Modern Science Sheds Light on Jewish History - June 11, 2010

Scientists decided that they would wade into a centuries old argument about the roots of European Jewry.  A 2008 book had revived the notion that Jews in Europe were actually descendants of Khazars, a Turkic group of the north Caucasus that converted to Judaism in late 8^th and 9^th Century AD.  The implication is that European Jews are not related genetically to the covenant people of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Armed with genomes collected from Jewish volunteers, scientists have released the first results of their study.  It was a natural extension of studies in the 1990’s that supported Biblical based notions of a priestly caste descended from Aaron, brother of Moses.

The results of the survey will be published in next month’s edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics” in an article called “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era.”  According to Newsweek Magazine, “scientists report that the Jews of the Diaspora share a set of telltale genetic markers, supporting the traditional belief that Jews scattered around the world have a common ancestry.”  In other words, genetics has refuted the argument that European Jews are related to the Khazars. 

In fact, Jewish populations have retained not only their cultural and religious traditions, but their genetic coherence as well, this in spite of migrations from the Middle East to Europe, North Africa and beyond in the past two millennia. According to geneticist Harry Ostrer of NYU Langone Medical Centre, who led the study, each Diaspora group has distinctive genetic features “representative of each group’s genetic history.” He added that each also “shares a set of common genetic threads” dating back to their common origin in the Middle East. “Each of the Jewish populations formed its own distinctive cluster, indicating the shared ancestry and relative genetic isolation of the members of each of those groups.”

In Jewish communities that were the smallest and most close-knit, such as the Italian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi, the genetics were more closely matched. According to Newsweek Magazine, “In general, the genetic similarity of any two groups was larger the closer they lived to one another, but there was an exception: Turkish and Italian Jews were most closely related genetically, but are quite separated geographically.”

The study also supports the Biblical record of the Babylonian exile.  The DNA proves that Iranian and Iraqi Jews date from communities that formed in Persia and Babylon, respectively, in the fourth to sixth centuries B.C.  The genetic signatures of these groups show that they remained relatively isolated—inbred—for some 3,000 years. The DNA also reveals that these Middle Eastern Jews diverged from the ancestors of today’s European Jews about 100 to 150 generations ago, or sometime during the first millennium B.C.

That’s when the Jewish communities in Italy, the Balkans, and North Africa originated, from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from people who converted to Judaism during Hellenic times. It was a time of active Jewish prosletyzing.  At the height of the Roman Empire, as the Roman historian Josephus chronicled, mass conversions produced 6 million practicing Jews, or 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire. The conversions brought in DNA that had not been part of the original gene pool in the land of Abraham.

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