What was originally a speculative hypothesis by Koestler warped into an Arab Muslim propaganda ploy in front of the UN as one of their main arguments against Jewish statehood during the 1940's, and has since been adopted (in the format presented by the Arabs) by neo-nazis, Jew-hating Muslims, and idiots alike. It was turned into a conspiracy theory which claims that Ashkenazi Jews do not descend from the middle east, but are European imposters and converts from the Khazar tribe, while Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are the "real Jews" who do actually descend from the "ancient Hebrews." Let us leave aside that conversion is a valid adoption of Jewish identity or the fact that Ashkenazi Jews existed well before any such khazar state-religion originated. And let's leave aside that the majority of the Jewish population in Israel is actually Sephardi/Mizrahi, NOT ashkenazi. Those are relevant facts and historically documented realities, but superfluous to this discussion.
This conspiracy theory did not hinge on facts but merely on racist and antisemitic overtones coupled with a revisionist history that denies the continuous oral and written tradition of not only an entire group of people (Ashkenazi Jews) but multiple peoples, because the Ashkenazi populations are reflected in the Sephardi rabbinic writings dating back hundreds of years and were never called into question as to their "origin" Jewish identity and/or authenticity.
Needless to say this insane theory was on par with 9/11 "controlled demolition" morons and other truthtard fantasies which do not base themselves in fact but on wishful thinking and tin-foil hat imagination seeking to deny vast array of facts and historical documentation.
Now, the empirical genetic research has disproven this insanity and driven the final nail in a coffin that already housed this irrational, idiotic bird-brain belief. Now even those who are ignorant and/or gullible or easily swayed cannot be swayed by the irrational belief system of the khazar theory-adherents.
Let us look at the hard evidence which disproves the stupidity.
Source 1.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09103.htmlUnfortunately the fulltext requires subscription, but I will place here the abstract.
Letter
Nature advance online publication 9 June 2010 | doi:10.1038/nature09103; Received 9 December 2009; Accepted 21 April 2010; Published online 9 June 2010
The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people
Doron M. Behar1,2,14, Bayazit Yunusbayev2,3,14, Mait Metspalu2,14, Ene Metspalu2, Saharon Rosset4, Jüri Parik2, Siiri Rootsi2, Gyaneshwer Chaubey2, Ildus Kutuev2,3, Guennady Yudkovsky1,5, Elza K. Khusnutdinova3, Oleg Balanovsky6, Ornella Semino7, Luisa Pereira8,9, David Comas10, David Gurwitz11, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir11, Tudor Parfitt12, Michael F. Hammer13, Karl Skorecki1,5 & Richard Villems2
Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions1, 2. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora3, 4, 5. This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people6. Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.
Source 2.
http://www.cell.com/AJHG/retrieve/pii/S0002929710002466Can download fulltext as PDF at this link.
I'll quote their abstract as well.
Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern AncestryGil Atzmon1, 2, 6, Li Hao3, 6, 7, Itsik Pe'er4, 6, Christopher Velez3, Alexander Pearlman3, Pier Francesco Palamara4, Bernice Morrow2, Eitan Friedman5, Carole Oddoux3, Edward Burns1 and Harry Ostrer3
For more than a century, Jews and non-Jews alike have tried to define the relatedness of contemporary Jewish people. Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations. However, these and successor studies of monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic markers did not resolve the issues of within and between-group Jewish genetic identity. Here, genome-wide analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi) and comparison with non-Jewish groups demonstrated distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture. Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry. Rapid decay of IBD in Ashkenazi Jewish genomes was consistent with a severe bottleneck followed by large expansion, such as occurred with the so-called demographic miracle of population expansion from 50,000 people at the beginning of the 15th century to 5,000,000 people at the beginning of the 19th century. Thus, this study demonstrates that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD genetic threads.
This nature.com blog discusses the results of these two recent studies
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/06/genes_link_jewish_communities.htmlIt says:
After a genome-wide analysis last week reported that Jews worldwide have significant genetic commonalities, a second study published today comes to a similar conclusion. But will the new evidence put to rest a debate that has lasted more than a century?
Tradition has it that Jews around the world are one people with shared religious and cultural practices. Several studies from the last decade that have looked closely at genetics have pointed to a common history based on shared genetics between different Jewish populations. But many historians doubt that genes could be shared, noting that there was so much mixing between Jews and neighboring populations – non-Jews converting to Judaism in large numbers around or before the time of Christ, or Jews being sold as slaves and sent off to far-off lands, then freed there – that they should have come to genetically blend into the geographical population where they ended up.
Catherine Hezser, who studies ancient Judaism at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and wasn’t involved in the research, notes that for this reason, she does not “believe in any of the genetic theories, which are usually propagated for non-scientific, ideological reasons”. But the researchers say their fine-grained analysis of 14 Jewish populations, published in Nature today, could provide some answers.
The groups examined in the study included not just major communities such as Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe and Sephardim from Bulgaria and Turkey, but also several that are much smaller and, like the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia and Jews from India, Ethiopia and Yemen, are often referred to as the “lost tribes” of Israel. The study mainly examined single-letter variations – called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – in individuals within each group, compared to individuals in surrounding areas.
Much like the analysis published last week, the study showed that all of the Jewish communities share some common genetic features, and for the most part, the Jewish groups are more similar to each other than to the non-Jews in the same regions.
“These two studies are the first pair of genome-wide studies of SNP variations in collections of multiple Jewish populations,” says Noah Rosenberg, a population geneticist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in either study. The strength of the Nature paper, he says, is that it compared the Jewish groups to an unprecedentedly broad array of non-Jewish groups, making the comparison – and the genetic ties identified – especially robust.
Because of their large panel of populations, the researchers were able to dive more deeply than ever before into fine scale relationships between different populations. The closest genetic clustering, both among Jewish and non-Jewish groups, is seen in the eastern Mediterranean area known as the Levant, including Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and surrounding regions, the study finds. One interpretation, then, says Tudor Parfitt, also of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and an author on the Nature study, may be that the most active mixing between Jews and non-Jews occurred there. That is, if those two groups were already genetically very close, such admixture wouldn’t have changed much.
Meanwhile, Ethiopian Jews and those from Mumbai, India, seem to be much closer genetically to their host populations than are other groups examined. These groups, says Parfitt, probably did largely come to Judaism more by conversion than by migrating from larger Jewish communities; in that sense, even the limited genetic ties the researchers identified were surprising, he notes. At the same time, stresses Richard Villems, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Tartu in Estonia and one of that study’s lead authors, “if the genes seem to tell a story that some Jewish communities are further away from the main communities, that doesn’t make them any less Jewish”.
Karl Skorecki at Technion University in Haifa, a nephrologist, occasional population geneticist, and a lead author on the study, notes that the two SNP studies together lay a foundation for studying disease-related genes that might be specific to Jewish people. Some questions to ask, he says, might be how do certain alleles become specific to certain populations, and how do periods of active mixing with other groups influence genome-wide structure. “One can start to do very rigorous analyses and extract them to other populations on the planet,” he adds.
Posted by Alla Katsnelson on June 09, 2010
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/06/tracing-the-roots-of-jewishness.htmlThis discusses the paper from American Journal of Human Genetics
There were also discussions of these papers in an article in the NY times which I think Muman might have already cited here.
Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/science/10jews.htmlBut none of this was surprising or new, except to the antisemitic arab nationalists and neonazis.
Topic: All the research disproves the antisemitic "Khazar Theory" (Read 5894 times)