Web Exclusives | “Are You Our Mother?” |
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| Written by Kate Ulansky | |||||
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Genetic Links to Our Four Mothers Finally, a way to bridge the gap between Tel Aviv and Mea Shearim, techno and Torah. A ray of hope from an unexpected place. I advise caution for the theologically-inclined among us; however, there is good news for the mathematically-minded who might enjoy the numerical roundness of the latest statistics out of the Israeli Technion and the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa: 40% of Ashkenazi Jews are the product of just four women’s wombs. The modern Jewish woman’s role is ever-expanding. Once we lit Shabbos candles, made challah, and monitored our menstrual cycles. Today, not only do we continue to perform these tasks, but we are also the proud carriers of the uniquely female strain of DNA, mtaDNA (mitochondrialDNA), that Dr. Behar and Professor Skorecki have used to support their sweeping conclusions. After analyzing the distinct mtaDNA of a sample of Ashkenazi Jews, Dr. Behar determined that 3.5 of the worlds’ 8 million Ashkenazi Jews share maternal ancestry—more specifically, they share mitochondrial DNA with the arba imahot who managed to pass their “code” on to the masses. It appears that in a few (short) thousand years you and your three of your friends could rejuvenate the Jewish race! But before losing yourself in delusions of Biblical grandeur, a caveat: there is ample reason to suspect that Dr. Behar’s four mothers are not the foremothers of the Tanakh. Behar postulates that these “founding mothers” left the Near East some time during the first or second century of the Common Era with their compasses pointed toward Italy. From there, the descendants of our “foremothers” carried their mtaDNA to the lands of Ashkenaz around 1,000 C.E. and eventually managed to engender the 10 million Jews who existed there before World War II. If all press is good press, Professor Skorecki has done his part to promote the Jewish genome. We can thank the Technion professor for his exhaustive study of the Y chromosome, which brought us theories like the one about the Cohanim gene (in which diverse Jewish populations share the priestly genetic marker) as well as for his investigation of the common Y chromosome in Jewish populations across the globe. At last the X chromosome gets a wor…Late breaking news: Hamas Beats out Fatah; Israel refuses to negotiate. The origin of the Jews is old-hat. People are more interested in what they’re up to in the Middle East. While some might consider these latest findings a threat to the prevalent strain of political correctness so fond of eliminating the historically charged categorizations of “race” or anything like it, the field of genetic research isn’t totally bankrupt. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences published a study, which details the genetic interconnectedness of Jews and their non-Jewish Near Eastern counterparts, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. If all this digging is an attempt to unearth our roots and understand where we come from, why not let the genes speak for themselves and just say “Hi, Mom!”
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