"Throw the Jews Down the Well"

[CarpeDiem]

Now the part which dissapeared from original site immediately i post link on sott:

Studies of Cohens and Levites
Rashmee Z. Ahmed. "India's children of Israel find their roots." The Times of India (July 20, 2002).
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=16588182
Excerpts:
"More than 2,000 years after they first claimed to have set foot in India, the mystery of the world's most obscure Jewish community - the Marathi-speaking Bene Israel - may finally have been solved with genetic carbon-dating revealing they carry the unusual Moses gene that would make them, literally, the original children of Israel. Four years of DNA tests on the 4,000-strong Bene Israel, now mainly based in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Ahmedabad, indicates they are probable descendants of a small group of hereditary Israelite priests or Cohanim, according to new results exclusively made available to the Sunday Times of India.... [Tudor] Parfitt, who initiated and led the research, says this is the first concrete proof that 'exiles from Palestine made it as far as India and managed to maintain Judaism in the sea of Hinduism and Islam'... Aharon Daniel expressed doubt about the new findings. 'Many scientists have claimed to have found Israeli or Cohenim genes in tribes in black Africa and other communities around the world and many here were sceptical about this,' he told STOI.... By studying certain genetic markers on the DNA chain, found only in male descendants of Aaron, Moses' elder brother, who founded the line of Jewish priests, the Bene Israel could well claim to be the purest of the pure."

Manoj Nair. "Thane Jews pass the blood test." Mumbai Mid-Day Newspaper (July 23, 2002). Excerpts:
"The news that recent DNA tests have linked India's Bene Israel Jewish community to the patriarch Moses has delighted the small Jewish community in Thane. For hundreds of years, the Bene Israel (meaning Children of Israel), now largely concentrated in and around Thane had fought Western prejudice that denied them their claim as descendants of one of Israel's 12 lost tribes. Now the Jews of Thane, home to 2,000 or 40 per cent of India's Jewry, can hold their head high among the rest of the Jewish community. '...Now science has proved that we are descendants of the Cohanim or hereditary priests. This will improve our status in the Jewish community,' says Ezra Moses, honorary secretary and trustee of Thane's Shaar Hashamaim or Gate of Heaven synagogue.... '...Now the DNA tests have confirmed our claims,' says Rachel Gadkar, a retired schoolteacher who recently published a book in Marathi called 'Bharatiya Bene Israel', that traces the origins of her community.... The current finding that the Bene Israel carry Moses's genes is the result of a research project that started seven years ago.... Sixty-six-year old Phinas Bamnolkar, the hazan or cantor at the Thane synagogue says, 'It was always our claim that we are descendants of Moses. Our claim has now been scientifically proved.'"

Terry Friel. "Ancient Indian Jewish Community Faces Unclear Future." Reuters (March 1, 2003).
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=2309686
Excerpt:
"Extensive DNA testing has found the Bene Israelis, clustered in and around the western city of Bombay, are direct descendants of a hereditary Israelite priesthood that can be traced back 3,000 years to Moses' brother, Aaron."

Tudor Parfitt. "Place, Priestly Status and Purity: The Impact of Genetic Research on an Indian Jewish Community." Developing World Bioethics 3:2 (December 2003): 178-185.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=14768650&dopt=Abstract
Excerpt:
"Of the Indian datasets, only the Bene Israel carry the Cohen Modal Haplotype..."

Jonathan Karp. "Seeking Lost Tribes of Israel in India, Using DNA Testing." Wall Street Journal (May 11, 1998). About Tudor Parfitt's genetic research in India.

Kevin Davies. Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. New York: The Free Press, 2001. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743204794/ref=nosim/thekhazariainfoc
Excerpts from Davies' book:
"But the most remarkable application of Y-chromosome markers is to Jewish populations in the Middle East and beyond... Aaron thus became the first Jewish priest, or cohen, a tradition that has since been handed down from father to son. [Michael] Hammer, Karl Skorecki, David Goldstein, and colleagues studied Y markers from three hundred Jews, including more than one hundred cohanim, and found that half of the Jewish priests shared the same genetic signature, compared to less than 5 percent in the lay Jewish population.... The results of the DNA studies [of the Lemba people of South Africa] were stunning: a significant portion of the Lemba Y chromosomes exhibit the characteristic genetic signature found in the cohanim, including more than 50 percent of the Buba, one of the 12 Lemba clans. These markers have also turned up in the Bene Israel, the oldest Jewish community in India..." (excerpts from pages 182-183)

"Where We Come From: Recent advances in genetics are starting to illuminate the wanderings of early humans." U.S. News and World Report (January 29, 2001). http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010129/migration.htm
Excerpts:
"On the Internet, Carvin located Family Tree DNA, a small Houston firm created to answer such questions. He mailed in a sample of his DNA, gathered by swabbing the inside of his cheek, and waited. In late October, he got a call from Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA. Not only did his Y chromosome have the cohanim markers-small genetic variations-but other markers matched with those of another man in the database, making it likely that they share a forefather within the past 250 years... Since then, other researchers have used the cohanim markers to ascertain that the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people in Southern Africa who have traditionally claimed Jewish ancestry, do indeed have Semitic roots. And last June, Hammer published results showing that although Palestinian and Jewish men may be political foes, they are also brethren, so closely related as to be genetically indistinguishable."

Doron M. Behar, Mark G. Thomas, Karl Skorecki, Michael F. Hammer, Ekaterina Bulygina, Dror Rosengarten, Abigail L. Jones, Karen Held, Vivian Moses, David Goldstein, Neil Bradman, and Michael E. Weale. "Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries." American Journal of Human Genetics 73:4 (October 2003): 768-779. (Mirror)
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/Levite%20paper.pdf
Abstract excerpts:
"...[T]he Levites, another paternally inherited Jewish caste, display evidence for multiple recent origins, with Ashkenazi Levites having a high frequency of a distinctive, non-Near Eastern haplogroup. Here, we show that the Ashkenazi Levite microsatellite haplotypes within this haplogroup are extremely tightly clustered, with an inferred common ancestor within the past 2,000 years. Comparisons with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups suggest that a founding event, probably involving one or very few European men occurring at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashkenazi community, is the most likely explanation for the presence of this distinctive haplogroup found today in >50% of Ashkenazi Levites."
Article excerpts:
"If a European origin for the Ashkenazi Levite haplogroup R1a1 component is accepted as a reasonable possibility, it is of interest to speculate further on the possible timing, location, and mechanism of this event. Because the modal haplotype of haplogroup R1a1 found in the Ashkenazi Levites is found at reasonably high frequency throughout the eastern European region, it is not possible to use genetic information to pinpoint the exact origin of any putative founder from the currently available data sets. ... One attractive source would be the Khazarian Kingdom, whose ruling class is though tto have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century (Dunlop 1967). ... It extended from northern Georgia in the south to Bulgar on the Volga River in the north and from the Aral Sea in the east to the Dnieper River in the west -- an area that falls within a region in which haplogroup R1a1 NRYs are found at high frequency (Rosser et al. 2000)."
Observations:
Approximately 38 percent of Ashkenazi Levites share a particular haplotype that is also found among about 11 percent of Sorbs and about 8.5 percent of Belarusians. (Sorbs and Belarusians are both Slavic peoples.) In The Ashkenazic Jews (1993), Paul Wexler had proposed that Ashkenazi Jews are related to Sorbs, but this was unable to be substantiated using non-genetic data. The DNA affinity with Sorbs may be significant but may not be the only explanation.
The study emphasizes that Ashkenazi non-Levite Jews in general do not have a major Khazar or European origin in their Y-DNA.

Nicholas Wade. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (The Penguin Press, 2006).
Excerpt from page 250:
"The Y chromosomes of Ashkenazic and Sephardic levites show no particular simularity. ... There is, however, a strong genetic signature common to 52% of Ashkenazic levites. It is a set of genetic variations belonging to a branch of the world Y chromosome tree known as R1a1. To judge by the amount of variation on these levite R1a1 chromosomes, the original ancestor seems to have entered the Jewish community about 1,000 years ago, roughly the time when Jewish settlement in northwest Europe began, in other words at the founding of the Ashkenazic community. The geneticists who discovered the R1a1 signature among the levites, a team that included Skorecki, Hammer and Goldstein, note that outside the Jewish community the R1a1 chromosome is relatively common in the region north of Georgia, in the Caucasus, that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom. The Khazars were a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century AD. The geneticists propose that one or more of the Khazar converts may have become levites, accounting for the R1a1 signature among today's Ashkenazic levites. But Shaye Cohen, an expert on Jewish religious history, believes it unlikely that converts would become levites, let alone founding members of the levite community in Europe. The Khazar connection is ''all hypothesis'' in his view."

Nicholas Wade. "Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites." The New York Times (September 27, 2003): A2. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/science/27GENE.html
Excerpts:
"A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. ... The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago... The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United States and England... They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the researchers suggest. Their reasoning is that the signature, a set of DNA variations known as R1a1, is common in the region north of Georgia that was once occupied by the Khazar kingdom. The signature did reach the Near East, probably before the founding of the Jewish community, but it is still rare there. ... The present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. ... If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been followed as tradition describes, then... all Levites [should be descended] from Levi, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. ... But the picture among the Levites was less clear, suggesting that they had a mixed ancestry. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki returned to the puzzle for their new report, based on data gathered from nearly 1,000 men of Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin and neighboring non-Jewish populations. ... The paternal ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the Cohanim from the two branches..."

Dean H. Hamer. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (Doubleday, 2004). Excerpt from pages 191-192:
"A recent study by Skorecki and colleagues uncovered a subgroup of Ashkenazic Levites who have a Y-chromosome pattern that is not seen in other priests, or indeed any major Jewish group, but is common in people around the mouth of the Volga River. A little sleuthing revealed the historical connection. ... || ... Sometime in the eighth century, they [Khazars] decided to convert from paganism to monotheism. Most of the common people became either Christian or Muslim, but the royal family and many members of the nobility opted for Judaism. They continued to rule the region for nearly five hundred years as a Jewish state. The DNA evidence shows that many of the Khazar converts declared themselves to be not only Jews but of the priestly caste. Thus the infusion of new genetic lines."

Neil Bradman, Dror Rosengarten, and Karl L. Skorecki. "The Origins of Ashkenazic Levites: Many Ashkenazic Levites Probably Have a Paternal Descent from East Europeans or West Asians." Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Ancient DNA and Associated Biomolecules, July 21-25, 2002.
http://www.dna6.com/abstracts/bradman.htm
Abstract excerpt:
"...Levite haplotype distributions were compared with distributions in Israelite Jews and candidate source populations (north Germans and two groups of Slavonic language speakers). The Ashkenazic Levites were most similar to the Sorbians, the most westerly Slavonic speaking group... Comparisons of the Ashkenazic Levite dataset with the other groups studied suggest that Y chromosome haplotypes, present at high frequency in Ashkenazic Levites, are most likely to have an east European or west Asian origin and not to have originated in the Middle East."

"Levite". MedTerms online medical dictionary.
http://www.medterms.com/pscript/main/art.asp?articlekey=24469

David Keys. Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000. Keys summarizes M. G. Thomas, Karl L. Skorecki, H. Ben-Ami, Tudor Parfitt, Neil Bradman, D. B. Goldstein, "Origins of Old Testament Priests." Nature 394 (July 9, 1998): 138-140.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=9671297&dopt=Citation
Excerpts from Keys' book:
"DNA tests on Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have revealed the possibility that at least one key section of the latter community may have genetic evidence of a potentially large-scale or even mass conversion which must have taken place sometime after around A.D. 700.... the only known mass conversion within that time frame and in that geographical area was that of the Khazars in the eighth century. Significantly, the section of the Ashkenazi community whose DNA may suggest a partially convert origin is that section which up till now had traditionally been said to be wholly descended from the Assistant Priests of ancient Israel.... By analyzing Y chromosomes from a sample of both Levite and non-Levite populations in both Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, geneticists have discovered that an astounding 30 percent of Ashkenazi non-Cohenic Levites have a particular || combination of DNA material on part of their Y-chromosome that is not shared to any extent by either non-Levite Ashkenazi Jews or the Sephardic community as a whole. This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests) - but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests, and then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry. What seems to have happened is not only a potentially large-scale conversion of non-Jewish people, almost certainly Khazars, to Judaism, but also the adoption of Levite (Assistant Priest) status by a substantial number of the Khazar converts.... A tenth-century letter of recommendation from the Jewish community of Kiev to Jewish communities outside Khazaria was signed by Jews with traditional Turkic names whose almost certainly Turkic Khazar ancestors had adopted second names... indicating that they saw themselves as descendants or close associates of the ancient tribe of Levi.... Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status. They claimed that they were the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel and were not converts at all but merely returnees to Judaism. Furthermore, the tribe they claimed ancestry from was that of Simeon, the brother of the founder of the tribe of Levi.... Probably it was the old pre-Jewish Khazar priests - the qams - who at the conversion had become Levites en masse..." (excerpts from pages 99-100)

Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas. "Genetics: The Pursuit of Jewish History By Other Means." Judaism Today 10 (Autumn 1998): 4-6. Excerpt:
"Notwithstanding the identification of the CMH, it is not possible to say that those are the markers of a 'true' Cohen or whether, indeed, there was a 'first Cohen'--be it Aaron or somewhere else. In a similar way, there is no Jewish haplotype and genetics cannot 'prove' whether someone is a Jew; that is a matter for religious authorities. Nor can genetics decide whether a particular community is or is not Jewish. What may be possible is to demonstrate either movement between or a common origin for two ore more communities, which may be known from other data to qualify for the epithet Jewish or as an ancient progenitor of such communities."

Peter Hirshberg, with reporting by Jane Logan. "Decoding the Priesthood." Jerusalem Report (May 10, 1999). Summary:
The topic is the discovery of a "Cohen" gene in the genetic make-up of an African people called Lemba who claim to be Cohens and Jews. The Lemba have the same proportion of the gene as "Western" Jews and a remarkably high frequency among their Buba clan, a senior clan parallel to our Cohens. The story makes further extensive references to the Lemba, all quite positive with regard to their Jewish origins. Another fascinating part of the story is that researchers came up with a genetically indicated timeline as to when the original Cohen forefather (Aaron) lived. Using a method for genetic dating based on the rate at which certain bits of the Y chromosome mutate, they found that the date was about 3,000 years ago, consistent with the oral Jewish tradition. Even if the black Lemba as well as Sephardic and Ashkenazic Cohenim descend from a single ancestor, they still represent peoples of divergent origins overall, because the racial makeup of the three groups are strikingly different. This therefore confirms the hypothesis that the Cohenic gene only demonstrates one of many lineages.

Nicholas Wade. "Group in Africa Has Jewish Roots, DNA Indicates." The New York Times (May 9, 1999). Excerpts:
"A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The priestly genetic signature is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan... A colleague in Hammer's and Skorecki's research was Neil Bradman, a businessman who is now chairman of the Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College, London. Bradman set about making a wider study of Jewish populations around the world through the lens of the Y chromosome technique. One recruit to Bradman's project is David B. Goldstein, a population geneticist at Oxford University in England... "The problem is there has been intermingling with host populations, and that has obscured their common ancestry," Goldstein said... He [Goldstein] finds that 45 percent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 percent of Sephardic priests have the cohen genetic signature, while in Jewish populations in general the frequency is 3 to 5 percent.

Erik Hakimian. "Jewish Genes." Megillah (July 2000).
http://www.mycweb.com/megilah/jul2000/jewish_genes.html
Excerpts:
"In a second study, more DNA samples were gathered and the selection of Y chromosome markers was expanded. It was discovered that a particular array of six chromosomal markers were in 92 percent Cohens tested. This collection of markers came to be known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) and is the standard genetic signature of the Jewish priestly family... This second study solidified the theory of the common ancestry of Cohens."

"Jewish Priestly Line Maintains Legacy - and Genetic Marker." IsraelWire (September 23, 1998). Excerpts:
"...Based on a study of 306 Jewish men in Israel, Canada and England, the researchers discovered that the 106 Jews who had identified themselves as kohanim shared genetic markers in their Y chromosomes that members of the general Jewish population did not... The study also found a predominance of certain chromosome features in kohanim of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin... But Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, has difficulty accepting the study's results. 'I'm a skeptic,' he said. 'What they're doing is Mickey Mouse social science.' The problem, he said, is their interpretation of the facts... Besides, he continued, 'there's no reason to think that there even was a priestly Aaron. It's an origin myth. To take at random something from the deep hoary past as if it's literally true and use that as your starting point, there's a problem with that. It's not science.'... Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona who worked on parts of the study, said Marks' criticisms missed the point. For the study, Hammer said, 'surnames were fairly irrelevant. It was a test case for genetics to see if the Y chromosome can be consistent with patrilineal descent.'"

Martha Molnar. "Priestly Gene Shared By Widely Dispersed Jews." Press Release. 10 July 1998.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/07/980714071409.htm

Edward Rothstein. "DNA Teaches History a Few Lessons of Its Own." The New York Times "Week in Review" (May 24, 1998). Excerpts:
"Last year, for example, Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, showed that a genetic analysis of the Y chromosomes of Jewish men who ritualistically identified themselves as descendants of the Biblical High Priest Aaron and are known as Cohanim showed a high transmission of markers that were less prevalent among Jews who did not identify as Cohanim. This was evidence, Hammer said, of the accuracy of the oral tradition."

Judy Siegel. "Genetic link found among 'kohanim'." The Jerusalem Post (January 3, 1997).
http://www.calvarysac.org/genetic.html

Tim Radford. "Cohens in a (gene) class of their own." Electronic Mail and Guardian (January 14, 1997).

Michael F. Hammer, Karl L. Skorecki, Sara Selig, Shraga Blazer, Bruce Rappaport, Robert Bradman, Neil Bradman, P. J. Warburton, Monica Ismajlowicz. "Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests." Nature 385(6611) (January 2, 1997): 32-33.
http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html
Excerpts:
"Based on surveys of Jewish cemetery gravestones, priests represent approximately 5% of the estimated total male world Jewish population of roughly 7 million.... We identified six haplotypes, whose frequencies are shown in the table (YAP+ DYS19A-E and YAP+ DYS19, all alleles.) Applying the x2 test to the frequencies of the T-chromosome haplotypes distinguishes priests from the lay population. The most striking difference was in the frequency of YAP+ chromosomes among compares to lay Jews. Only 1.5% of Y-chromosomes among priests were YAP+, in comparison to a frequency of 18.4% in lay Jews. In contrast, we found no significant difference in the distribution of alleles for the non-Y-chromosomes locus polymorphism D1S191. (data not shown). These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal genealogy for Jewish priests... This result is consistent with an origin for the Jewish priesthood antedating the division of world Jewry into Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities, and is of particular interest in view of the pronounced genetic diversity displayed between the two [Sephardic and Ashkenazic] communities."
Regarding the "Cohen gene": David Goldstein, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford University, said: "It looks like this chromosomal type was a constituent of the ancestral Hebrew population. It was incredibly exciting to find something that could be tracing paternally-inherited traits over 40 to 50 generations, three or four thousand years of history."
Only about half, or less (40-45%), of Ashkenazi Jewish Cohens have the so-called "Kohen gene". A somewhat greater percentage of Sephardic Cohens have the gene. But it doesn't approach 100 percent. Tell that to the staff of Karl Skorecki's institution, Technion University, who claim here
http://pard.technion.ac.il/fastfacts/FastFacts.html
"Professor Karl Skorecki discovered genetic proof that all Jews belonging to the Cohen family are descendents of the biblical high priest Aaron Hacohen." If that's not misrepresentation I don't know what is. [Dr. Skorecki himself does not approve of the university's use of the word "all" and has asked them to fix their description of his research.]
Daniel Friedman observes: "Ashkenazi and Sephardic Cohanim (left two columns in the chart below) show significant differences in the occurrence frequencies of the haplotypes said to make up the 'Cohen gene'. Israelite populations from both populations (right two columns) do not show the same differences. If the 'Cohen gene' comes from a single Biblical ancestor, the Cohanim seem to have had different genetic histories since the split between Sepharad and Ashkenaz."

[here was a picture The COHEN YAP + DYS19 Haplotypes
Data from Hammer et al., Nature, Vol 385, 2 January 1997]


Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin. "Are today's Jewish priests descended from the old ones?" HOMO: Journal of Comparative Human Biology - Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Biologie des Menschen 51:2-3 (Urban and Fischer Verlag, 2000): 156-162. (Summary- http://www.ariga.com/genes.htm).
Abstract:
"Careful examination of their [Skorecki's and Thomas's] works reveals many faults that lead to the inevitable conclusion that their claim [that most Cohenim share a common origin] has not been proven. The faults are: the definition of the studied communities, significant differences between three samples of Jewish priests, failure to use enough suitable markers to construct the Unique-Event-polymorphisms haplotypes, problematic method of calculating coalescence time and underestimating the mutation rate of Y chromosome microsatellites. The suggestion that the 'Cohen modal haplotype' is a signature haplotype for the ancient Hebrew population is also not supported by data from other populations." (p. 156)
Zoossmann claims that the studies of Jewish priests are rather problematic. They merge together the Sephardim even though they are diverse, and he claims this is unscientific. He also argues that some useful markers were not used in the studies. The SRY4064, SRY 465, Tat, and sY81 polymorphisms were useless for the purposes of the studies, he writes. Also, the Cohen modal haplotype is the most common haplotype among Southern Italians and Central Italians [A. Caglia et al., "Increased forensic efficiency of a STR-based Y-specific haplotype by addition of the highly polymorphic DYS385 locus." International Journal of Legal Medicine 111 (1998): 142-146], Iraqi Kurds [C. Brinkmann et al., "Human Y-chromosomal STR haplotypes in a Kurdish population sample." International Journal of Legal Medicine 112 (1999): 181-183], and Hungarians [S. Furedi et al., "Y-STR haplotyping in two Hungarian populations." International Journal of Legal Medicine 113:1 (1999): 38-42]
http://athene.em.springer.de/cgi/view-hd.pl?/search97cgi/s97_cgi?action=view&VdkVgwKey=%2Fdata%2Fsearch%2Fjour%2Fjour%2F00414%2Fbibs%2F9113001%2F91130038.htm&queryZIP=%28%22baranya%22%29&strURL=http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00414/papers/9113001/91130038.pdf&strXML=http://athene.em.springer.de/search97cgi/s97_cgi?action=view&VdkVgwKey=%2Fjour%2Fjour%2F00414%2Fpapers%2F9113001%2F91130038.pdf&doctype=xml&collection=springer02&queryZIP=%28%22baranya%22%29

Some Greeks and Armenians also have the Cohen modal haplotype. Since the haplotype is found among many populations in the eastern Mediterranean, Zoossmann demonstrated that it does not represent (exclusively) an ancient Israelite trait.

Judy Siegel. "Genetic kohanim descent claims disputed." The Jerusalem Post (February 28, 2001).
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/02/28/News/News.22178.html
Excerpts:
"...Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin (Ph.D.)... recently published an article in the German-language Journal of Comparative Human Biology that attempts to casts doubt on Skorecki's study. Zoossmann-Diskin, who during the 1990s worked in the laboratory of Tel Aviv University geneticist Prof. Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, concludes that studies of kohanim are 'problematic and arrive at conclusions are not supported by all available data.'... Asked to comment yesterday, Skorecki said that Zoossmann-Diskin repeatedly attacked his findings until four years ago, 'but we have not heard from him since. He presented an article to Nature, but when we were asked by the editor to explain, our arguments were accepted, and Zoossmann-Diskin's article was not published.'..."

Kyle Berger. "Tracing roots to Aaron: Kohanim represent the original Jewish priesthood." The Western Jewish Bulletin (Vancouver, B.C., Canada, February 1, 2002).
http://www.jewishbulletin.ca/archives/Feb02/archives02feb01-02.html
Excerpts:
"Today, it is estimated that approximately five per cent or 350,000 men of the seven million male Jews around the world are kohanim.... So, now I know that, not only am I a direct descendant of Moses' brother, but I am a member of the Jewish priesthood who carries the heavy responsibilities of keeping the traditions of the kohanim alive.... In early 1997, Nature reported that a research team had found a unique genetic chromosome linking kohanim across the globe. Prof. Karl Skorecki... along with his researchers, found that the 188 unrelated kohanim they tested shared a variation of the Y chromosome which linked them to Aaron, who was born in 2365 BCE. This specific chromosome would only be passed from father to son. This research provided proof that the priesthood established by Aaron probably did exist as the Torah details it. However, not everyone in the scientific world agreed with Skorecki's conclusions. Dr. Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin... attempted to cast doubt on Skorecki's findings. In an article published in the Jerusalem Post, Feb. 28, 2001, Zoossmann-Diskin claimed that studies of kohanim are 'problematic and arrive at conclusions that are not supported by all available data.'... But Skorecki maintained his claims to be true and said the findings of his research team have been corroborated several times since then. OK. So, now I accept that I probably really am a descendant of Aaron and that kohanim are supposed to be the role models of the Jewish people."
Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan (Yerevan, Armenia), Head of the Institute of Man and President of the Armenian Anthropological Society:
"Indeed there are some evidences of genetic relation between Armenians and Jews. Jewish population could preserve 'genetic signature' of their ancient ancestors in male Y chromosome - in genetically isolated communities of Cohanim. It is so called 'Cohanim modal haplotype' - CMH. We found the presence of CMH in modern Armenians as well. This is a strong evidence of ancient genetic contacts between Armenians and Hebrews. We suppose that these contacts took place about 3-4k years ago. Our paper on Y chromosome diversity in the Armenian population is in press. It is impossible to establish the ethnic origin of any person according to blood ABO groups."

Nicolas D. Kristoff. "Is Race Real?" The New York Times (July 11, 2003): Opinion section.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/07/11/nyt.kristof/
Excerpt:
"Among Jews, there are common genetic markers, including some found in about half the Jewish men named Cohen. But this isn't exactly a Jewish gene: The same marker is also found in Arabs."

Harlen Wall. "It began with an idea in a synagogue: Jewish scientist researches heritage, Finds genetic marker in priestly tribe." Toronto Star (September 26, 2003).
http://thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1064527811222&call_pageid=968867505381&col=969048872038
Excerpts:
"...Now a leading researcher at the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa, Skorecki, 50, has been involved in breakthroughs in molecular genetics that continue to revolutionize the field of medicine. In addition, his DNA studies have opened new vistas in the life sciences and raised many profound questions regarding identity. ... In the first study, reported in 1997 in the journal Nature, a particular genetic marker was detected in 98.5 per cent of all Cohanim tested. Solidifying the hypothesis was a second study in which six chromosomal markers were found in 97 of 106 Cohanim tested. The collection of markers has come to be known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype, the standard genetic signature of the Jewish priestly family. ... Although they look the same as their African neighbours, the Lemba have a standard genetic signature of Jewish people. ... So, does this mean science has proven that Jews have a genetic link going back 3,300 years to Aaron, brother of Moses? Perhaps. What is certain is that research which began with an idea in a North York synagogue has shown a clear genetic relationship among Cohanim and their direct lineage from a common ancestor."

J. Travis. "The Priests' Chromosome? DNA analysis supports the biblical story of the Jewish priesthood." Science News 154:14 (October 3, 1998): 218. http://sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_3_98/Bob1ref.htm
Excerpts:
"...Hoping to tap this genetic gold mine, in 1996 Skorecki contacted Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who has used the Y chromosome to investigate the origins of people in Japan (SN: 2/15/97, p. 106) and elsewhere. Working with colleagues at University College London, Skorecki and Hammer obtained DNA samples of 188 Jewish men from Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom, 68 of whom called themselves cohanim. The scientists focused on two genetic markers on the Y chromosome... From their analysis of YAP and another genetic marker, Skorecki, Hammer, and their colleagues concluded that the Y chromosomes of cohanim are indeed distinct from those of others Jews, which supports the oral tradition of father-to-son transmission of priestly status. "There's nothing unique or special about these markers," he [Skorecki] says, pointing out that many noncohanim, and even non-Jews, possess the same markers. In fact, the researchers hope to document the dispersal of the original Hebrew people from which Jews originated by studying the frequency with which the cohanim chromosome appears in various Jewish and non-Jewish populations worldwide..."

Denise Grady. "Finding Genetic Traces of Jewish Priesthood." The New York Times (January 7, 1997): 6.

Denise Grady. "Father Doesn't Always Know Best." The New York Times (January 19, 1997): Section 4, Page 4.

Debra Nussbaum Cohen. "Kohen gene pioneers fear misuse." Jewish Telegraphic Agency (January 7, 1997).
http://www.jewishsf.com/bk970107/usgene.htm
For more information about the presence of the Cohen Modal Haplotype among the Lemba people, see: Studies that test the potential Israelite ancestry of certain non-Jewish populations

 

[CarpeDiem]

here is the part 3 of jewish genetic studies deleted from khazaria(dot) com almost immediately I post link on sott

Studies on Jewish genetic diseases
(with special attention on studies that help to confirm Jewish origins, relationships, and migrations)
Laurie J. Ozelius, Geetha Senthil, R. Saunders-Pullman, E. Ohmann, et al., "LRRK2 G2019S as a Cause of Parkinson's Disease in Ashkenazi Jews." The New England Journal of Medicine 354:4 (January 26, 2006): 424-425.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/354/4/424
Excerpts:
"... We screened 120 unrelated Ashkenazi Jewish patients with Parkinson's disease ... Ancestry was determined according to the patients' self-descriptions, and all but one patient (who reported being 50 percent Sephardic) reported that both parents were Ashkenazic. ... Among 120 Ashkenazi Jewish patients with Parkinson's disease, the LRRK2 G2019S mutation was detected in 22 (18.3 percent; 95 percent confidence interval, 11.9 to 26.4 percent). ... These rates are 15 to 20 times as high as those in most prior reports involving European subjects. ... A common founder mutation has been reported in the European and North African populations. We evaluated allelic association at individual markers surrounding and within the LRRK2 gene. For six of the seven markers, the associated allele was the same as reported for the common European-North African haplotype, indicating a common ancestral origin. The apparently high frequency among North African patients with Parkinson's disease and controls, particularly those of Arab ancestry as well as among Ashkenazi Jewish subjects as shown here, suggests a likely Middle Eastern origin for the G2019S mutation. It also establishes once again the Middle Eastern origin of Ashkenazim."

M. M. Carrasquillo, J. Zlotogora, S. Barges, and Aravinda Chakravarti, "Two different connexin 26 mutations in an inbred kindred segregation non-syndromic recessive deafness: implications for genetic studies in isolated populations." Human Molecular Genetics 6(12) (November 1997): 2163-2172.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9328482&dopt=Abstract
This study examines DFNBs that cause non-syndromic recessive deafness (NSRD), with particular attention to human chromosome 13q11 (DFNB1). It was discovered that some Jews, Palestinian and Israeli Arabs, and other Mediterranean peoples possess the DFNB1 genetic mutation.

Bethany L. Niell, Jeffrey C. Long, Gad Rennert, and Stephen B. Gruber. "Genetic Anthropology of the Colorectal Cancer-Susceptibility Allele APC I1307K: Evidence of Genetic Drift within the Ashkenazim." American Journal of Human Genetics 73 (2003): 1250-1260.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v73n6/40070/brief/40070.abstract.html
Abstract excerpts:
"The adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) I1307K allele is found in 6% of the Ashkenazi Jewish population and in 1%2% of Sephardi Jews; it confers a relative risk of 1.52.0 for colorectal cancer (CRC) on all carriers. ... A common progenitor haplotype spanned across APC I1307K from the centromeric marker D5S135 to the telomeric marker D5S346 and was observed in individuals of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Arab descent. The ancestor of modern I1307K alleles existed 87.9118 generations ago (~2,200-2,950 years ago)."

George E. Ehrlich, M.D. "Genetics of Familial Mediterranean Fever and Its Implications." Annals of Internal Medicine 129 (October 1, 1998): 581-582.
http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/01oct98/fevredit.htm
Excerpts:
"Ashkenazi Jews -- those chiefly from the Pale of Poland, Russia, and central European countries -- seem to be genetically different from their Sephardic coreligionists, who mainly stem from the Mediterranean countries of Africa and Europe. Familial Mediterranean fever is rare among Ashkenazi Jews but common among Sephardim.... In the case of Jews, almost two millennia may not be long enough to account for the genetic differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in their inherited disease propensities (such as diabetes mellitus and Tay-Sachs disease in eastern Ashkenazi Jews and familial Mediterranean fever in Sephardim). Professor Heller was among those who believed that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have different origins. Some speculate that Ashkenazi Jews descended from the Khazars, an early medieval empire that straddled the Volga River and dominated the eastern Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Their rulers and many of their subjects converted to Judaism, probably in the eighth century, and the Khazars were gradually forced westward after successive losses to Muslim armies from the south, Mongols from the east, and the Rus (Scandinavians who gave Russia its name) from the north. The genetic distribution of the missense mutations reported by Eisenberg and colleagues9 adds further detail to the argument: It distinguishes between the Sephardic (M693V) and Ashkenazi (V726A) Jews, grouping the latter with Iraqi Jews and some Armenians and suggesting that all three groups originated in an area contiguous to or encompassing the Khazar empire (which probably incorporated many of the Jews remaining in that area after the Babylonian captivity). In fact, the Khazars were a Turkic people, and it would be of interest to look for this genetic mutation in contemporary Turks with the clinical signs and symptoms of familial Mediterranean fever."

9. Eisenberg S, Aksentijevich I, Deng Z, Kastner DL, Matzner Y. Diagnosis of familial Mediterranean fever by a molecular genetics method. Ann Intern Med. 1998;129:539-42.
Letters
http://www.annals.org/issues/v130n9/full/199905040-00017.html
in response to Ehrlich's article were published in the May 4, 1999 issue on pages 780-781.

Shlomit Eisenberg, Ivona Aksentijevich, Zuoming Deng, Daniel L. Kastner, and Yaacov Matzner. "Diagnosis of Familial Mediterranean Fever by a Molecular Genetics Method." Annals of Internal Medicine 129:7 (October 1, 1998): 539-542.
http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/129/7/539
Excerpt:
"Familial Mediterranean fever, or recurrent polyserositis, is a recessively inherited disorder that affects Sephardic Jews, Turks, Armenians, and Arabs."

N. Stoffman, N. Magal, T. Shohat, M. Shohat, R. Lotan, S. Koman, A. Oron, Y. Danon, G. J. Halpern, Y. Lifshitz. "Higher than expected carrier rates for familial Mediterranean fever in various Jewish ethnic groups." European Journal of Human Genetics 8(4) (April 2000): 307-310.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10854115&dopt=Abstract

The International FMF Consortium. "Ancient Missense Mutations in a New Member of the RoRet Gene Family are Likely to Cause Familial Mediterranean Fever." Cell 90 (August 22, 1997): 797-807.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9288758,9288094&dopt=Abstract
Abstract excerpt:
Haplotype and mutational analyses disclosed ancestral relationships among carrier chromosomes in populations that have been separated for centuries.

R. Loewenthal, Y. Slomov, M.F. Gonzalez-Escribano, I. Goldberg, M. Korostishevsky, S. Brenner, A. Nuez-Roldan, J.S. Conejo-Mir, E. Gazit. "Common ancestral origin of pemphigus vulgaris in Jews and Spaniards: a study using microsatellite markers." Tissue Antigens 63:4 (April 2004): 326-334.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/abstract.asp?ref=0001-2815&vid=63&iid=4&aid=3&s=&site=1
Abstract excerpts:
"Pemphigus is a group of autoimmune blistering diseases of the skin and mucous membranes. ... Studies showed that the associated HLA haplotype in Jewish pemphigus vulgaris (PV) patients is HLA-B38, DRB1*0402, and DQB1*0302; or HLA-B35, DRB1*0402, and DQB1*0302. Similar associations with class II genes were found in Spanish non-Jewish PV patients. As Jews lived in Spain for hundreds of years and many converted to Christianity, the presence of the same HLA haplotype in the Jewish and Spanish PV suggests that they may share the same founder. ... The distance between the two PV cohorts is relatively short, but the distance between the Jewish patients and the Jewish controls is greater compared to the distance between Spanish patients and Spanish controls. In both PV populations, the same microsatellite haplotypes in addition to a common class II haplotype were found, suggesting that both patient populations originated from the same genetic stock and, therefore, share the same ancestral disease gene."

N. Mobini, E.J. Yunis, C.A. Alper, J.J. Yunis, J.C. Delgado, D.E. Yunis, A. Firooz, Y. Dowlati, K. Bahar, P.K. Gregersen, A.R. Ahmed. "Identical MHC markers in non-Jewish Iranian and Ashkenazi Jewish patients with pemphigus vulgaris: possible common central Asian ancestral origin." Human Immunology 57:1 (September 15, 1997): 62-67.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=9438197&dopt=Abstract
Abstract:
"Previous studies showed that almost all Ashkenazi Jewish patients with pemphigus vulgaris carried the extended haplotype [HLA-B38, SC21, DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302] or [HLA-B35, SC31, DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302] or class II fragments of them. Non-Jewish patients carried [HLA-B55, SB45, DRB1*1401, DQB1*0503] or its class II fragments. In the present study of 20 Iranian patients with pemphigus vulgaris, 17 were found to carry DRB1*0402, DQB1*0302 haplotypes, also found among normal Iranian haplotypes and the same as that of the Jews. These findings suggest that the pemphigus MHC susceptibility gene among Iranians derived from the same ancestor as that in the Ashkenazim. The ancient Jews were under Persian domination from 500 B.C. until 300 B.C. and in the 8th century A.D., a Tataric people living in the kingdom of Khazar on the Western shore of the Caspian Sea and the Northern shore of the Black Sea, near Persia, converted to Judaism, providing possible opportunities for gene mixing in two populations that are distinct and separate today."

Nicholas Wade. "Gene From Mideast Ancestor May Link 4 Disparate Peoples" The New York Times (August 22, 1997): A19. http://www.cilicia.com/armo24g.html Excerpts:
"...there lived a person who bequeathed a particular gene to many present-day descendants... They include Jews, Arabs, [Anatolian] Turks and Armenians. The gene, a variant of a gene that controls fever, has come to light because it causes an unusual disease called familial Mediterranean fever in individuals who inherit a copy from both parents. The gene's presence among a surprising group of populations hints at the rich archeology that lies buried in the human genome, once geneticists and historians have learned how to interpret it... For example, the variant form of the gene found in North African Jews, Iraqi Jews and Armenians is the same, carrying both the same mutation and a pattern of 11 other genetic changes, all harmless... A second variant form of the gene, according to the American team, is shared by Iraqi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, the Moslem Druze sect and Armenians. The two variants are similar and probably derive from the same founder... He also noted that the variant fever gene established a common genetic lineage between Ashkenazi Jews and Iraqi Jews."

J. Siegel. "Researchers Discover Gene in Familial Mediterranean Fever." Canadian Jewish News (October 1, 1997): 57.
William Kavesh. "Jewish Genetic Diseases." In The Second Jewish Catalog, eds. Sharon Strassfeld and Michael Strassfeld (JPS, 1976). Excerpt from p. 57:
"Among non-Ashkenazic Jews, a number of diseases occur with increased frequency, Familial Mediterranean fever is a relatively rare condition afflicting Arabs, Armenians, and Sephardic Jews with periodic episodes of fever, abdominal and chest pains, and arthritis. How it came to affect these three groups is a question whose answer might provide an incentive to peace in the Middle East."

G. A. Diaz, B. D. Gelb, Neil Risch, T. G. Nygaard, A. Frisch, I. J. Cohen, C. S. Miranda, O. Amaral, I. Maire, L. Poenaru, C. Caillaud, M. Weizberg, P. Mistry, and R. J. Desnick. "Gaucher Disease: The Origins of the Ashkenazi Jewish N370S and 84GG Acid beta-Glucosidase Mutations." American Journal of Human Genetics 66:6 (June 2000): 1821-1832. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10777718&dopt=Abstract
Gaucher Disease is found among Ashkenazic Jews as well as some Europeans (e.g., Portuguese Christians and German Christians).

Neil Risch, D. de Leon, L. Ozelius, P. Kramer, L. Almasy, B. Singer, S. Fahn, et al. "Genetic analysis of idiopathic torsion in Ashkenazi Jews and their recent descent from a small founder population." Nature Genetics 9 (February 1995): 152-159.

Amos Frisch, Roberto Colombo, Elena Michaelovsky, Mazal Karpati, Boleslaw Goldman, and Leah Peleg. "Origin and spread of the 1278insTATC mutation causing Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazi Jews: genetic drift as a robust and parsimonious hypothesis." Human Genetics 114:4 (March 2004): 366-376.
http://www.springerlink.com/app/home/contribution.asp?wasp=6ea5d385wlduqjbd6t6y&referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,16;journal,11,107;linkingpublicationresults,1:100421,1
Abstract:
"The 1278insTATC is the most prevalent Beta-hexosaminidase A (HEXA) gene mutation causing Tay-Sachs disease (TSD), one of the four lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs) occurring at elevated frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews (AJs). To investigate the genetic history of this mutation in the AJ population, a conserved haplotype (D15S981:175-D15S131:240-D15S1050:284-D15S197:144-D15S188:418) was identified in 1278insTATC chromosomes from 55 unrelated AJ individuals (15 homozygotes and 40 heterozygotes for the TSD mutation), suggesting the occurrence of a common founder. When two methods were used for analysis of linkage disequilibrium (LD) between flanking polymorphic markers and the disease locus and for the study of the decay of LD over time, the estimated age of the insertion was found to be 40+/-12 generations (95% confidence interval: 30-50 generations), so that the most recent common ancestor of the mutation-bearing chromosomes would date to the 8th-9th century. This corresponds with the demographic expansion of AJs in central Europe, following the founding of the Ashkenaz settlement in the early Middle Ages. The results are consistent with the geographic distribution of the main TSD mutation, 1278insTATC being more common in central Europe, and with the coalescent times of mutations causing two other LSDs, Gaucher disease and mucolipidosis type IV. Evidence for the absence of a determinant positive selection (heterozygote advantage) over the mutation is provided by a comparison between the estimated age of 1278insTATC and the probability of the current AJ frequency of the mutant allele as a function of its age, calculated by use of a branching-process model. Therefore, the founder effect in a rapidly expanding population arising from a bottleneck provides a robust parsimonious hypothesis explaining the spread of 1278insTATC-linked TSD in AJ individuals."

Gloria M. Petersen, Jerome I. Rotter, Rita M. Cantor, L. Leigh Field, Susan Greenwald, Joyce S. T. Lim, Chitra Roy, Victor Schoenfeld, J. Alexander Lowden, and Michael Kaback. "The Tay-Sachs Disease Gene in North American Jewish Populations: Geographic Variations and Origin." American Journal of Human Genetics 35 (1983): 1258-1269. Summary:
Tay-Sachs disease is found in a high frequency among Hungarian Jews. The geneticists Petersen et al. mention the possibility that the Hungarian Jews are descended from the Khazars, and allege that their data support this contention. Separately from this article, it came to my attention years ago that a scientist at a conference in Israel also proposed that Tay-Sachs came from the Khazars, though I have no details on this other scientist's research. But if Tay-Sachs comes from Khazars then why would Austrian Jews have a greater percentage of it than Hungarian Jews? Daniel Friedman suggests this is from a founder effect that may have nothing to do with Khazars. Excerpts from Petersen et al.:
"Relative to Jews of Polish and Russian origins, there was at least a twofold increase in the TSD carrier frequency in Jews of Austrian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovakian origins (P < .005). These findings suggest that the TSD gene proliferated among the antecedents of modern Ashkenazi Jewry after the Second Diaspora (70 A.D.) and before their major migrations to regions of Poland and Russia (before 1100 A.D.).... Our study was conducted (1) to obtain an estimate of the Jewish TSD heterozygote frequency and its ancestral variation by direct count of individuals screened for Tay-Sachs disease, and (2) to test the hypothesis of a Polish-Russian origin of the TSD gene in the Jewish population by estimating TSD heterozygote frequencies by European country of origin.... Based on direct assessment, we determined the overall TSD carrier frequency in the Jews tested to be .0324 with a standard error of +/- .0008, giving a 95% confidence interval of (.0308, .0340)... With the data sorted by individual countries of origin for all of Europe (see table 2 and fig. 1), the TSD carrier frequencies are significantly higher for Austria (.1092), Czechoslovakia (.0853), and Hungary (.0723), rather than for Poland (.0343), Russia (.0335), or Germany (.0269). In addition, further tests of difference in proportion indicate that the TSD carrier frequency of the Austria/Czechoslovakia/Hungary region (obtained by combining the results from individual countries) differs significantly from the frequencies both of the Polish/Russia region and of Germany (P < .0001)... [A]s an independent second test, we computed the frequency in those groups of individuals who indicated as their origin a mixture of these countries. None of these individuals was included in the above single-country-of-origin analysis. Table 3 shows that the group fo mixed origin from the Austria/Hungary/Czechoslovakia region has a TSD carrier frequency (.0928) significantly higher than that of any group of mixed origins from Poland, Russia, or Germany (.0278-.0369). Data from an independent TSD screening program in Canada also show a higher carrier frequency in Jews who had originated from Middle Europe relative to Poland and Russia (table 4).... There are several important implications of this observation.... Third, the Khazar people, a Turkic tribe that lived to the north of the Caucasus Mountains from 400 to 1200 A.D. and who converted to Judaism during this period, have been suggested by Neel [5] (based on Koestler's hypothesis [38]) as a possible source of the TSD 'private polymorphism' for the Ashkenazic Jewish population. There is historical evidence of specific migrations of Khazars to Magyar territory (including present-day Hungary). Our results are consistent with this possibility. Further, Lowden, in analyzing the high TSD gene frequency among Canadian Jews of Polish-Russian origin, observed that the Russian Jews in his study tended to come from southern Russia [25]."

5. NEEL JV: History and the Tay-Sachs allele, in Genetic Diseases among Ashkenazi Jews, edited by GOODMAN RM, MOTULSKY AG, New York, Raven Press, 1979, pp 285-299

25. LOWDEN JA: Tay-Sachs screening and prevention: the Canadian experience, in Tay-Sachs Disease: Screening and Prevention, edited by KABACK MM, RIMOIN DL, O'BRIEN JS, New York, Alan R. Liss, 1977, pp 37-46

38. KOESTLER AC: The Thirteenth Tribe. New York, Random House, 1976

James V. Neel. "History and the Tay-Sachs allele", in Genetic Diseases among Ashkenazi Jews, eds. Richard M. Goodman and Arno G. Motulsky (New York, 1979), pages 285-299. Excerpt from page 297:
"The Khazars are the one identified group in European history who might have contributed the TSD allele in the necessary numbers to Ashkenazim."

Jared Diamond. "Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto." Discover Magazine 12[3] (March 1991): 60-61.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~azsbc/ant101/ghetto.pdf
Excerpts:
"As a second possibility, the Ashkenazim might have acquired the Tay-Sachs gene from some other people who already had the gene at high frequency. Arthur Koestler's controversial book The Thirteenth Tribe, for example, popularized the view that the Ashkenazim are really not a Semitic people but are instead descended from the Khazar, a Turkic tribe whose rulers converted to Judaism in the eighth century. Could the Khazar have brought the Tay-Sachs gene to Eastern Europe? This speculation makes good romantic reading, but there is no good evidence to support it. Moreover, it fails to explain why deaths of Tay-Sachs children didn't eliminate the gene by natural selection in the past 1,200 years, nor how the Khazar acquired high frequencies of the gene in the first place."

Philip Evans. "Some of My Best Friends are Khazars." World Medicine 12 (June 15, 1977): 85-86. Suggests that Ashkenazic genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs may have derived from the Khazars.

Megan Goldin. "Geneticists Study Jewish Genes for Disease Clues." Reuters (December 16, 2001).
http://in.news.yahoo.com/011217/107/1b4p6.html
Excerpts:
"''The population of Ashkenazi Jews is relatively homogenous which facilitates gene discovery,'' said Ariel Darvasi, IDgene's president and a geneticist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.... The forefathers of the Ashkenazi community began to settle in parts of Europe during the Roman Empire... They moved to Spain, France, Italy and other Mediterranean basin countries, but spread over the centuries to the Rhineland in Germany, Poland and Russia. Frequent persecution kept their numbers small. Modern Ashkenazi Jews are believed to descend from about 1,500 Jewish families dating back to the 14th century. But Darvasi said the forefathers of today's Ashkenazis came from an even smaller gene pool. Darvasi said ''maybe 500 families were really the source of the total (Ashkenazi) population today...probably in the order of 100 independent chromosomes,'' because they enjoyed better nutrition and had lower infant mortality rates than less affluent Jews.... For religious and historical reasons, most Ashkenazi Jews married within their community, a phenomena that Darvasi said shows up in the Ashkenazi genes he studies which tend to have a high degree of similarity."

Stanford University Medical Center. "Stanford Research Points To Chance As Cause Of Genetic Diseases In Ashkenazi Jews." Press Release. February 28, 2003.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/02/030228071643.htm
Excerpts:
"It just happened that those who founded the Ashkenazi Jewish population had disease mutations and passed them along to their children. Because Ashkenazi Jews tend to marry within their own population, those mutations remained common.... He [Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University Medical Center, working with colleagues] found three points in time when mutations entered the population. One mutation has been in the Jewish population for 120 generations - around the time that the Jewish people formed a distinct population in the Middle East. This mutation causes a type of hemophilia called Factor 11 deficiency type II. The majority of the mutations - including all of the mutations in lysosomal storage genes - entered the population when the Ashkenazi Jews formed a coherent group about 50 generations ago. The final mutations cropped up in the Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jews about 12 generations ago."
Lauren John. "Genetic Diseases in Ashkenazi Jews." GeneticHealth.com (2000). Excerpts:
"Scholars disagree about how the Jews, living for thousands of years in the Middle East, first arrived in Eastern Europe.... Stanford University geneticist Neil Risch explains the range of genetic diseases unique to the Ashkenazi Jewish population by theorizing that most of today's Ashkenazi Jews descend from a group of perhaps only a few thousand people -- the privileged Ashkenazi that lived 500 years ago in Eastern Europe."

David B. Goldstein, David E. Reich, Neil Bradman, Sali Usher, Uri Seligsohn, and Hava Peretz. "Age Estimates of Two Common Mutations Causing Factor XI Deficiency: Recent Genetic Drift is Not Necessary for Elevated Disease Incidence Among Ashkenazi Jews." American Journal of Human Genetics 64(4) (1999): 1071-1075.
http://www.broad.mit.edu/mpg/popgen/pubs/1999_AJHG_FactorXI.pdf
Abstract excerpt:
"The type II and type III mutations at the FXI locus, which cause coagulation factor XI deficiency, have high frequencies in Jewish populations. The type III mutation is largely restricted to Ashkenazi Jews, but the type II mutation is observed at high frequency in both Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jews, suggesting the possibility that the mutation appeared before the separation of these communities."
Article excerpt:
"Since the best estimate for the coalescent time of the type II mutation is 120 or 185 generations, depending on which allele was ancestral, this analysis also provides evidence that the ancestry of at least some members of both Iraqi and Ashkenazi Jewish populations can, in fact, be traced to a single ancestral population, presumably residing in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah before the various dispersions."

Hava Peretz, Avital Mulai, Sali Usher, Ariella Zivelin, Avihai Segal, Zahavi Weisman, Moshe Mittelman, Hannah Lupo, Naomi Lanir, Benjamin Brenner, Ofer Shpilberg, and Uri Seligsohn. "The Two Common Mutations Causing Factor XI Deficiency in Jews Stem From Distinct Founders: One of Ancient Middle Eastern Origin and Another of More Recent European Origin." Blood 90:7 (October 1, 1997): 2654-2659.
http://www.bloodjournal.org/cgi/content/abstract/90/7/2654

Ofer Shpilberg, Hava Peretz, Ariella Zivelin, R. Yatuv, A. Chetrit, T. Kulka, C. Stern, et al. "One of the two common mutations causing factor XI deficiency in Ashkenazi Jews (type II) is also prevalent in Iraqi Jews, who represent the ancient gene pool of Jews." Blood 85 (1995): 429-432.

(1) Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin. "Two Common Mutations Causing Factor XI Deficiency in Ashkenazi Jews May Point to a European Origin." Blood 86(8) (1995): 3267. (2) Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin. "ITD in Ashkenazi Jews - genetic drift or selection?" Nature Genetics 11 (1995): 13-14. And other works. According to Zoossmann-Diskin, genetics shows that Jews genetically resemble the populations surrounding them. Elsewhere, Zoossmann-Diskin claims that the genetic composition of an ancestral Jewish population cannot accurately be calculated by averaging the genetic composition of 4 modern Jewish populations (as Hammer et al. attempted to do in 2000). Nor, he argues, is the percentage of admixture between Jews and non-Jews accurately calculated in studies like Hammer et al. (Note: ITD = Idiopathic torsion dystonia)

R. B. Bar-Sade, A. Kruglikova, B. Modan, E. Gak, G. Hirsh-Yechezkel, L. Theodor, I. Novikov, R. Gershoni-Baruch, S. Risel, M. Z. Papa, G. Ben-Baruch, and E. Friedman. "The 185delAG BRCA1 mutation originated before the dispersion of Jews in the diaspora and is not limited to Ashkenazim." Human Molecular Genetics 7(5) (1998): 801-805. Shows that the 185delAG breast cancer mutation originates from around the 1st century CE and is found among some Ashkenazi Jews and some Moroccan Jews.

David Pollack. "Studies Casting New Light On Origin of Europe's Jews: Stanford's Risch Puts Mythic Theory To Rest." Forward (August 17, 2001).
http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.08.17/genetic2.html
The subtitle of the article, using the word "mythic" and with its quick "end" to a complicated debate, is the most biased I have ever seen. Jews have lived in Lithuania since at least the 14th century. The fact that a mutation for idiopathic torsion dystonia first occurred around the 16th-17th centuries does not necessarily have a bearing upon Lithuanian Jewish origins. Other problems with the article are that Risch's comments contradict the results of genetic studies that show that Ashkenazi Jews are closely related not only to Arabs but also to Anatolian Turks, and that mtDNA studies are not discussed. Excerpts:
"....Dr. Neil Risch, a researcher at the Department of Genetics at Stanford University, is at the forefront of a field that has brought evidence that may help to break the deadlock between historians who argue over the history and makeup of Ashkenazi Jewry.... Among the theories seeking to explain the origins of the Ashkenazim is a theory propagated by the late writer Arthur Koestler. Koestler contended that the predecessors of Ashkenazi Jews did not originate in Palestine, but rather in Khazaria, a medieval empire populated by a people of Turkish stock whose nobility converted to Judaism.... But... geneticists such as Dr. Risch defend the traditional history of Jewish origin. 'If you made a [genetic] map of Europe and the Middle East and you put Ashkenazi Jews on it,' Dr. Risch said, 'they would not end up in Turkey or in the middle of Europe, but in the Mediterranean.' ...Dr. Risch studies the mutated genes that cause some of the diseases commonly found in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. In 1995, he and a team of other researchers investigated the history of idiopathic torsion dystonia, a movement disorder that affects the Jewish population at a much higher frequency than it does any gentile population. Using the family history of his patients and a dating technique called linkage disequilibrium analysis, Dr. Risch determined that the mutation arose less than four centuries ago in present-day Lithuania and Byelorussia. In the paper, Dr. Risch notes that the mutation 'first appeared approximately 350 years ago ... [and] that the carriers preferentially originate from the northern part of the historic Jewish Pale of settlement.' The fast proliferation of the disease, Dr. Risch argues, can be explained by the migratory patterns of the population. 'Our data from that study,' he said, 'suggests that there was a 'bottleneck' during the period of time that the Ashkenazi Jews went into Lithuania.... It could either be that the mutation first arose at that time, or, more likely, that it was carried by somebody who, by chance, had a lot of children.' Accepting the latter scenario, Dr. Risch rejects the possibility that the Khazar migration could have brought the mutation - which, according to Dr. Risch's study, now exists at a frequency 'between 1 in 6,000 to 1 in 2,000 in Ashkenazi Jews' - in the population. 'I'm not sure I would make that argument,' Dr. Risch said. 'The timing is wrong. The mutation that causes torsion dystonia entered the Ashkenazi population 400 or 500 years ago at the most, rather than the much earlier time that the Khazars probably migrated.' Dr. Risch's more recent work in the field provides further evidence in support of the traditional theory of Jewish history. In a study published in April of last year, Dr. Risch and another team of researchers analyzed two mutations that cause Gaucher disease, a storage disorder that is more widespread in the Jewish population than is dystonia. Finding that the mutations had a longer history than that which causes dystonia, Dr. Risch also noted that the disease is not restricted to the Jewish population. 'We dated one mutation to the period of time that the Ashkenazi population probably first coalesced as a distinct group, 1,100 or 1,200 years ago,' Dr. Risch said. 'We also have evidence that the other mutation actually predates the formation of the Ashkenazi Jews because it exists in non-Jews also. It has a reasonable frequency in the Portuguese community and exists in many Caucasian groups.' To Dr. Risch, these facts place the antecedents of today's Ashkenazi Jewish population in Central Europe, and not Khazaria, during the Middle Ages. 'My interpretation is that this evidence is more in line with the founding of the Ashkenazi population in Central Europe,' he said. 'The Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi gene pool is probably not that significant.' Dr. Harry Ostrer, a researcher in the Department of Genetics at New York University Medical School, contends that the Ashkenazi Jewish population is undoubtedly closer to other Jewish populations, at least genetically, than it is to non-Jewish groups outside the Middle East.... Another finding of Dr. Ostrer's study is that while the Ashkenazi Jews are not very close genetically to European gentiles, they are genetically close to some Arab groups. Reinforcing this evidence is a study by Aravinda Chakravarti, director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who found that a certain genetic mutation causing deafness, DFNB1, affects Jews, Palestinians and other groups of the Mediterranean."
A letter in response to David Pollack's article was published in Forward's August 31, 2001 issue.
In the January 22, 1998 issue of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin, Dr. Risch was quoted as saying: "Several studies have shown that Ashkenazi Jews have a unique genetic make-up."

[bold]Studies on beneficial/protective mutations [/bold]

Marc M. Buhler, Anne Proos, Viive Howell, Bruce H. Bennetts, Leslie Burnett, and Graeme J. Stewart. "Could Admixture of the CCR5-D32 Allele into Ashkenazi Jews and Vikings be Explained by an Origin in the Kingdom of the Khazars?" Papers of the XIX International Congress of Genetics (Melbourne, Australia, July 2003); also scheduled for publication in a journal. The D in D32 represents the Greek letter Delta both in the presentation title above and in the abstract below. http://www.genunet1.org/IGC2003/abstracts/15MinSpeakers-HTML/ge2003abstract00792.htm Abstract:
"CCR5 is the major co-receptor for viral entry used by macrophage-tropic HIV strains and protection from infection is seen in homozygotes for the 32-basepair deletion mutation CCR5-D32. Global surveys of the CCR5--D32 allele have confirmed a single mutation event in a Northeastern European population as the source of this allele. While the initial population survey of CCR5--D32 showed the highest frequency in Ashkenazi Jews and another study did support this, other reports including Ashkenazi samples have not shown such increase. Here, Australian Ashkenazi Jews (n = 807) were found to have a CCR5--D32 allele frequency of 14.6% while Australian Sephardic Jews (n = 35) had a frequency of 5.7% and non-Jewish Australian controls (n = 311) had an allele frequency of 11.25%. Homozygotes (n = 23) for CCR5--D32 were genotyped with 3p21 region microsatellites including D3S4579, D3S4580, D3S3559, D3S663, D3S1578, afmb362wb9 and chlc.gaat12d11. This defined an ancestral haplotype on which the mutation first occurred and helped to date this event to about 50 generations, or just over a thousand years ago. Data on birthplace of grandparents showed a gradient with highest CCR5--D32 frequencies from Eastern European Ashkenazim (~19.5% for those whose four grandparents come only from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia; n = 197) which differs significantly from the frequency seen in Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe (n = 101, p = 0.001). This gradient, combined with the dating of the mutation by microsatellite allele frequencies, suggests an origin for the CCR5--D32 allele in the kingdom of Khazaria with subsequent admixture into both Swedish Vikings and Ashkenazi Jews."

Deborah Smith. "From an ancient kingdom, the mutant that can fight off AIDS." The Sydney Morning Herald (July 12, 2003). http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/11/1057783358837.html Excerpts:
"It's a story about ... a genetic mutation that arose in just one person who was probably living in the lost Kingdom of Khazars in southern Russia more than 1200 years ago. Today the mutation is widespread among Caucasians and helps protect carriers against infection with the AIDS virus. Marc Buhler, a Sydney geneticist, has pieced together this colourful history of the mutation's origins to explain its particularly high prevalence in populations as disparate as Jewish people in Australia and people living in Iceland. The mutation, in a gene known as CCR5, was discovered in 1996. People with one copy usually take several years to become ill if they acquire HIV. People with two copies rarely become infected. Mr Buhler ... tested DNA from about 1400 Australians and found about 15 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews (from Germany and Eastern Europe) were carriers, but only 6 per cent of Sephardic Jews (from southern Europe and Africa). ... he found about 20 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews had the mutation if their grandparents had come from Russia, Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia. ... But how to explain its prevalence in Iceland and other Nordic countries? ... If a person in Khazar had developed the CCR5 mutation it would have spread back to Scandinavia with the Vikings [suggested Buhler]."
Observations:
Marc Buhler indicates that the article contains erroneous statistics: "the values in the article are given for individuals where I was describing alleles (so there are twice the value cited, so to speak). What the writer of that article did was take 'allele frequencies' and put them in terms of individuals. Each person has two alleles, so to speak, but that was not corrected for." Buhler also provides the following specific data about his study: "Of 807 Australian Ashkenazi Jews, 216 individuals (26.6%, i.e. about 1 in 4) carried the deletion. 197 were 'heterozygoytes', that is carriers with one wild-type allele and one allele with the deletion. 19 were 'homozygotes' for the allele. In terms of allele frequency, these 807 individuals have 1614 alleles in total and the allele frequency of the deletion was 14.6% ( (38+197) / 1416 ) since all homozygotes have two of the alleles and heterozygotes have one. The general frequency found for European caucasian groups is an allele frequency of about 10% (or about one in five individuals). This frequency is slightly greater in countries to the north and east of Europe. An allele frequency of ~15% was reported for Iceland, and Sweden has three reports of about 14%. The allele frequency I reported for the Sephardic Jews was 5.7% or just over 1 in 10 individuals. When the grandparents of the individuals we tested came from a group of countries (Russia, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary) the frequency was seen to be 19.5%. (197 individuals with 30% carriers and 4.6% homozygotes, or 1 out of 3 individuals.) Note that 'Austria' somehow dropped from the SMH report. Elevated frequency of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe was initally reported by Martinson in 1997 (~21% allele frequency for 43 Ashkenazi) and also reported by Lucotte, but our numbers are quite large. The Australian Ashkenazi Jews with grandparents from Western Europe had an allele frequency more in line with the general caucasian frequency. Of 123 Western Europe Ashkenazi, an allele frequency of 11.8% was seen (about one in five individuals). Our non-Jewish Australian sample was of 311 individuals and the allele frequency was 11.3%. ...n general, the Middle East groups, while often not zero, are still just a few percent and not as high as the ~10% seen in European caucasians and certainly not above that. One group that has been pointed out with an elevated frequency are the Mordvinians (reported allele frequency of ~17%)."
Other studies have shown that the CCR5-D32 allele appears to have a protective effect not only against HIV infection, but also rheumatoid arthritis and smallpox, and possibly also multiple sclerosis, Crohn's Disease, and type 1 diabetes.
See also the July 25, 2003 news release from the University of Sydney by Alison Handmer.
http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/newsevents/articles/2003/jul/25_gene.shtml

Laura Spinney. "HIV protection via the Vikings?" BioMedNet News (July 23, 2003).
http://www.news.bmn.com/news.story?day=0307723&story=1
Excerpts:
"A common genetic mutation that confers protection against HIV and possibly also multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes may have arisen over 1000 years ago in a lost kingdom in what is now Russia, according to an Australian geneticist. Marc Buhler of the Institute for Immunology and Allergy Research at the University of Sydney thinks that the delta32 deletion mutation in the CCR5 gene is now a target for selection because it protects against certain strains of HIV, but that initially it may have been selected for because carriers survived small pox... The CCR5-delta32 mutation is particularly common among Ashkenazi Jews... among Ashkenazis from Western Europe, for instance, it occurs with the same frequency as in Caucasian non-Jews... He then genotyped the 26 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals who turned out to be homozygous for the mutation, and measured the degree of recombination that had taken place in the region in which the mutation occurs to come up with an estimate of when the mutation first arose. To his surprise, his calculations generated an age of 50 generations, or just over 1000 years. The Ashkenazi Jews left Israel around 2000 years ago... Since the mutation is not common among the Sephardic Jews who stayed in the Middle East, and since it appears to be older than the Ashkenazis' Germanic period - the last time they were concentrated as a population - Buhler surmises that it had its origins elsewhere [other than Germany]. There were several other pieces to fit into the jigsaw: for instance, the incidence of CCR5-delta32 is relatively high among Scandinavians... When he gathered information about his Ashkenazi volunteers' forebears, he found that the frequency of the mutation leapt to 20% in a subgroup whose grandparents came from Russia or Eastern Europe - almost 10% higher than the frequency among Western European Ashkenazis... Since small pox kills around one third to a half of its untreated victims, Buhler says selection would have been very strong for CCR5-delta32 if heterozygotes did indeed avoid death... pper class Khazars adopted Judaism in the mid-10th century... 'The Jewish Khazars had the main block of the mutation,' says Buhler, 'But a few [Khazar] slaves kidnapped by the Vikings would have been enough for them to take it away as a souvenir.' Khazaria ceased to exist around the 13th century, when it was absorbed by Russia, and from then on the Khazar Jews would have blended with the Ashkenazi ancestors of Buhler's Australian volunteers."
"Geneticist finds Ashkenazi immunity." Australian Jewish News (August 22, 2003). Excerpts:
"...In a study of 1400 subjects, Marc Buhler found that Jews originating from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia are prone to carry CCRS-delta 32 - a gene modifier that alters the immune system. ...Buhler said that the gene modifier fends off the symptoms of HIV/AIDS for anywhere between four years and a lifetime. ... Presented in Melbourne at the International Congress of Genetics, the study found CCRS-delta 32 in as many as 35 per cent of Jewish subjects originating from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia. The proportion for non-Jewish subjects hailing from that part of the world was around 25 per cent. However, Jews from other parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East are no more likely to carry the gene modifier than their non-Jewish counterparts from the same region, he said. CCRS-delta 32 was also discovered in nearly 30 per cent of subjects from Iceland - an observation that prompted Buhler to speculate that the mutation first emerged among medieval Russian Jewish communities and was spread to Northern Europe by the Vikings. Buhler believes that the first carrier of the gene mutation was probably born in Khazaria (in Southern Russia) between 800 and 1000AD. ... Buhler said that CCRS-delta 32 may have also protected Jews against the smallpox. The gene modifier has thrived, he said, because it can ward off adverse symptoms and keep carriers alive long enough to procreate."

"Um reino perdido e o HIV." O Globo (August 4, 2003): Ciencia e Vida, Segunda-feira. Excerpt:
"Um geneticista australiano apresentou uma das mais interessantes teses sobre a origem de uma mutaГЦo genИtica cujos portadores apresentam maior resistЙncia Ю Aids. A mutaГЦo no gene CCR5 chama-se delta 32. ApСs analisar amostras genИticas e mergulhar em livros de histСria, Marc Buhler, da Universidade de Sydney, concluiu que ela vem do esquecido reino de Khazaria, que existiu atИ o sИculo XIII, na regiЦo que hoje И o sul da RЗssia. Buhler chegou Ю Khazaria atravИs da anАlise de DNA de judeus ashkenazes, populaГЦo que apresenta a maior incidЙncia da mutaГЦo protetora. Ela teria sido naturalmente selecionada por proteger tambИm contra a varМola. Os judeus migraram em massa para Khazaria por volta do sИculo XI. A tese И interessante, mas Buhler ainda precisarА de mais provas."

(dot)khazaria(dot)com site articles on jewish genetic studies ARE back on-line.
Articles taken off site max 2 hours after i posted links, and it was a deeeep night. Someone wasn't sleeping
Only one logical explanation - sott is being monitored 24x7x365 by junior tirocinio ADL - Bnai folks.
Today wasn't their day.

 

[brainwave]

In a study of 1400 subjects, Marc Buhler found that Jews originating from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia are prone to carry CCRS-delta 32 - a gene modifier that alters the immune system. ...Buhler said that the gene modifier fends off the symptoms of HIV/AIDS for anywhere between four years and a lifetime. ... Presented in Melbourne at the International Congress of Genetics, the study found CCRS-delta 32 in as many as 35 per cent of Jewish subjects originating from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia. The proportion for non-Jewish subjects hailing from that part of the world was around 25 per cent. However, Jews from other parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East are no more likely to carry the gene modifier than their non-Jewish counterparts from the same region, he said. CCRS-delta 32 was also discovered in nearly 30 per cent of subjects from Iceland - an observation that prompted Buhler to speculate that the mutation first emerged among medieval Russian Jewish communities and was spread to Northern Europe by the Vikings. Buhler believes that the first carrier of the gene mutation was probably born in Khazaria (in Southern Russia) between 800 and 1000AD. ... Buhler said that CCRS-delta 32 may have also protected Jews against the smallpox. The gene modifier has thrived, he said, because it can ward off adverse symptoms and keep carriers alive long enough to procreate."

I remember reading this stuff when doing some research for an epidemics course. While the CCR5delta mutation protects from HIV, it appears to infer an increased risk for Hepatitis C. There is however ongoing debate about that. Some studies show evidence for this being the case, and others show no association. My personal take is that it is a risk factor because of the way the mutation protects from HIV. The downregulation of CCR5s on immune cells decrease the chances of the HIV virus entering the cells. However this downregulation increases the opportunity for Hepatitis C infection to take hold. The delta version of the gene is also implicated in several forms of cancer as well as increased risk of death from multiple sclerosis and west nile virus. MS tend to be more frequent in scandanavian and russian populations. The idea that it the CCR5 mutation emerged around the time of bubonic plague may have some merit but is debatable because of plague is bacterial. Personally I also have questions about the dating of a given mutation but I can see how carriers were protected in the presence of certain selection pressures and why those in scandinavia and Russia tend to have this mutation.



http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/53/6/895

Taken together, there exist intriguing theoretical concepts as well as first observational evidence to suggest an important role of CCR5 and its ligands with respect to the pathogenesis of HCV infection. However, the available observational data remain controversial at the present stage. [bold] Further research in different ethnic populations and consideration of additional genetic markers are needed to understand the role of polymorphic genetic traits in a disease that is of polygenic nature.[/bold] Furthermore, chronic hepatitis C virus infection may be just a first example for a group of infectious diseases, where alterations in the balance between type 1 and type 2 immune responses may be of importance. Therefore, it should also be worthwhile studying the potential roles of CCR5 and its ligands in other infectious diseases with a putatively altered immune balance such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

I am all for genetic research because the variation within and between ethnic propulations can give us information for fighting diseases. Like everything else, it ain't black and white and sadly psychopaths use whatever is learned for nefarious purposes.

http://www.aegis.com/conferences/CROI/2001/499.html

 

[Dave]

Long ago, there was a Medieval Kingdom of Khazaria, 652-1016 AD that included part of modern day Russia, Ukraine, and a sliver of what is now Kazakhstan. This area was somewhat interesting in history because when considering the choice of Islam, or Christianity or Judaism the leaders of this 'empire' decided to declare themselves Jewish. That was a very odd choice in an area of the world which was predominately Islam and Christian. There was little Zoroastrianism...but Jewish was essentially not on the radar.

The Khazaria Empire could not extend any further south because the Tatars and Turkmen proved to be about as obstinate as the Afghans have been throughout history.

The Khazarian 'Jews' are NOT descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel and their world view and lack of truly, pious spiritual Judaism have created conflict within that religion ever since.

To a great extent, these are our current day Zionist Jews (including Neocons, of course) who have formed a world power banking, extortion cult of war and death that has little or nothing to do with being devout adherents of Judaism. These are the folks who think nothing of breaking the law, lying (Kol Nidre), stealing, graft, corruption, assassination, blackmail, extortion or destroying tens of millions of people to get their way.

Throughout the past century, they have done just that in directly and indirectly liquidating over 100 million people. These soul- less 'reptilian' killers obey only the Talmud, not the laws of the lands they live in. This very behavior and 'ethics' appear, in fact, in the Talmud as Rabbinical teaching. Most pious Jews of good heart and conscience who follow the Torah know that such is not the way to achieve civilized, enlightened society.

This is, in part, one of the reasons "Jew haters" have often been unable to differentiate between the truly religious descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel (the ones the Old Testament of the Bible is about) and these squatters and interlopers who came from Central Asia and have, for the most part, taken over their religion and turned it into an evil club of power manipulation, greed, money, war, death and destruction.

Many true Torah Jews are highly-offended at the atrocities these Zionist Khazars Talmudic Jews have inflicted on mankind. From the huge massacre of Russian Christians under Zionist Bolshevik Communism, to the mass starvation holocaust of 20-30 million Ukrainians, to the creation of Nazism/fascism of World War II, to the mass slaughter of Christian Armenians, and to the current day blood-lust genocide of Iraq and Iran...these Zionist Khazars have made it abundantly clear, to the tune of over 100 million dead, that they have nothing but murderous contempt of Christians and Muslims.

These were the Khazar Jews that many have heard about over the years but did not have a clue where they came from in the first place. The map below shows you where they came from before they infested Russia, Europe and the US.

_http://www.khazaria.com/





Right there is the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea...the current venue of massive world tensions. The problem is not 'the Jews'...the problem is the KHAZAR Jews who are THE power behind Zionist Israel, the UK and US.

If readers pay attention to the map below, they will clearly see that the geologic division between Europe and Central Asia (what some call Eurasia) is the Caucasus Mountain range between Russia and Georgia. Just as the Himalaya Mountains are the geologic division between the continent of Asia and the continent of India, the Caucasus Mountains separate Central Asia and Europe. Georgia is NOT Europe except in the minds of those wishing to push stupid agendas against Russia.

Georgia was apparently never part of the Khazar empire and was predominately Christian until recent times. As of the Bush- Saakashvili fiasco with Russia, information has surfaced that Georgia is now 60% Muslim. The government is composed mostly of Muslims and Zionist Jews probably of Khazar descent. George Soros has had his greedy hands all over this fiasco just as he has over in the Ukraine. Most of what is now Ukraine used to be part of the Khazaria Empire.

Remember: geologically and geographically speaking, Georgia is NOT part of Europe...and NATO and the EU need to reject Rothschild Zionism's charade that Georgia is anything other than a part of Eurasia or Central Asia. It is also clear that NATO and the EU both must reject NATO membership for Georgia - a predominately Muslim, non-European nation that grows steadily more under the control of Khazar Zionist US Jews and their Muslim confederates.

What is going on in Georgia - and the constant provocation of Russia - is a formula for disaster for the United States which must somehow find leaders who can more clearly see the real agenda of the Khazarian Zionists.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been hinting there is another Cold War coming - one that could become very hot in seconds. In response to BushCo putting nuclear missiles on Russia's front porch (and this latest genocide of Russian Orthodox Christians in South Ossetia), Russia has responded in two ways.

First, it recently announced it would like to refuel its long-range strategic nuclear bombers in Cuba. Second, Russia apparently plans to put nuclear missiles in the Mediterranean theater, and Syria in particular, and aim them at European strategic targets and no doubt more than a few at Zionist Israel.

Folks, the Russian Bear has put up with all of the -shite- from the Zionist West it intends to tolerate.

Georgia is a good place to set up basese to wage covert war and black ops against Russia, which is now geographically sitting on what used to be the Khazaria Empire. That is probably why there are 4,000 Israeli and Blackwater mercenaries in Georgia right now.
It is also a convenient base to launch black ops against the Caspian Basin area to try to force more people into handing over their oil and natural gas to the US and its Zionist thugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus







The deep seated hatred of Russia by these Khazars goes back over 1,000 years when Russia crushed their empire and many of them fled to Europe into the areas now called Poland, Romania and Hungary, and Ukraine. Those who remained were under Russian rule for a while but even that changed in about 100 years time.

<start insert>

_http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-history.html

Decline and fall. During the 10th century, the East Slavs were united under Scandinavian overlordship. A new nation, Kievan Rus, was formed by Prince Oleg. Just as the Khazars had left their mark on other peoples, so too did they influence the Rus. The Rus and the Hungarians both adopted the dual-kingship system of the Khazars. The Rus princes even borrowed the title kagan. Archaeologists recovered a variety of Khazar or Khazar-style objects (including clothing and pottery) from Viking gravesites in Chernigov, Gnezdovo, Kiev, and even Birka (Sweden). The residents of Kievan Rus patterned their legal procedures after the Khazars. In addition, some Khazar words became part of the old East Slavic language: for example, bogatyr ("brave knight") apparently derives from the Khazar word baghatur.

The Rus inherited most of the former Khazar lands in the late 10th century and early 11th century. One of the most devastating defeats came in 965, when Rus Prince Svyatoslav conquered the Khazar fortress of Sarkel. It is believed that he conquered Itil two years later, after which he campaigned in the Balkans. Despite the loss of their nation, the Khazar people did not disappear. Some of them migrated westward into Hungary, Romania, and Poland, mixing with other Jewish communities.2

<end insert>

Note the comment in the insert about 'the Balkans' and maybe you will better understand the clash between the Zionist West and Russia over the Balkans. As stated in a recent essay, the Serbians are related to the Russians.

Both the Russians and remaining Khazars had to flee for their lives when the Mongol hordes took over most of Asia under the leadership of Genghis Khan, 1161-1227. Many of these Khazar Jews had no choice but flee with the Russians northeast, and have been a murderous pain in the ass to Russia for much of its history since.

These were the "Jews" that came into power in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and Lenin needed their help to topple Tsar Nicholas, the last remnant of the Romanov dynasty. They helped overthrow Tsar Nicholas because he was not friendly to the Khazar Jews. These were the Zionist Jews who set about forcing communism on Christian Russia and murdered 30-40 million Russians who refused to give up their land or bow down to Bolshevik-Zionism-Khazarian- Communism.

These were the same Khazar Jews - later called the Trotskyites after exiled Leon Trotsky - who fled for their lives when Stalin came to power and tore that evil out of the heart of Russia to a large extent. Many of them fled to Germany, and UK and the US to seek safety. They are now the Zionist Jews who are causing the most problems in this world.

These are the same people who have pushed all the "hate Russia" crap in the media and in US foreign policy to the point of ad nauseum even after the Cold War ended.

It was this group of Khazar Jews that aided and abetted the formation of Nazism as an ideological counter to what they viewed as 'un-pure communism' under Stalin. Communism is communism, their real axe to grind was Stalin sent them fleeing and had many of them put to death or sent to the gulags of Siberia for orchestrating the slaughter of tens of millions of predominately Russian Orthodox Christians. Stalin was also most displeased that the Trotskyites helped to form Nazism in Germany. That wound up getting another 20 million Russians killed in World War II.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born in Georgia, not Russia proper.

The US Neocons, and those of the UK and Israel, are to a large extent Trotskyites, Zionist Jew or Christian Zionist Sheeple who do not know enough about history and the legacy these Khazarian Jews have left in their path. There are huge differences in the Biblical 12 Tribes and these Khazars who have embedded themselves into Judaism like a tick on a hound dog.

They have been so despicably murderous to Russians that a special word just for them was created: zhids.

Did they change when they fled Russia? Not a chance. These people have always had visions of rebuilding the grandeur of their Khazar Empire for over 1,000 years. It is this group of Jewish squatters who pushed the hardest, and in the most evil and deceitful ways, to get the UN, US and UK to establish Israel in 1948.

Most of us Baby Boomers, now age 50-65, have now witnessed 60 years of atrocities by 'poor little Israel' and these Zionist Khazar thugs but that was preceded by the colossal atrocities of killing about 50 million Russians, another 49-55 million killed in World War II, and the list goes on and on.

Their latest escapade to put on that list is South Ossetia.

These were part of the Turkic Jews, also known later as Crypto Jews who perpetrated the genocide of 1.2 to 1.5 million Armenian Christians in the early 1900s. The Rothschild and Rockefellers wanted the Armenians out of the way so they could get large amounts of oil from Azerbaijan through Armenia to the Black Sea. Such was the legacy of the Ottoman Empire.

If you want to get a history lesson as to why Ukraine was almost always a sub-district of Russia, check into the Battle of Izmail, named for the Ottoman fort that was conquered by who may be the greatest of all Russian czars, the German-born Catherine the Great.





The Russians have had to defend Russia against the machinations of these Fake Jews for 1,000 years. They just did so again in South Ossetia.

Even the famous "Steps of Potemkin" in Odessa, Ukraine (very close to Izmail, Ukraine) are in honor of a paramour of Catherine the Great and his contribution in defending Ukraine and Russia from the Ottoman-Khazarian hordes that were trying to take over Europe and Russia.

Folks, please get this straight in your head. These Khazar Jews constitute nothing but psychopathic, warmongering, blood-thirsty evil on feet. They now control the power structure of the US and UK.

Get that?

Part of their deep-seated hatred for Russia goes back 1,000 years when Russia upended their empire and sent them packing. Then Genghis Khan sent many of them and the Russians fleeing when the Mongols arrived in town. Many of the Khazars fled to Turkey and were intimately involved in the formation of the Ottoman Empire, the attempted conquer of Europe, and repeated attacks across the Black Sea at Mother Russia. This was yet another 'hate Russia' routine from these cretins.

Chechnya, Russia is just on the other side of those Caucasus Mountains and was part of the Khazaria Empire until Russia crushed it. Russia knows all too well - and remembers all too well - who was behind the Chechnya War that they had to fight twice within the past 20 years.

Ingushetia, Russia is just on the other side of those Caucasus Mountains and was part of the Khazaria Empire until Russia crushed it. If you missed my recent essays on the problems 'poor little Georgia' and how the US and Israel are trying to stir up in Ingushetia, these two links clarify what is going on and being orchestrated out of Georgia, Washington, DC and Tel Aviv.

_http://www.rense.com/general83/stupid.htm [please do not leave live links to known disinformation sources - link deactivated by moderator]

_http://www.rense.com/general83/ism.htm

Dagestan also used to be part of the Khazaria Empire, and the US has waged covert ops to try to take that area over so they can build a pipeline from Kazakhstan to Georgia to the Black Sea.

_http://www.rense.com/general82/opd.htm

These people have plotted and schemed for 1,000 years to get their Khazarian Empire back, and now that the entire world knows that the historical area of Khazaria is sitting on a mother lode of oil and natural gas, they *really* want it back. They salivate like Pavlovian Dogs and have wet dreams of dollars and shekels about all that oil and natural gas in what used to be their Khazarian Empire, long since dead and gone except in their delusional minds.

Many of the DNC Zionist Communists who defected to the RNC in 1996, are Russia-hating, Zionist Khazarian Jews. They have now defected back over to the DNC and backing Obama...the sock puppet of the pathological Russia-hating Zbigniew Brzezinsky and George Soros.

Many of the Zionist Jews in power in Israel, the UK and US cannot trace their roots back to the 12 Tribes. Many of the dual citizen, wanted criminals Israel is harboring are Khazarian Jews, not descendants of the 12 Tribes. Many of them are from Russia after Genghis Khan sent both Russian and Khazarians fleeing.

We just witnessed Georgia attacking Russian Orthodox Christians in South Ossetia, aided and abetted by the US, Israel and Ukraine.

North Ossetia used to be part of the Khazarian Empire and the North and South Ossetians are ethnically the same people.

There are growing border problems between Ukraine and Russia, both areas formerly part of the Khazarian Empire. Ukraine had the audacity to inform Russia it could no longer park its Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, Ukraine. The Kiev government is firmly under the control of Zionist Jews, as is the Tbilisi, Georgia regime.

In both Georgia and Ukraine, the dirty hands of George Soros can be found because he has been pushing for 'White Stream 1 and 2' pipelines from Georgia to Ukraine as a supply link to the EU to lessen the growing energy might of Russia. George Soros is Hungarian by birth, probably of Khazarian Jew origin.

This entire area that used to be Khazaria is loaded with oil and natural gas and these Khazarian Jews have had an axe to grind with Russia for over 1,000 years.

Getting the picture, folks?

Can these Zionist Khazarian Jews do it alone? NO! They absolutely have to have the muscle of the United States to pursue these stupid, petty, long-since-dead illusions of grandeur and empire.

Karl


Addendum

Jeff Rense received a telephone message and asked that I clarify something. This is the gist of the call he received...

A very polite man somehow got his private number and left a message stating that his relatives are of Khazarian ancestry and he feels the article casts all Khazarian Jews as evil - which, of course, is not the case. I urge him to reread the article less emotionally and he'll see that the point of it is that Khazars are at the core of Western Zionism. He was very perplexed and said he found the article to be full of 'hate' and that all Jews of Khazar background are lumped together.

If one reads the essay carefully and honestly, one cannot possibly miss the fact that the term 'Zionist' is used to clearly, and unequivocally, qualify the ZIONIST Khazar issue from beginning to end. Obviously, patently, not all Khazarian Jews are 'bad' or part of the problem. There is good and bad everywhere: all nations, all races, all religions. There are good and bad Americans, Russians, Christians, Catholics, Jews, Khazarian Jews, Whites, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, you name it.

It is important to always remember the following when reading my materials...

1. My focus is on the dark and deadly genocidal mindset of evil that plagues this dying planet. I am not firing at 'all' of any nation, or race, or religious caste. I have close friends from all groups, including Jews...both Khazarian and those of the 12 Tribes. All fully understand where I am coming from and know when I speak or write, I am not aiming cruise missiles or arrows at them. They know my entire crusade in life is to expose evil...in whatever flavor you find it.

2. Evidently, this caller felt I was condemning 'all Khazarian Jews' but that is certainly not the case. I only criticize those who have evil in their hearts to the point they have no goodwill towards their fellow man. I loathe and detest evil...and that is my God-given right. Yours, too.

3. This world has many problems and none of them are worth fighting, killing and dying over. Most of our problems arise from greed-driven, criminal, psychopathic, genocidal evil.

Maybe since he is Kharzian Jew, he could join this fight with his knowledge and insights about the inner workings of Zionism which is THE problem in the Western world - regardless of whether one speaks of 12 Tribe Zionist , Khazarian Zionist, or a Christian Zionist (the most numerous of all Zionists...and the biggest dupes around).

There are many wonderful people of the Jewish faith and heritage who are tired of being used and sacrificed by Zionism and they, like Jews Against Zionism, are doing everything possible to put a final stop to it and awaken people to the REAL problem.

 

[Vulcan59]

Hi Dave,

Welcome to the forum. :) We recommend all new members to post an introduction in the Newbies section telling us a bit about themselves, and how they found their way here. Have a read through that section to get an idea of how others have done it. Thanks.

 

[meta-agnostic]

Not long after this episode first aired, I remember seeing it reported that patrons of the bar in question claimed that one or more additional verses of the song were cut from the broadcast. They claimed there was one about throwing his wife's cooking down the well, which would undoubtedly make the whole concept seem more jokey. I've always wanted to hear the full uncut version of the song.

 

[monksgirl]

This has been a very interesting thread to read, especially given the presence of guests who would like to remain anonymous, who put forth passionate arguments about why the reader should support their own opinion on the complexities of the Jewish population of the world in the 21st Century, and the political conquest aims of a certain faction of the population. But there also seemed to be some possible historic inaccuracies thrown into the soup by these guests. Is it truly a given that all Talmud-believers are of Khazar lineage? And thus only Khazarian Jews are responsible for the Russian Revolution, world revolution, and Zionism ? Did the origins of the Talmud predate the Khazars taking the Judaic faith?
Tsar Nicholas is accused of depredations against the Jews, but he also wanted the Jews to come out of their settlements 'beyond the pale', and become fully involved in public life in Russia, and to assist the Jews in this beneficial assimilation, he decided to have the Talmud transcribed into Russian and prepaid for a number of copies, and this action was almost immediately followed by upheavals. When the Talmud was to be transcribed into German, similar upheavals occurred. So isn't it then seen that the Talmud becoming available in the local language, leaving it's vicious secrets open to public scrutiny, a source of real discord between ethnicities? And thus the Talmudic ideal of the world in thrall to Zion is the source of the real problem?
The emphasis given of Torah being a peaceful teaching, seems and feels similar to Islamic argument that the Koran is by and large peaceful in intent. But aren't the militant teachings of Moses in the Torah the source that sanctified the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in the Israeli founding era, and caused the diaspora of the Palestinians from their ancestral homeland? And aren't there similar militant teachings in the Koran, and extra-scriptural opinion in Christian Dominionism? So isn't the feeding of the lowest parts of the individual ego, through the means of scriptural interpretation, the real source of much of human misery and wars through the ages? Desire for power, and the desire to control others and to make use of their resources; these are the evils seen in both religions and politics, and these pathologies are the motivators of the actions that we speak against.