'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert
'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert
Israeli Scientist Challenges Hypothesis of Middle East Origins
Science Feud: Johns Hopkins geneticist Eran Elhaik says his research debunks the long-held theory that Jews are a single race.
getty images
By Rita Rubin
Published May 07, 2013, issue of May 10, 2013.
Scientists usually dont call each other liars and frauds.
But thats how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of pathology and genetics at Yeshiva Universitys Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.
For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews and Ashkenazim in particular are indeed one people, Ostrers research finds.
Its a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.
But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.
Hes just wrong, said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.
The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?
The debate touches upon such sensitive issues as whether the Jewish people is a race or a religion, and whether Jews or Palestinians are descended from the original inhabitants of what is now the State of Israel.
Ostrers theory is sometimes marshaled to lend the authority of science to the Zionist narrative, which views the migration of modern-day Jews to what is now Israel, and their rule over that land, as a simple act of repossession by the descendants of the lands original residents. Ostrer declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his writings, Ostrer points out the dangers of such reductionism; some of the same genetic markers common among Jews, he finds, can be found in Palestinians, as well.
By using sophisticated molecular tools, Feldman, Ostrer and most other scientists in the field have found that Jews are genetically homogeneous. No matter where they live, these scientists say, Jews are genetically more similar to each other than to their non-Jewish neighbors, and they have a shared Middle Eastern ancestry.
The geneticists research backs up what is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jews descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and settled in Southern Europe. In the late Middle Ages they moved into eastern Europe from Germany, or the Rhineland.
Nonsense, said Elhaik, a 33-year-old Israeli Jew from Beersheba who earned a doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston. The son of an Italian man and Iranian woman who met in Israel, Elhaik, a dark-haired, compact man, sat down recently for an interview in his bare, narrow cubicle of an office at Hopkins, where hes worked for four years.
In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, published in December in the online journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Elhaik says he has proved that Ashkenazi Jews roots lie in the Caucasus a region at the border of Europe and Asia that lies between the Black and Caspian seas not in the Middle East. They are descendants, he argues, of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ashkenazi genes, Elhaik added, are far more heterogeneous than Ostrer and other proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis believe. Elhaik did find a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.
Elhaik writes that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although many historians believe that only royalty and some members of the aristocracy converted. But widespread conversion by the Khazars is the only way to explain the ballooning of the European Jewish population to 8 million at the beginning of the 20th century from its tiny base in the Middle Ages, Elhaik says.
Elhaik bases his conclusion on an analysis of genetic data published by a team of researchers led by Doron Behar, a population geneticist and senior physician at Israels Rambam Medical Center, in Haifa. Using the same data, Behars team published in 2010 a paper concluding that most contemporary Jews around the world and some non-Jewish populations from the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, are closely related.
Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others, but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared genetic signatures found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the medieval state.
Its an unrealistic premise, said University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer, one of Behars co-authors, of Elhaiks paper. Hammer notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaiks study.
Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents outlier folks who have a minority view thats not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.
Feldman, director of Stanfords Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years theres no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin, he said. He added that Elhaiks paper is sort of a one-off.
Elhaiks statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.
Elhaik, who doesnt believe that Moses, Aaron or the 12 Tribes of Israel ever existed, shrugs off such criticism.
Thats a circular argument, he said of the notion that Jews and Armenians genetic similarities stem from common ancestors in the Middle East and not from Khazaria, the area where the Armenians live. If you believe that, he says, then other non-Jewish populations, such as Georgian, that are genetically similar to Armenians should be considered genetically related to Jews, too, and so on and so forth.
Dan Graur, Elhaiks doctoral supervisor at U.H. and a member of the editorial board of the journal that published his paper, calls his former student very ambitious, very independent. Thats what I like. Graur, a Romanian-born Jew who served on the faculty of Tel Aviv University for 22 years before moving 10 years ago to the Houston school, said Elhaik writes more provocatively than may be needed, but its his style. Graur calls Elhaiks conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews originated to the east of Germany a very honest estimate.
In a news article that accompanied Elhaiks journal paper, Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People, said the study vindicated his long-held ideas.
Its so obvious for me, Sand told the journal. Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say theyre not a race is anti-Semitic. Its crazy how history plays with us.
The paper has received little coverage in mainstream American media, but it has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and anti-Semitic white supremacists, Elhaik said.
Interestingly, while anti-Zionist bloggers have applauded Elhaiks work, saying it proves that contemporary Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, some white supremacists have attacked it.
David Duke, for example, is disturbed by the assertion that Jews are not a race. The disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory, wrote the former Ku Klux Klansman and former Louisiana state assemblyman on his blog in February.
Im not communicating with them, Elhaik said of the white supremacists. He says it also bothers him, a veteran of seven years in the Israeli army, that anti-Zionists have capitalized on his research; not least because theyre not going to be proven wrong anytime soon.
But proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis also have a political agenda, he said, claiming they were motivated to justify the Zionist narrative.
To illustrate his point, Elhaik swivels his chair around to face his computer and calls up a 2010 email exchange with Ostrer.
It was a great pleasure reading your groups recent paper, Abrahams Children in the Genome Era, that illuminate the history of our people, Elhaik wrote to Ostrer. Is it possible to see the data used for the study?
Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do, he wrote. Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people. That last requirement, Elhaik argues, reveals the bias of Ostrer and his collaborators.
Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is peculiar, said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. Whats this guy trying to hide?
Despite what his critics claim, Elhaik says, he was not out to prove that contemporary Jews have no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible. His primary research focus is the genetics of mental illness, which, he explains, led him to question the assumption that Ashkenazi Jews are a useful population to study because theyre so homogeneous.
Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes. Koestler, who was Jewish by birth, said his aim in writing the book was to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe. Should this theory be confirmed, the term anti-Semitism would become void of meaning, the book jacket reads. Although Koestlers book was generally well reviewed, some skeptics questioned the authors grasp of the history of Khazaria.
Graur is not surprised that Elhaik has stood up against the clique of scientists who believe that Jews are genetically homogeneous. He enjoys being combative, Graur said. Thats what science is.
'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert
Israeli Scientist Challenges Hypothesis of Middle East Origins
Science Feud: Johns Hopkins geneticist Eran Elhaik says his research debunks the long-held theory that Jews are a single race.
getty images
By Rita Rubin
Published May 07, 2013, issue of May 10, 2013.
Scientists usually dont call each other liars and frauds.
But thats how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of pathology and genetics at Yeshiva Universitys Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.
For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews and Ashkenazim in particular are indeed one people, Ostrers research finds.
Its a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.
But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.
Hes just wrong, said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.
The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?
The debate touches upon such sensitive issues as whether the Jewish people is a race or a religion, and whether Jews or Palestinians are descended from the original inhabitants of what is now the State of Israel.
Ostrers theory is sometimes marshaled to lend the authority of science to the Zionist narrative, which views the migration of modern-day Jews to what is now Israel, and their rule over that land, as a simple act of repossession by the descendants of the lands original residents. Ostrer declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his writings, Ostrer points out the dangers of such reductionism; some of the same genetic markers common among Jews, he finds, can be found in Palestinians, as well.
By using sophisticated molecular tools, Feldman, Ostrer and most other scientists in the field have found that Jews are genetically homogeneous. No matter where they live, these scientists say, Jews are genetically more similar to each other than to their non-Jewish neighbors, and they have a shared Middle Eastern ancestry.
The geneticists research backs up what is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jews descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century and settled in Southern Europe. In the late Middle Ages they moved into eastern Europe from Germany, or the Rhineland.
Nonsense, said Elhaik, a 33-year-old Israeli Jew from Beersheba who earned a doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston. The son of an Italian man and Iranian woman who met in Israel, Elhaik, a dark-haired, compact man, sat down recently for an interview in his bare, narrow cubicle of an office at Hopkins, where hes worked for four years.
In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, published in December in the online journal Genome Biology and Evolution, Elhaik says he has proved that Ashkenazi Jews roots lie in the Caucasus a region at the border of Europe and Asia that lies between the Black and Caspian seas not in the Middle East. They are descendants, he argues, of the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived in one of the largest medieval states in Eurasia and then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ashkenazi genes, Elhaik added, are far more heterogeneous than Ostrer and other proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis believe. Elhaik did find a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.
Elhaik writes that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although many historians believe that only royalty and some members of the aristocracy converted. But widespread conversion by the Khazars is the only way to explain the ballooning of the European Jewish population to 8 million at the beginning of the 20th century from its tiny base in the Middle Ages, Elhaik says.
Elhaik bases his conclusion on an analysis of genetic data published by a team of researchers led by Doron Behar, a population geneticist and senior physician at Israels Rambam Medical Center, in Haifa. Using the same data, Behars team published in 2010 a paper concluding that most contemporary Jews around the world and some non-Jewish populations from the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, are closely related.
Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others, but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared genetic signatures found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the medieval state.
Its an unrealistic premise, said University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer, one of Behars co-authors, of Elhaiks paper. Hammer notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaiks study.
Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents outlier folks who have a minority view thats not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.
Feldman, director of Stanfords Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years theres no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin, he said. He added that Elhaiks paper is sort of a one-off.
Elhaiks statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.
Elhaik, who doesnt believe that Moses, Aaron or the 12 Tribes of Israel ever existed, shrugs off such criticism.
Thats a circular argument, he said of the notion that Jews and Armenians genetic similarities stem from common ancestors in the Middle East and not from Khazaria, the area where the Armenians live. If you believe that, he says, then other non-Jewish populations, such as Georgian, that are genetically similar to Armenians should be considered genetically related to Jews, too, and so on and so forth.
Dan Graur, Elhaiks doctoral supervisor at U.H. and a member of the editorial board of the journal that published his paper, calls his former student very ambitious, very independent. Thats what I like. Graur, a Romanian-born Jew who served on the faculty of Tel Aviv University for 22 years before moving 10 years ago to the Houston school, said Elhaik writes more provocatively than may be needed, but its his style. Graur calls Elhaiks conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews originated to the east of Germany a very honest estimate.
In a news article that accompanied Elhaiks journal paper, Shlomo Sand, history professor at Tel Aviv University and author of the controversial 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People, said the study vindicated his long-held ideas.
Its so obvious for me, Sand told the journal. Some people, historians and even scientists, turn a blind eye to the truth. Once, to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say theyre not a race is anti-Semitic. Its crazy how history plays with us.
The paper has received little coverage in mainstream American media, but it has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and anti-Semitic white supremacists, Elhaik said.
Interestingly, while anti-Zionist bloggers have applauded Elhaiks work, saying it proves that contemporary Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, some white supremacists have attacked it.
David Duke, for example, is disturbed by the assertion that Jews are not a race. The disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory, wrote the former Ku Klux Klansman and former Louisiana state assemblyman on his blog in February.
Im not communicating with them, Elhaik said of the white supremacists. He says it also bothers him, a veteran of seven years in the Israeli army, that anti-Zionists have capitalized on his research; not least because theyre not going to be proven wrong anytime soon.
But proponents of the Rhineland Hypothesis also have a political agenda, he said, claiming they were motivated to justify the Zionist narrative.
To illustrate his point, Elhaik swivels his chair around to face his computer and calls up a 2010 email exchange with Ostrer.
It was a great pleasure reading your groups recent paper, Abrahams Children in the Genome Era, that illuminate
Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do, he wrote. Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people. That last requirement, Elhaik argues, reveals the bias of Ostrer and his collaborators.
Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is peculiar, said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. Whats this guy trying to hide?
Despite what his critics claim, Elhaik says, he was not out to prove that contemporary Jews have no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible. His primary research focus is the genetics of mental illness, which, he explains, led him to question the assumption that Ashkenazi Jews are a useful population to study because theyre so homogeneous.
Elhaik says he first read about the Khazarian Hypothesis a decade ago in a 1976 book by the late Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes. Koestler, who was Jewish by birth, said his aim in writing the book was to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe. Should this theory be confirmed, the term anti-Semitism would become void of meaning, the book jacket reads. Although Koestlers book was generally well reviewed, some skeptics questioned the authors grasp of the history of Khazaria.
Graur is not surprised that Elhaik has stood up against the clique of scientists who believe that Jews are genetically homogeneous. He enjoys being combative, Graur said. Thats what science is.
most of these people are from Russia, Poland etc 
His brother Shem is the one who birth the line of Israel. 
guys this stuff isn't that hard.