Researchers Locate Jewish Genetic Linkage

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jewishA new study, the largest of its kind ever conducted, reveals that the Jewish people shares clear genomic significance. Apparently, the genetic similarity between a Jewish Italian and a Jewish Pole is larger than the similarity between Jewish Pole and a Christian Pole, for instance.

“The Jewish communities share much more (genetic information) between Jews rather than non-Jews in the same geographic area,” Dr. Gil Atzmon, co-author of the study and professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Genetics, told the New York Post.

Some 237 Jews of representing the three major Diaspora communities, including Ashkenazi Jews from throughout Europe, Sephardim, and Mizrachim from Syria, Iran, and Iraq, participated in the study.

The study found that Ashkenazim share genetic density that could suggest that most of them are ancestors of a small number of original mothers. The researchers noted that the level of relatedness among Ashkenazi Jews is similar to the level of relatedness between fifth-degree cousins.

This is not the first study attempting to isolate a genetic thread among Jews. However, it is the first to show clear and unequivocal genetic significance. The study, titled “The Children of Abraham in the Genome Era,” was recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

“We found that Jewish communities created their own genetic clusters,” said Atzmon.

Genetic analysis from the study showed that two major groups of Jews, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, diverged nearly 2500 years ago.

“The study supports the idea of a Jewish people linked by a shared genetic history,” explained the study’s senior author, Prof. Harry Ostrer of New York University.

“The goal of the study was to determine a genomic baseline,” said lead author Gil Atzmon, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and of genetics at Einstein. “With this established, we’ll be able to more easily identify genes associated with complex disorders like diabetes that are determined by multiple variants across the genome. Armed with this information, we will be better positioned to treat patients.”

{Ynet/Yair Alpert-Matzav.com Israel}


9 COMMENTS

  1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/science/10jews.html

    Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity

    Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago…

    A major surprise from both surveys is the genetic closeness of the two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim thrived in North and Eastern Europe until their devastation by the Hitler regime, and now live mostly in the United States and Israel. The Sephardim were exiled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 and moved to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the Netherlands…

    The two genome surveys extend earlier studies based just on the Y chromosome, the genetic element carried by all men. They refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times…

    Jewish communities from Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus all have substantial genetic ancestry that traces back to the Levant, except for Ethiopian Jews and two Judaic communities in India, which are genetically much closer to their host populations…

  2. this is just the ongoing attampt to make out of Torah and yaadut just a simple nationalety or better a race like other countries . Har sinai , kabules ha-Toire and or if you keep Torah and mitzwes isn`t important anymore to be a koshere jew , now it is much more important and you could even be more jewish if your DNA fits to their political agenda.
    it makes me realy wonder where we are ging to ????

  3. And let it be known that the head of the study, Dr. Ed Burns, a yarei shamayim and an ehrliche yid, is a musmach of MTJ.

  4. Why does this “scientific research” into Jewish genes so vividly remind me of similar projects conducted in Germany during WW2?

    Or have we all conveniently forgotten what happened in Auschwitz and Matthausen?

  5. I don’t see this as an attempt to reduce the nature of klal yisroel from mesorah to genetics. Rather, in the current political context surrounding the state of Israel, many of the anti-semites/zionists claim that today’s Jews and Israelis are Europeans and have no genetic connection to the yidden who lived 2000 years ago. They claim then that the Pals are the real inhabitants of Israel. Thus, this study is significant in that it demonstrates that there is a distinctly Jewish nation, and that we are a “people” with rights to the land.

  6. The reason all Jews had the same DNA — except the Ethiopians and Indians — is because the Ethiopians and Indians aren’t Jewish.

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