Wednesday, October 9, 2013

In the New York Times: Genes Suggest European Women at Root of Ashkenazi Family Tree

"A new genetic analysis has now filled in another piece of the origins puzzle, pointing to European women as the principal female founders, and to the Jewish community of the early Roman empire as the possible source of the Ashkenazi ancestors.
The finding establishes that the women who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Europe were not from the Near East, as previously supposed, and reinforces the idea that many Jewish communities outside Israel were founded by single men who married and converted local women."

4 comments:

  1. " The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, is based on a genetic analysis of maternal lineages. A team led by Martin B. Richards of the University of Huddersfield in England took a fresh look at Ashkenazi lineages by decoding the entire mitochondrial genomes of people from Europe and the Near East.

    Earlier DNA studies showed that Jewish communities around the world had been founded by men whose Y chromosomes bore DNA patterns typically found in the Near East. But there was a surprise when geneticists turned to examine the women founders by analyzing mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element that is separate from the main human genome and inherited just through the female line. "

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  2. I am wondering if and how the results of the above research can be reconciled with the results of the research referred to here -

    "At a recent meeting of the Association of Orthodox Jewish scientists and the Columbia Center for the Study of Science and Religion, it became clear that Jewish curiosity has provided sufficient genetic material to give a perfectly clear negative answer: There is no support in the genomes of today’s Jews for the calumnious and calamitous model of biological Judaism. Though there are many deleterious versions of genes shared within the Ashkenazic community, there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew."
    Robert Pollack, "The Fallacy of Biological Judaism"

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    1. Well, both, in two different approaches confirm that the "Jews coming back home" schtick is a fallacy. Palestine has never been home to most of today Israelis.

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  3. I am for a two state solution.....Palestine for Palestinians and Poland for Polish Jews.

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