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Sinai in our DNA Every Jew wonders at some point why the rest of the world cannot figure out what he is. The Jews seem to be a massive puzzle. In ancient times the civilized world of the Fertile Crescent knew a people called “Ivrim” descended from Iver, known in the Torah as the great grandson of Noach’s son Shem and Avraham’s ancestor. Avraham’s grandson Jaakov became known as Israel after the famous riverside wrestling match. Jaakov’s descendents and followers were therefore known to themselves as Am Yisrael, the people Israel. In a straightforward way, we were seen in ancient times as a people, which incidentally like other peoples had a belief system, in our case monotheistic. Fast‐forward to Christian Europe. The Christians found the “Hebrews” as Ivrim was transliterated, in the bible and the “Jews” living nearby. The term “Jew” had its origins not in Jaakov’s name but in that of his fourth son, Judah, who gave his name to the tribe and kingdom, Judea. Mysteriously, there was this ancient people mentioned in the bible, who somehow left the scene with the emergence of Christianity, to be succeeded after a long gap by the European Jews, having both their faith and their own foods, music, and customs. More recently, the Israelis appeared on the scene, somehow related to these two other groups but not the same. The result of the different times and names is that the world argues whether Judaism is a religion, a people, an ethnicity, a culture, or a civilization. Those who belong to faiths with strong histories of conquest or conversion, such as Islam or Christianity, find the notion of being a people a strange claim for a religious group; certainly, for Jews as well, converts to Judaism are as Jewish as someone born into the faith. While Jews were often caricatured in art and Jesus given European facial features, the notion of Jews as a race is a modern phenomenon, rooted in the emergence of racial theory in the 19th century. The emergence of the view that the Jews were a race, of course, had the extremely unfortunate consequence that the old frustration at the failure to convert them to Christianity or isolate them from society, together with hatred of them as a social group, led to the Nazi program of genocide. The Nazi racist demonization of the Jews was conveniently adopted by Mohammad Amin al‐Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who sought a Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine as well. In contrast to al‐Husseini, his current political descendents seek to deny the notion that the Jews are a historic people with a unique origin and a connection to the ancient land of Israel. A common version holds that today’s Jews are European and Khazar converts, not descendents of Avraham, and have no historical tie to the land of Israel and no claim of ownership by descent from the original inhabitants. Inevitably, this view has been best expressed by a Jew, Shlomo Sand, professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He argues in his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” (2008) that the Ashkanazim are descended from the Khazars, the Sephardim from North African Berbers, and the Jewish People an invention of 19th century Zionists. 1 Ironically, Sand was born in Austria in 1946 to Holocaust survivors. He grew up in the Israeli Communist Youth Banki and later Matzpen. It is therefore no wonder that his ideas have gained traction among American and European pro‐Palestinian, anti‐Zionist leftists. His book was even promoted by the Swedish energy company Kraft & Kultur to their electricity customers in Finland. In essence, the argument is that Jesus was a Palestinian and that today’s Palestinians are the true descendents of the ancient Israelites. Into this morass of politically and theologically colored views on the origins of the world’s Jews entered a scientific study by a team of 21 researchers from 13 research institutions in Israel, Europe, and the USA. Their results were published on July 8th, 2010 in Nature (Behar et al. 2010. Nature 466: 238), which is the world’s top‐ranking scientific journal. Although earlier studies had firmly established that the Kohanim, the male priestly line, appears to be uninterrupted since ancient times, a study of the total genetic picture of the Jewish people had not yet been made. The researchers chose 14 Diaspora communities and 69 non‐Jewish communities for comparison. Their findings should, at long last, put to rest the debate on the origins of today’s Jews. The researchers used a recently available method, made possible by the human genome project. Different individuals have slightly different versions of each of the 25 000 or so genes in the human genome. These versions, called “alleles,” differ from one another at many individual nucleotides, which are the “letters” of the genes that tell the cell what to make as well as when and where to make it. A total of 226 839 of these differences, called “SNPs” (single‐nucleotide polymorphisms) across all the human genes except those on the sex chromosomes, which had been studied earlier, were used in the analysis. This constitutes an enormous amount of data, and offers about a thousand‐fold better sharper view than possible earlier. The genetic differences separate the non‐Jewish populations by continent along two major axes: sub‐Saharan Africa from those of the rest of the Old World and East vs West Eurasia.. The European populations could be separated from Middle Eastern populations by those of the Caucasus and Cyprus. Bedouins, Jordanians, Palestinians were closely related to each other. Egyptians, Moroccans, Berbers, and Yemenites also could be grouped together. Among the world’s Jewish communities, all except those of Ethiopia and India, representing 90% of the current Jewish population, together with the Samaritans and the Israeli Druze, could be placed together with non‐Jewish Levantine (region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean) populations (Fig. 1). Among the Jews, communities, the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Moroccan, Iranian, Iraqi, Azerbaijani and Uzbekistani Jewish communities clustered strongly together. They genetically overlap with the Lebanese and Syrians forming a bridge to the Palestinians, Bedouins, Saudis, and Jordanians, who together form a distinct cluster. Only the Yemini Jews cluster with these. 2 The next nearest non‐Jewish population is from Cyprus. Indian Jews are more similar to their non‐Jewish hosts and the Ethiopian Jews to their Semitic‐, rather than Cushitic‐speaking neighbors in particular. The data from the Y‐chromosome, which determines male and Kohane identity, the Bene Israel population of Israel was also strongly linked to the Levant. Several independent analytical methods all pointed to the same result. The bottom line is that data strongly support a common genetic origin between contemporary Jews a whole and the non‐
Jewish populations of the Levant. The Jewish historical narrative of descent from the ancient Israelites of the Torah, moreover, offers the best explanation for the patterns found within the data. What are the implications of these findings? First, they tell us that the Jews are indeed a people. Not only do we share a religious, cultural, and ethnic heritage, but also a common genetic origin, which is largely intact despite two thousand years of dispersion. Second, they place our physical origins within our spiritual homeland, the land of Israel. The Druze and Samaritans are our closest relatives. The data also supports the view held by the Samaritans that they were split from the Israelites by the Babylonian exile and not converts (Cutheans, Kutim) from the region of Iraq as held by the Talmud. The findings also support the distinctiveness of the Indian, Yemeni, and Ethiopian Jews, who all nonetheless have genetic connections to the Jewish people as a whole. Among the non‐Jewish population of the Levant, the residents of Mandatory Palestine, which includes present‐day Jordan and the West Bank are most similar genetically to the Saudis, Yemenites, and Syrians. It would seem that the term “Arab” is apt – it reflects the fact that not only did Islam come to the Levant from Arabia, brought by a few muftis and soldiers, but also a large population. The political implication is also clear. Palestinian Arabs and their supporters elsewhere can no longer view Israel as a kind of 19th century colonialist enterprise foisted on the indigenous people by outsiders. The PLO Charter continues to state (Article 20): “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.” The Charter is, however, now found to be correct when it states (Article 1), “the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.” Perhaps there is more likelihood of a fair and lasting peace if the Palestinians and other Muslims of the world not only come to accept that the Jews are home in Israel and home to stay, but would also say so. This would be a strong confidence building measure. 3 Some among us will react with horror to these findings because they seem to add fuel to the racist anti‐Semitic fire, by supporting the notion of common traits resulting from the genetic similarities. Genetic determinism as a whole, however, is simply false. Moreover, the genetic study does not, of course, tell us how to live as a Jews. There are many ways of being Jewish, and these are not genetically determined. We have Torah Jews, cultural Jews, “bagel and lox Jews,” Tikkun Olam Jews, Marxist Jews and Freudian Jews, Science Jews and Art Jews, Law Jews and Medicine Jews and even plumber Jews, Ba’al Teschuva Jews and three‐times‐a‐year Jews, proud Jews and those ashamed to be Jewish. Now we know that we are also one big, happy family. Our past may be in our genes, but our future is absolutely in our hands. Alan H. Schulman Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Figure 1 (below).: Map of genetic variation by “principal component analysis.” Jewish populations are circled. Modified from Fig. 2B, Nature 466: 238‐242. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd, copyright 2010. 4