← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · yummybear
Thread ID: 10091 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2003-09-28
2003-09-28 18:51 | User Profile
[B]Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites[/B]
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/science/27GENE.html?tntemail0[/url]
By NICHOLAS WADE
team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. The signature is thought to have originated in Central Asia, not the Near East, which is the ancestral home of Jews. The finding raises the question of how the signature became so widespread among the Levites, an ancient caste of hereditary Jewish priests.
The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago, just as the Ashkenazim were beginning to be established in Europe. Ashkenazim, from whom most American Jews descend, are one of the two main branches of Jews, the other being the Sephardim, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain.
The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United States and England, who have been studying the genetics of Jewish communities for the last six years.
They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the researchers suggest.
Their reasoning is that the signature, a set of DNA variations known as R1a1, is common in the region north of Georgia that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom. The signature did reach the Near East, probably before the founding of the Jewish community, but it is still rare there. The scholars say they cannot exclude the possibility that a Jewish founder brought the signature on his Y chromosome to the Ashkenazi population, but they consider that a less likely explanation.
The present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. Dr. Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, one of the authors of the report, said he was looking among the Chuvash, a Turkic-speaking people of the Volga Valley, to see if they might have contributed the R1a1 signature.
Dr. Shaye Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard University, said he could see no problem with outsiders being converted to the Jewish community. He said he considered it less probable, however, that outsiders would become Levites, let alone founding members of the Levite community in Europe. The connection with the Khazars is "all hypothesis," he said.
Even if the Khazar hypothesis is correct, it would have no practical effect on who is a Levite today. "Genetics is not a reality under rabbinic law," Dr. Cohen said. "Second, the function of Levites is so minimal it doesn't mean anything."
Six years ago Dr. Hammer and Dr. Karl Skorecki, of the Technion and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, looked at the Y chromosomes of both Levites and Cohanim. Both are hereditary priesthoods passed from father to son. They were important in ancient Israel, but sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 their functions were taken over by rabbis, and Jewish status came to be defined by the biologically more reliable standard of maternal descent.
If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been followed as tradition describes, then all Cohanim should be descended from Aaron, the brother of Moses, and all Levites from Levi, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki found that more than half the Cohanim, in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities, did indeed carry the same genetic signature on their Y chromosome. Their ancestor lived some 3,000 years ago, based on genetic calculations, and may indeed have been Aaron, Dr. Skorecki said.
But the picture among the Levites was less clear, suggesting that they had a mixed ancestry. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki returned to the puzzle for their new report, based on data gathered from nearly 1,000 men of Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin and neighboring non-Jewish populations.
They found that the dominant signature among the Levites was the R1a1 signature, which is different from the Cohanim signature. The paternal ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the Cohanim from the two branches, who resemble each other and presumably originated before the two branches split. And the ancestor of the R1a1 signature apparently lived 2,000 years more recently than the founder of the Cohanim signature.
The Levites' pedigree does not seem to accord with tradition as well as the Cohanim one does but is venerable nonetheless. "How many people can trace their ancestry back to the 17th century, let alone a thousand years?" Dr. Hammer said.
2003-10-10 04:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE=AntiYuppie]Common sense and everyday observation lends equally strong support for the Khazar theory. It is ludicrous to suggest that the Kingdom of Khazaria left no descendants today, or that these descendents would have converted back from Judaism to something else. Furthermore, even a cursory glance at Eastern European Jews compared with the physiognomy of "Oriental" Jews (those from Arab nations) suggests that the two groups have relatively little in common. The latter are probably authentic Israelites (they resemble Arabs) while the former look more like the peoples of the Caucausus.[/QUOTE]
This is of course very interesting, and as you say is definitely evidence for the Koestler thesis.
It would be interesting to see how MacDonald interprets this. Sort of unusual among the semitico critical he was skeptical of the Koestler thesis.
I don't think in any sense it impacts on his overall theory, since it is of Judaism as an evolutionary strategy. As oppossed to a pure race, he mentions the possibility that distinct genetic groupings of Judaism could exist. It is less important that there is a common tie between all the genetic groupings of Judaism than that they maintain their strategy of isolation from the host population.
2003-10-10 18:46 | User Profile
My impression from reading Tribe publications is that there's a lot of hostility to the Khazaria hypothesis. Probably for the reasons you state: it weakens the claims by Ashkenazim on Palestine. Of course do some searching around on the net and look at Tribe write-ups on life in Israel. There are racial devides there you'd not believe. If Koestler is right, a whole lot of the really white, blue-eyed, European "jews" are going to say, to hell with this shitty little country, I'm outta here! Why do you think you've got guys like Chomsky, Shahak, etc.? They're rare offshoots who are disgusted with the Jewish agenda, and in many cases hardly racially Jewish if at all. Koestler was probably one of these himself. Thought of himself as a Jew until he met some real ones and looked into the matter and researched the history.
2003-10-10 23:50 | User Profile
And this is what appears to be happening among "white" jews, like that movie actor, Izzy Dempsky, what's his name? Something like "Kirk Douglas"? Very Aryan looking, married a White, and also "old as the hills" now, his kids are going to identify as White not Jewish unless they've been really brainwashed and I doubt that's happened because my reading of Izzy's autobio seems to show an almost complete lack of religious observance.
And the "jewy jews jewing jewily" hate this, there's a lot of fear of assimilation these days. I think what's happening is those selfish genes sticking up for themselves, blonde(!) jews in Isn't-real getting sick and tired of having rocks thrown at them by their supposed brethren etc, there's a whole school of literature written by Shahak seen-the-light types.
2003-10-12 06:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=AntiYuppie]Indeed, one can argue that a "Jew" is defined precisely in terms of group identification, whether one's ancestors come from Palestine or the Caucausus...[/QUOTE]
It's the only way one can argue -- tit for tat.
Because at least one Jew runs a rag called Race Traitor which argues that "Whiteness is a Social Construct." Social construct and group identitiy are the same thing.
So when Race Traitor tells us "Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to the Human Race" we can just fire back that treason to Judaism is loyalty to simple sanity.
Except we won't get any of the federal grant money he got... :ohmy:
2003-10-12 07:16 | User Profile
Why do you suppose the media gave so much attention to the Chandra Levy story?