(Newsweek) Sharon Begley - Scientists are able to read Jewish genomes like a history book. The latest DNA research weighs in on the claim that European Jews are all the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic group of the north Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the late eighth and early ninth century. The DNA has spoken: no. In the wake of studies in the 1990s that supported biblically-based notions of a priestly caste descended from Aaron, brother of Moses, an ambitious new project analyzed genomes collected from Jewish volunteers. 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 the age-old question of whether Jews are simply people who share a religion or are a distinct population, the scientific verdict is settling on the latter. Researchers collected DNA from Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Ashkenazi Jews around New York City; Turkish Sephardic Jews in Seattle; Greek Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki and Athens; and Italian Jews in Rome as part of the Jewish HapMap Project. Jewish populations have retained their genetic coherence just as they have retained their cultural and religious traditions, despite migrations from the Middle East into Europe, North Africa, and beyond over the centuries, says geneticist Harry Ostrer of NYU Langone Medical Center, who led the study. Each diaspora group has distinctive genetic features "representative of each group's genetic history," he says, but each also "shares a set of common genetic threads" dating back to their common origin in the Middle East. The various Jewish groups were more related to each other than to non-Jews.
2010-11-26 08:49:06Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive