[wvns] Joachim Martillo: The Origins of Modern Jewry
The Origins of Modern Jewry
Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni @ aol.com)
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html
Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist
supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against
the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim
are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.
This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies
scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard
Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic
Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot
of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in
Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de
l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which
Professor Cohen referred.
Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The
Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as
many worshippers of the high God El within the fold of the Jerusalem
Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was
Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre
El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.
At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshippers, who were
adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection
whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.
In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz argues in
Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews,
Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by
the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely
shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late
Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings
of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it
today to the 4th century.
In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because
Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late
Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah
but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout
Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean
Christians view themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no
Jewish group has a well-defined position on matrilineality or on
conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.
As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenches or breaks
down, the Khazar Kingdom rises in Southern Russia and flourishes from
the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom
seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other
Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine
Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.
Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human
trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman
slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and
give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud
Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and
Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early
Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.
Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a
tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and
Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave
trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an
obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam
and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation
is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less
committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most
part made strong distinctions between members of the community and
gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile)
slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars
began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar
Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages,
Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as
Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs
who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).
In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often
include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional
immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show
the typical convert pattern of choosing names out of scripture as
described in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet.
Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic
graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia
and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary.
Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew
inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or
epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among
Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or
earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants
from Palestine or Mesopotamia.
The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been
willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange
for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of
Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal
system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism
to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time
that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the
Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave
trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, medicine or
estate management, which were professions supported almost entirely by
the slave trade in the early Medieval Period. The Jewish slavers that
accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of
Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.
Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved
exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of
Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade
while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the
Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in
rather isolated parts of the world.
Amitav Gosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a
Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and
Gosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of
income.
This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et
Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and
Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the
Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam
by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of
Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid
gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew
Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably
created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and
Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that
practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized
as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.
As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed
to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A
similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave
trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and
Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar traders, who initially probably
used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic
dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking
populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian
Sorbian and Polabian. During the 9th-13th centuries this process
created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish
dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the
Slavo-Khazar Jewish population becomes larger and more important
within the Jewish community, Arabic dies out as a language of
religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.
As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely
new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews develop distribution
networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish
non-Slavery-related trade does not seem to have been highly valued
because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the
shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as
a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.
The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks
by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while
Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important
and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the
overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.
As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the
Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian
dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian
Jewish populations (with the exception of certain isolated communities
in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West
Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the
vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without
proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of
Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also
demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some
of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in
German territories.
By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar
kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European
Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group.
During the German economic depression during the century after the
signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable
mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many
Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some
Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the
same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion
(1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began
to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even
after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between
German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been
particularly solid.
This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of
Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely
flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in
http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the
Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007,
http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of
the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede
that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other
Jewish groups except insofar as members ethnic Ashkenazi communities
or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been
exported to non-Ashkenazi or proto-Ashkenazi communities in the past.
The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the
basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient
Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that
believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must
concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous
genocidal thieves and interlopers.
===
Zionazi Racial Science
Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Yale University addresses the flaws in Zionazi
racial science in a letter to the Society of Histocompatibility and
Immunology. (More material can be found at THE AMBASSADORS - OPINIONS
- Vol. 5, Issue 1 (January 2002)
http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue11/opinions2.htm).
=================
Dear President Bray, President-elect Zeevi, and Society of
Histocompatability and Immunology Officers:
I am asking that you print this in the journal as a response to the
unfair treatment of Dr.Arnaiz-Villena et al. following publication of
their paper and to read and act on my comments.
Arnaiz-Villena et al. published a paper in this journal titled "The
origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other
Mediterranean populations (Human Immunology. 62(9):889-900, 2001). It
is one of at least 13 papers published in this journal by
Dr.Arnaiz-Villena and colleagues (hundreds published elsewhere). The
paper demonstrated with ample evidence the similarity of certain
Jewish populations to Palestinians. After some pressures because the
data appears inconsistent with Zionist ideology and mythology
(including the preposterous claims that Palestinians are recent
immigrants to the "land of Israel" and Jews as a distinct race), the
paper was pulled from web pages and the society took an unprecedented
and in my humble opinion illegal action of penalizing an author
(removing him from the editorial board) to satisfy a political
constituency within the society.
The data provided by the paper is ironically consistent with data
published in the same journal by Israeli scientists (Amar et al.
"Molecular analysis of HLA class II polymorphisms among different
ethnic groups in Israel" Human Immunology, 1999, 60:723-730). Amar et
al. showed that "Israeli Arabs" (Palestinians who are Israeli
citizens) are closer to Sephardic Jews than either is to Ashkenazi
Jews. The data also showed that Ethiopian Jews are genetically very
distant from all. Yet, Amar et al. incredibly concluded that "We have
shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common
ancestry." Amar et al also failed to include Slavic populations in the
study which would have revealed similarities between Ashkenazi and
these populations in the areas around the black Sea (see below).
Unfortunately, misuse of genetics is not new. Francis Galton coined
the term eugenics in 1883 (Greek; eu means "good" and genic derives
from the word for "born"). Galton defined it as "the science of
improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding." At
the height of the eugenics movement in the 1920s, the Encyclopedia
Britannica (1926) entry on eugenics emphasized that the term connoted
a "plan" to influence human reproduction.
Between 1907 and 1960 in the United States at least 60,000 people were
sterilized without their consent pursuant to state laws to prevent
reproduction by those deemed genetically inferior (especially mentally
retarded or those with psychological problems). At the peak of these
programs in the 1930s, about 5,000 persons were sterilized annually.
Based on the American development (especially the works of the
American champion of Eugenics, Harry Hamilton Laughlin), the Eugenics
of the Nazis grew to eclipse and the American system and then to
become even much more and contribute to the mass murder of Jews,
Gypsies and others. These examples (& Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union)
are well studied by societies determined not to repeat these
horrendous laws. Few now believe it is useful or desirable to limit
diversity and enhance ideas of racial purity or protecting the gene
pool of a particular population. So how is this relevant to Zionism
and Jewish nationalism?
The founders of Zionism were Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazi) who
argued that they are fulfilling the ingathering of the Jews to "their
ancestral homelands." Many argued that assimilation and interbreeding
with communities where Jews exist were very dangerous. Many worked
feverishly to establish links (however tenuous) between Ashkenazi Jews
are and the ancient Israelites (and named their new country Israel) as
evidenced by the published works of Bonne-Tamir and others. Much was
spent to explain away the physical differences between Ashkenazi Jews
(light skins, fair smooth hair), and Sephardic (oriental) Jews and
massage the data to fit the pre-ordained conclusions. Here is an example.
An article titled "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations
Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes" was
published in PNAS, vol. 97, no. 12, June 6,2000
(http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/12/6769). The article is from
the laboratory of Dr. Bonne Tamir in Israel and is co-authored with 11
other authors. PNAS publishes articles based on communication from
respected scientists and not by the traditional peer review process
(although those communicating the article are encouraged to have them
peer reviewed). This particular article was communicated by Arno G.
Motulsky.
Of course Ashkenazi Jews would be closer to Arabs than either is to
the Europeans studied in the PNAS paper. But Ashkenazim are also
clearly closer to Turkic/Slavic than either is to Sephardim or Arab
populations. The authors avoided studying Slavic groups that
researchers have identified as closely related to hypothetical Slavic
ancestral populations of modern Ashkenazi communities. The article
seems to have avoided discussing this particularly problematical issue
and insisted in the conclusion to reiterate the contention made in the
introduction that Jews of today are by and large descendent from the
original Israelites. As Daniel Friedman wrote
(http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/friedman.html ):
"The relative abundances of specific haplotypes within the Ashkenazi
population included in Hammer's study appear to have significant
differences from the reconstructed "ancestral Jewish population" and
"Separate analysis is also necessary to determine the genetic
contribution of the various central Asian Turkic tribes which so
strongly influenced European history."
Italian researches studied many more populations including more
diverse Turkish and Eastern European populations (American Journal of
Human Genetics, 61:1015-1935). The study looked at Y chromosome
polymorphisms (genetic variations) in 58 populations including
European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African. That study clearly shows
that Ashkenazi Jewish samples clustered distinct from Sephardic Jews
and closer to Turkic samples. Overall, the genetic data in that study
were congruent with linguistic distances. The authors concluded that
genetic data do not justify a single origin for the currently
disparate Jewish subpopulations (Ashkenazi and Sephardi). It seems odd
though that authors who are accepting of Zionist claims or are Jewish
make conclusions not even supported by their own data while authors
from other backgrounds based on similar data (showing clear links of
Ashkenazim to Turkic populations) make differing conclusions.
The claims of a "single Jewish origin" flies in the face of incredibly
rich data from historical and archeological sources including:
language (e.g. Yiddish origin and history and absence of use of
Aramaic in ancient Khazar Jewish sources), the conversion of Yemenite
Arab populations to Judaism and Christianity. There is ample
historical evidence that Levantine people and Eastern European Jewish
people do share ancestry as well as evidence for significant
population mixing. Greek and Turkish populations exported their people
throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Asia Minor and the Levant
(e.g. the Ottoman Empire and the Hellenistic periods). Similarly
Slavic populations have exported people into Asia Minor and the
Levant. There was thus tremendous mixing of populations.
Some studies on Eastern European Jewish people have been used to
support the idea that the Zionist colonization of Palestine
represented a return of a race of Jewish people to their homeland.
Valid scientific research must not be shunned by political pressure
groups intent on preventing any rational discussion and stifling
apparent conflict with the aims of Zionism. Similarly, scientists
should not be allowed to publish statements and conclusions not
supported by the data simply because they appear "politically correct"
at the moment or do not generate an outcry. A statement such as that
by Amir et al. that "We have shown that Jews share common features, a
fact that points to a common ancestry" should not be allowed to stand.
The correct statement from their own data is that some Jews
(Sephardim) are more similar to Palestinians than either group is to
other Jews (Ashkenazim or Ethiopian Jews).
Of course the transition from any kind of genetic evidence to justify
dispossession of the native Palestinians by Ashkenazi immigrants from
Europe is in no way justified regardless of population genetics. After
all, one would have to be totally immune to basic elements of justice
to allow dispossession of people who are native in every sense of the
word and whose ancestors farmed the land for hundreds of years (if not
thousands) based on any kind of perceived separatedness/uniqueness of
gene pools of the new immigrants/settlers. To use "genetic" tools
(regardless of their distortion or validity), to justify denying
Palestinian people the right of self-determination is of course a
travesty of justice. Genetics and eugenics has been used successfully
in many other instances to justify the unjustifiable. Distortions of
the science of genetics was used for racist and ethnic cleansing many
times before. Unfortunately this particular use may not be the last
one either.
Sincerely,
Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of Genetics
Yale University School of Medicine
Email: mazin.qumsiyeh@yale.edu
=================
From Joachim Martillo:
Dr. Qumsiyeh correctly surmises the connection of modern Zionist
racial pseudoscience to 19th and early 20th century racial
pseudoscience. For the smoking gun I refer the interested reader to a
series of articles written by Vladimir Jabotinsky in Evreiskaia zhizn'
(Hebrew Life) between 1904 and 1914. I know that advocates of Zionist
racial science like to cite a few articles by Indian scientists, but
these researchers are typically associated with the Hindutva movement,
which has long-standing ties to Jabotinskians.
Dr. Qumsiyeh also addresses some of the flaws in the PNAS paper but
not all. Hammer and Oppenheim in their studies have consistently and
quite improperly used self-identification in their research to class
an individual as Ashkenazi or Sephardi. Until recently times the
population that is considered Ashkenazi probably consisted of at least
3 genetically distinct subpopulations. The modern concept of Sephardim
is a rather artificial construct that consists of an Ibero-Berber
refugee population and numerous unconnected local communities
throughout N. Africa and the Orient. As these communities were
generally very small and highly endogamous, we should have expected
significant genetic drift among them.
The analysis that Hammer and Oppenheim have carried out implicitly
depends on a Palestinian emigrant founder model. Because we have no
genetic information on the alleged ancient Israelite population, the
Hammer and Oppenheim research begs the question that it is supposed to
address. Dr. Qumsiyeh does not explicitly make the claim, but the body
of research better fits the hypothesis of a major founder population
in Southern Russia that has been exporting population to Judean/Jewish
communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean since the 8th
century. Refinements to this hypothesis would include additional
founder communities in the Balkans, Mesopotamia and Eastern Europe.
Hammer is also the primary author of Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests
(http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html). It is hard to square
Hammer's results current archeological theories about the Exodus
(there was none) and the origins of the "ancient Israelite"
population. Moreover, the alleged founding modal haplotype of Jewish
priesthood is particularly common among Sicilians and Armenians.
Lately, Zionist racial scientists have stopped citing the claims of
the Cohen haplotype because it only inspires derision among genuine
scientists.
Some new theories of the behavior of the Y Chromosome have challenged
the fundamental assumptions of the use of haplotypes in genetic
anthropology.
More recent studies have shown that certain genetic markers common
among Ashkenazim and other European ethnic groups that are
hypothesized to be descendants of Central Asian migrant populations
are indeed common among certain Central Asian population groups but
are not particularly common in the Syro-Palestinian region.
===
Here is another article that describes a misuse of genetic
anthropology and that comes to an opposite conclusion.
Genetics
A Skeleton in the Jewish Family Closet?
By TALIA BLOCH
August 20, 2004
http://www.forward.com/articles/1864
Has there been a non-Jewish "skeleton" sitting quietly in the Jewish
family closet?
That's the implication of a recent genetic study.
The study, "Multiple Origins for Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome
Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries," published
last fall in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that
about half of all Ashkenazi Jewish men of the Levite caste may be
descendant from one or a handful of closely related Eastern European
ancestors who lived about 1,000 years ago.
The problem, for Jews at least, is that those ancestors probably were
not Jewish, but Slavic. According to Jewish law, membership in one of
the three groups of Cohen, Levi or Israel is passed down from father
to son alone. Both the priestly caste of Cohanim (plural of Cohen) and
their helpers, the Levites, are said to be descendant from the
biblical tribe of Levi. Scientists and historians, therefore,
speculate that the evidence uncovered by the genetic study shows that
some ancestors who contributed genes in the formative years of the
Ashkenazi community either were faking their status as Levites or
simply mistakenly believed they were Levites when they were not.
"One would have to assume that at some point close to the founding of
the Ashkenazi community, somebody or some people — it doesn't have to
be a lot of people — assimilated into Levitical standing," said
Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of the department of Hebrew and Judaic
Studies at New York University.
This misidentified Levite would have had to either have been a convert
himself, or to have inherited his genes from a convert or even from a
non-Jewish father, since the genetic markers that are found among
Ashkenazi Levites frequently occur among non-Jewish Eastern Europeans,
but are extremely rare within the general Ashkenazi population.
"It could have been a conversion or something less pleasant, like a
rape or other nonpaternity event," explained Dr. Karl Skorecki,
director of the Technion's Rappaport Family Institute for Research in
the Medical Sciences in Haifa, Israel, and one of the principal
researchers on the study. A nonpaternity event is one in which the
father of a child is not known or not acknowledged publicly.
When scientists study the paternal line of inheritance, they look at
the y-chromosome, which determines maleness and is passed down from
father to son, largely unchanged.
Since the time of the first human male, however, occasional
misspellings of the y-chromosome's sequence of DNA letters have
occurred, coalescing into what researchers have identified as 18
different primary groupings. Known as haplogroups, these groupings
break down along geographic and ethnic lines.
Previous studies have shown that the type of y-chromosome most
frequently found among Jewish men falls into the same groups as that
of Middle Eastern populations, confirming a Middle Eastern ancestry
for Jews.
A landmark study in 1997 determined that a majority of Cohanim not
only clustered into the same group, but also shared a more specific
identical genetic marker. "Seventy percent of all Cohanim have the
same y-chromosomal lineage tracing back to the same common ancestor,"
said Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, who
was also a researcher on the Levite study. "You would expect the same
for the Levites."
Instead, researchers found that while Sephardi Levites had the same
genetic lineage as Cohanim, slightly more than half the Ashkenazi
Levites had y-chromosomes that very much resembled those of the Slavic
individuals included in the study.
"What's also striking," noted Skorecki, "is how closely related the
Ashkenazi Levites are. They are so similar to each other, like
brothers, over a vast geographic expanse." It is this similarity that
led researchers to the conclusion that the progenitor for this group
could only have been one man or several men within the same family.
Researchers also estimate that the originating ancestor entered the
Jewish gene pool close to the founding of the Ashkenazi community. "It
probably happened about 1,000 years ago, early in the genesis of
Ashkenazi Jewry," said Neil Bradman of the University College London
and a third researcher on the study, which included 12 scientists from
Israel, Great Britain and the United States.
It is commonly accepted among geneticists that the Ashkenazi Jewish
community started from a very small base — perhaps 30,000 people alive
in the year 1500 — but between the 15th and the 19th century swelled
from about 50,000 to 5 million individuals.
"The fact that there is not much genetic diversity argues for
relatively few founders" of the community, said Dr. Harry Ostrer,
director of the human genetics program of the pediatrics department at
New York University School of Medicine, who specializes in population
genetics.
Yet, in the extant historical records there is never any mention of
non-Levites assuming Levitical status. "If your father is not a Cohen
or a Levi, there is no way you can become one," said Rabbi Eliezer
Diamond, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological
Seminary. A convert, by definition, could not. But this does not mean
that someone couldn't pass himself off as a Levite.
Diamond speculated that confusion might have occurred as the result of
a talmudic passage concerning the ritual of pidyon haben or redemption
of the first born, in which, at the age of 30 days, a first-born son
is symbolically released from Temple service. If a child's father is a
Cohen or Levite, no pidyon haben is necessary. The Talmud cites a case
in which a woman had relations with a gentile man. "Somewhat
surprisingly, the Talmud says that this child is exempt from pidyon
haben," Diamond explained. Since the father was not a Jew, paternal
identity reverted back to the mother's father, who in this case was a
Levite. Since for this one ritual alone, the child is treated as if he
were a Levite, Diamond speculated it is conceivable that this may have
caused the confusion.
It is also possible that a woman who was married to a Levite but had a
son out wedlock, either because of a rape or an affair, still might
have raised her son as if he were a Levite.
There is one other possible explanation, researchers say. "I slightly
favor the hypothesis that it was one Jew from the Middle East who,
because of the bottleneck effect, passed [the chromosome] along,"
Hammer said. Although highly infrequent, the y-chromosome shared by
non-Jewish Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Levites does occur
occasionally among other Jews. It is therefore possible that one man
among the founders of the Ashkenazi community happened to carry it.
Because he was just one among very few founders, this man's genes were
replicated many times and became overrepresented in subsequent
generations — the bottleneck effect.
While Skorecki acknowledged that this explanation also was plausible,
he remarked that "it would be a remarkable coincidence to have this
set of markers which are the same as the people around them" appear in
the Jewish population, but originate with someone who traces his
ancestry back to the Middle East.
Another researcher into Jewish genetics who did not participate in
this study, Neil Risch of Stanford University, commented that he saw
no flaws in the study, but added: "One can never prove where something
came from" completely.
Researchers and scholars emphasized that the aim of the Levite study
was to illuminate an aspect of Jewish history, and not in any way to
determine identity today. "A person's religious or ethnic identity
should be separated from anything genetic or physical," Skorecki said
when listing the most important conclusions he drew from the study. He
saw a "social-ethical imperative not to extrapolate to individual
identity."
Ostrer concurred: "If someone has a non-Jewish haplotype, it doesn't
mean that person is not Jewish,"
Added Schiffman: "People have to understand one thing. [The study]
reflects history and not some form of modernity. We are not going to
go around testing to see who is a Levite and then suggest that people
should be de-Levitized."
Copyright 2005 © The Forward
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