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After more than eight years in development, a book contract was awarded to Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald N. Yates for their collaborative study of Crypto-Jews and Crypto-Muslims in the settlement of British North America. Titled Star, Crescent and Cross:  Jews and Muslims in Colonial America, the work will be published next year by McFarland, a leading U.S. publisher of scholarly, reference and academic books.

Among original investigations by the authors are genealogical studies of the West Country Gentlemen and others who proposed and promoted England's first colonies. From Sir John Hawkins (Sephardic Jewish surname Haquines, "physician" in Arabic) and Sir Francis Drake (whose family coat of arms bore a six-pointed star until it was air-brushed out by later historians) to Stephen Parmenius (a Jew from Turkish-held Hungary) and Captain John Smith, the principal players in England's colonization efforts are revealed to be far different from the white Anglo-Saxon Christian buccaneers American schoolchildren are taught about.

"England's reliance on Iberian Jews to promote its interests abroad goes back as far as the Tudors," according to Star, Crescent and Cross. "Henry VIII used Spanish Jewish lawyers to justify his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. One of them, an Italian banker tapped for his shrewdness and knowledge of international law, was the ancestor of Oliver Cromwell, Protector of the Commonwealth."

The book presents a series of colonial documents, contemporary firsthand accounts, records, portraits, family genealogies and ethnic DNA test results which fundamentally challenge the national storyline depicting America’s first settlers as white, British and Christian. The authors postulate that many of the initial colonists were of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish ancestry, usually arriving as crypto-Jews or crypto-Muslims.

Names Ordinary and Illustrious

The footnotes in the study document origins and meanings of over 5,000 surnames previously assumed to be sturdy English ones of ancient bearing. The authors' research casts a sidelight on celebrated Jewish Americans who can trace back to colonial forebears. These range from the Massachusetts Kennedys to the Byrds of Virginia, from actors Johnny Depp and Adrien Brody to actresses Roseanne Barr and Gwyneth Paltrow, from writers Louise Glück and Neil Simon to politicians Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders and jurists Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

"We hope that the remarkable stories of the men, women and families in Star, Crescent and Cross will serve as a reminder of America’s early diversity and stimulus for rewriting some of the inaccurate and injudicious portions in the country's history," said Yates.

Among the famous colonial figures discussed (and usually illustrated with a portrait) are William Byrd II, Patrick Henry, William Bradford, William Penn, George Mason, George Washington, Richard Lee II, Thomas Paine, Paul Revere, Peter Stuyvesant, Luis Gomez, Jacob Troxell, Anthony Ashley Cooper Lord Shaftesbury, Tench Tilghman, Christopher Gist, John Skeen, Sir Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, Virginia Dare, Don Luis de Carvajal, Daniel Boone, William Cooper, the Salem Witches, Christopher Gist, Lord Saye and Sele, and various Lowells, Cabots, Lodges, Livingstones, Delanceys and Roosevelts.

Chapter 2, "Sephardim in the New World" is a survey of Crypto-Jews in North America, especially the Caribbean and Atlantic Islands. It includes autosomal DNA data proving the Melungeons are probably descended from Jews mixed with American Indians, Africans and Gypsies/Romani, as recently reported in this blog. 

There are chapters and name-lists devoted to each of the original colonies. The book will contain over 50 illustrations.

English navigators and explorers included many West Country gentlemen. Most were from intermarried Crypto-Jewish families. New York Public Library.

Jewish I is described as "the most common of the three markers . . . its frequency highest in Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Slavic peoples who intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. It also appears in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan Jews (Sephardim)." This means it is a marker of general European admixture. But where is it most common, and where did the European Jews it identifies originate? Where were they concentrated in earliest times?

Statistical searches in ENFSI provide some tantalizing answers. Jewish I is found at a relatively high frequency throughout Europe but at elevated levels in Poland, Portugal and Belgium. It is lowest in Italy and Finland.

This would suggest that Jewish ancestry and intermarriage was common in countries where the population still carries this admixture marker.

Jewish II is characterized as the "strongest" marker, correlating very often with Ashkenazi Jewish parentage, especially in its double allele form (two checks under parents' columns on an 18 Marker Ethnic Panel or Jewish DNA Ancestry report). This description is validated by ENFSI results for 22 countries of Europe, where its strongest showings are in Czechoslovakia, Croatia and Slovenia (all Central European Slavic populations).

Its lowest frequency occurs in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, countries with few Ashkenazi Jews today. There are no data for Hungary in ENFSI since it does not belong to the European Union. Czech is the closest population in geography and historical composition. Likewise, there are no data for Slovakia, the southern part of the former Czechoslovakia, as Slovakia chose not to participate in ENFSI.

In Czechoslovakia, nearly 1 in 26 people carry Jewish II in its double allelic form, suggesting both parents were Jewish. The lowest frequency of Jewish II occurs in Scotland, where only 1 in 65 have it.

Note that even though most Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, a Germanic dialect, they were not necessarily German in origin. More likely they belonged to the Slavic peoples. Yiddish is not linguistically descended from Rhinish or Low German but a High German language of convenience adopted by Slavic-speaking Jews during Germany's medieval Drang nach Osten (Push to the East). Germany itself was considered a predominantly Slavic nation by geographers until the nineteenth century, when it was first unified under the Prussian monarchy.

The reason Jewish II is not detected at a higher level in today's German population is because of the ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by the Nazi government in the Second World War. For various reasons, Czechoslovakia and Hungary's Jewish populations, many of them assimilated Jews, survived better than Germany's.

The best book about German Jewry is probably The Pity of It All, A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon (Macmillan, 2002), although the author's approach to Jewish ethnicity is Zionist and doctrinaire.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is interested in their namesake's Jewish ancestry. Do a Google Search and you'll get numerous hits under "Abraham Lincoln Jewish Ancestry." They can all be traced back to the work of Rutgers University professor Elizabeth C. Hirschman, who published her findings in The Melungeons:  The Last Lost Tribe in America in 2005 (Mercer University Press). Melungeons.com immediately reported the news in an article on Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, in March 2005.

Actually, the revelation goes back to Abraham Lincoln's own lifetime. In 1909 a book was written by Isaac Markens titled Abraham Lincoln and the Jews. In it is the germ of the controversy. Rabbi Isaac Wise of Cincinnati wrote in 1865, "Abraham Lincoln believed himself to be bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He supposed himself to be of Hebrew parentage, he said so in my presence, and indeed he possessed the common features of the Hebrew race both in countenance and features."

Sketch of young Lincoln shows typical Sephardic Jewish looks:  dark features, bony skull, lanky build, big nose, craggy brow.

Lincoln's son Robert later denied the admission of Hebrew ancestry. He told Markens that he had "never before heard that his father supposed he had any Jewish ancestry." Markens dismissed the exchange between Lincoln and the rabbi as a "pleasantry."

Pleasantry or not, the rumor seems to reflect historical truth. "The Lincoln material in my book traces his family's arrival from England into the New Hingham Colony in Massachusetts and their migration down to the Appalachian area," Elizabeth Hirschman told the curator of the Lincoln Collection, James M. Cornelius, who contacted her in September. "I use genealogies, marriage practices, wills and cemetery inscriptions to build the case for his Jewish--and likely Sephardic--ancestry."

Now that Lincoln is beginning to be seen as having Jewish ancestry, what about his status as a Melungeon? That has now slipped into jeopardy, it seems. Jewish and Melungeon ancestry go hand in glove, except in the eyes of those who don't believe Melungeons are a distinct ethnic group at all. They are opposed to finding any unwanted ethnicity in people claiming to be Melungeon. We predict Lincoln's Jewishness will rapidly be disposed of by these devotees of the received standard version of American history.

Ashkenazi Jews May Have Founded Israel,

But Hebrew-Speaking Khazars Created Ashkenaz

Yes, the Khazars spoke Hebrew. It was the official language of the medieval kingdom, just as it is today in Israel. That is one of the surprising revelations of a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv history professor Shlomo Sand, who devotes half a chapter to the “strange empire in the East” (London:  Verso, 2009).

Judaism has not always been a closed society. During all but the last four or five centuries of its existence, it has been a proselytizing (and stabilizing) force in world events. Great states like the now-forgotten Khazaria played a role in the balance of powers and destiny of world civilization. The policies of the Kagan and his viceroy the Bey were praised everywhere for creating a prosperous, multi-ethnic, multi-faith state that held sway over the lives of millions for five centuries (700-1200).

Out of the Mists of Time

In an older book, Catastrophe (New York:  Ballatine), David Keys pursues a wider theme. He also has a chapter on Khazaria, “The Jewish Empire.” In it, after reviewing what we know about the medieval state, he concludes:  “The Khazar empire prevented the westward spread of Islam. If it had not been for the military might of the empire, Islam would likely have rolled west into pagan eastern Europe and possibly even into pagan Scandinavia in the eight and ninth centuries A.D.” He postulates that the Vikings could well have become Muslim, as well as Poland, Hungary, Romania, eastern Austria, the Czech and Slovak lands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Danelaw, the Viking state that emerged in eastern England.

“If the Khazar empire had not prevented Islamic expansion, it is even possible that the Normans (originally Vikings from Denmark) might have already been Muslims for two hundred years by the time they conquered England in 1066. What’s more, if the Arabs had occupied what is now the Ukraine and Russia [rather than the Khazars, who founded Kiev, Russia’s first capital], a Viking people known as the Rus would never have been able to push south and east from the Baltic to establish Russia” (p. 98).

An “investigative archeologist,” Keys attributes the rise and spread of the Khazar state to a devastating volcanic explosion in Java in 535 that caused worldwide darkness, crop loss, famine, droughts, floods, migration of peoples and destabilization of regimes. Among the losers in what has passed into history as the Dark Ages were the Byzantines, Britons, French, Spanish, south Arabs, Tang Chinese, Teotihuacan and Peruvians. The winners were Avars, Huns, Koreans, Japanese, Toltecs, Incas, Mohammedans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Visigoths. The global disaster had far-reaching effects that formed the modern world.

Sand is a professor in the department of European history (separated, curiously, from “Jewish” history in his country, Israel) and is concerned, as all historians are, with books. On the basis of records and written accounts, he reveals Khazaria’s rise as no opportunistic accident to adorn a schoolboy’s tale but as a historical phenomenon central to the formation of world Jewry. What Sand and Keys have in common is their iconoclastic, multi-disciplinary approaches. Independently, they assign a prominent role to Khazaria in world history. Both attack taboo subjects with relish and finesse and are soundly ignored, no doubt, in the balkanized institutional world of learning.

Physical Evidence in Genes

Sand was apparently unaware of Keys or the global catastrophe of 525, but Keys has an excellent genetic summary of the heritage of the Khazars, one that is consistent with the latest research into the unity and diversity of the Jewish people(s).

“The Jewish empire’s other legacy was the creation of a large pool of Jews of ethnically non-Jewish origin who subsequently became a major part—perhaps even the numerically dominant part—of northeast European Jewry and subsequently of world Jewry,” Keys writes (p. 99). He goes further and substantiates and characterizes the convert origin of the Ashkenazi community in the ascendancy in modern Israel and the United States.

“This group, according to tradition, comprises the majority of the descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Levi—people who today still bear the name Levi or Levy. Significantly, it does not include a Levite subgroup—the Priests themselves—who often have the name Cohen. . . . This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests)—but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests [Levites]. And then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry . . . . If some top Khazars were adopting Cohenic Levitical status (i.e., Chief Priest status), then it is more than likely that others—a larger number—were adopting ordinary Levitical status (i.e., Assistant Priest status). Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status” (p. 100).

Kaftans and Yarmulkes

Both Keys and Sand write of the revealing role of Yiddish, the lingua franca of medieval European Jewry and first language of 80% of the settlers in the modern-day Land of Israel. They agree that Yiddish, even though it has a medieval German base, has more elements that are Slavic, Romance, Hebrew, Aramaic and even Turkic and is more accurately to be regarded as the result of a relexification process by originally mixed Sorbs, Magyars, Khazars and others, not as the dialect of west German or Rhineland Jews. In conventional Jewish teaching, Yiddish is regarded as a prestigious import from the Rhadanite and other Romano-Frankic Jews (who were Judean merchants under the Romans, according to most, hence retaining the desired link to ethnic origins in the Middle East). In the new view, Yiddish loses a lot of its special historical claims and becomes simply a language of convenience in the polyglot Khazar domain of former times.

The two books attribute also a superabundance of anthropological characteristics of Ashkenazi Jews to Khazar predominance, including shtetls (townlets), silk kaftans, fur headdresses, naming individuals after Jewish holidays (we have an Aunt Hanukkah and Uncle Pesach in our family tree) and innumerable place-names in Eastern Europe. Finally, Sand notes that the word yarmulke is derived from a Turkic word (p. 247).     

Although the “Khazar thesis” is largely ignored or silenced by Israeli leaders and Jewish scholars, it is unlikely that the rulers of the modern state of Israel will make any constructive impact on the course of world events on the scale of Khazaria. Jews should study Khazaria's intellectual and international model of statecraft instead of the tired and chauvinistic histories of nineteenth-century Zionists. As Sand says, “Why not begin to dream its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?”

Only His Geneticist Knows for Sure 

A visit to the temple by a Canadian doctor and one-page letter to the journal Nature in 1997 started it all, a frenzied hunt for the multi-study, double-blind, placebo-controlled proof that Jewish men of the surname Cohen carried the same genes as the biblical patriarch Aaron, the mystical Cohen Modal Haplotype (Skorecki et al., 1997).  Early testing showed that nearly half of men named Cohen—Cohanim in the Hebrew plural—had the same values at six locations on their Y chromosome. For the record, here are the magic numbers that first defined the “Y chromosome of Old Testament Priests”:

DYS19 - 14

DYS388 - 16

DYS390 - 23

DYS391 - 10

DYS392 - 11

DYS393 – 12

But having those scores did not make you a member of the club. As the authors of an article on the “extended CMH” finally appearing last year write, the original research by Thomas et al. (1998) “produced a ‘low resolution’ CHM that was shared among many non-Jewish populations” (M. F. Hammer et al., “Extended Y Chromosome Haplotypes Resolve Multiple and Unique Lineages of the Jewish Priesthood,” Human Genetics 126:707-17). 

That would never do. Moreover, such sketchy data “did not provide the phylogenetic resolution needed to infer the geographic origin of the CHM lineage.”

So Hammer at the University of Arizona, partnering with the National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli Populations, spent ten years and millions of dollars narrowing down the definition of the CMH and pinpointing its origin in history. Glossing over the statistics, subjects and methods—are you ready—the extended CMH is not much different from the original CMH, only it has no living matches.

Yes, you read that right. Whereas Skorecki’s minimal 6-locus haplotype might be proudly shared by thousands who eagerly sent in their DNA samples to genetic testing companies over the years, the new and improved CMH of Hammer et al. with twice the definition or 12 loci when “compared with the YHRD [Y-STR Haplotype Reference Database in Berlin]. . . yielded zero out of 10,243 possible haplotypes in 66 populations” (711).

Way to go, I hear from Marketing.

From a dybbuk the CMH has gone to being a dynosaur. It was once doubted whether it existed. It is now proven to be extinct.

No further research is needed on this subject, not as far as I'm concerned.

Implications for Jewish History and Genealogy

Article:  Gil Atzmon et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era:  Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (June 11, 2010) 850-859.

This blog posting attempts to summarize this important article and translate its technical results into layman’s language for the sake of our customers. From the genetic evidence, we hope to glean some useful information about Jewish history and genealogy, especially for those who find they have “some” Jewish ancestry in their family tree but who are non-Jewish in the way they identify.

The eleven authors represent a stellar team of international researchers specializing in population genetics. The institutions involved are leading centers of genetics and biomedicine, starting with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and including Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Appearance in the American Journal of Human Genetics, a publication of the American Society of Human Genetics, assures prestige and finality of the highest order.

The study uses a new sample of 237 carefully qualified Jewish subjects, which it compares with data from the Human Genome Diversity Project started at Stanford in the 1990s, as well as the Population Reference Sample (PopRes) project, containing hundreds of thousands of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms, used to differentiate genes that show heredity lines and disease linkage in populations).

The scale of the project is colossal, and it must have taken years to complete. Financial support came from private and public sources, including the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and NIH. It supersedes (while it confirms or clarifies) the two types of previous approaches to the problem: 1) genetics studies on blood groups from the 1970s, and 2) recent studies of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial haplotypes. The latter “uniparental” studies could only offer a limited view of the subject. This study uses autosomal DNA to its full advantage. The scientists had supercomputers and the latest tools in biostatistics at their disposal.

Material and Methods

The two cornerstones of any statistical study are reliability and validity. Experts would be challenged to find anything wrong with the reliability of “Abraham’s Children.” State-of-the-science genotyping, phylogeny, bootstrapping and GERMLINE algorithms are employed. But validity issues may be mentioned as likely to call some of the findings into slight question in some areas. Subjects were recruited in New York (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian and Ashkenazi Jews), Seattle (Turkish Sephardic Jews), Greece (Greek Sephardic Jews) and Rome (Italian Jews). The main divisions into Italian, Ashkenazi, Syrian, Middle Eastern (termed Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews here) can be seen in some instances to be question-begging, and there are equivocations in labels that might, conceivably, create “desired results.” Moreover, subjects “were included only if all four grandparents came from the same Jewish community.” Such a rule might have influenced one of the findings, namely, that “Jewish Communities Show High Levels of IBD,” or Informative By Descent shared segments of DNA (p. 855f.).

Notably, the conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews are highly inbred, with most being as close as 3^rd or 4^th cousins to each other, could be an effect of the sample selection from New York Ashkenazi Jews, who often emigrated together and belonged to the same synagogue for several generations. A larger, more randomized selection would have been better. The total number of Ashkenazi Jews used was only 34 persons.

Jews now living in Rome are not the same as Roman Jews. Traditional schemes of Jewry speak of the Romaniot Jews, but these were traditionally at home in the Byzantine Empire. Are Syrian Jews mostly Middle Eastern or are they another amalgam of émigrés and remnants? Where are Central Asian Jews like the large Uzbekistani population my local barber represents? The absence of Caucasian and Central Asian Jews may have affected the study’s rather resounding, over-confidant statement that it “refutes” the contention that Ashkenazi Jews have little Middle Eastern heritage and rather more of a contribution to their genetics from Khazars and Slavs. The study, like many, seems at pains to prove Middle Eastern connections of Ashkenazi Jews, who are the leading force in present-day Israel.

There are no German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or English Jews in the study. “Ashkenazi” seems to represent Jews living in New York with rather uniform ancestry in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Lithuania and Russia. All Jews in the study seem to be of the “go to temple” (at least on the High Holy Days) sort, although no mention is made of religious orientation. Subjects were chosen because of their ostensibly “pure” Jewish roots.

Ashkenazi Jews at Yom Kippur in 19th century Central Europe from a painting by Gottlieb.

Seven Jewish population clusters are defined: 

1. Irani Jews
2. Iraqi Jews
3. Syrian Jews
4. Ashkenazi Jews
5. Italian Jews
6. Greek Jews
7. Turkish Jews

These were sorted out into three major groups of the Jewish Diaspora:

• Eastern European Ashkenazim
• Italian, Greek and Turkish Sephardim
• Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian Middle Easterners

How Different are Jews from Each Other? From Non-Jewish Populations?

Table 1 on page 853 shows Fst values, which indicate the degree of projected inbreeding within a cluster and allow one to make comparisons between clusters. If we look at the table of genetic diversity among Jews, we can pick out some of the following points of interest:

• Ashkenazi Jews are very, very different genetically from Italian (Sephardic) Jews: genetic distance between the two populations is over 3.1, whereas that between Ashkenazi Jews and non-Jewish European populations such as Russian or French hardly ever goes above 1.0.

• Syrian and Iraqi Jews are also very different from each other; Syrian Jews group together with European (Ashkenazi and Sephardic) Jews, a major finding of the study.

• All Jewish populations, including Ashkenazim, resemble genetically the Druze, a Middle Eastern population that is still in its original place in Lebanon and Israel. Syrian and Turkish Jews (Sephardim) most resemble Druzes.

The study identifies two major groups of Jews, characterizing them as Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. Of the Middle Eastern Jews, the Irani and Iraqi were scarcely distinguishable. The Europeans have varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations into which they have been dispersed. European Jews are 20-40% (or on another page, 30-60%) European, the study concludes, while Sephardic Jews have 8-11% North African (Berber) DNA. Italian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi Jews are the most inbred.

All these statistics “highlight the commonality of Jewish origin” and expose the Middle Eastern origins and genetic unity of Jewish people, even in dispersal from their homeland in ancient Israel.

The flipside of inbreeding is outbreeding or exogamy. If European Jews are highly admixed, by the same token, many Europeans must have some degree of Jewish admixture. Gene flow did not go just one way. What are the most outbred Jewish clusters according to the study? It is the Sephardic Jews from Italy, Greece and Turkey, with low rates of shared IBD and greater diversity than the Ashkenazim.

Lost Tribes Still Lost

 The brief Discussion section at the end of the article attempts to put the statistical findings together with an outline of Jewish history and resolve some of the mysteries of Jewish genetic makeup, chiefly the Khazar question. “Each of the Jewish populations formed its own cluster as part of the larger Jewish cluster,” the authors conclude. “Each group demonstrated Middle Eastern ancestry and variable admixture with European populations.”

Next, the authors attack the difficulty of determining when the major split between Eastern and Western Jewish groups occurred (with Syrians falling out with the Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the West, although intermediate in genetic distance with Middle Eastern Jews like the Iraqi and Irani). Based on IBD or calculations of shared genes on the front end or bottlenecks and back end or genetic drift, “a split between Middle Eastern Iraqi and Iranian Jews and European/Syrian Jews…is 100-150 generations [or] 2500 years ago.” They correlate this population divide with the Babylonian and Persian periods of Jewish history. These disturbances began in the 900s-800s BCE when the Kingdom of David fell apart into the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Northern Kingdom (Samaria , Israel, Ephraim) and were finalized in the 6^th century BCE when King Cyrus of Persia granted permission to the exiles to be repatriated from Babylon to Jerusalem.

In the shuffle, the so-called Lost Tribes representing the Northern Kingdom had been dispersed “beyond the river” into Central Asia, leaving the Judeans in the ascendancy in Israel. Although the authors do not explicity state it, the fact that Syrian Jews are several quantums’ length closer in affinity with European Jews than Middle Eastern Jews seems to reflect the historic Return to Zion and inauguration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 516 BCE and explain why European Jews, especially Sephardim, emphasize the House of David and Tribes of Levi in their traditional ancestral accounts. So far, the autosomal clock of change seems to beat with the march of history.

Khazar kingdom in the Middle Ages.

The article is clear about another thing, “the idea of non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestry in the formation of the European/Syrian Jewish groups,” attributing this to the mass conversions and proselytism during Greco-Roman times. It mentions that there were six million Jews in the Roman Empire, when Judaism accounted for 10% of the population. But here is where the authors’ sense of history begins to get fuzzy. They do not speak of medieval conversions or mention, for instance, the Jews of Visigothic and Berber Spain and Septimanian France and gloss over the huge Khazar conversion and expansion event, 600-1000 CE. Again, medieval history does not seem to be geneticists’ strength.

“Abraham’s Children” claims that the genetic composition of European/Syrian Jewish groups “is incompatible with theories that Ashkenazi Jews are for the most part the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars or Slavs” (857). In this brief sentence are a number of fallacies, special pleading, misnomers, false assumptions, sleights of hand, straw arguments and equivocations. This blog  posting can only touch on the controversy, but to begin with, as we have seen, Ashkenazi Jews (n=34, all from New York) are lumped together with Sephardim and Syrian Jews as having Middle Eastern core pedigrees, even though they have the highest amount of local population admixture. Are Khazars the same as Slavs? Not ethnographically. They are sometimes treated as Middle Easterners and sometimes as Europeans or other interlopers in this article, but it doesn’t seem to matter really, because there are no Khazars in the study sample. The authors are thus stalking a phantom, which they duly track down and slay.

Ghost in the Machine

Using haplogroup studies, the authors raise the possibility of 12.5% non-Middle Eastern admixture per generation in Ashkenazi Jews (based on Hammer et al.). They also draw attention to the 7.5% frequency of haplogroup R1a1 among Ashkenazi Jews, a non-Middle Eastern, rather Eastern European male lineage. But R1a1 is not diagnostic of Khazars; try maybe G. R1a1 descendants are typically fair haired and light-eyed; Khazars had a Middle Eastern, Turkic appearance, with dark features.

In a sense, geneticists always seem to find support for what they set out to prove in the first place. It is small wonder that “Abraham’s Fathers” comes at the end of and completes a decades-long push by Big Science to legitimize Jewish claims to Middle Eastern roots. It is a splendid survey, the last in a long series, but it is not the final word on the subject. There are flaws both in the sampling and historical thinking.

The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Ashkenazi Jewish author, advanced the thesis that the modern Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe is not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars. This Turkic people of the Caucasus region converted to Judaism in the 8th century and moved into Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania and Germany during the 12th and 13th century when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. Koestler's work was founded on that of the French scholar Ernest Renan and set off a firestorm of controversy among Zionists. 

Since the spate of Jewish genetic studies appearing this summer, reports in the media have announced that nearly all Ashkenazi Jews descend from only four women, and that if you are Ashkenazi you are likely to be no farther distant in kinship than fifth or sixth cousins from any other Ashkenazi Jew (for instance, your spouse). The DNA Fingerprint Plus marker called Ashkenazi Jewish II (or simply Jewish II) often occurs in the panels of Ashkenazi Jews (and their spouses) in pairwise fashion, meaning both parents carried it, a further indication of consanguinity in this population.

In forensic studies, Jewish II occurs in its double-pure form in about one-fourth of the sample, consisting of 178 nominally unrelated Jews living in Budapest, Hungary. Like all alleles, it is found in other populations, but on a world population match basis, aside from some random Asian and Native American populations, it is most common in Hungarian Ashkenazim and least common in Arabs and Egyptian Muslims (study 111). These statistics underline a division historically along religious lines in which Jews tended to marry other Jews and Muslims other Muslims.

On an informal basis, Jewish II was also observed in pedigree-related comparisons of Ashkenazi Jews who numbered among DNA Consultants' customers. Those who reported the strongest "line-bred" genealogies in Central and Eastern Europe typically also carried Jewish II from both parents.

  Unidentified Ashkenazi Jewish violinist. Library of Congress.

Two major research articles on Jewish DNA appeared in June. As reported by Nicolas Wade in the New York Times in an article titled "Studies Show Jews' Genetic Similarity," they settle an old controversy. One of the surveys of genomic or autosomal DNA was conducted by Gil Atzmon of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Harry Ostrer of New York University and appears in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The other, led by Doron M. Behar of the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa and Richard Villems of the University of Tartu in Estonia, is published in the journal Nature. The two teams reached similar conclusions independently and simultaneously. Their findings refute the long-standing contention that Jews “have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.”

One of the articles, published online June 9, and in print July 8, was "The Genome-Wide Structure of the Jewish People," (Nature 466, 238-42). The editors' summary for it goes like this:

A comparison of genomic data from 14 Jewish communities across the world with data from 69 non-Jewish populations reveals a close relationship between most of today's Jews and non-Jewish populations from the Levant. This fits in with the idea that most contemporary Jews are descended from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant. By contrast, the Ethiopian and Indian Jewish communities cluster with neighbouring non-Jewish populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively. This may be partly because a greater degree of genetic, religious and cultural crossover took place when the Jewish communities in these areas became established.

An abstract for the other article mentioned by the New York Times, "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era," is given as follows by the publisher, The American Journal of Human Genetics:

For more than a century, Jews and non-Jews alike have tried to define the relatedness of contemporary Jewish people. Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations. However, these and successor studies of monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic markers did not resolve the issues of within and between-group Jewish genetic identity. Here, genome-wide analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi) and comparison with non-Jewish groups demonstrated distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture. Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry. Rapid decay of IBD in Ashkenazi Jewish genomes was consistent with a severe bottleneck followed by large expansion, such as occurred with the so-called demographic miracle of population expansion from 50,000 people at the beginning of the 15^th century to 5,000,000 people at the beginning of the 19^th century. Thus, this study demonstrates that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD genetic threads.

Critics of the new research findings point out that there are still no known markers for Jewish ancestry in genomic DNA. They obviously are not among our customers, however, since those who have purchased the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel available since last year are routinely screened for Jewish I, Jewish II and Jewish III. Their locations on genomic DNA were discovered by the company last August. 

A Jewish genetic signature expressed in terms of autosomal DNA was predicted last year in a study titled, "A Genome-Wide Genetic Signature of Jewish Ancestry Perfectly Separates Individuals with and without Full Jewish Ancestry in a Large Random Sample of European Americans," by Ann C. Need et al. (Genome Biology 2009, vol. 10). That study spoke of "near perfect genetic inference of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry." Interestingly, it also foresaw that "the genetic distinction between Jews and non-Jews may be more attributable to a Near-Eastern [i.e. Middle Eastern] origin for Jewish populations than to population bottlenecks." [American usage favors "Middle East" over the British and outdated "Near East" still retained in academia.]

A final study of Jewish autosomal DNA that deserves mentioning is "Genomic Microsatellites Identify Shared Jewish Ancestry Intermediate between Middle Eastern and European Populations," published also last year in BMC Genetics, vol. 10, by Naama M. Kopelman et al. It used 678 autosomal microsatellite loci in 78 individuals, but what is proven on a large scale seems equally true on the small scale of our three Jewish markers based on microsatellites forming part of your DNA fingerprint.