Israeli Researchers: Group of Colorado Indians Have Genetic Jewish Roots

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indiansSheba Medical Center geneticists have found that a population of Indians in the U.S. state of Colorado has genetic Jewish roots going back to the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

The common marker was a unique genetic mutation on the BRCA1 gene. This mutation, commonly known as the “Ashkenazi mutation,” is found in Jews of Ashkenazi origin and is associated with an increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

The trail began with research conducted by Prof. Jeffrey Weitzel, an oncogenetic (cancer genetics) expert at the City of Hope Hospital in California. Weitzel examined samples from 110 American families of Hispanic origin, and followed them through a computational genetics study, and in 2005 published an article pointing to their common ancestry: People who had immigrated to the United States from Mexico and South America.

Weitzel’s discovery of the BRCA1 mutation in these Hispanics led him to suspect that there was a genetic connection between them and European Jews, and he sought to confirm the connection.

A study recently conducted at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer whose findings have been accepted for publication by the European Journal of Human Genetics has found the missing link: The mutation was also found in a group of Mexican Indians who had immigrated from Mexico to the United States over the past 200 years and settled in western Colorado.

When their samples were submitted to a computational genetic study, it emerged that they, along with Weitzel’s original Hispanic subjects, all had a common ancestor: A Jew who immigrated from Europe to South America up to 600 years ago, the period in which Christopher Columbus discovered America and the Jews of Spain were expelled.

The Sheba research was performed by a team headed by Prof. Eitan Friedman, head of the medical center’s Oncogenetics Unit, and student Yael Leitman, and sought to identify the original source of the BRCA1 mutation, found in about 1.5 percent of Jews of Ashkenazi origin and 0.5 percent of Iraqi Jews.

To do this, they collected samples from 115 families carrying this mutation from all over the world. These included Jewish families of Ashkenazi and Iraqi origin, and Jews originating from the Indian city of Cochin. They also, with Weitzel’s help, collected samples from 16 mutation-carrying families among the Mexican Indians in Colorado, five British families from Manchester, and three families from Malaysia.

The study was based on previous Sheba research from 15 years ago, during which primitive analyses were done on the mutation found in Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jews; at that time, it was thought the mutation had first occurred 2,500 years earlier, during the dispersion after the destruction of the First Bais Hamikdosh.

However, the new analysis, which checked 15 different genetic markers associated with the mutation, demonstrated that the Iraqi version of the mutated gene traces back only 450 years, which testifies to a migration of Ashkenazi Jews to Iraq – most probably merchants – that has not been well documented.

Meanwhile, the mutation found in the Colorado Indians was found to be identical to that of Ashkenazi Jews, and dates to a period more than 600 years ago. Researchers say this offers incontrovertible genetic proof that some of the Jews expelled from Spain who reached the New World intermarried with local Indians whose descendants later migrated to the United States.

{Haaretz/Matzav.com Newscenter}


9 COMMENTS

  1. This all means nothing. It only says that a jewish merchant married a local. I feel this is the same as the ethiopians/falasha african so called ‘jews’ intermarrying and intermarrying over and over.
    A documentary showed the africans graveyards had crosses within the star on the tombstone but they are embraced as long lost jews.
    Thats the job for Mashiach not us. Our job should be to ‘save’ our youth from going off the path.
    As these liberals search for ‘lost’ tribes we are losing Jews to missionary groups.

  2. A big Yasher Koach to #2, DACON9. It’s good to read facts from an intelligent commenter. Today’s PC has turned truth upside down. What you wrote is the plain old-fashioned truth! Even if there are remnants of, let’s say, some of the ten lost tribes from within maybe the ‘Cherokee Indians’, they have nothing to do with being Jews – they are lost to the Jewish people forever. Individuals from such a group, some times, might have a yearning to become a ger tzedek and convert, but that’s all. It’s the liberals who have this unTorah agenda. I agree totally with you!

  3. Nobody is advocating that these Indians be accepted as Jews. They are obviously not. One ancestor hundreds of years ago makes for scientific interest but little else. Halachically, the descendents of this man cannot be Jews anyway, because membership in the Jewish people is only through the mother. We can, however, meditate on the fate of that one lone and lonely Jew, refugee from the horrors of the Inquisition, who gave up and assimilated.

  4. In another 500 years some researcher is going to claim American are one of the long lost tribes? Why you may ask? Because they have in their vocabulary words like mentch,shlep, and whatever other words that have seeped into the American language. In addition, they give “hanukah” presents.

  5. They are not “Colorado Indians”. They are descendants of Spanish settlers. The victims of cancer in the community of San Luis Colorado are not enrolled tribal members of any U.S. federally recognized tribe.

    The picture of Indians in this article should have never been used. It is a photo from the Denver intertribal pow wow, an event composed of enrolled tribal members (real Indians).

    Calling descendants of Spanish settlers “Indians” is an insult to U.S. American Indians, just as people would be offended if Palestinians were called Jews.

  6. Columbus set sail to find a new route to Spice Trade in India at the time of Spanish Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand’s Inquisition were Jew were forcibly converted to Christianity. Columbus was his cover name for he was Jewish according to Jewish scholars, his real name was (sorry I don’t recall been many decades since I read this story) and Queen Isabella gave him the ships and crew to man them, the latter also Jews who had been condemned by the Spanish Christian Courts. Reason being that at that time it was thought the world was flat and to sail into uncharted waters they would fall off the edge of the world, no Spanish crew made themselves available. As the story goes Columbus and his crew made first contact with the natives of the Caribbean Islands just off the coast of America. Several trips from Spain to the Caribbean Islands and America were made over the years, several crew men stayed and lived among the native people. The claim of traces of a Jewish blood link with American Indians prompted me to add this note. Apologies for not giving more detailed information my memory not that good due to age. Perhaps someone may research this in more detail – as I found it mentioned in a old Jewish paper.

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