JEWS AND GENETICS

by Andrew Ryan and Peter J. White

"The Jewish secular religion today is singularly concerned about blood purity over any other concerns; it could easily be called a eugenics secular religion."
- M. Nuenke [1]

"The percentage of foreign blood in Jews today is very low. Probably no important European race is so pure."
- Justice Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court.

"Most American Jews say that being Jewish means belonging to a cultural or ethnic group, rather than a religious group. Less than 5% (of the nation-wide Jews questioned) picked solely the religious group category, whereas 90% defined being Jewish as being a member of a cultural or ethnic block." [2]

It has been a popular belief among Christian patriots, as well as conservative nationalist writers, to hold that the Jews are not a "race" or a sub-racial group.[3] This belief - which will be shown to be a myth in this paper - is usually held with the "13th tribe" or Khazar theory of the origin of Ashkenazi Jews, promoted by the Jewish communist Arthur Koestler. Those using such arguments often claim that the Ashkenazim, well known today, do not have an essential racial link with those Jews of "The Book". [4] However, these views are refuted by biological evidence which is summarized here.

The Jews as a Race: It is true that the frequency of genes identified in ethnic Jews overlaps with the gene frequencies of the majority population in the area in which they live. However it is logically fallacious to infer from a mere overlap that Jews do not constitute an ethno-racial group as Helen Macbeth does. [5] An overlap is consistent with an existence - albeit one with vague boundaries. There is an overlap in the color spectrum and in all natural phenomena, but no rational scientist infers non-existence of a phenomena on that basis alone.
The first argument that Jews constitute an ethno-racial group is that there are specific genetic based diseases which are largely found in their group. Here is a preliminary list of genetic diseases of specific racial, sub-racial and ethno-racial groups.

--RACE--

Ethnic Group Disorder Mode of Inheritance

Africans Hemoglobinpathies, namely Autosomal dominant
HbS, HbC, and persistent HbF
Alpha - and Beta - Thalassemia Autosomal recessive

Armenians Familial Mediterranean fever Autosomal recessive

Chinese Alpha-Thalassemia Autosomal recessive
G-6-PD deficiency, Chinese type X-linked recessive

Japanese (Koreans) Acatalasia Autosomal recessive
Dsychromatosis universilas
hereditaria Autosomal recessive
Oguchi's disease Autosomal dominant or
recessive?

Jews (Ashkenazic) A-Beta-Lipoproteinemia Autosomal recessive
Bloom's disease Autosomal recessive
Dystonia musculorum
deformans Autosomal recessive
Factor XI (PTA) deficiency Autosomal recessive
Gaucher's disease Autosomal recessive
Familial dysautonomia Autosomal recessive
Niemann-Pick disease Autosomal recessive
Pentosuria Autosomal recessive
Spongy degeneration of the brain Autosomal recessive
Stub thumbs Autosomal recessive
Tay-Sachs disease Autosomal recessive

Jews (Sephardic) Familial Mediterranean fever Autosomal disease
G-6_PD deficiency, Mediterranean
type X-linked recessive

Mediterraneans Familial Mediterranean fever Autosomal recessive

Greeks G-6-PD deficiency X-linked recessive

Italians Thalassemia (mainly Beta) Autosomal recessive

Richard Goodman in his medical text, Genetic Disorders Among Jewish People [6] gives a detailed analysis of such diseases. The reader should not be concerned about the specific meaning of each genetic disease, but merely "get a feel" for the magnitude and variety of disorders.

Genetic disorders among Ashkenazi Jews include:
- Abetalipoprotienemia (Bassen-Kornzweig syndrome);
- Bloom syndrome
- Familial Dysautonomia (Riley-Day syndrome).
- Gaucher disease Type I (Chronic adult non-cerebral form)
- Mucolipidosis Type IV
- Niemann-Pick disease (Type A: Acute Neuropathic form)
- Primary Torsion Dystonia (dystonia musculorum deformans)
- PTA Deficiency (Plasma Thromboplastin Antecedent, or Factor XI, Deficiency)
- Spongy Degeneration of the Central Nervous System
- Tay-Sachs disease (GM2 Gangliosidosis Type I)

Genetic Disorders Among Sephardic and Oriental Jews
-
- Ataxia-telangiectasia
- Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia
- Cystinosis
- Cystinuria
- Down Syndrome (Mongolism)
- Dubin-Johnson syndrome
- Familial Deafness
- Familial Mediterranean fever
- Glanzmann Thrombasthenia
- Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase deficiency
- Glycogen Storage Disease Type III (Debrancher Enzyme deficiency)
- Ichthyosis Vulgaris
- Metachromatic Leukodystrophy
- Phenylketonuria
- Pituitary Dwarfism II
- Pseudocholinesterase deficiency
- Selective hypoaldosteronism
- Selective vitamin B12 malabsorption
- Thalassemia
- Werdnig-Hoffmann disease

Rarer Genetic Diseases in non-Ashkenazi Jews
- Acute Hemolytic Anemia with familial ultra structural abnormality of the red-cell membrane
- Acrocephalop Dysyndactyly Type IV
- Aldolase A deficiency
- Blue Sclerae and Keratoconus
- Chronic Airway disease
- Cleidocranial Dysplasia
- Combined Factor V and factor VIII deficiency
- Congenital Deafness and Onychodystrophy
- Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis and Nephronophthisis
- Congential Ichthyosis with atrophy, mental retardation, dwarfism and generalized aminoaciduria
- Vutis Laxa
- Deaf-mutism with total albinism
- Familial infantile renal tubular acidosis with congenital nerve deafness
- Familial syndrome of the central nervous system and ocular malformations
- Glycinuria associated with nephrolithiasis
- Glycoprotienuria, osteopetrosis and dwarfism
- Hydrotic ectodermal dysplasia
- Hypouricemia, hypercalciuria and decreased bone density
- Leprechaunism
- Meckel syndrome
- Metachromatic Leukodystrophy
- Neurological syndrome simulating familial dysautonomia
- Ocuulopharyngeal muscular dystrophy
- Partial albinism and deaf-mutism
- Pyloric atresia
- Radioulnar synostosis
- Spondyloechondroysplasia
- Tel hashomer Camptodactyly syndrome
- Upper limb-cardiovascular syndromes
- Werner syndrome
- Wrinkly skin syndrome
- X-linked gout caused by mutant feedback-resistant phosphoribosylpy-rophosphate synthetase
- X-linked recessive retinal dysplasia

Here is a brief account of the effects of some of these diseases; paraphrased from Richard Goodman's textbook.

Abetalipoproteinemia -
- (or ABL) affects Jewish infants in the first year of life. They fail to grow or gain weight and suffer from diarrhea, vomiting, and visual defects leading to blindness. There is unsteady walk and muscle weakness. Most die of congestive heart failure before age 30.

Bloom Syndrome -
- results in dwarfism. This affects a very large number of Jews who are easily identified walking around Jewish neighborhoods and resorts. Israel's Prime Minister Shamir is nearly a dwarf standing at only 5' 1" tall!
The features of the full Bloom's disease also includes a weakening of the immune system and a predisposition to cancer. They show small facial skin lesions and have a high-pitched voice. Those with the full disease die by age 16. The genetic trait of this disease is found in 1 out of every 120 Jews. This affects large numbers of Jews to one degree or another.

Familial Dysautonomia -
- affects no one except members of the Jewish race. It also causes dwarfism, vomiting, difficult swallowing, instability in walking and spastic arm and head movements. The speech is slurred, monotonous with a peculiar nasal quality. There is diffuse pain and hyperactivity. The disease is found in 1 in every l0,000 Jews and a carrier frequency of 18 out of every 1,000 Jews.

Gaucher's Disease -
- begins in teen-age Jews. It involves the spleen, liver and bone. The bones fracture easily especially the hip. There is severe bone pain which can last from days to weeks at a time. There is a yellow pallor of the skin. This disease affects 1 in every 2,500 Jews and the gene frequency is 0.02%. Death usually occurs by age 45.

Mucolipidosis Type IV -
-features mental and physical degeneration and blindness. Affected children can only speak a few words and show little response to verbal commands. They are unable to walk or feed themselves. They rarely live past age 10.

Niemann-Pick Disease -
- features vomiting, skin lesions, thickening of the skin, brownish-yellow skin color, loss of physical and mental functions. Death usually occurs by age 4. The disease affects 1 in every 20,000 Jews born and this gene deficiency is found in 1 in every 100 Jews.

Primary Torsion Dystonia -
- begins around age 10 and will cause one foot to drag with bizarre involuntary jerking movements of the arms, legs, head and torso. The disease affects 1 in every 17,000 Jews and the gene is found in one out of every 130 Jews. This disease is not fatal but few are ever able to lead normal or productive lives. Comedian Jerry Lewis first reached fame mimicking the jerky movements of such victims. Later he gave up such performances after protests objecting to his making fun of these people.

PTA Deficiency -
- causes episodes of excessive bleeding after cuts, dental work, minor surgery or traumas. Some experience severe bleeding for no outside reason. The disease affects 1 in every 12,000 Jews and the carriers are 1 in every 56 Jews.

Spongy Degeneration of The Central Nervous System -
- begins during the third month of life. The victim cannot support his head, suffers seizures and spastic movements. The head becomes enlarged and blindness occurs. Most die by age 4. The genetic defect has never been identified but 80% of all such cases are found in Ashkenazi Jews.

Tay-Sachs Disease -
The best known of all Jewish diseases is Tay-Sachs disease. Nearly all infected new-born occur in Ashkenazi Jews. An Ashkenazi Jew has a 1 in 30 chance of being heterozygotic, so there is a 1 in 900 (30 x 30) chance that a couple will both be heterozygotes.
Genetic disorders affecting Jews are largely autosomal recessives. These disorders are primarily due to Jewish consanguinity - the mating of genetically related individuals which was an important phenomenon in Jewish history. Goodman accepts that this mechanism accounts for disorders in Jewish non-Ashkenazi communities but he says, giving no evidence or argument at all, that it plays no role in Ashkenazi Jewish communities.[7] He also rejects other hypotheses accounting for genetic disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish communities because of lack of evidence such as: linkage to an advantageous gene, heterozygotes advantage, genetic drift and the founder effect, hybridization and high mutation rates. Thus he is left with no hypotheses at all to account for the wide variety of genetic disorders in Ashkenazi Jews.
Scientific reasoning and considerations of simplicity would suggest that the inbreeding (consanguinity) hypotheses would explain this phenomena.

A.E. Mourant in The Genetics of Jews [8] cites reports of blood group tests on thousands of individual Jews in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. A strain of genetic homogeneity runs through Jewry. Jews as a group differ from their host populations as a group having a Negro admixture of 5 to 10 per cent. This refutes the Khazar theory of Jewish origin. Even in Russia there have been very few Khazars.

Mourant says:
"Looking at the complete blood group picture of either the Ashkenazim or the Sephardim separately, one may observe that neither of these populations resemble closely the people among whom they now or recently have lived, and the range of variation between separate samples of the Ashkenazim compared with one another and the Sephardim compared with one another, is so small that we can be sure that each is essentially a single population group.
When, however, we compare Ashkenazim with Sephardim we find that there are indeed systematic differences between them. But these are so small that we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the two populations have a common origin, and a common original blood group picture, only slightly modified in one direction or another by their different histories since separation."[9]
Mourant (et al) examined the blood groups and other inherited blood factors, such as systems of plasma proteins, red-cell enzymes, hemoglobin system, systems of lymphocyte and tissue antigens, the histocompatibility or HLA systems, other polymorphic systems including the secretion into the saliva of the antigens of the ABO blood-group system and the ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide. Here is a summary of their research.

The Samaritans

- The Kell gene K is absent so is the African marker gene Jsa and African marker Fy4 and absent also is Mongoloid marker gene Dia.
- Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency present in most other Jewish populations is rare.
- Frequency of the phenylthiocarbamide tester gene is 75 per cent. High in the author's opinion.
- Frequency of male color blindness is high as are congenital abnormalities such as deafness and neuromuscular diseases.

The Oriental Jews

- This includes Kurdish Jews, Persian Jews, the Jews of Bukhara, Jews between the Caspian and the Black Seas, the Jews of Afghanistan and Jews of India.
- With respect to the ABO blood groups there are primarily high A and B frequencies. The Karaites in Iraq and the Bene-Israel Jews of Bombay have very high B frequencies for example. The Cochin Jews of Kerala, "White Jews" have higher A frequency than the "Black Jews".
- There is a high frequency of M gene in Jews of the Arabian Peninsula and generally in indigenous populations in South-west Asia, including Iraq (Babylonian Jews) Iraq Kurdish Jews and Iran Kurdish Jews.

Yemenite Jews

- North and South Yemenite Jews have a high frequency of Fy4, the African gene marker and also a high frequency of Jka (Kidd) gene which has higher levels in African than in Caucasoid populations.
- Glucose-6-phospahte dehydrogenase deficiency is present in most Jewish populations except for the Ashkenazim Jews of Eastern Europe.
- Yemenite Jews have a well-defined set of African marker genes. Thus both the Yemenite Jewish populations have some African genes.

Karaites

- There is very high frequency of the B gene especially the Karaites of Hit, Iraq, and a high M gene frequency.
- Karaites of Iraq in the Rh system have 53 per cent of the Rh-negative Cde complex, which is one of the highest levels known.

Jews of Africa

- This includes Jews in Egypt, North Africa from Libya to Morocco, and the Falashas "Black Jews" of Ethiopia.
- Such Jews have a higher B gene frequency than non-Jews, and generally a higher A frequency. The M gene frequency is higher in Jews than in non-Jews.
- With regard to Rhesus groups, nearly all Jewish populations everywhere show frequencies of RO or cDe complex slightly higher than the European level of 2-3 per cent, which indicates a small amount of African admixture in these Jews. Falashas of Ethiopia Rh frequencies suggest that they are at least 50 per cent of Negroid ancestry.

Sephardic Jews

- Every single national group of Sephardic Jews has a higher B gene frequency than the average 11 per cent for the Ashkenazim. Sephardic have a high frequency of Rh negatives.
- Sephardic have a high frequency of the cDe African marker allele well above the 2-3 per cent found in most European populations.
- Low levels of Fya are found implying the presence of high frequencies of the African marker allele Fy4. High frequencies of the Jka gene of the Kidd system may also indicate an African component. [10]

Ashkenazim

- Maurant tested Koestler's theory of a Khazar ancestry for the early Ashkenazim. He found Ashkenazim were European Jews closely related to the Sephardim.
- There is a closer similarity between the Jewish populations of various European countries than between non-Jews with respect to ABO blood groups. Ashkenazi gene frequencies in European samples cluster A 27 per cent, B 12 per cent, which is about the same as samples in Israel
- The African marker allele cDE (Ro) is always present in Ashkenazi Jews at frequencies higher than in indigenous European populations.
- The high frequencies of the Kidd JKa gene may also be another indicator of an African component in Ashkenazi Jews.
- Maurant believes that Ashkenazi and Sephardim are essentially a single population group, and that considerable hybridization between Jews and their African slaves has occurred.

Genetic Aspects of Diseases in Jews

Some hereditary diseases are commoner among Ashkenazi Jews than Europeans and are:

- Dystasia musculorum dysfunction
- Familial autonomic dysfunction
- Gaucher's disease
- Infantile amaurotic idiocy
- Lipid histiocytosis
- Pemphigus vulgaris
- Essential pentosuria
- Polycythaemia vera
- Dubin-Johnson syndrome (hyperbilirubin-aemia, chronic idiopathic jaundice is especially prevalent in the Jews of Iran.
- Kurdish Jews have a very high frequency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency and infantile renal tubular acidosis.
- Yemenite Jews have a large number of very rare hereditary diseases such as familial neonatal hyperbilrubinaemia, infantile acute Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, deficiency of plasma thromboplastin antecedent (Factor XI), recessive cystic disease of the lung, benign familial neutropenia and they also have the highest known incidence of recessive deficiency of peroxidase and phospholipids in the eosinophil granulocytes of the blood.

CONCLUSIONS:

Mourant concludes:

"It may be said that, in general, blood-group data are readily correlated with the known facts of history, and that they support the relative homogeneity of the main historical Jewish communities and their distinctions from one another."[11]

Each major community bears some resemblance to the indigenous people of the region where they first developed.
Nearly all Jewish communities have a substantial proportion of African Negroid marker genes implying a total Negroid admixture of the order of 5 to10 per cent.

The genetic unity of the Jews is also confirmed by more recent genetic studies. A study of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes (i.e., Y-chromosome markers) concludes that all Jews (except for the Ethiopian Jews) throughout the Near-East, North Africa and Europe descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population that bred endogamously, even though wide dispersion occurred. [12] The Khazar theory of the origin of Ashkenazi Jews is therefore refuted by the genetic evidence.

NOTES

1. M. Nuenke, "Reproducitve Perspectives: A Review of Some Recent Books on the Ethics of Manipulating Human Genes," The Mankind Quarterly, vol.61, no.3, Spring 2001, pp.315-350, cited p.320.
2. Council of Jewish Federation, Chicago Sun-Times, June 15, 1991, p.15.
3. e.g., W.P. Fairchild, Race and Nationality as Factors in American Life, (Ronald Press, New York, 1947).
4. See J. Tiffany, "The Khazar Origins of the Jews," The Barnes Review, July 1997, pp.9-12. In reality Nordic Russians destroyed the Khazar kingdom, and the remnants converted to Islam in the 11th century, all contrary to Koestler.
5. H. Macbeth, "Ethnicity and Human Biology," in M. Chapman (ed.), Social and Biological Aspects of Ethnicity, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), pp.47-91.
6. R.M. Goodman, Genetic Disorders Among Jewish People, (The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1979).
7. Above p.464.
8. A.E. Mourant, The Genetics of Jews, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978).
9. Above p.38.
10. Above p.43.
11. Above p.57.
12. M.F. Hammer, (et al), "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol.97, no.12, 2000, pp.6769-6774; A. Nebel (et al), "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East," American Journal of Human Genetics, vol.69, 2001, pp.1095-1112; D.M. Behar (et al) "Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries," American Journal of Human Genetics, vol.73, 2003, pp.768-779.