So here’s the big Zhiddy post I promised….
A few months ago the Zhid wife went to a work related conference. At the end of the conference, as a form of entertainment for the poor people who had sat through two days of mind-numbing banking presentations, a National Geographic anthropologist made a presentation about the study he was doing.
The study happened to be the National Geographic Genographic project. Click on the link for more information, but what it does, in essence, is collect DNA samples from people around the world in an attempt to isolate certain parts of DNA that can be used to track a person's history through the world.
That's probably a terrible description of what the project does, so just go to the link. What is important, though, is that at the end of the presentation everyone was given a kit (free, to warm this Zhid's heart) that would allow the participant to submit a DNA sample and receive a report that shows where that participant's ancestors came from.
The Zhid wife knew that I was very interested in this type of thing and allowed me to participate in the study. That day I swabbed my Zhiddy cheek and sent off the sample for analysis.
The way the analysis works is that you send the sample with no identification other than an alphanumeric id that you use to check the results of the test. They have no idea who the participant is.
In other words, for all they knew, I was a black female from Alabama. It's a totally blind study.
Fast forward six or so weeks and the results are in.
As background, I was interested to see where my DNA says I came from not only for the obvious reason (i.e., it's interesting), but also because I would like to know whether there is anything in my DNA that would corroborate family history and my Jewish identity. That is, am I really a person descended from the Israelites of biblical times or am I someone whose family, somewhere over the centuries, picked up a religion and stuck with it.
Because of this angle, I requested that the analysis be done on my mother's side. The test is either/or-you can test either the Y chromosone or the X, but not both. Since in Judaism your lineage is tracked through the mother's side, that is the side I wanted tested.
And as further background, my grandmother (who lived to the age of 97 and was shockingly lucid right up to the end) was a woman of few words (probably because she came to the United States in the 40s, when she was in her 40s, speaking nothing but Czech and German and was always uncertain of her English skills, even though they were perfectly fine, though accented). She didn't regale us with stories of her past very much, but when she did she had a specific story to tell, one that was always consistent.
The story was that while her family last lived near Prague in Czechoslovakia, the family lore was as follows: before arriving in central Europe, part of her family had spent a number of years in Spain (the Zhid father believes that they were the Aguilar family, but I think he mistakes the book "The Family Aguilar", which is a story of Jews in Spain, for my grandmother's family in particular), being forced out in the late 1400s as a result of the inquisition. They arrived in Spain from Rhodes, where, according to my grandmother, her family had spent many centuries.
There is some historical support for this, as there was a Jewish community on Rhodes from as far back as around 300 BC. Nonetheless, prior to Rhodes, the family tracked itself back to the land of Israel and it ends there.
That was my grandmother's story and it was a story that she told many times over the years, but we never did much research into it.
So now comes the DNA results and all of a sudden my grandmother's words come back to life.
Before getting into the details of what I found, here is the map that shows my mother's family's journey, based on the DNA analysis.
The red line is my DNA's history. The premise, based on the DNA collected and other studies, is that all people originated somewhere in eastern Africa at the beginning of human existence. From there the various races developed as people migrated around the world and developed different characteristics. So everyone's map will start where the L1 line is. From there, things diverge based on the individual.
As I understand this, if you are an African tribesman, your DNA should show the L1 line and maybe L2 and L3, but assuming you are pure of race, that's about all it will show. Likewise, if you are, say, asian, it'll start with L1 and then your line wanders from Africa over into Asia. If you are of many races, you'd have multiple lines crisscrossing the map.
This is why I find my DNA map so interesting. I am on the N line, the N1B subtype in particular. My DNA was pure (which I understand is relatively rare) and shows a few things.
First, it shows that my grandmother's story is likely based in fact. While the N1 line branched off several times, some up through the Syria/Iraq and around the Black Sea into Europe, some east into Iran, one of the lines goes from the land of Israel into Turkey/Greece, which would corroborate the story of my grandmother's family spending a lot of time on Rhodes after leaving the biblical land of Israel.
And then a curious thing happens. The line stops.
I have one of the more compact DNA lines around, which means the following: After the time that the family landed in Rhodes, they stayed in very small communities with others of the same background and had no outside influence (i.e., my grandmother's ancestors didn't mess around with the goyim or even other Jews from different backgrounds). Since the history would indicate that the time on Rhodes was pre-Inquisition, what it likely means is that from before 1400 till my mother's generation, we were pure Jews, and if the story of the family being in Spain is true, there was no mixing with the Spanish population.
The next interesting thing has to do with the specific sub-category of my DNA (the N1B haplotype). Here's what the report said:
Your Branch on the Human Family Tree Your DNA results identify you as belonging to a specific branch of the human family tree called haplogroup N1. Haplogroup N1 contains the following subgroups: N1*, N1a, N1b, N1c.
The map above shows the direction that your maternal ancestors took as they set out from their original homeland in East Africa. While humans did travel many different paths during a journey that took tens of thousands of years, the lines above represent the dominant trends in this migration.
Over time, the descendants of your ancestors spread throughout the Near East; your haplogroup constitutes one of the four founding Ashkenazi Jewish mitochondrial lineages. But before we can take you back in time and tell their stories, we must first understand how modern science makes this analysis possible.
What does this mean? The part in bold was the most interesting thing. The report told me that I am an Ashkenazi Jew. They had no idea who I was when I submitted the sample. Like I said, for all they knew, I was a black woman from the American south. That they not only told me that I'm a Jew but knew specifically what type I am was quite impressive.
Even more impressive is the level of specificity that they provided:
Haplogroup N1: A New Tribe Is Formed
Ancestral line: "Eve" > L1/L0 > L2 > L3 > N > N1
Your genetic lineage places you in one of the subgroups of N, known as N1. In addition to a wide geographic distribution similar to that of N, your haplogroup is significant because its members constitute one of the four major Ashkenazi Jewish founder lineages.
In addition to a wide geographic distribution similar to that of N, one particular branch of N1, namely N1b, is significant because one of its lineages constitute one of the four major Ashkenazi Jewish founding lineages. The N1b lineages representative of this Ashkenazi heritage are characterized by the mutations 16145A, 16176A, 16223T, 16390A, 16519C which can be confirmed using the data above.
The term "Ashkenazi" refers to Jews of mainly central and eastern European ancestry. Most historical records indicate that the founding of the Ashkenazi Jewry took place in the Rhine Basin and subsequently underwent vast population expansions. In more recent times, the Ashkenazi population was estimated at approximately 25,000 individuals around 1300 A.D., whereas that number had increased to about 8,500,000 individuals by the turn of the twentieth century.
Around half of all Ashkenazi Jews trace their mitochondrial lineage back to one of four women, and your haplogroup N1 represents one of those lineages. N1 is seldom found in populations of non-Ashkenazi Jews. While it is virtually absent in Europeans, it appears at frequencies of roughly three percent or higher in those from the Levant, Arabia, and Egypt. This indicates a strong genetic role in the Ashkenazi founder event, which likely occurred in the Near East.
Today, haplogroup N1 is the second most common in Ashkenazi Jews and today is shared by around 800,000 people.
They were able to isolate me to a group of 800,000 people on the planet. While this may not seem like a very specific result, when you consider that there are currently about 6.7 billion people on the planet, they were able to pinpoint me to .01% of the world's population. I consider that an incredible result.
More incredible is that they can trace my mother's side back to one of the four founding women of the Ashkenazi Jewish people and can further state that this line of DNA rarely exists outside of Ashkenazi Jews and when it does appear outside of Jews, it is almost never in Europeans (where my mother's side lived last, showing that there was no inbreeding with non-Jews) and those it does show up in are non-Jewish people of the area around biblical Israel, indicating that they likely were Jews who strayed from the faith but stayed in the greater Israel area.
I did some further study on the N1B lineage and found some very detailed genetic studies that show the source of the N1B line was the area of modern Israel.
And that's what was most gratifying to me. Not only do I now have solid DNA evidence of my Jewish lineage, I have evidence that is about as strong as it comes that my bloodline is directly tied to the land of Israel. Not a little bit of it, but a pure line, a direct connection between me and Israel.
Where I go with this is, of course, political. I often hear those who hate Israel, especially those in Arab countries, say that the Jews are interlopers in the land, that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inhabitants of Israel and the Jews are actually Europeans who have made an unsupportable claim on Arab lands.
If this is true, how can they explain the fact that my DNA traces directly and purely back to the people who lived in the land of Israel thousands of years ago? More damming for them, of course, is the fact that my people stayed pure over the centuries of the diaspora.
How can anyone say that I, and my fellow Jews, have no right to the land of Israel when our DNA clearly and directly puts us in that land?
