DEBATE ON EUROPEAN JEWS’ ORIGIN SETTLED?

ED Noor: No matter how fascinating studying the past of the Jews of today may be, we must remember that all we learn merely intensifies and clarifies what we already know concerning the current Talmudic threat facing us all from these rogues and their allies.

The bullying take-no-prisoners activation of the international nuclear Sampson Option is not something that knowledge of genetic make-up can halt. Israel does whatever it wants if it thinks it can pull it off and works hand in hand with its international JWO/NOW policing force, the US.

These snippets of knowledge are just that ~ snippets of a huge overall picture that poses the threat of engulfing this world in a similar blackness that resulted in the Black Plague back in the Dark Ages ~ the same dark ages that threaten us all today should we manage to avoid Armageddon.  

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PART ONE:

DEBATE ON EUROPEAN JEWS’ ORIGIN SETTLED?

Gene study says Jews of European descent are mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created empire that lasted half a millennium

TUT

Jews of European origin are a mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created an empire that lasted half a millennium, according to a gene study.

The investigation, its author says, should settle a debate that has been roiling for more than two centuries.

Findings of new study support historical record of Middle Eastern Jews settling in North Africa during Classical Antiquity, proselytizing and marrying local populations, forming distinct populations that stayed largely intact for more than 2,000 years

Jews of European descent, often called Ashkenazim, account for some 90% of the more than 13 million Jews in the world today.

According to the so-called Rhineland Hypothesis, Ashkenazim descended from Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest of 638 AD.

They settled in southern Europe and then, in the late Middle Ages, about 50,000 of them moved from the Rhineland in Germany into eastern Europe, according to the hypothesis.

But detractors say this idea is implausible.

Barring a miracle ~ which some supporters of the Rhineland Hypothesis have in fact suggested ~ the scenario would have been demographically impossible.

It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century.

That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.

Seeking new light in the argument, a study published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution, compares the genomes of 1,287 unrelated individuals who hail from eight Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations.

Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, trawled through this small mountain of data in search of single changes in the DNA code that are linked to a group’s geographical origins.

Such telltales have been used in past research to delve into the origins of the Basque people and the pygmy people of central Africa.

Among European Jews, Elhaik found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East.

The results, said Elhaik, give sound backing for the rival theory ~ the “Khazarian Hypothesis.”

BACKED BY ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDINGS

Under this concept, eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

The Judeo-Khazars built a flourishing empire, drawing in Jews from Mesopotamia and imperial Byzantium.

They became so successful that they sent offshoots into Hungary and Romania, planting the seeds of a great Diaspora.

But Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols and became weakened by outbreaks of the Black Death.

The Judeo-Khazars fled westwards, settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and in Hungary, where their skills in finance, economics and politics were in demand, and eventually spread to Central and Western Europe, according to the “Khazarian Hypothesis.”

“We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans,” says Elhaik.

“Their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga, with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.”

Many things are unknown about the Khazars, whose tribal confederation gathered Slavs, Scythians, Hunnic-Bulgars, Iranians, Alans and Turks.

But, argues Elhaik, the tale sketched in the genes is backed by archaeological findings, by Jewish literature that describes the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism, and by language, too.

“Yiddish,

the language of Central and Eastern European Jews,

began as a Slavic language”

before being reclassified

as High German, he notes.

Another pointer is that European Jews and their ancestral groups in the Caucasus and Middle East share a relatively high risk of diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

The investigation should help fine-tune a fast-expanding branch of genomics, which looks at single-change DNA mutations that are linked with inherited disease, adds Elhaik.

PART TWO 
GENETIC MAP OF JEWISH DIASPORAS DEFINED

Findings of new study support historical record of Middle Eastern Jews settling in North Africa during Classical Antiquity, proselytizing and marrying local populations, forming distinct populations that stayed largely intact for more than 2,000 years

Ynetnews

November 8, 2012

A new genetic analysis focusing on Jews from North Africa has provided an overall genetic map of the Jewish Diasporas. The findings support the historical record of Middle Eastern Jews settling in North Africa during Classical Antiquity, proselytizing and marrying local populations, and, in the process, forming distinct populations that stayed largely intact for more than 2,000 years.

The study, led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, was published online recently in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

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“Our new findings define North African Jews, complete the overall population structure for the various groups of the Jewish Diaspora, and enhance the case for a biological basis for Jewishness,” said study leader Harry Ostrer, M.D., professor of pathology, of genetics and of pediatrics at Einstein and director of genetic and genomic testing for the division of clinical pathology at Montefiore Medical Center.

Dr. Ostrer noted that obtaining a comprehensive genetic fingerprint of various Jewish subpopulations can help reveal genetic links to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other common diseases.

In a previous genetic analysis, the researchers showed that modern-day Sephardic (Greek and Turkish), Ashkenazi (Eastern European) and Mizrahi (Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian) Jews that originated in Europe and the Middle East are more related to each other than to their contemporary non-Jewish neighbors, with each group forming its own cluster within the larger Jewish population.

Further, each group demonstrated Middle-Eastern ancestry and varying degrees of mixing with surrounding populations. Two of the major Jewish populations ~ Middle Eastern and European Jews ~ were found to have diverged from each other approximately 2,500 years ago.

The current study extends that analysis to North African Jews ~ the second largest Jewish Diaspora group. Their relatedness to each other, to other Jewish Diaspora groups, and to their non-Jewish North African neighbors had not been well defined.

HIGH DEGREE OF ENDOGAMY

The study also included members of Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Yemen and Georgia. In all, the researchers analyzed the genetic make-up of 509 Jews from 15 populations along with genetic data on 114 individuals from seven North African non-Jewish populations.

North African Jews exhibited a high degree of endogamy, or marriage within their own religious and cultural group in accordance with custom. Two major subgroups within this overall population were identified:

Moroccan/Algerian Jews and

Djerban (Tunisian)/Libyan Jews.

The two subgroups varied in their degree of European mixture, with Moroccan/Algerian Jews tending to be more related to Europeans ~ most likely stemming from the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain during the Inquisition, starting in 1492. Ethiopian and Yemenite Jewish populations also formed distinctive genetically linked clusters, as did Georgian Jews.

Dr. Ostrer’s paper is titled, “NORTH AFRICAN JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH POPULATIONS FORM DISTINCTIVE, ORTHOGONAL CLUSTERS.” Additional Einstein contributors include: Christopher Campbell, Gil Atzmon, Ph.D., Carole Oddoux, Ph.D., Alexander Pearlman, Ph.D., and Edward R. Burns, M.D. Other contributors include: Pier Francesco Palamara and Itsik Pe'er, Ph.D. (Columbia University, New York, NY); Laura Rodríguez-Botigué and David Comas Martínez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain); Marc Fellous, M.D., Ph.D. (Cochin Institute, Inserm, Paris, France); Li Hao, Ph.D. (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ); Brenna Henn, Ph.D., and Carlos Bustamante (Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, CA); Maya Dubrovsky and Eitan Friedman, M.D., Ph.D (Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel).

The research was supported by grants from the Lewis and Rachel Rudin Foundation; the Iranian-American Jewish Federation of New York; the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation; National Cancer Institute (CA121852) of the National Institutes of Health; and Ruth and Sidney Lapidus.