-
Contents
- Sweet Confusion: Does high fructose corn syrup deserve such a bad rap?
- Closed Thinking: Without scientific competition and open debate, much psychology research goes nowhere
- subscribe
- give a gift
- renew
- RSS Feeds
- email alerts
- Digital Edition
- Podcast
- Past issues
-
Contents
- Better chow yields more milk: A more nutritious form of corn for dairy cows boosts farm profits, teen investigator finds
- Fuzzy future: Kids may suffer impaired vision from spending too little time outdoors, studies suggest
- Building with moon rocks: Working on the moon with lunar soil and grit could prove easier, more efficient and less costly than using earthly materials
Web edition: August 6, 2012
Print edition: September 8, 2012; Vol.182 #5 (p. 8)
Historical Jewish migrations out of the Middle East about 2,000 years ago can also be traced in the DNA of people living in Africa and Southwest Asia today.
These distinctive genetic signatures bolster historical accounts that there were waves of Jewish migration out of the Middle East into neighboring regions. Human geneticist Harry Ostrer of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and colleagues report their analysis of 509 people from 15 Jewish populations online August 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focusing their attention on communities in North Africa, Ethiopia, Yemen and the Caucasus.
Geneticists have previously traced movements of Jewish groups in Europe and the Middle East (SN: 7/3/10, p. 13; SN: 1/3/09, p. 12), but few studies have focused on Diaspora groups in other regions.
Jews settled in Tunisia more than 2,000 years ago, and genetic signatures carried from the Middle East are still evident in Tunisian Jews today, the researchers found. Together with Djerban and Libyan Jews, the Tunisian Jews form a separate genetic branch from Moroccan and Algerian Jews.
Jews in Morocco and Algeria bear genetic signatures characteristic of Sephardic Jews, who once lived in Spain and Portugal. The Spanish Inquisition caused the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and many went to North Africa, carrying their genetic heritage with them.
DNA signatures found in Ethiopian Jews indicate that they are genetically different from Middle Eastern Jews and from the other people living in Ethiopia. The genetic evidence can’t confirm the origin tale that Ethiopian Jews are descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, but the findings are consistent with historical accounts that local people were converted to Judaism, then spent more than 2,000 years in cultural and genetic isolation.
Yemenite Jewish people also form a separate genetic group from other Jews, consistent with conversions. “I like to think of it as both the flow of ideas as well as genes that contribute to Jewishness,” Ostrer says.
In the Caucasus, Georgian Jews are an offshoot of groups that first moved from Palestine to present-day Iran and Iraq, the new analysis shows.
Although the new study is the most in-depth of its kind, it certainly doesn’t determine who is a Jew, says Francesc Calafell, a population geneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. Palestinians have a similar genetic makeup to Jewish people, he points out. “Genetics is only a facet of identity.”
Citations
C. L. Campbell et al. North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online August 6, 2012. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1204840109. Abstract available: [Go to]
Suggested Reading
T. H. Saey. Tracing Jewish roots. Science News. Vol. 178, July 3, 2010, p. 13. Available online: [Go to]
T. H. Saey. Spanish Inquisition couldn’t quash Moorish, Jewish genes. Science News Vol. 175, January 3, 2009, p. 12. Available online: [Go to]
Please alert Science News to any inappropriate posts by clicking the REPORT SPAM link within the post. Comments will be reviewed before posting.
Ishmael and Isaac were half brothers, Esau and Jacob twins
The law, Deuteronomy 7:3 was: Don't intermarry. They regularly disobeyed. Solomon did. His mother was a Hittite. The "Jews" were still doing it in Ezra's day, Chap.10. The land has been overrun by armies ever since. How can there be a pure line of either Palestinians or Jews 2500 years later? They almost all came from somewhere else.
In other words, the "diaspora" is not really so much a diaspora, any more than more than the population of Christians in the world can be called a "diaspora" because (maybe) some were exiled from Palestine in ancient times. Both populations are mainly the result of proselyting.
I don't, of course, doubt that some ancestors of today's Jews came from the Middle East. I don't doubt some genetic ancestral connection to modern Palestinians among many Jews. However the same can almost certainly said about any population around the Mediterranean, but we aren't subjected to study after study purporting to show Mediterranean populations came from the Middle East, in particular the Levant where Israel is now. Hence, it seems to me the point of many "genetic studies" of the subject is to bolster, if not prove, a biblical myth.
Are these studies showing DNA traces from people who migrated here or there, and weren't Jews (because nobody was at that time), and then following merely the groups who eventually DID become Jews?
Moreover, Judaism has nothing to do with DNA, except for the fact that Jews try NOT to make babies with non-Jews. They couldn't have even felt that way before there was Judaism. Not only that, but (as we all know) people just love to have sex, and even the most pious will often have sex liberally and wherever they can get it. So pre-Jews may have passed on their genes to people who could have migrated anywhere at all, not even knowing they have "Jew" genes.
I don't think science can rely on the exclusivity of Jews mating only Jews as a basis for a study of diasporas, genetics, etc. There are simply too many variables. Not only that, but studying so much more heavily on the Jews automatically brings in political garbage, racial hatreds, religious hatreds, and more into the acceptability of the research. Why add complications?
Why don't they study, instead, peoples who have visible characteristics that can be traced back, perhaps, to a time when people, who were already "altering" animals to their tastes, would have tried to do the same thing with people? It would be a logical next step. Please read my commentary here about the three genetic studies that I think ought to be undertaken. The deliberate manipulating of human genomes in PREHISTORY is a very real possibility. Shouldn't it be studied?
1.
"Bad seed" genes? Religions once claimed a person who behaved way off the map was a "bad seed." The notion has been encompassed so thoroughly by religion that scientists don't seem inclined to study whether there might be some reason to study it. But there ARE families in which certain very BAD attitudes and basic characters seem to be dominant. Environment can't account for it alone. In one family, it seems to run through the female lineage, and manifests mostly in the females, making them very controlling of others, almost obsessively so, but has even been able to make some of them, literally, amoral. But where it does not manifest, the people are not off the hook from its effects. They are more vulnerable to the evils of the world, not as able to arm themselves (even when they seek to do so vigilantly) as the average person. It may not manifest in them, but it takes something from them, and also it CAN be transmitted by them to their children. If a non-manifested person gives birth to someone who, as an adult, is amoral, you can't blame environment all that much. The person became that way, in SPITE of monumental efforts by the parent to have them grow up responsible and caring. There's enough reason to suspect that a gene might be involved to justify studying this. Though it isn't "politically correct," science has often ignored such social taboos and done real research that ended up changing our mindsets on many things. I think it's time to do the same thing on this matter.
2.
Did people engage in genetic engineering in prehistory? Especially in Africa, where it seems humans have been longest? The tallest people in the world are the Nilotes. Yet within the same general region there exist the smallest people in the world. Long before recorded history, people knew how to manipulate animals to develop more of the traits they wanted and less of the ones they didn't. They were very successful. Today's "dog" bears little resemblance to the ancestral wolf, for example, and many of our livestock varieties have been similarly manipulated, even in prehistory. What was there to stop them from trying to apply what they knew to people? To develop a "race" of elegantly tall and handsomely superior people and a "race" of smaller, inferior workers to serve them? I can think of nothing else that could explain how the Nilotic peoples came to be. They are exceptionally tall - even women often top six feet - but there's more. Their faces are much more "sculptured" looking, and almost none of the known "negroid" features (thick lips, large flattened nose, etc.) are prominent in them. If people were not experimenting on humans, where did these differences arrive FROM?
3.
How is it some animals (cockroaches, flies, hyenas) can consume the most virulently infective things and thrive on them? What is in their genes that allows that? Could it be found and transferred to humans? Their resistance to the infectiousness of carrion's many pathogens HAS to be inscribed into their genes. So if they can have it, why can't we?
You must register with Science News to add a comment. To log-in click here. To register as a new user, follow this link.