Posted on 09/18/2014 10:35:58 AM PDT by Fenhalls555
There may be no such thing as a Jewish gene, but communities can definitely have defining characteristics, and one such community is Jews with roots in central and eastern Europe.
A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today’s Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the medieval era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today’s sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews — there are more than 10 million around the world — derived from just 350 people or so. That previously postulated population bottleneck — a drastic reduction in population size — occurred between 25 to 32 generations ago, the scientists say.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications by a team headed by Columbia University’s Shai Carmon.
A number of genetic characteristics are associated with Ashkenazi groups, as opposed to other Jewish populations and other contemporary Middle-Eastern and European peoples. Certainly they are genetically distinguishable. “Compared with European samples, our Ashkenazi Jewish panel has 47 percent more novel variants per genome,” write the scientists.
Unfortunately, Ashkenazim are also associated with no less than 19 genetic disorders, according to the Center for Jewish Genetics. Many are fatal and arise from single-gene mutations. The list includes forms of breast and ovarian cancer, Tay-Sachs disease and so-called maple syrup urine disease, in which the pee of affected children smells sweet.
Compared with Europeans in general, Ashkenazi Jews have a slightly greater deleterious mutation load, as it were. (Sephardi Jews have illnesses of their own, including the genetic disorder Wolman’s disease and an allergy to fava beans – the ful so loved by non-allergic Israelis.)
(Excerpt) Read more at forward.com ...
The Ten Lost Tribes
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/531159/posts
Same is true for Catholics. The more conservative - the bigger the families - the more Republican.
Classic beauty.
Haredi women are like Catholics of old. They have an average of 6.7 children in Israel (the average Jewish Israeli women has 3 children which is still not bad).
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Well God bless those families...we need all the help we can get!
I always get a chuckle watching Monty Python’s poke at Catholic’s reproductive power’s even though I should be offended (I guess). I know so many Irish Catholic families with 12 or 13 kids.
It’s here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
Very funny. Thanks for that.
Exactly! There’s no reason at all to believe that only breeding 350 individuals existed.
Population bottlenecks happen all the time and have happened in the past.
Let’s not forget that there have always been some number of European Jews who have converted to Christianity and whose offspring were subsequently “lost”. Some converted through conviction but many as a practical matter.
Just like today, not all members of a faith are equally strong in it.
Well, yeah. But that wouldn’t get the population down from some hundreds of thousands, probably, to 350.
I’m with ancesthntr. This just doesn’t make any sense.
I’m not qualified to comment on the genetic evidence, but I have studied history for several decades.
Let’s assume, without much evidence, that there were 1000,000 Jews in Europe in 1100, and somewhere around 500,000 in 1600.
Does it make any sense at all that the number dropped to 350 in the period between and then rebounded? I don’t believe it. I doubt it’s even mathematically possible, given the infant mortality rates of the time.
Wiki: A 2013 survey conducted in the United States by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project found that intermarriage rate to be 58% among all Jews and 71% among non-Orthodox Jews.
NOT a recipe for a minority group’s continued existence.
The Lord God promised there would always be a remnant.
Simply a greater diversity of genes with which to improve overall resistance to disease is reason enough.
Hard to believe.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Last I heard it was from four women, of which I am skeptical. If for no reason than the four women had mothers and grandmothers. Which in those days meant more women. Now am I to believe 346 men serviced four women.
Give me a break. The original Jewish population going down to Egypt numbered 70 souls coming from the loins of Jacob, and left numbering 600,000-and-change males over the age of 20. Everybody comes from fewer ancestors than their present population. And they come to that conclusion from a sample of 128?
Now, as to the four females, that’s pretty straightforward. Moshe Kapuchnik marries a hot girl and they have 10 daughters. All the newly-exiled boys in town marry a Kapuchnik girl, and have more daughters and sons, the former of whom inherit the hot-girl gene from mommy and pass it on to the female descendants of themselves and the cousin that they marry. Eventually, their genes are mixed in with the entire population and becomes the main brand name, because hot girls are more desirable than homely ones.
I think you are overestimating, especially because they are speaking of Ashkenazi only, which excludes a large number of Jews who would have been living around the Mediterranean. Here’s something from Wikipedia that gives some estimates concerning that time (for both Askenazi and Sephards):
“As regards the number of Jews in the Middle Ages, Benjamin of Tudela, about 1170, enumerates altogether 1,049,565; but of these 100,000 are attributed to Persia and India, 100,000 to Arabia, and 300,000 to an undecipherable “Thanaim”, obviously mere guesses with regard to the Eastern Jews, with whom he did not come in contact. There were at that time probably not many more than 500,000 in the countries he visited, and probably not more than 750,000 altogether. The only real data for the Middle Ages are with regard to special Jewish communities.
The Middle Ages were mainly a period of expulsions. In 1290, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England; in 1306, 100,000 from France; and in 1492, about 200,000 from Spain. Smaller but more frequent expulsions occurred in Germany, so that at the commencement of the 16th century only four great Jewish communities remained: Frankfurt, 2,000; Worms, 1,400; Prague, 10,000; and Vienna, 3,000 (Heinrich Grätz, Geschichte der Juden x. 29). It has been estimated that during the five centuries from 1000 to 1500, 380,000 Jews were killed during the persecutions, reducing the total number in the world to about 1,000,000. In the 16th and 17th centuries the main centers of Jewish population were in Poland and the Mediterranean countries, Spain excepted.”
If those estimates are correct, and there were only around 15,000 Askenazi in German lands in 1500, that does suggest quite a serious bottleneck around that time. As I said in another post, the genetic evidence does not suggest that at any time there were only 350 Ashkenazi, it only suggests that all living Ashkenazi are descended from 350 individuals. There might have been thousands more alive at the worst bottleneck, but many of their descendants did not survive subsequent events (such as the Holocaust).
A model based on 128 subjects is garbage.
Except for the fact firstly of Israel and secondly the ultra-Orthodox who almost never “marry out” and have very large families.
True. Sounds more like Messalina’s competition with a prostitute in Robert Graves’ “I Claudius”.
But to get Chomsky and Soros into the title of the article is a (sinister) joke, I'd presume. I'd say that becoming a leftist radical is generally caused more by environmental factors than genetics.
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