroup Eu 10 derived from more southerly Middle Easterners. Palestinian Arabs and Bedouins often belong to Eu 10 and could have substantial ancestry from the Arabian Peninsula.
The above study is summarized by Judy Siegel in her Jerusalem Post article "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." (November 20, 2001).
An exceptional North African Jewish community is Libyan Jewry, which appears to differ noticeably from Moroccan Jewry, Tunisian Jewry, and Algerian Jewry. According to Noah A. Rosenberg, Eilon Woolf, Jonathan K. Pritchard, Tamar Schaap, Dov Gefel, Isaac Shpirer, Uri Lavi, Batsheva Bonne'-Tamir, Jossi Hillel, and Marcus W. Feldman in their article "Distinctive genetic signatures in the Libyan Jews." (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) 98:3 (January 30, 2001): 858-863), "...Libyan Jews... separate from and show strong differentiation from the other populations of our study. This population has a unique history among North African Jewish communities, including an early founding, a harsh bottleneck, possible admixture with local Berbers, limited contact with other Jewish communities, and small size in the recent past..."
In the article "High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews" (Human Genetics 107(6), December 2000, pp. 630-641), Ariella Oppenheim, Almut Nebel, Dvora Filon, Mark G. Thomas, D. A. Weiss, M. Weale, and Marina Faerman presented evidence that Israeli Jews and Israeli/Palestinian Arabs are genetically similar but not identical. They suggested that these groups shared common origins, with somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of Jews and about 50 percent of Arabs sharing ancestry. The study clarifies the finding of Michael F. Hammer, Alan J. Redd, Elizabeth T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, Hamdi Jarjanazi, Tanya Karafet, Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti, Ariella Oppenheim, Mark A. Jobling, Trefor Jenkins, Harry Ostrer, and Batsheva Bonne'-Tamir in "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97:12 (June 6, 2000) that Ashkenazi Jews are related through paternal ancestry to Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Anatolian Turks. Meanwhile, Aravinda Chakravarti, director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, found that the mutation DFNB1, which causes deafness, is found among Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and other Mediterranean populations.
Notice that the latest study by Nebel et al., like the previous ones, focuses on paternal ancestries rather than maternal ancestries, so the assumption that Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian Jews did not mix with Berbers and that Kurdish Jews did not mix with Kurds may not necessarily be correct. The Yemenite Jews serve as a useful comparison - the Yemenite Jewish paternal lines appear to come from Israelites while their maternal lines resemble those of Yemenite Arabs. Might the same (increased diversity in mtDNA lineages compared to Y-chromosomal lineages) be true of North African Jews and Ashkenazi Jews?
Quotes:
"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." - from the abstract to Nebel et al., "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East" in Am J Hum Gen.
"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." - from the article "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe" by Siegel in the Jerusalem Post.
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I would like to add to my remarks concerning the latest Jewish DNA study ["The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East" by Almut Nebel, Ariella Oppenheim, et al., The American Journal of Human Genetics 69:5 (November 2001): 1095-1112].
First, it says that Jews are most related to Kurds and secondarily to other northern Mediterranean groups, then to Arabs and Europeans.
Second, this study correlates nicely with the finding that the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) is found not only among Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews but also among Iraqi Kurds*1 and Armenians*2. Plus, Familial Mediterranean Fever is found among Ashkenazic Jews, Iraqi Jews, North African Jews, Armenians, Druze, Anatolian Turks, and Arabs*3.
Third, one point not fully clarified by Ha'aretz*4 and the Jerusalem Post*5 is the following quote directly from the Nebel, Oppenheim, et al. study, which shows that Ashkenazic Jews do have some non-Israelite elements (perhaps Khazarian and Slavic) in paternal lineages. The researchers wrote:
"Previous studies of Y chromosome polymorphisms reported a small European contribution to the Ashkenazi paternal gene pool (Santachiara-Benerecetti et al. 1993). 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 AD (Dunlop 1954)."
This finding, along with Nathaniel Pearson's research (whose Ukrainian Jewish Y-chromosomal haplotype matched with an Uzbekistani Uzbek, an Uzbekistani Tajik, and two men from New Delhi in northern India), contradicts the assertion of other geneticists that Ashkenazim are not at all descended from Khazars and other European converts.
Footnotes:
* 1 C. Brinkmann et al., "Human Y-chromosomal STR haplotypes in a Kurdish population sample." International Journal of Legal Medicine 112 (1999): 181-183.
* 2 Communication from Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan of the Armenian Anthropological Society.
* 3 Nicholas Wade, "Gene From Mideast Ancestor May Link 4 Disparate Peoples." The New York Times (August 22, 1997).
* 4 Tamara Traubman, "Study finds close genetic connection between Jews, Kurds." Ha'aretz (November 21, 2001).
* 5 Judy Siegel, "Genetic evidence links Jews to their ancient tribe." The Jerusalem Post (November 20, 2001).
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