The Golden Door

Jobling said. Jewish Y chromosomes resemble those of Middle Eastern peoples, and the Jewish Diaspora is one way Middle Eastern chromosomes entered Europe. But because so little work has been done on the rare K2 lineage, “our research raises the Two Takes On Jewish Genetics

possibility, but doesn’t help anyone to answer it either way,” Dr. Jobling said.

Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the , said he had compared the Jefferson Y chromosome with those in his database of Y chromosomes and found close matches with four other individuals. There was a perfect match to the Y chromosome of a Moroccan Jewish Genetics: Abstracts and Summaries

Jew, and matches that differed by two mutations from another Moroccan Jew, a Kurdish Jew and an Egyptian.

Eastern European Jews have significant Eastern Mediterranean elements which manifest themselves in close relationships Dr. Hammer said he would “hazard a guess at Sephardic Jewish ancestry” for Jefferson, although any such interpretation was with Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian Arab, Lebanese, Syrian, and Anatolian Turkish peoples. This is why the Y-DNA haplogroups highly tentative. Sephardic Jews are descendants of those expelled from Spain and Portugal after 1492.

J and E, which are typical of the Middle East, are so common among them. Jewish lineages from this region of the world derive Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA, a DNA-testing service, said that among the 90,000 Y chromosome

from both the Levant and the Anatolia-Armenia region. At the same time, there are traces of European (including Northern samples contributed to his database, K2 occurred in 2 percent of Ashkenazim, Jews of Central or Northern European origin, and Italian and Western Slavic or Eastern Slavic) and ancestry among European Jews. Many Greek and Roman women married

3 percent of Sephardim.

Jewish men before conversion to Judaism was outlawed by the Roman Empire, and many of the Southern European ancestral

“Whether the non-Jews with K2 are descendants of Jews or come from an earlier migration into Europe is hard to say,” Mr.

lines in Ashkenazic families come from these marriages. Ethiopian Jews mostly descend from Ethiopian Africans who converted Greenspan said, “but my sense is that it’s separate migrations from the Middle East.”

to Judaism, but may also be related to a lesser extent to Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Jews descend from Arabs and Israelites. North Even if Thomas Jefferson had had a Sephardic Jew in his ancestry in the 15th century, very little of that ancestor’s genome African Jewish and Kurdish Jewish paternal lineages come from Israelites. Jewish Y-DNA tends to come from the Middle East, would have come down to him along with the Y chromosome, given that in each generation a child inherits only half of each and that studies that take into account mtDNA show that many Jewish populations are related to neighboring non-Jewish groups parent’s genes.

maternally. All existing studies fail to compare modern Jewish populations’ DNA to ancient Judean DNA and medieval Khazarian DNA, but in the absence of old DNA, comparisons with living populations appear to be adequate to trace geographic roots.

A MOSAIC OF PEOPLE: THE JEWISH STORY AND A

REASSESSMENT OF THE DNA EVIDENCE

Ellen Levy-Coffman

The Jewish community has been the focus of extensive genetic study over the past decade in an attempt to better

understand the origins of this group. In particular, those descended from Northwestern and Eastern European Jewish groups, known as “Ashkenazim,” have been the subject of numerous DNA studies examining both the Y chromosome and

mitochondrial genetic evidence.

The focus of the present study is to analyze and reassess Ashkenazi results obtained by DNA researchers and synthe-size them into a coherent picture of Jewish genetics, interweaving historical evidence in order to obtain a more accurate depiction of the complex genetic history of this group. Many of the DNA studies on Ashkenazim fail to adequately address the complexity of the genetic evidence, in particular, the significant genetic contribution of European and Central Asian peoples in the makeup of the contemporary Ashkenazi population.

One important contribution to Ashkenazi DNA appears to have originated with the Khazars, an ancient people of

probable Central Asian stock that lived in southern Russia during the 8th-12th centuries CE. Significant inflow of genes from European host populations over the centuries is also supported by the DNA evidence. The present study analyzes not only the Middle Eastern component of Ashkenazi ancestry, but also the genetic contribution from European and Central Asian sources that appear to have had an important impact on Ashkenazi ancestry.