Comparing DNA Patterns of Sephardi,

           Ashkenazi & Kurdish jews 

by Abraham D. Lavender PhD

Considering the diverse origins of the Israelites, the large numbers of conversions into and out of the Jewish community, and major disasters which have befallen Jewish communities throughout history, what is the genetic composition of Jewish communities today?

From HaLapid, Spring 2005

 

In the days before genetic testing, the famous Jewish anthropologist Raphael Patai used cephalic indexes and blood groups to show the similarities between Jews and other groups. He and a number of other scholars discussed the mixed origins of the ancient Hebrews and the major extent to which male Hebrews married women from diverse ethnic groups (1971). Shaye Cohen has shown that in antiquity there was not a strong boundary between Jews and Gentiles. By the second century BCE there was a boundary, but it could be crossed, and “gentiles crossed it and became Jews in a variety of ways, whether by political enfranchisement, religious conversion, veneration of the Jewish God, observance of Jewish rituals, association with Jews, or other means” (1999: 342). For the first time, there was now the notion of conversion to Judaism, and religion overcame ethnicity. In the second century CE, the concept of matrilineal descent was begun. Debate continues over the reasons, but Patai notes that it was only after the Roman Exile, when “violation and impregnation of Jewish women by foreign conquerors, invaders, armies, bands, or marauders” became common that Talmudic law changed to recognize matrilineal rather than patrilineal descent (1971: 61).

The genetic composition of the Jewish people became even more mixed after the major dispersions from Israel. After the fall of Israel in 721 BCE (the dispersal of the ten northern tribes), the fall of Judah in 586 BCE (the Babylonian exile and the beginning of the Egyptian Diaspora), and during and after the fall of the Second Commonwealth in 70 CE, “conversion of individuals and groups to Judaism became, if not frequent at least not exceptional.” There are at least three reported cases of groups converting to Judaism: the Kingdom of Abiabene of Iraq, in the first century CE (Wexler, 1996: 28), the Himyars in Yemen in the third to fifth centuries CE (Ben-Zvi, 1957), and the Khazars of Georgia (Eastern Europe) in the ninth century CE (Brook,1999). Patai and Patai note that in pre-Islamic Arabia, “intermarriage between Jews and pagan Arabs was frequent....With the expansion of Islam, Jews intermarried not only with Arabs but also with members of the nations drawn into the Muslim orbit by the Arab conquests” (1980: 103). As parts of Arabia were conquered by Islamic forces, there also were numerous cases of Jews converting, sometimes voluntarily but often involuntarily, to Islam. Stillman (1991), Patai (1971, 1997), Ben-Zvi (1957),  Goitein (1974), and DeFelice (1985) give numerous examples. Wexler, especially, gives examples of conversions going both ways.

There are also examples of descendants of the lost tribes of Israel claiming Jewish origins, with many of them now returning to Judaism. So far there has been little DNA testing, but regarding the Bene Israel Jews of the Bombay area of India, Parfitt concludes that his DNA research “clearly suggests that the Bene Israel are a very ancient, probably Jewish, group” (2003: 11). He also concludes that he has “likely evidence” that the Black Jews of Cochin are descendants of “an early migration of what were probably Jews from the Near East to India in ancient times” (p. 15). The examples of Jews converting to Christianity in the last thousand years or so are too numerous to mention, and there is no question that millions of people who identify as non-Jewish today have Jewish ancestry.  The Jewish community, while bemoaning the loss of so many people, frequently because of discrimination or oppression, also has not sufficiently recognized the large number of people who have joined Jewish communities. The world Jewish population in the first century of the Common Era (CE) was about four to five million, with 1.5 to two million in Israel. Massive conversions, persecutions, and murders have led to drastic population decreases which also have affected the specific genetic distribution of worldwide Jewry (because some Jewish groups and areas have suffered more than others).

The extent of interaction of Jews and non-Jews has been the topic of a number of genetic studies, with the majority of researchers suggesting little interaction and others suggesting substantial interaction. Part of the controversial differences are because of different loci (points on the genetic chain) being tested, different levels of comparisons being utilized, or small samples which can lead to variable results. Space prohibits discussion of all of the genetic studies on this topic, but for an idea of the overall findings, results of some major studies follow.

Santachiara noted in 1993 that mtDNA (female) studies had already been published, by Batsheva Bonne-Tamir et al (1986) and by Tikochenski et al (1991), but that genetic comparisons for male Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Y-chromosomes) had not been done (p. 56). Tikochinski, using Israeli samples, had analyzed twenty-one Ashkenazi women from Eastern Europe and thirty-eight Sephardi women (mostly from Morocco). Her data implied that these Jewish women descended from a diversity of maternal lineages that had been distinct for four to five thousand years. Thomas et al, in 2002, published data on Jewish women in nine geographically separated areas, and concluded that, contrary to non-Jews, there was greater differentiation for mtDNA than for the Y-chromosome, that “cultural practice–in this case, female-defined ethnicity–has had a pronounced effect on patterns of genetic variation” (p. 1417).  By the early 1990s, however, methodological advances were beginning to make it possible for Y-chromosome studies also to be conducted. In 1991, Livshits et al compared twelve pairs of Jewish and non-Jewish populations from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe with each Jewish/non-Jewish pair sharing the same (or close) geographic area: Yemen, Iran, Iraq; Morocco and Libya; Poland, Russia, and Georgia; Germany and Czechoslovakia; Bulgaria and Turkey/Spain (Turkish Jews were compared to Spanish non-Jews because most Turkish Jews were exiled from Spain by the Inquisition). Their conclusion: modern Jewish populations in general derived from an earlier common gene pool which had undergone relatively little admixture with non-Jewish neighbors after dispersal from Israel. Somewhat differently, Kurdish Jews had experienced considerable interaction with non-Jewish Kurds, and Yemenite Jews may have had a substantial component of different genes from conversion into Judaism (p. 145).

In 1993, Santachiara et al compared eighty-three Sephardim (mostly from Tunisia and Morocco), eighty-three Ashkenazim (mostly from Russia and Poland), and 105 non-Jew