New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine

Genome Evolution of Jewish Population John Hopkins Study of the genome background of the worlds Jewish population

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New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine

All geopolitical implications below are mine and not Dr. Elhaik’s. The militant Zionists have already politicized it by sending arch-Zionist Dore Gold out to do a hit piece on this new work. Dore has handed me his head on a platter, and I will be serving it to you all on a follow-up piece platter, with all the trimmings. You might want to get a good bottle of wine to go with it. The real holocaust deniers have exposed themselves … Jim W. Dean

Geneticist, Dr. Eran Elhaik

On December 14, 2012, Dr. Eran Elhaik turned almost two generations of Jewish genome research upside down.

But he went even further. The young Israeli-American geneticist has charged former researchers with academic fraud, and he has the research to back it up.

How could those those eminent Jewish scientist before him have been so wrong? (VT)

ABSTRACT of his Study (Dr Eran Elhaik, Jewish himself)

1Research ArticleThe Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the KhazarianHypothesesEran Elhaik 

1,2

1

Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, MD, USA, 21208.

2

McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA, 21208.Running head: The Missing Link of Jewish European AncestryKeywords: Jewish genome, Khazars, Rhineland, Ashkenazi Jews, population isolate, EasternEuropean Jews, Central European Jews, Population structure,Please address all correspondence to Eran Elhaik ateelhaik@jhsph.edu Phone: 410-502-5740. Fax: 410-502-7544.

 © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society forMolecular Biology and Evolution.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNon-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permitsunrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited.

Abstract

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries andhas yet to be resolved. The “Rhineland Hypothesis” depicts Eastern European Jews as a“population isolate” that emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastwardand expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the “Khazarian Hypothesis” suggests that Eastern EuropeanJew descended from the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in theearly centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8thcentury. 

Mesopotamian and Greco-RomanJews continuously reinforced the Judaized Empire until the 13thcentury. Following the collapseof their empire, the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry istherefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo-Khazars. Thus far, however, the Khazar’scontribution has been estimated only empirically, as the absence of genome-wide data fromCaucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian Hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modernCaucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian Hypothesis and compare it with theRhineland Hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare thesetwo hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewishgenome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe major difference amongCaucasus populations explained by early presence of Judeans in the Southern and CentralCaucasus. Our results have important implications on the demographic forces that shaped thegenetic diversity in the Caucasus and medical studies.

Introduction

Contemporary Eastern European Jews comprise the largest ethno-religious aggregate of modernJewish communities, accounting for nearly 90% of over 13 million Jews worldwide (UnitedJewish Communities 2003). Speculated to have emerged from a small Central European founder group and thought to have maintained high endogamy, Eastern European Jews are considered a“population isolate” and invaluable subjects in disease studies (Carmeli 2004), although their ancestry remains debatable between geneticists, historians, and linguists (Wexler 1993; Brook 2006; Sand 2009; Behar et al. 2010). Recently, several large-scale studies have attempted tochart the genetic diversity of Jewish populations by genotyping Eurasian Jewish and non-Jewish populations (Conrad et al. 2006; Kopelman et al. 2009; Behar et al. 2010). Interestingly, some of these studies linked Caucasus populations with Eastern European Jews, at odds with the narrativeof a Central European founder group. Because correcting for population structure and usingsuitable controls are critical in medical studies, it is vital to examine the hypotheses pertaining toexplain the ancestry of Eastern and Central European Jews. One of the major challenges for anyhypothesis is to explain the massive presence of Jews in Eastern Europe, estimated at eightmillion people at the beginning of the 20thcentury. 

We investigate the genetic structure of European Jews, by applying a wide range of analyses — including 3 population test, principalcomponent, biogeographical origin, admixture, identity by descent, allele sharing distance, anduniparental analyses — and test their veracity in light of the two dominant hypotheses depictingeither a sole Middle Eastern ancestry or a mixed Middle Eastern-Caucasus-European ancestry toexplain the ancestry of Eastern European Jews.

The “Rhineland Hypothesis” envisions modern European Jews to be the descendents of theJudeans – an assortment of Israelite-Canaanite tribes of Semitic origin (Figures 1,2)(Supplementary Note 1). It proposes two mass migratory waves: the first occurred over the twohundred years following the Muslim conquest of Palestine (638 CE) and consisted of devotedJudeans who left Muslim Palestine for Europe (Dinur 1961). Whether these migrants joined theexisting Judaized Greco-Roman communities is unclear, as is the extent of their contribution to 4the Southern European gene pool. The second wave occurred at the beginning of the 15thcentury by a group of 50,000 German Jews who migrated eastward and ushered an apparent hyper-baby- boom era for half a millennia (Atzmon et al. 2010). The Rhineland Hypothesis predicts a MiddleEastern ancestry to European Jews and high genetic similarity among European Jews (Ostrer 2001; Atzmon et al. 2010; Behar et al. 2010).

Interestingly, some of these studies linked Caucasus populations with Eastern European Jews, at odds with the narrativeof a Central European founder group. Because correcting for population structure and usingsuitable controls are critical in medical studies, it is vital to examine the hypotheses pertaining toexplain the ancestry of Eastern and Central European Jews. One of the major challenges for anyhypothesis is to explain the massive presence of Jews in Eastern Europe, estimated at eightmillion people at the beginning of the 20th century. We investigate the genetic structure of European Jews, by applying a wide range of analyses — including 3 population test, principalcomponent, biogeographical origin, admixture, identity by descent, allele sharing distance, anduniparental analyses — and test their veracity in light of the two dominant hypotheses depictingeither a sole Middle Eastern ancestry or a mixed Middle Eastern-Caucasus-European ancestry toexplain the ancestry of Eastern European Jews.The “Rhineland Hypothesis” envisions modern European Jews to be the descendents of theJudeans – an assortment of Israelite-Canaanite tribes of Semitic origin (Figures 1,2)(Supplementary Note 1). It proposes two mass migratory waves: the first occurred over the twohundred years following the Muslim conquest of Palestine (638 CE) and consisted of devotedJudeans who left Muslim Palestine for Europe (Dinur 1961). Whether these migrants joined theexisting Judaized Greco-Roman communities is unclear, as is the extent of their contribution to 4the Southern European gene pool. The second wave occurred at the beginning of the 15th century by a group of 50,000 German Jews who migrated eastward and ushered an apparent hyper-baby- boom era for half a millennia (Atzmon et al. 2010). The Rhineland Hypothesis predicts a MiddleEastern ancestry to European Jews and high genetic similarity among European Jews (Ostrer 2001; Atzmon et al. 2010; Behar et al. 2010).The competing “Khazarian Hypothesis” considers Eastern European Jews to be the descendantsof Khazars (Supplementary Note 1). 

The Khazars were a confederation of Slavic, Scythian,Hunnic-Bulgar, Iranian, Alans, and Turkish tribes who formed in the central-northern Caucasusone of most powerful empires during the late Iron Age and converted to Judaism in the 8th  century CE (Figures 1-2) (Polak 1951; Brook 2006; Sand 2009). The Khazarian, Armenian, andGeorgian populations forged from this amalgamation of tribes (Polak 1951) followed by relativeisolation, differentiation, and genetic driftin situ (Balanovsky et al. 2011). Biblical andarcheological records allude to active trade relationships between Proto-Judeans and Armeniansin the late centuries BCE (Polak 1951; Finkelstein and Silberman 2002), that likely resulted in asmall scale admixture between these populations and a Judean presence in the Caucasus. After their conversion to Judaism, the population structure of the Judeo-Khazars was further reshaped by multiple migrations of Jews from the Byzantine Empire and Caliphate to the KhazarianEmpire (Figure 1). Following the collapse of their Empire and the Black Death (1347-1348) theJudeo-Khazars fled eastwards (Baron 1993), settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and Hungary(Polak 1951) and eventually spreading to Central and Western Europe. The KhazarianHypothesis posits that European Jews are comprised of Caucasus, European, and Middle Easternancestries. Moreover, European Jewish communities are expected to be different from oneanother both in ancestry and genetic heterogeneity. The Khazarian Hypothesis also offers twoexplanations for the genetic diversity in 

Caucasus groups first by the multiple migration waves toKhazaria during the 6th

to 10thcenturies and second by the Judeo-Khazars who remained in theCaucasus. 5Genetic studies attempting to infer the ancestry of European Jews yielded inconsistent results.Some studies pointed to the genetic similarity between European Jews and Caucasus populationslike Adygei (Behar et al. 2003; Levy-Coffman 2005; Kopelman et al. 2009), while some pointedto the similarity to Middle Eastern populations such as Palestinians (Hammer et al. 2000; Nebelet al. 2000), and others pointed to the similarity to Southern European populations like Italians(Atzmon et al. 2010; Zoossmann-Diskin 2010). 

Most of these studies were done in the pre-genomewide era using uniparental markers and included different reference populations, whichmakes it difficult to compare their results. More recent studies employing whole genome datareported high genetic similarity of European Jews to Druze, Italian, and Middle Eastern populations (Atzmon et al. 2010; Behar et al. 2010).Although both the Rhineland and Khazarian Hypotheses depict a Judean ancestry and are notmutually exclusive, they are well distinguished, as Caucasus and Semitic populations areconsidered ethnically and linguistically distinct (Patai and Patai 1975; Wexler 1993; Balanovskyet al. 2011). Jews, according to either hypothesis, are an assortment of tribes who acceptedJudaism, migrated elsewhere, and maintained their religion up to this date and are, therefore,expected to exhibit certain differences from their neighboring populations. Because, according to both hypotheses, Eastern European Jews arrived in Eastern Europe roughly at the same time (13th and 15th centuries), we assumed that they experienced similar low and fixed admixture rates withthe neighboring populations, estimated at 0.5% per generation over the past 50 generations(Ostrer 2001). These relatively recent admixtures have likely reshaped the population structureof all European Jews and increased the genetic distances from the Caucasus or Middle Eastern populations. Therefore, we do not expect to achieve perfect matching with the surrogateKhazarian and Judean populations but rather to estimate their relatedness.

Materials and MethodsData collection

. The complete data set contained 1,287 unrelated individuals of 8 Jewish and 74non-Jewish populations genotyped over 531,315 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs). An LD-pruned data set was created by removing one member of any pair of SNPs instrong LD (r 2>0.4) in windows of 200 SNPs (sliding the window by 25 SNPs at a time) using

indep-pairwise in PLINK  (Purcell et al. 2007). This yielded a total of 221,558 autosomal SNPsthat were chosen for all autosomal analyses except the identical by descent analysis that utilizedthe complete data set. 

Both data sets were obtained fromhttp://www.evolutsioon.ut.ee/MAIT/jew_data/(Behar et al. 2010). MtDNA and Y-chromosomaldata were obtained from previously published data sets as appear in Behar et al. (2010). Thesemarkers were chosen to match the phylogenetic level of resolution achieved in previouslyreported data sets and represent a diversified set of markers. A total of 11,392 samples wereassembled for mtDNA (6,089) and Y-chromosomal (5,303) analyses from 27 populations(Tables S1-2).

Terminology

In common parlance, Eastern and Central European Jews are practicallysynonymous with Ashkenazi Jews and are considered a single entity (Tian et al. 2008; Atzmon etal. 2010; Behar et al. 2010). However, the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word “Ashkenaz”was applied to Germany in medieval rabbinical literature – contributing to the narrative thatmodern Eastern European Jewry originated on the Rhine. We thus refrained from using the term“Ashkenazi Jews.” Jews were roughly subdivided into Eastern (Belorussia, Latvia, Poland, andRomania) and Central (Germany, Netherland, and Austria) European Jews. In congruence withthe literature that considers “Ashkenazi Jews” distinct from “Sephardic Jews,” we excluded thelater. Complete population notation is described in Table S3. Choice of surrogate populations

As the ancient Judeans and Khazars have been vanquishedand their remains have yet to be sequenced, in accordance with previous studies (Levy-Coffman).  Read more: 

http://stopdebezetting.org/?p=1249