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From DNA to Politics

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Zionism and the Biology of Jews

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 19))

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Abstract

MK Zeev Boim: “What is there in Islam at all? What is there in the Palestinians specifically? Is this a cultural deprivation? Is this a genetic defect?”

MK Yechiel Khazan: “It is known that for generations Arabs murder Jews. Nothing can be done: It is in the blood. This is something genetic.” (February 24, 2004, memorial session in the Knesset for the victims of the terror attack on a bus on Israel’s main coastal highway.)

In the previous chapters I have tried to describe the efforts of many scientists to challenge or prove the Mediterranean links between the gene pools of the Israeli ethnic groups. Whether it was blood types or skull dimensions, diseases or DNA sequences, no matter how much data was gathered, conclusions were drawn from premises that were basically assumptions. The more genetic research progressed, the clearer it became that it would be impossible to derive from genetics unequivocal conclusions concerning the historical interrelations or connections between the Jewish ethnic groups on the one hand, and between them and Palestinians who have been living in the country, some of them for many generations, on the other hand. In the end, it is the historical data that ought to to give meaning to gene distributions and not vice versa.

Most Jewish communities were as a rule small and relatively, though not hermetically, closed and many of the presumably selectively neutral genetic markers were found to significantly affect survival, often in unpredictable directions. It became increasingly obvious that it was essential to consider a large number of variables and to stay as close as possible to the genotypic level proper in order to try to follow in the footsteps of history of the gene pools of the populations that gathered in Israel. It is in the nature of genetic analysis to deduce from the apparent effect (the phenotype) to that of the immanent (genotypic) level, the most explicit expression of which is the phenotype of the DNA molecule and its nucleotide sequences. The beginning of the twenty-first century is marked by the universal detailed sequencing of the genotypes of any individual organism, and the examination of variability at a very large number of sites and the effects of their interactions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See footnote 6 in Chap. 8. As noted, whereas DNA sequences are composed of the four nucleotides, adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), proteins, the major component of enzymes, are composed of precise sequences of twenty amino-acids, coded by sequences of DNA nucleotide triplets.

  2. 2.

    The rate of spontaneous mutations (those not induced by man-made agents such as X-ray radiation, or treatment with “mutagenic” materials) is roughly one in a thousand million (10–9) per nucleotide per cell generation.

  3. 3.

    For the distribution of HLA blood antigens, see Bonné-Tamir et al. (1978). Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) has already been mentioned. For other diseases in this community, see Hsia et al. (1991); Weinberger et al. (1974). See also Rosenberg et al. (2001).

  4. 4.

    Nurit Kirsh, among others, noted that the Israeli researchers emphasized every detail of similarity found among ethnic groups while noticing fewer points of disagreement (Kirsh 2003, p. 649). These researchers’ explanations were not necessarily wrong; they were biased.

  5. 5.

    The gene whose alleles may cause cystic fibrosis is defined as a DNA sequence in the human chromosome called the “CF chromosome.” It is located to the long arm of chromosome 7 at position 31.2. Cytogenetic Location: 7q31.2.

  6. 6.

    Haplotype, a contraction of the phrase “haploid genotype,” as had been mentioned repeatedly, is a set of closely linked genetic markers present on one chromosome that tend to be inherited together (not easily separated by recombination).

  7. 7.

    My Ashkenazi daughter is married to a Sephardic Cohen. Their son, assuming that he carries on his Y- chromosome a CMH derivative, continues the patroclinous Cohanim tradition, even if he marries an Ashkenazi girl. Doing so, he would further blur the “Ashkenazi-Sephardic barrier,” if such a barrier existed, and a “Sephardic” Y-chromosome will be transmitted in the future among Sephardic and Ashkenazi Cohanim, even if the biblical tradition of Aaron, the common progenitor of all Cohanim, were only a legend.

  8. 8.

    According to Behar et al. (2004a), the differences in mutation rates and elimination rates by random drift of SNPs and of microsatellites may explain many of the apparently conflicting findings concerning the relationship among eidoth of common origin.

  9. 9.

    In this context, it is important to consider the short paper by Baum et al. (2005), on the meaning of the Darwinian metaphor with respect to “phylogenetic trees” and the proper way to read phylogenetic schemes.

  10. 10.

    See further on, Atzmon et al. (2010).

  11. 11.

    In the December 2011 issue of Discover, Jeff Wheelwright tells the story of Shonnie Medina, a Hispanic young woman in Colorado found to be affected by “The Lethal Gene that Emerged in Ancient Palestine and Spread Around the Globe,” the BRCA1 gene 185delAG, which causes aggressive breast cancer. “Its discovery in the Hispano community confirmed events of half a millennium before in Spain that are echoing still. Most likely the mutation arrived by way of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition. From Spain they traveled to the New World.”

  12. 12.

    Actually, the involvement of many unspecified genetic factors in gene-related traits was always in the back of the minds of experimental Mendelian geneticists. In reductive Mendelian genetics, these were usually dismissed as “modifiers.” But see Rieger et al. (1991), pp. 332–3.

  13. 13.

    See Joel Marcus, “Four Comments on Folders in the Dark,” Haaretz, December 6, 1996, p., 1B: “A professional geneticist discovered that the Palestinians are actually Syrians.” Also, Uzi Benziman, “A Letter to the Prime-Minister,” Haaretz, December 20, 1996, p. 3B: “The new Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor spoke in a language reminding the world of concepts of a pure race theory.” The Forum of the Deans of the Medical Schools responded with a declaration saying that “it is forbidden that somewhere on the surface of the Earth, certainly not in the Jewish State, the contents of the genetic materials would provide an excuse for any kind of discrimination of any kind whatsoever and a base for political discussion.” On that occasion, the Deans’ Forum described eugenics as an issue that only scientists at the fringe of the scientific system dealt with. As has been repeatedly stressed in this book, eugenics served as an important branch of scientific thought. Scientists at the forefront of research and theory were leading eugenicists (see, e.g., Paul 1984). In a telephone call to Prof. Chanakuglu (October 31, 2005), who was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Advisor, he told me that he never said what he was allegedly quoted as saying. All he did was refer to the study of Ariel Rösler (1992), who located a mutation in the gene for HSD (17-β-hydroxysteroid) in a Palestinian family in Gaza, which could be followed for eight generations to its origins in Syria.

  14. 14.

    See Klarreich (2001). The Jewish British geneticist, Walter Bodmer, did not understand what the fuss was about: “If the journal did not like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?” The paper appeared in an issue of the journal, for which the first author, Arnaiz-Vellena, was guest editor. Other researchers went so far as to argue that the paper was “scientifically worthless” (Risch et al. 2002).

  15. 15.

    See also Chapter 7 and Ornan (1969). The subject does not disappear from the agenda. In Haaretz Supplementary of March 31, 2006, pp. 52–58, a long story by Aviva Lori tells of a group of Israelis who examine a theory of the origin of most Palestinians as progeny of “Jewish farmers who stuck to their land and converted to Islam.”

  16. 16.

    Note that whereas Iranian, Turkish, Syrians, etc. are specified, all Ashkenazi from the Atlantic coast to deep into Russia are pooled into one entity.

  17. 17.

    A computer algorithm seeks out short, exact pairwise matches between individuals, and then extends from these seeds to long, inexact matches that are indicative of identity by descent (IBD). Theoretical analysis suggests that the number of IBD segments of a particular length L resulting from a shared ancestor k generations ago, decreases as a function of L. See Atzmon et al. (2010, p. 852).

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Falk, R. (2017). From DNA to Politics. In: Zionism and the Biology of Jews. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57345-8_9

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