Recent news reports about genetic discoveries concerning Jewish people have caused some to say these studies are motivated by racism. They are not. They do however attempt to determine if Jews are a race, a tribe, a people, a religious affinity or a multi-faceted combination of all of the above. Is there, as geneticist Dr. Harry Ostrer proposes, a “biological basis of Jewishness?”
While the concept “The Jewish people” remains controversial, DNA analysis shows close links among Jews—Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi, all of whom, according to Israel’s “Law of Return” have an automatic right to return and an automatic right to receive Israeli citizenship.
As Dr. Ostrer notes, some of the same markers found in Jews can be found in Palestinians, our genetic cousins. Advances in genetic studies have opened windows into thousands of years of Jewish history. Geneticists have identified links connecting Jewish and non-Jewish communities that point to common ancestry even where religion and culture are no longer a commonality. Women of European descent have been identified as principal female pro-generators of Ashkenazic Jewish communities originating as early as the early Roman Empire. In a study published in October 2013 in the journal Nature Communications, Dr. Martin B. Richards of the University of Huddersfield (England) examined Ashkenazi lineages through analysis of mitochondrial genomes, a genetic element inherited only through female antecedents.
Richards theorizes that many Jewish communities outside Israel were founded by single men who married and converted local women. His study says analysis indicates that 40% of mitochondrial DNA variation found in Ashkenazi Jews exhibit “clusters” found within European lineages, not Near Eastern ones. His study concludes that “the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant… Overall, at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, 8% from the Near East, with the rest uncertain. Richards also states that the Y chromosomal DNA of Ashkenazi males suggests a likely origin in the Near East.
David B. Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University, detected similarity between the founding mothers of Jewish communities and their host populations that complimented the new analysis, but questioned its statistical justification. Goldstein feels mitochondrial DNA lineages rise and fall randomly. Multiple genetic studies indicate that Ashkenazi maternal ancestry includes both Levantine [Near Eastern] and European origins. In an e-mail to The Scientist, geneticists Doron Behar of the Gene by Gene company in Houston and Karl Skorecki, of the Rambam Healthcare Campus in Israel, argue against Richards’s hypothesis that major Ashkenazi lineages link to pre-historic European origin. They say the DNA data used in Richard’s study did not represent the full spectrum of mitochondrial diversity.
Richard’s theories are buoyed by Gil Atzmon of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, whose study results in Nature Communications noted that there were mass conversions to Judaism in the Roman Empire. He proposes that the mixture of European ancestries ranged from 30% to 60% among Ashkenazi and Sephardi populations, with Northern Italians showing the greatest proximity to Jews of any Europeans.
Richards sees this as a possible time and place at which the four significant European lineages could have entered the Jewish community, becoming more numerous as the Ashkenazi population in northern Europe expanded from around 25,000 in 1300 A.D., to more than 8.5 million at the beginning of the 20th century. This mixed community may have been the source of both the Ashkenazim of Europe and the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal. According to Richards, the two groups have considerable genetic commonality.
Ostrer, Director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center, maintains that Jews are a homogeneous group which, for most of its 3,000-year history, were considered a “race” or a “tribe.” Jewish exceptionalism was acknowledged. He says Jews around the world can trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago—the seed population for Judaism and much of early Christianity and Islam. In his book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, he details the biology of Jewishness, claiming that Jews are different, and exhibit distinctive genetic markers.
Ostrer does not entirely disagree with Richards, saying his conclusions “seem reasonable… (and) fit with what we understand about Jewish history.” He does suggest that the foremost common mitochondrial DNA lineages among Ashkenazim came from the Near East. His study implies that four Jewish women were the ancestors of nearly half of European Jewry. According to this scenario, Ashkenazim seemed to descend from the migration of whole communities. He says “Ashkenazim, in particular, are relatively homogeneous despite the fact that they are spread throughout Europe and have since immigrated to the Americas and back to Israel. The Inquisition shattered Sephardi Jewry, leading to far more incidences of intermarriage and to a less distinctive DNA.”
He writes that “on the one hand, the study of Jewish genetics might be viewed as an elitist effort, promoting a certain genetic view of Jewish superiority. On the other, it might provide fodder for anti-Semitism by providing evidence of a genetic basis for undesirable traits that are present among some Jews. These issues will newly challenge the liberal view that humans are created equal but with genetic liabilities.”
