Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on July 12, 2015

Are most modern Jews primarily of European or Middle and Near Eastern ancestry?That controversial subjectat the heart of the debate over the historical right ofreturn claimed by many religious Jewsis back in the headlines with the releaseof a massive new study published in Nature Communications challenging someestablished views of the origins of European Jewry.

The total Ashkenazi population is estimated at around 8 million people. Theestimated world Jewish population is about 13 million.

Before the advent of advanced DNA research, it had been thought by somehistorians that European Jewry traced to the largely pagan population of ancientKhazaria in the Caucuses, whose leadership was believed to have converted toJudaism beginning around 700 AD. But that theoryknown as the Khazarianhypothesishas been largely discredited by DNA research. One geneticist, Eran Elhaik, has recently attempted to revive the theory, but his research has been sharply challenged.

A groundbreaking paper published in 2000 by Harry Ostrer, a professor of geneticsat the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Arizona geneticistMichael Hammer showed that most modern Jews are descended on their male sidefrom a core population of approximately 20,000 Jews who migrated from Italy overthe first millennium and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.

All European [Ashkenazi] Jews seem connected on the order of fourth or fifthcousins, Ostrer has said.

Known as the so-called Rhineland hypothesis, the consensus research holds thatmost Ashkenazi Jews, as well as many Jews tracing their lineage to Italy, NorthAfrica, Iraq, Iran, Kurdish regions and Yemen, share common paternal haplotypesalso found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Only a smallpercentage of the Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jewsless than 25 percentoriginatedoutside of the Near East, presumably as converts.

This historical and genetic mosaic has provided support for the controversialconcept of a Jewish people. The Law of Return, the Israeli law that establishedthe right of Jews around the world to settle in Israel and which remains in forcetoday, was a central tenet of Zionism. It is invoked by some religious Jews to supportterritorial claims (even though, based on this research, many Arabs, includingPalestinians, where therefore also have a genetic right of return).

But what about the female lineage? That history is more obscure and contentiouslydebated. Duke Universitys David Goldstein and Mark Thomas of the Center forGenetic Anthropology in London reported in 2002 that much of the mitochondrialDNA of women in Jewish communities around the world that they examined did notseem to be of Middle or Near Eastern origin, and indeed each community had itsown genetic pattern. This suggested that migrating Jewish men might have taken onlocal wives, who converted to Judaism. The estimates of the percentage of Ashkenaziwomen of European image was probably more than 50 percent, they estimated, butthe data was too murky to come up with a firm estimate.

But a subsequent and more extensive study in 2006 by a team based at Technionand Rambam Medical Center in Haifa suggested that Ashkenazi women40 percentor moremay indeed have had ancient Near and Middle Eastern roots, and mayhave accompanied their husbands as part of families migrating together.

The new study published in Nature Communications aligns itself more closely withthe 2002 hypothesis, although there are differences. Professor Martin Richards,who heads the University of Huddersfields Archaeogenetics Research Group (andwho participated in the 2002 study), and colleagues sequenced 74 mitochondrialgenomes and analyzed more than 3,500 mitochondrial genomes far more datathan the 2006 survey, which reviewed only a short length of the mitochondrial DNA,containing just 1,000 or so of its 16,600 DNA units, in all their subjects.

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Ashkenazi Jewish women descended mostly from Italian ...

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