Zionazi Racial Science

[Note this blogentry has been updated for consistency with the Forward website.]

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Yale University addresses the flaws in Zionazi racial science in a letter to the Society of Histocompatibility and Immunology. (More material can be found at THE AMBASSADORS - OPINIONS - Vol. 5, Issue 1 (January 2002)
http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue11/opinions2.htm).

=================

Dear President Bray, President-elect Zeevi, and Society of Histocompatability and Immunology Officers:

I am asking that you print this in the journal as a response to the unfair treatment of Dr.Arnaiz-Villena et al. following publication of their paper and to read and act on my comments.

Arnaiz-Villena et al. published a paper in this journal titled "The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations (Human Immunology. 62(9):889-900, 2001). It is one of at least 13 papers published in this journal by Dr.Arnaiz-Villena and colleagues (hundreds published elsewhere). The paper demonstrated with ample evidence the similarity of certain Jewish populations to Palestinians. After some pressures because the data appears inconsistent with Zionist ideology and mythology (including the preposterous claims that Palestinians are recent immigrants to the "land of Israel" and Jews as a distinct race), the paper was pulled from web pages and the society took an unprecedented and in my humble opinion illegal action of penalizing an author (removing him from the editorial board) to satisfy a political constituency within the society.

The data provided by the paper is ironically consistent with data published in the same journal by Israeli scientists (Amar et al. "Molecular analysis of HLA class II polymorphisms among different ethnic groups in Israel" Human Immunology, 1999, 60:723-730). Amar et al. showed that "Israeli Arabs" (Palestinians who are Israeli citizens) are closer to Sephardic Jews than either is to Ashkenazi Jews. The data also showed that Ethiopian Jews are genetically very distant from all. Yet, Amar et al. incredibly concluded that "We have shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common ancestry." Amar et al also failed to include Slavic populations in the study which would have revealed similarities between Ashkenazi and these populations in the areas around the black Sea (see below).

Unfortunately, misuse of genetics is not new. Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883 (Greek; eu means "good" and genic derives from the word for "born"). Galton defined it as "the science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding." At the height of the eugenics movement in the 1920s, the Encyclopedia Britannica (1926) entry on eugenics emphasized that the term connoted a "plan" to influence human reproduction.

Between 1907 and 1960 in the United States at least 60,000 people were sterilized without their consent pursuant to state laws to prevent reproduction by those deemed genetically inferior (especially mentally retarded or those with psychological problems). At the peak of these programs in the 1930s, about 5,000 persons were sterilized annually. Based on the American development (especially the works of the American champion of Eugenics, Harry Hamilton Laughlin), the Eugenics of the Nazis grew to eclipse and the American system and then to become even much more and contribute to the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies and others. These examples (& Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union) are well studied by societies determined not to repeat these horrendous laws. Few now believe it is useful or desirable to limit diversity and enhance ideas of racial purity or protecting the gene pool of a particular population. So how is this relevant to Zionism and Jewish nationalism?

The founders of Zionism were Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazi) who argued that they are fulfilling the ingathering of the Jews to "their ancestral homelands." Many argued that assimilation and interbreeding with communities where Jews exist were very dangerous. Many worked feverishly to establish links (however tenuous) between Ashkenazi Jews are and the ancient Israelites (and named their new country Israel) as evidenced by the published works of Bonne-Tamir and others. Much was spent to explain away the physical differences between Ashkenazi Jews (light skins, fair smooth hair), and Sephardic (oriental) Jews and massage the data to fit the pre-ordained conclusions. Here is an example.

An article titled "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes" was published in PNAS, vol. 97, no. 12, June 6,2000 (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/12/6769). The article is from the laboratory of Dr. Bonne Tamir in Israel and is co-authored with 11 other authors. PNAS publishes articles based on communication from respected scientists and not by the traditional peer review process (although those communicating the article are encouraged to have them peer reviewed). This particular article was communicated by Arno G. Motulsky.

Of course Ashkenazi Jews would be closer to Arabs than either is to the Europeans studied in the PNAS paper. But Ashkenazim are also clearly closer to Turkic/Slavic than either is to Sephardim or Arab populations. The authors avoided studying Slavic groups that researchers have identified as closely related to hypothetical Slavic ancestral populations of modern Ashkenazi communities. The article seems to have avoided discussing this particularly problematical issue and insisted in the conclusion to reiterate the contention made in the introduction that Jews of today are by and large descendent from the original Israelites. As Daniel Friedman wrote (http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/friedman.html ):

"The relative abundances of specific haplotypes within the Ashkenazi population included in Hammer's study appear to have significant differences from the reconstructed "ancestral Jewish population" and "Separate analysis is also necessary to determine the genetic contribution of the various central Asian Turkic tribes which so strongly influenced European history."

Italian researches studied many more populations including more diverse Turkish and Eastern European populations (American Journal of Human Genetics, 61:1015-1935). The study looked at Y chromosome polymorphisms (genetic variations) in 58 populations including European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African. That study clearly shows that Ashkenazi Jewish samples clustered distinct from Sephardic Jews and closer to Turkic samples. Overall, the genetic data in that study were congruent with linguistic distances. The authors concluded that genetic data do not justify a single origin for the currently disparate Jewish subpopulations (Ashkenazi and Sephardi). It seems odd though that authors who are accepting of Zionist claims or are Jewish make conclusions not even supported by their own data while authors from other backgrounds based on similar data (showing clear links of Ashkenazim to Turkic populations) make differing conclusions.

The claims of a "single Jewish origin" flies in the face of incredibly rich data from historical and archeological sources including: language (e.g. Yiddish origin and history and absence of use of Aramaic in ancient Khazar Jewish sources), the conversion of Yemenite Arab populations to Judaism and Christianity. There is ample historical evidence that Levantine people and Eastern European Jewish people do share ancestry as well as evidence for significant population mixing. Greek and Turkish populations exported their people throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Asia Minor and the Levant (e.g. the Ottoman Empire and the Hellenistic periods). Similarly Slavic populations have exported people into Asia Minor and the Levant. There was thus tremendous mixing of populations.

Some studies on Eastern European Jewish people have been used to support the idea that the Zionist colonization of Palestine represented a return of a race of Jewish people to their homeland. Valid scientific research must not be shunned by political pressure groups intent on preventing any rational discussion and stifling apparent conflict with the aims of Zionism. Similarly, scientists should not be allowed to publish statements and conclusions not supported by the data simply because they appear "politically correct" at the moment or do not generate an outcry. A statement such as that by Amir et al. that "We have shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common ancestry" should not be allowed to stand. The correct statement from their own data is that some Jews (Sephardim) are more similar to Palestinians than either group is to other Jews (Ashkenazim or Ethiopian Jews).

Of course the transition from any kind of genetic evidence to justify dispossession of the native Palestinians by Ashkenazi immigrants from Europe is in no way justified regardless of population genetics. After all, one would have to be totally immune to basic elements of justice to allow dispossession of people who are native in every sense of the word and whose ancestors farmed the land for hundreds of years (if not thousands) based on any kind of perceived separatedness/uniqueness of gene pools of the new immigrants/settlers. To use "genetic" tools (regardless of their distortion or validity), to justify denying Palestinian people the right of self-determination is of course a travesty of justice. Genetics and eugenics has been used successfully in many other instances to justify the unjustifiable. Distortions of the science of genetics was used for racist and ethnic cleansing many times before. Unfortunately this particular use may not be the last one either.

Sincerely,

Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of Genetics
Yale University School of Medicine
Email: mazin.qumsiyeh@yale.edu

=================

Dr. Qumsiyeh correctly surmises the connection of modern Zionist racial pseudoscience to 19th and early 20th century racial pseudoscience. For the smoking gun I refer the interested reader to a series of articles written by Vladimir Jabotinsky in Evreiskaia zhizn' (Hebrew Life) between 1904 and 1914. I know that advocates of Zionist racial science like to cite a few articles by Indian scientists, but these researchers are typically associated with the Hindutva movement, which has long-standing ties to Jabotinskians.

Dr. Qumsiyeh also addresses some of the flaws in the PNAS paper but not all. Hammer and Oppenheim in their studies have consistently and quite improperly used self-identification in their research to class an individual as Ashkenazi or Sephardi. Until recent times the population that is considered Ashkenazi probably consisted of at least 3 genetically distinct subpopulations. The modern concept of Sephardim is a rather artificial construct that consists of an Ibero-Berber refugee population and numerous unconnected local communities throughout N. Africa and the Orient. As these communities were generally very small and highly endogamous, we should have expected significant genetic drift among them.

The analysis that Hammer and Oppenheim have carried out implicitly depends on a Palestinian emigrant founder model. Because we have no genetic information on the alleged ancient Israelite population, the Hammer and Oppenheim research begs the question that it is supposed to address. Dr. Qumsiyeh does not explicitly make the claim, but the body of research better fits the hypothesis of a major founder population in Southern Russia that has been exporting population to Judean/Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean since the 8th century. Refinements to this hypothesis would include additional founder communities in the Balkans, Mesopotamia and Eastern Europe.

Hammer is also the primary author of Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests (http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html). It is hard to square Hammer's results current archeological theories about the Exodus (there was none) and the origins of the "ancient Israelite" population. Moreover, the alleged founding modal haplotype of Jewish priesthood is particularly common among Sicilians and Armenians. Lately, Zionist racial scientists have stopped citing the claims of the Cohen haplotype because it only inspires derision among genuine scientists.

Some new theories of the behavior of the Y Chromosome have challenged the fundamental assumptions of the use of haplotypes in genetic anthropology.

More recent studies have shown that certain genetic markers common among Ashkenazim and other European ethnic groups that are hypothesized to be descendants of Central Asian migrant populations are indeed common among certain Central Asian population groups but are not particularly common in the Syro-Palestinian region.

Here is another article that has been completely expunged from the Forward website, that describes the Zionist prejudices associated with research in Jewish genetic anthropology, and that belies the idea of single Jewish origin..

http://www.forward.com/articles/1864

Genetics

A Skeleton in the Jewish Family Closet?

By TALIA BLOCH
August 20, 2004

Has there been a non-Jewish "skeleton" sitting quietly in the Jewish family closet?

That's the implication of a recent genetic study.

The study, "Multiple Origins for Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries," published last fall in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that about half of all Ashkenazi Jewish men of the Levite caste may be descendant from one or a handful of closely related Eastern European ancestors who lived about 1,000 years ago.

The problem, for Jews at least, is that those ancestors probably were not Jewish, but Slavic. According to Jewish law, membership in one of the three groups of Cohen, Levi or Israel is passed down from father to son alone. Both the priestly caste of Cohanim (plural of Cohen) and their helpers, the Levites, are said to be descendant from the biblical tribe of Levi. Scientists and historians, therefore, speculate that the evidence uncovered by the genetic study shows that some ancestors who contributed genes in the formative years of the Ashkenazi community either were faking their status as Levites or simply mistakenly believed they were Levites when they were not.

"One would have to assume that at some point close to the founding of the Ashkenazi community, somebody or some people — it doesn't have to be a lot of people — assimilated into Levitical standing," said Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of the department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

This misidentified Levite would have had to either have been a convert himself, or to have inherited his genes from a convert or even from a non-Jewish father, since the genetic markers that are found among Ashkenazi Levites frequently occur among non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, but are extremely rare within the general Ashkenazi population.

"It could have been a conversion or something less pleasant, like a rape or other nonpaternity event," explained Dr. Karl Skorecki, director of the Technion's Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences in Haifa, Israel, and one of the principal researchers on the study. A nonpaternity event is one in which the father of a child is not known or not acknowledged publicly.
When scientists study the paternal line of inheritance, they look at the y-chromosome, which determines maleness and is passed down from father to son, largely unchanged.

Since the time of the first human male, however, occasional misspellings of the y-chromosome's sequence of DNA letters have occurred, coalescing into what researchers have identified as 18 different primary groupings. Known as haplogroups, these groupings break down along geographic and ethnic lines.

Previous studies have shown that the type of y-chromosome most frequently found among Jewish men falls into the same groups as that of Middle Eastern populations, confirming a Middle Eastern ancestry for Jews.

A landmark study in 1997 determined that a majority of Cohanim not only clustered into the same group, but also shared a more specific identical genetic marker. "Seventy percent of all Cohanim have the same y-chromosomal lineage tracing back to the same common ancestor," said Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, who was also a researcher on the Levite study. "You would expect the same for the Levites."

Instead, researchers found that while Sephardi Levites had the same genetic lineage as Cohanim, slightly more than half the Ashkenazi Levites had y-chromosomes that very much resembled those of the Slavic individuals included in the study.

"What's also striking," noted Skorecki, "is how closely related the Ashkenazi Levites are. They are so similar to each other, like brothers, over a vast geographic expanse." It is this similarity that led researchers to the conclusion that the progenitor for this group could only have been one man or several men within the same family.

Researchers also estimate that the originating ancestor entered the Jewish gene pool close to the founding of the Ashkenazi community. "It probably happened about 1,000 years ago, early in the genesis of Ashkenazi Jewry," said Neil Bradman of the University College London and a third researcher on the study, which included 12 scientists from Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It is commonly accepted among geneticists that the Ashkenazi Jewish community started from a very small base — perhaps 30,000 people alive in the year 1500 — but between the 15th and the 19th century swelled from about 50,000 to 5 million individuals.

"The fact that there is not much genetic diversity argues for relatively few founders" of the community, said Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of the human genetics program of the pediatrics department at New York University School of Medicine, who specializes in population genetics.

Yet, in the extant historical records there is never any mention of non-Levites assuming Levitical status. "If your father is not a Cohen or a Levi, there is no way you can become one," said Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. A convert, by definition, could not. But this does not mean that someone couldn't pass himself off as a Levite.

Diamond speculated that confusion might have occurred as the result of a talmudic passage concerning the ritual of pidyon haben or redemption of the first born, in which, at the age of 30 days, a first-born son is symbolically released from Temple service. If a child's father is a Cohen or Levite, no pidyon haben is necessary. The Talmud cites a case in which a woman had relations with a gentile man. "Somewhat surprisingly, the Talmud says that this child is exempt from pidyon haben," Diamond explained. Since the father was not a Jew, paternal identity reverted back to the mother's father, who in this case was a Levite. Since for this one ritual alone, the child is treated as if he were a Levite, Diamond speculated it is conceivable that this may have caused the confusion.

It is also possible that a woman who was married to a Levite but had a son out wedlock, either because of a rape or an affair, still might have raised her son as if he were a Levite.

There is one other possible explanation, researchers say. "I slightly favor the hypothesis that it was one Jew from the Middle East who, because of the bottleneck effect, passed [the chromosome] along," Hammer said. Although highly infrequent, the y-chromosome shared by non-Jewish Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Levites does occur occasionally among other Jews. It is therefore possible that one man among the founders of the Ashkenazi community happened to carry it. Because he was just one among very few founders, this man's genes were replicated many times and became overrepresented in subsequent generations — the bottleneck effect.

While Skorecki acknowledged that this explanation also was plausible, he remarked that "it would be a remarkable coincidence to have this set of markers which are the same as the people around them" appear in the Jewish population, but originate with someone who traces his ancestry back to the Middle East.

Another researcher into Jewish genetics who did not participate in this study, Neil Risch of Stanford University, commented that he saw no flaws in the study, but added: "One can never prove where something came from" completely.

Researchers and scholars emphasized that the aim of the Levite study was to illuminate an aspect of Jewish history, and not in any way to determine identity today. "A person's religious or ethnic identity should be separated from anything genetic or physical," Skorecki said when listing the most important conclusions he drew from the study. He saw a "social-ethical imperative not to extrapolate to individual identity."

Ostrer concurred: "If someone has a non-Jewish haplotype, it doesn't mean that person is not Jewish,"

Added Schiffman: "People have to understand one thing. [The study] reflects history and not some form of modernity. We are not going to go around testing to see who is a Levite and then suggest that people should be de-Levitized."

Copyright 2005 © The Forward

Sphere: Related Content