Jewish Genetics
razib | January 10, 2010The New Republic has published a review of the book The Invention of the Jewish People. There is a genetic aspect to the story:
But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand's book are those in which he displays an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva…
razib | December 9, 2009According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically…
razib | September 28, 2009The past 10 years have seen a lot of ups & downs in the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) hypothesis, which suggests some veracity to the Biblical narrative whereby the priestly caste status of the Jewish people is passed down patrilineally from Aaron, the brother of Moses. But could there be multiple Aarons? Possibly. Extended Y chromosome haplotypes resolve multiple and unique lineages of the Jewish priesthood:
It has been known for over a decade that a majority of men who self report as members of the Jewish priesthood (Cohanim) carry a characteristic Y chromosome haplotype termed the Cohen…
razib | September 4, 2009Dienekes posted some abstracts of the ASHG 2009 meeting. This one is in the category of facts we assumed but weren't totally sure of:
Abraham's children in the genome era: Major Jewish Diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry
Here, we present population structure results from compiled datasets after merging with the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Population Reference Sample studies, which consisted of 146 non-Jewish Middle Easterners (Druze, Bedouin and Palestinian), 30 northern Africans (Mozabite from Algeria), 1547 Europeans, and…