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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. 

List Proven to Work in Part Also for Melungeon, Cherokee Family History

As part of our series on Jewish ancestry, we reproduce below an appendix from the forthcoming book, Star, Crescent and Cross:  Jews and Muslims in Colonial America, by Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates.

Rituals and Practices of the Secret Jews of Portugal

The following is an incomplete list of practices that may be indicative of Jewish origin among Anusim or secret Jews or former Jewish families in the New World today.

Told one is Jewish explicitly by parents, grandparents, or other relatives, a boy when he turns 13, a girl at 12.

Having Jewish family names: Duran, Lopez, etc.

Secret synagogues; secret prayer groups.

 New Mexico Crypto-Jews. Newsweek.

Avoiding church.

Churches without icons.

Lighting candles on Friday night when the first star appears.

Clean house and clothes for Shabbat.

Not allowed to do anything Friday night (not even wash hair).

El Dia Puro (Yom Kippur).

Celebrating a spring holiday.

Fasts: three days of Tanit Esther; every Monday and Thursday, fast of Gedalia.

Venerating Jewish saints, with celebrations:  Santa Esterika, Santo Moises, etc.

Eight candles for Christmas.

Circumcision; consecration on eighth day (avoiding circumcision because that would bind child to the laws of Moses.

Biblical first names, like Esther.

Women taught Tanakh and ruled on questions.

Married under huppah/canopy.

Rending of garments; burial within one day; covering mirrors; spigots in cemeteries.

Seven days, then one year, of mourning.

Tombstones bearing Hebrew names, designations such as “daughter of Israel,” and Jewish symbols (hand pointing to a star, open book of life, torah, star of David).

Possessing talit and tefillin, mezuzot, Tanakh, siddurim other Jewish objects.

Sweeping the floor away from the door (to avoid defiling mezuzah).

Having Cabalistic knowledge and practices.

Ritual slaughter (special knives, tested on hair or nails); covering blood with sand; removing sinew.

Purging, soaking, salting, boiling meat.

Avoiding pork and shellfish and other non-kosher foods (squirrel, rabbit).

Avoiding blood; throwing out eggs with bloodspots.

Avoiding red meat in general.

Waiting between meat and milk.

Eating only food prepared by mother or maternal grandmother.

Adapted from Professor Eduardo Mayone Dias

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Los Angeles, California

Birth Rituals

To place a rooster’s head over the door of the room where the birth will occur.

After the birth the mother must not uncover herself or change clothes for 30 days.

To throw a silver coin into the baby’s first bath water, especially a son’s.

To say a prayer eight days after birth in which the baby’s name is included.

Belief that the fairies (hadas) preside over a naming ceremony at birth

Wedding Rituals

Only home weddings.

To fast on the wedding day (both bride and groom, as well as two male friends of the groom and two female friends of the bride).

To bind the bride and groom’s hands with a white cloth while a prayer is said.

To follow the wedding ceremony with a light meal consisting of a glass of wine, salt, bitter herbs, honey, an apple and unleavened bread.

At the wedding ceremony bride and groom eat and drink out of the same plate and glass.

Marrying your brother’s widow (Levirate law).

Funeral Rituals

To have ritual meals to which a beggar is invited and serve the food the deceased liked best.

To throw away all water in the home of the deceased.

To leave furniture overturned to show how a relative’s death has upset the family.

To appear disheveled and careless about your own appearance during mourning.

To go to the deceased’s room for eight days and say: May God give you a good night.  You were once like us, we will be like you.

Not to shave for 30 days after the death of a relative.

Not to eat meat for one week after a death in the family, then fast on the anniversary.

Naming Rituals

Having two names, a private one in Hebrew (kinnui, e.g. Moses) and public one in the vernacular (Morris). Others:  Jacob/James, Raphael/Ralph, Hannah/Johannah, Adina/Adelaide.

Allusions to mascots of Hebrew tribes like deer (Naphthali) and wolf (Levi).

Belief in being descended from the Biblical King David.

Naming after religious objects:  Paschal, Menorah.

Translating Hebrew names, especially girls’:  Hannah into Grace, Esther into Myrtle, Peninah into Pearl, Roda into Rose, Shoshannah into Lillian, Lily. Simchah into Joy, Tikvah into Hope, Tzirrah into Jewel, Golda into Goldie.

Allusions to Jacob’s blessing of his sons and grandsons, e.g. Fishel for Ephraim because he was to multiply like the fish of the sea.

Use of Hebrew, but non-biblical names (e.g., Meir, Hayyim, Omar, Tamarah/Demarice).

Use of names from Jewish legend and folklore (e.g. Adinah, Edna, Adel, progenitress of the tribe of Levi).

Use of hypocoristic or pet names within the family alluding to Hebrew ones, for instance Zack or Ike for Isaac, Robin (Rueben) instead of Robert.

Adding the theophoric suffix -el to surnames, e.g., Lovell, Riddell, Tunnel.

Naming after a living relative, preferably the eldest born after the grandfather or grandmother, the next born after uncles and aunts and only after the father when these names are exhausted (Sephardic) or naming only after dead relatives (Ashkenazic).

Use of double names like Edward Charles and James Robert.

Changing the name of a child who becomes ill to foil the angel of death.

Giving a child an amuletic name like Vetula (“old woman”) to bring long life.

Favoring names that begin with Lu- to remind the child that the family was once Portuguese (Lusitanian):  Louise, Luanne, etc.

Belief in gematria (numerology of names, determined by Hebrew alphabet)

Avoiding saint’s names (Paul, Peter, Barbara) and using Marianne or Mariah instead of Mary.

Jokes about the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary

Using names like Christopher or Christina to dispel doubts about conversion to Christianity.

Knowing whether your family belongs to the Kohanim (priestly caste), Levite (House of David) or Israelite (all the rest) division of Jews.

Other

Swearing an oath with your hat on.

Not mentioning the name of God. Writing it G*d.

Washing your hands before prayer.

A father blessing a son in public.

Saying grace after the meal.

Bowing and bobbing during religious service.

Jokes about the central tenets of Christianity (Immaculate Conception of Mary, rising from the dead of Jesus, etc.).

Deriding idolatry of saints and ornate decor of churches.

Hatred of the pope.

Preparing Saturday’s meal (often a slow-cooking stew, for instance of eggplant) on Friday afternoon so no work is performed on the Sabbath.

Eating preferably fruits that grow in the land of Israel (dates, olives, oranges, grapes, peaches etc.).

Spreading sand from Israel on a grave or in a sanctuary.

Eating tongue on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize head of the year.

Having Bibles containing only the Old Testament and prayer books consisting only of the Psalms.

Having pictures of rabbis and scholars rather than saints in the sanctuary.

Performing tashlich, letting old clothes float away in running stream to mark a new year.

Forgiving a debt on Yom Kippur.

Facing Jerusalem during rituals.

Uttering brief blessings when you see lightning, mountains and other natural wonders.

Using only percussion instruments like the tambourine and hand clapping in services.

Silent prayer by congregation after prayers made out loud.

Worship services in the home.

Having 11 elders in a place of worship (minyam).

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.

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to Eastern Mediterranean Origins

In memoriam Gloria Farley

Donald N. Yates

DNA Consultants

Keynote address for Ancient American History and Archeology Conference, Sandy, Utah, April 2, 2010

SUMMARY  Three examples of North American rock art are discussed and placed in the context of ancient Greek and Hebrew civilization. The Red Bird Petroglyphs are compared with Greek and Hebrew coins and the Bat Creek Stone. The Possum Creek Stone discovered by Gloria Farley is identified as a Greek athlete’s victory pedestal. The Thruston Stone is interpreted as a record of the blending of Greek, Cherokee, Native American, Egyptian and Hebrew civilization. Keetoowah Society traditions, as captured in The Vision of Eloh’, are adduced to confirm a general outline of the origins of the Cherokee people in a Ptolemaic Greek trans-Pacific expedition joining pre-arriving Greeks, Jews and Phoenicians in the Ohio Valley around 100 c.e.  Recent DNA investigations showing Egyptian, Jewish and Phoenician female lineages and the Y chromosome of Old Testament Priests among the Cherokee are also touched upon. Greek words and customs in the Cherokee are reviewed as time permits. Slide projector requested.

A cave entrance overlooking the Redbird River, a tributary of the South Fork of the Kentucky River in Clay County, Kentucky in the Daniel Boone National Forest, has inscriptions which according to Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati display a nineteenth-century example of writing in the Cherokee syllabary. A local resident (Burchell) recognizes Greek writing in one inscription (called Christian Monogram #2) but his reading is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Evaluation by experts in Greek and Semitic epigraphy identifies two distinct inscriptions, one in Greek and one in Hebrew.  They appear to be contemporaneous with the Bat Creek Stone unearthed in the 1889 excavation of a tomb in East Tennessee by Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian Institution.

Another record of Greek-speaking people in ancient America is the Possum Creek Stone, discovered by Gloria Farley in Oklahoma in the 1970s. It is discussed by her in Volume 2 of In Plain Sight as proof that the man history knows as Sequoyah did not invent the Cherokee syllabary.  The inscription can be read as Greek, HO-NI-KA-SA or ‘o nikasa, i.e. “This is the one who takes the prize of victory,” a common inscription for the pedestal upon which victors were crowned at athletic games.  The use is Homeric, and the spelling Doric.

A third piece of evidence helps fill in the background of the arrival of Greeks and their intermarriage with Asiatic and other Indians in North America. In 1870, an engraved 19 x 15 inch limestone tablet was uncovered in a mound excavation on Rocky Creek near Castalian Springs in Sumner County, Tennessee (see Ancient American, vol. 12, no. 77). Dating to an earlier time than its Mississipian Period context, it commemorates a peace treaty between the Cherokee and Shawnee. The Cherokee chief wears a horse-hair crested helmet and carries the spear and shield of a Greek hoplite. His Shawnee adversary clasps hands in a wedding ceremony with a Cherokee woman who bears wampum belts as a pledge of peace, has her hair in a maidenly bun, wears a Middle Eastern-style plaid kilt, and displays a large star of David. In the Red Record or Walam Olum, we learn that before crossing the Mississippi, somewhere along the south bank of the Missouri, the Algonquians or Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians), who are later allied with the Cherokee, encounter a foreign tribe they call the Stonys. Cherokee legends about Stone-coat demonstrate that the original Cherokee had metal armor and weapons. DNA studies confirm a mixture of “anomalous” East Mediterranean mitochondrial lineages such as Egyptian T, Greek U and Phoenician X with “standard” American Indian haplogroups A, B, C and D in the Cherokee and certain other Eastern Woodlands Indians.

To sum up, the Red Bird Petroglyph is a Greek inscription from the 2nd to 3rd century c.e., not a crude Cherokee scratching of around 1800 as announced recently by the Archeological Institute of America and the New York Times. It occurs above what is, in all likelihood, an inscription in Maccabean-era Hebrew. The Sequoyan syllabary for which these Greek and Hebrew inscriptions were mistaken originated in the Greek world of the Bronze Age along with other syllabaries like Linear A, Linear B and Cypro-Minoan. The Cherokee language, which today is Iroquoian, is the result of a relexification process in the distant past. It contains many relics of words of Greek origin, especially in the area of government, military terminology, mythology, athletics and ritual. Cherokee music also reflects Greek origins.  The Cherokee Indians are, quite literally, the Greeks of Native America.

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to East Mediterranean Origins (PPT)

Greek Words and Customs in Cherokee

DNA Consultants’ 18 Marker Ethnic Panel Reveals Native American, Jewish, Other Hard-to-Find Lines in Your Family Tree

PHOENIX – (April 7, 2010) – The market leader in autosomal DNA testing for ancestry, DNA Consultants announced that it has introduced the latest enhancement to its DNA Fingerprint Test™ ancestry tool. The add-on to its popular all-in-one ancestry tracing product is called the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel and sells for $50.00.

“With the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel, you can easily verify Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish, African and other ethnic lines that may be hidden in your family tree,” said Donald Yates, the company’s founder and principal scientist. “If you get a check mark for Native American marker I or II from either parent, you have Native American ancestry…it’s that simple.”

Like the DNA Fingerprint Test upon which it is based, the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel uses the same unique DNA profile familiar from television police shows like CSI. The markers were discovered by the company last August after statistical validation showing they reflected population splits in early human migrations.

“We’re not talking about ancient history,” said Yates. “These markers reflect recent genetic contributions to your overall ethnic mix within a relatively shallow time frame of about the last ten generations.” The reason, he said, was that Native American and the other types of DNA are “so distinctive their genetic signature lasts and never completely goes away.”

The 18 Markers include tell-tale evidence for Native American, Mediterranean, East European, Ashkenazi Jewish, Sub-Saharan African, Asian and several other definitive ethnic groups.

 “The test doesn’t tell you how much of that ancestry you have,” Yates added. “It only tells you if you have it, even if it is a minor line.” The panel also reports whether you have a given ethnic heritage from one parent or both.

To obtain the 18 Marker Ethnic Panel you must first order or submit results from a DNA Fingerprint Test. The core test is a comprehensive analysis of all your ancestral lines and gives you matches to populations and countries around the world where you have accumulations of ancestry. It sells for $250.00. Combined with the new 18 Marker Ethnic Panel, the test is called DNA Fingerprint Plus and costs $300.00.

Order online at dnaconsultants.com or call toll free 1-888-806-2588.

For more information, maps and sample report, visit DNA Consultants’ product page for the DNA Fingerprint Plus at:

http://dnaconsultants.com/_product_60282/DNA_Fingerprint_Plus.

DNA Consultants’ complete and total ancestry analysis is based on human prehistory but detects recent ethnic contributions to your DNA.

Donald Yates discovered

new DNA markers in 2009.

Ethnic admixture markers included in the DNA Fingerprint Plus 18 Marker Ethnic Panel range from Native American to Sub-Saharan African.

Press Release dated April 7, 2010

DNA Consultants

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Original Post:  

Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician and Hebrew Origins of Cherokee?

Donald N. Yates

submitted August 31, 2009

ABSTRACT. A sample of 52 individuals who purchased mitochondrial DNA testing to determine their female lineage was assembled after the fact from the customer files of DNA Consultants. All claim matrilineal descent from a Native American woman, usually named as Cherokee. The main criterion for inclusion in the study is that test subjects must have obtained results not placing them in the standard Native American haplogroups A, B, C or D. Hence the use of the word "anomalous" in the title of a paper prepared by chief investigator Donald N. Yates, "Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee."

Most subjects reveal haplotypes that are unmatched anywhere else except among other participants, and there proves to be a high degree of interrelatedness and common ancestral lines. Haplogroup T emerges as the largest lineage, followed by U, X, J and H. Similar proportions of these haplogroups are noted in the populations of Egypt, Israel and other parts of the East Mediterranean (see below).

The Cherokee and Admixture. According to a 2007 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Cherokee are the largest tribal group today, with a population of 331,000 or 15% of all American Indians. Despite their numbers, though, the Cherokee have had few DNA studies conducted on them. I know of only three reports on Cherokee mitochondrial DNA. A total of 60 subjects are involved, all from Oklahoma. Possibly the reason the Cherokee are not recruited for more studies, I would suggest, stems from their being perceived as admixed in comparison with other Indians. Accordingly, they are deemed less worthy of study.

In the past, whenever a geneticist or anthropologist conducting a study of Native Americans has encountered an anomalous haplogroup, that is, a lineage that does not belong to one of the five generally accepted American Indian mitochondrial DNA haplogroups A, B, C, D and X, it has been rejected as an example of admixture and not included in the survey results. This is true of the two examples of H and one of J reported by Cherokee descendants by Schurr (2000:253). Schurr takes these exceptions to prove the rule and regards them as instances of European admixture. The governing logic of population geneticists seems to go as follows:

Lineage A, B, C, D and X are American Indian.
Therefore, all American Indians are lineage A, B, C, D and X.

The fallacy in such reasoning is apparent. It could be restated as: "All men are two-legged creatures; therefore since the skeleton we dug up has two legs, it is human." It might be a kangaroo.

"The geneticists always seem to cry 'post-Columbian admixture,'" says Stephen C. Jett, a geographer at the University of California at Davis, "but fail to take into account that there are no plausible post-Columbian sources for the particular genetic mix encountered."

"Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee" concentrates on the "kangaroos"- documented or self-identifying Cherokee descendants whose haplotypes do not fit the current orthodoxy in American Indian population genetics. Here are some highlights, organized by haplogroup.

Haplogroup H. Although this quintessentially European haplogroup would seem to be the most likely suspect if admixture were responsible for the anomalous haplogroups, there are but four cases of it.

Haplogroup X. Haplogroup X is a latecomer to the "pantheon" of Native American haplogroups. Its relative absence in Mongolia and Siberia and a recently proven center of diffusion in Lebanon and Israel (Brown et al. 1998, Malhi and Smith 2002; Smith et al. 1999; Reidla 2003; Shlush et al. 2009) pose problems for the standard account of the peopling of the Americas. DNA Consultants Cherokee-descended customers include seven instances of haplogroup X. David E. Lewis (whose Cherokee name is Wayauwetsi) traces his unmatched X haplotype back to Seyinus, a Cherokee woman of the Wolf Clan born on or near the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina in 1862. Two cases represent descendants (unknown to each other, incidentally) of the Cherokee woman called Polly who was the namesake for the Qualla reservation (the sound p lacking in the Cherokee language and being rendered with qu).

Haplogroup J. Two other cases, both J's, are related to Polly, tracing their lines back to Betsy Walker, a Cherokee woman born about 1720 in Soco (One-Town). A descendant was the wife or paramour of Col. Will Thomas, the first chief and founder of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians located today on the Qualla Boundary. Views about J are still evolving, but it seems to have originated in present-day Lebanon approximately 10,000 years before present. It is a major Jewish female lineage (Thomas 2002).

Haplogroup U has never been reported in American Indians to my knowledge. In our sample it covers 13 cases or 25% of the total, second in frequency only to haplogroup T. One of the U's is Mary M. Garrabrant-Brower. She belongs to U5a1a* (all U5a1a not matched or assigned) but has no close matches anywhere. Her great-grandmother was Clarissa Green of the Cherokee Wolf Clan, born 1846. Mary's mother Mary M. Lounsbury maintained the Cherokee language and rituals. One of the cases of U2e* is my own. This line evidently arose from a Jewish Indian trader and a Cherokee woman. My fifth-great-grandmother was born about 1790 on the northern Georgia and southwestern North Carolina frontier and had a relationship with a trader named Enoch Jordan. The trader's male line descendants from his white family in North Carolina possess Y chromosomal J, a common Jewish type. Some Jordans, in fact, bear the Cohen Modal Haplotype that has been suggested to be the genetic signature of Old Testament priests (Thomas et al. 1998). Enoch Jordan was born about 1768 in Scotland of forbears from Russia or the Ukraine. My mother, Bessie Cooper, was a double descendant of Cherokee chief Black Fox and was born on Sand Mountain in northeastern Alabama near Black Fox's former seat at Creek Path (and who was Paint Clan). All U2e* cases appear to have in common the fact that there are underlying Melungeon, Cherokee and Jewish connections.

Haplogroup T. "Tara," as she was named by Brian Sykes, is believed to have originated in Mesopotamia approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago and to have moved northwards through the Caucasus and westwards from Anatolia into Europe. The closer one goes to its origin in the Fertile Crescent the more likely T is to be found in higher frequencies. The haplogroup includes slightly fewer than 10% of modern Europeans, but accounts for 28% of people in the DNA Consultants study. The great-great-grandmother of Linda Burckhalter was Sully Firebush, the daughter of a Cherokee chief who married Solomon Sutton, the stowaway son of a London merchant, in what would seem to be another variation of the "Jewish trader marries chief's daughter" pattern. Three T1*'s are perfectly matching individuals completely unknown to one another before testing who are clearly descended from the same woman. Two of them claim Melungeon ancestry.

The many interrelationships noted above reinforce the conclusion that this is a faithful cross-section of a population. No such mix could have resulted from post-1492 European gene flow into the Cherokee Nation. So where do our non-European, non-Indian-appearing elements come from? The level of haplogroup T in the Cherokee (26.9%) approximates the percentage for Egypt (25%), one of the only lands where T attains a major position among the various mitochondrial lineages. In Egypt, T is three times what it is in Europe. Haplogroup U in our sample is about the same as the Middle East in general. Its frequency is similar to that of Turkey and Greece. J has a frequency not unlike Europe (a little less than 10%). The only other place on earth where X is found at an elevated level apart from other American Indian groups like the Ojibwe is among the Druze in the Hills of Galilee in northern Israel and Lebanon. The work of Shlush et al. (2009) demonstrates that this region was in fact the center of the worldwide diffusion of haplogroup X.

Phoenicians. On the Y chromosome side of Shlush et al.'s study, male haplogroup K was found to have a relatively high frequency of 11% in the Galilee region (2008:2). K (renamed T in the revised YCC nomenclature) has long been suspected to be the genetic signature of the Phoenicians. A TV show by National Geographic appeared about a year ago titled Who Were the Phoenicians?, in which Spencer Wells of the National Genographic Project, unveiled this theory. Without a doubt it was the Phoenicians, whose name among themselves was Cana'ni or KHNAI 'Canaanites', not Phoenikoi 'red paint people' (Aubet 2001:9-12; cf. Oxford Classical Dictionary s.v. "Phoenicians" ), who are referenced by James Adair when he observes that "several old American towns are called Kan?ai," and suggests that the Conoy Indians of Pennsylvania and Maryland were Canaanites and their tribal name a corruption of the word Canaan. The Conoy Indians are the same Indians William Penn around 1700 described as resembling Italians, Jews and Greeks. By about 1735 they had dwindled to a "remnant of a nation, or subdivided tribe, of Indians," according to Adair (1930:56, 67, 68). One of the oldest Cherokee clans is called Red Paint Clan (Ani-wodi).

So do the two subclades of X and other haplogroups represent Old World and New World branches diverging from each other as long ago as 30,000 years, or do the Native American "anomalous" haplotypes come more recently (but not as late as Columbus) from the same source in the East Mediterranean? The answer probably depends on how open one is to new evidence and revisionary thinking. According to Jett, "The splits may have taken place well before transfer, with one only or both being transferred to a new place and then one dying out in the home area (and the other in the new area, if both were transferred)." The distinction, at any rate, is irrelevant to the Cherokee who exhibit these not-so-rare haplogroups, although to those denied authenticity on the basis of anthropologists' hardened ideas about the genetic composition of American Indians it is welcome vindication either way.

References
1. Adair, James (1930). Adair's History of the American Indians, ed. by Samuel Cole Williams, originally published London, 1775. Johnson City: Watauga.
2. Richards, Martin et al. (2000). "Tracing European Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA Pool." American Journal of Human Genetics 67:1251-76. Supplementary Data. URL: http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/~vincent/founder2000/index.html.
3. Schurr, Theodore G. (2000). "Mitochondrial DNA and the Peopling of the New World," American Scientist 88:246-53. 
4. Shlush, L. I. et al. (2009) "The Druze: A Population Genetic Refugium of the Near East." PLoS ONE 3(5): e2105. URL: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2324201

When Objects Become Subjects 
(and Talk Back to Researchers)
Review
Paul Brodwin, "'Bioethics in Action' and Human Population Genetics Research"

Population genetics experts who lecture in the groves of academe or trudge through the jungles of the Amazon are not immune to racist bombshells and political dynamite. In 1991, Stanford geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza announced a project to study human genetic diversity. The ponderous monograph that issued forth in 1994 became as revered as it was unreadable. His History and Geography of Human Genes posited two main limbs in the human DNA tree, the African and non-African, with the latter branching off into Europeans (Caucasians) and Northeast Asians. Included in Northeast Asians were the so-called Amerindians. Amerinds were closest in genetic distance to Northern Turkic, Chukchi and other Arctic and Mongolian peoples.

Little did Cavalli-Sforza and his team expect to encounter any opposition to their benign project, much less withdrawal of funding by the U.S. government and United Nations, but this is exactly what happened. The genial professor was surprised one day by a letter from a Canadian human rights group called the Rural Advancement Foundation International. The group demanded he stop his work immediately. It accused the Human Genome Diversity Project of biopiracy, stealing DNA from unsuspecting indigenous people and mining it for valuable information pharmaceutical companies could use to make drugs Third World people could not afford.

Paul Brodwin's article published in 2005 in the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (29:145-78) reviewed this controversy, which had some positive repercussions in forcing researchers to rethink colonialist attitudes toward their subjects. But in the second case of "bioethics in action," Brodwin painted a much more ambiguous picture. It concerned the use of genetics by the ethnic group called Melungeons of Tennessee and Virginia to prove identity claims and press their ideas of special entitlements.

In the section of the article titled "The Reinvention of Melungeon Ethnicity," Brodwin chronicles the conflict between scientific genetics and the Melungeons' demand for collective recognition. Complicating this issue is that the academics were by no means certain among themselves about who or what Melungeons were from an anthropological perspective. A rancorous standoff between Virginia DeMarce and N. Brent Kennedy was matched by the tendentious nature of the Melungeons' own theories and assertions about themselves. Was there even such a thing as Melungeons or were they simply genealogical ghosts and lurid creations of popular journalism? Did they truly have some black and American Indian ancestry? Was the title only to apply to people in and around Newmans Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee, or be extended to a wide range of persons of mixed ancestry like the Carolina Turks and Lumbee Indians? If the Melungeons went back before the arrival of Europeans, could they seek legal recognition as an indigenous American Indian tribe?

Questions abounded and it seemed all of them were murky, emotionally charged and political. Unlike the Human Genome Diversity battle, neither party seemed to gain any advantages in the free-for-all. There were apparently no lessons to be learned on either side. At the end of the day, everyone just gave up and went home, exhausted.

Brodwin obviously sympathizes with the forces of the Academy in all this. He throws his lot in with the geneticist Kevin Jones, who found "he did not control the goals of research or the interpretation of findings." The Melungeon fracas illustrated "the political and conceptual vulnerabilities of human population genetics." In my opinion, however, Brodwin missed the point. Whom do university professors and academic researchers serve, if not the public? They should rejoice that so many of the great unwashed (even in the hills and hollers of Tennessee) are engaged by and even interested in their research. And if they cannot achieve a satisfactory dialogue with their lay critics, whose fault is that? The debate should continue, not be swept under the rug of philosophical reflection. Whatever else they might be, Melungeons are people. As such, they should not be dismissed when they become intractable.

Introducing the DNA Fingerprint Plus

Since the disappearance of DNAPrint and AncestryByDNA from the market in February the demand for an autosomal test that would tell you whether you had Native American or other admixture and estimate what mix you had, has been unmet. While it is doubtful, for many reasons, there will ever be a test that can assign percentages to ethnicities, DNA Consultants has developed a panel of 18 markers potentially evident in a person's CODIS profile that have high probabilities for signaling different ethnic contributions. The Ethnic Panel has been added to the company's DNA Fingerprint Test in the DNA Fingerprint Plus.

As with all genetic markers, the fact that you do not have a marker does not mean that you lack that type of heredity, but its presence is a strong indicator of likelihood that you do possess certain genes. Because we receive one allele or unit of variation from one parent and one from another, and each parent possesses two themselves, one person can fail to inherit, say, a Native American marker but a sibling can have it.

DNA Consultants' chief investigator Dr. Donald Yates made the discoveries in July that laid the foundation for the new product, which was rolled out in early September. Like the CODIS test it is based on, the DNA Fingerprint Plus reflects your total ancestry, not just a male or female line. The 18 Marker Ethnic Panel costs $50.00 and there is no need to repeat any testing. It uses the results of your DNA Fingerprint Test.

The markers include checks for Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish, Northern European, Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan African, Asian and other types of probable contributions to your overall genetic legacy. They do not tell you how much of a given ancestry you may have or what line in your genealogy it might come from.

The way the Panel works is this: Depending on your ethnic mix, your score on a certain allele may fall near one end or the other on a probability scale. All these polarizations in the data correspond to major forks in the road of prehistoric human migrations. They support the conclusions of Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer and others that early humans left Africa in one or two migrations that gave birth to all the ethnic types in the rest of the world, from Australian Aborigines to Europeans. Native Americans and Europeans are closer, genetically speaking, than Native Americans are to Asians. One of the markers apparently reflects a divide between Asian ancestry on the one hand and European/Native American on the other. It is useful in distinguishing between Asian and Native American, two ethnicities that have a high degree of shared deep ancestry and are often otherwise mistaken for each other. Some ethnic markers can be shown by certain control measures to be a "false positive" and not indicative of that ancestry at all. They are also listed in the DNA Fingerprint Plus report.

Question or comment? Would you like to read the full version? Email me.