Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots
Jews
break down into three genetic groups, all of which have Middle Eastern
origins – which are shared with the Palestinians and Druze.
Josie Glausiusz Oct 20, 2015 2:38 PM
Blood brothers: Palestinians and Jews share genetic roots, though so did Cain and Abel. AP, elaboration by Haaretz
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Confronted
by the violence sweeping over Israel, it can be easy to overlook the
things that Jews and Palestinians share: a deep attachment to the same
sliver of contested land, a shared appetite for hummus, a common
tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham, and, as scientific
research shows - a common genetic ancestry, as well.
Several
major studies published in the past five years attest to these ancient
hereditary links. At the forefront of these efforts are two researchers:
Harry Ostrer, professor of pediatrics and pathology at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and Karl Skorecki, director
of medical and research development at the Rambam Health Care Campus in
Haifa. Back in June 2010, and within two days of each other, the two
scientists and their research teams published extensive analyses of the
genetic origins of the Jewish people and their Near East ancestry.
“The
closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish groups were the Palestinians,
Israeli Bedouins, and Druze in addition to the Southern Europeans,
including Cypriots,” as Ostrer and Skorecki wrote in a review of their
findings that they co-authored in the journal Human Genetics in October
2012.
“Karl
and I are good friends,” Ostrer told Haaretz by telephone from New
York. “We used somewhat different analytical methods—there’s no claim
there for superiority, or one side versus the other.” In their results,
as well, “there was really very little difference at all.”
Ostrer’s
research on “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” published in The
American Journal of Human Genetics, sampled 652,000 gene variants from
each of 237 unrelated individuals from seven Jewish populations:
Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi. These
sequences were then compared with reference samples from non-Jews drawn
from The Human Genome Diversity Project, a global database of genetic
information gathered from populations across the world.
Each
of the Jewish populations, they found, “formed its own distinctive
cluster,” indicating their shared ancestry and “relative genetic
isolation.”
Ostrer’s
team also identified two major groups of Jews: Middle Eastern Jews
(Iranian and Iraqi) and European/Syrian Jews. The split between these
two groups of Jews occurred some 2,500 years ago.
Cousins with the Druze and French
Both
groups of Jews shared ancestry with contemporary Middle Eastern and
Southern European populations. The closest genetic relatives of the
Middle Eastern Jews are Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians. The closest
genetic relatives of the European group of Jews are Northern Italians,
followed by Sardinians and French.
In
a 2012 study, Ostrer identified North African Jews as a third major
group. In Skorecki’s study on the genome-wide structure of the Jewish
people, published in the journal Nature, he and his fellow researchers
sampled tens of thousands of genetic variants from the genomes of 121
individuals hailing from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities, and compared
these variants with samples drawn from 1,166 individuals from 69 Old
World non-Jewish populations.
They
found that Jews from the Caucasus (Azerbaijan and Georgia), the Middle
East (Iran and Iraq) North Africa (Morocco) and Sephardi and Ashkenazi
communities, as well as Samaritans, form a “tight cluster” that overlaps
with Israeli Druze.
This, the authors write, “is consistent with an ancestral Levantine contribution to much of contemporary Jewry.”
In
addition, a “compact cluster” of Yemenite Jews “overlaps primarily with
Bedouins but also with Saudi individuals.” Ethiopian and Indian Jews
are more closely related to their own neighboring, host populations.
Middle East origins in European Jews
Further
evidence for the Middle Eastern origins of Ashjenazi Jews came from a
study published in 2014: In that research, which appeared in Nature
Communications, a team led by Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem sequenced the complete genomes of 128 people of Ashkenazi
Jewish ancestry. Their analysis revealed that the Ashkenazi Jewish
population is “an even mix” of European and Middle Eastern ancestral
populations—suggesting, as Carmi writes on the web site of The Ashkenazi
Genome Consortium (TAGC), “a sex-biased process, where, say,
Middle-Eastern Jewish men married European non-Jewish women.”
Are
these genetic ties between Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin, and Druze
important in a contemporary context? “It doesn’t matter to me
personally,” Skorecki says, “since I think that global human identity
supersedes all other considerations.”
“We
want to know who we are and where we came from,” Ostrer, who is now
studying cancer risks among Ashkenazi Jews and Northern Israeli Druze
populations, sums up. Even so, shared ancestry doesn’t necessarily imply
a special bond. As Ostrer notes, citing the Biblical tale of Cain and
Abel, “the fact that people are related to one another doesn’t prevent
their developing extreme hostility to one another.”
Josie Glausiusz
Haaretz Contributor
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