70 years ago: Yale University professor predicts the sexual revolution

On February 1, 1950, Yale University anthropologist George Murdock, addressing a meeting of the American Social Hygiene Association in New York, predicted that "within three generations" society would accept pre-marital sexual experimentation as a valuable aid in picking a mate. He urged the Protestant church to take the lead in such a "reform."

Professor Murdock was too modest in predicting such a change within three generations; the change took no more than three decades. He was perceptive in recognizing churches as potential leaders of social change; to see examples of Protestant churches' promotion of "reform" in human sexual relations and other areas, go to the websites of the United Church of Canada; Anglican Church of Canada; Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada; Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Presbyterian Church (USA); and United Church of Christ.

Israeli scholar claims that Romani (Gypsies) are descendants of Simeon

And Esau said, Let me now leave with thee some of the folk that are with me. Genesis 33:15a

As reported by Yaniv Pohoryles of Ynet News, May 5, 2018 (link, bold in original):

Hundreds of Gypsies have been flocking to Israel for conferences following an Israeli scholar’s discovery of a biblical connection between Jews and Gypsies. According to Shmuel Avukia of the community of Kokhav Yaakov, one of the organizers of these conferences, the Romani people are the lost descendants of the Israelite tribe of Simeon.

“A few years ago, I began studying the biblical texts thoroughly,” says Avukia, who has been researching the Jewish-Gypsy connection for several years now. “Not just on the surface, what we read in the Torah portion every week, but really thoroughly. And that’s where I stumbled upon the Romani issue.

“I discovered very interesting things about their connection to the Jewish people. It was really big, and I started talking about it a bit on Facebook and on the Internet and there was a huge response. I received many reactions and I decided to take it one step further and create the Jewish-Gypsy Forum.”

The forum convened in Jerusalem for the first time in early December 2017. About 60 Romani tourists from France arrived in Israel for a series of meetings with Avukia and other forum members. Together, they created a symbol combining a Star of David and the spoked wheel featured in the Romani flag.

During the gathering, Avukia presented the findings of his research, which concluded that the Romani people are descendants of the tribe of Simeon.

“The Gypsies know that they are of Jewish descent, but they have no proof. I believe that together with my research and things we’ll learn about the Romani community, its traditions and its sources, we’ll be able to piece things together.”

In a lecture to the Romani delegation, Avukia said the first verse he found pointing to Jewish-Gypsy connection is from the Book of Genesis: “Esau said, ‘Then let me leave some of my men with you.’” According to Avukia, deeper interpretations of the verse, and mainly of the world “leave,” might be a reference to other things apart from the literal meaning.

Since publishing his findings, Avukia has been contacted by thousands of members of the Romani community, and hundreds of them have already visited Israel for additional gatherings.

“I am in touch with several representatives of Romani communities from France, Finland, Spain, Russia and even the United States,” he says.

What drove you to search for a Jewish connection that has never been proven?

“We see a historical connection between the people. The Nazis, for example, sought to annihilate only two people—the Jews and the Gypsies. And there are other historical contexts too. I think if we have proof that we have found a lost tribe, we can’t ignore it.”

Has any rabbinical authority confirmed your research?

“I’m currently working on a video and on a book that will present all the evidence and the full research. Afterwards, we’ll present it to the rabbis and to halachic authorities.”

I assume they won’t accept it.

“Clearly, most people will try and toss it away, but I’m following Jewish logic—it’s only that which seems impossible that happens in the end, like the establishment of the State of Israel. It was a dream that seemed imaginary, but here we are.

“It’s clearly a process, and we’re only at the beginning of the road and we have to do it smartly and slowly. But if it’s the truth, it will materialize in the end.”

Controversial genomic study supporting "Khazar Hypothesis" of origin of eastern European Jews comes under attack

This blogger has no expertise in the subjects of this post, but the fact that the study in question is being cited with approval by such "usual suspects" as "Dr." David Duke and Ted Pike and sites such as Stormfront automatically makes me skeptical of its conclusions.

As reported by Agence France-Presse, February 5, 2013:

Jews of European origin are a mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created an empire that lasted half a millennium, according to a gene study.

The investigation, its author says, should settle a debate that has been roiling for more than two centuries.

Jews of European descent, often called Ashkenazim, account for some 90% of the more than 13 million Jews in the world today.

According to the so-called Rhineland Hypothesis, Ashkenazim descended from Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest of 638 AD.

They settled in southern Europe and then, in the late Middle Ages, about 50,000 of them moved from the Rhineland in Germany into eastern Europe, according to the hypothesis.

But detractors say this idea is implausible.

Barring a miracle – which some supporters of the Rhineland Hypothesis have in fact suggested – the scenario would have been demographically impossible.

It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century.

That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.

Seeking new light in the argument, a study published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution, compares the genomes of 1,287 unrelated individuals who hail from eight Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations.

Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, trawled through this small mountain of data in search of single changes in the DNA code that are linked to a group's geographical origins.

Such telltales have been used in past research to delve into the origins of the Basque people and the pygmy people of central Africa.

Among European Jews, Elhaik found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East.

The results, said Elhaik, give sound backing for the rival theory – the "Khazarian Hypothesis."

Under this concept, eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

The Judeo-Khazars built a flourishing empire, drawing in Jews from Mesopotamia and imperial Byzantium.

They became so successful that they sent offshoots into Hungary and Romania, planting the seeds of a great Diaspora.

But Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols and became weakened by outbreaks of the Black Death.

The Judeo-Khazars fled westwards, settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and in Hungary, where their skills in finance, economics and politics were in demand, and eventually spread to central and western Europe, according to the "Khazarian Hypothesis."

"We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans," says Elhaik.

"Their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga, with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan."

Many things are unknown about the Khazars, whose tribal confederation gathered Slavs, Scythians, Hunnic-Bulgars, Iranians, Alans and Turks.

But, argues Elhaik, the tale sketched in the genes is backed by archaeological findings, by Jewish literature that describes the Khazars' conversion to Judaism, and by language, too.

"Yiddish, the language of Central and Eastern European Jews, began as a Slavic language" before being reclassified as High German, he notes.

Another pointer is that European Jews and their ancestral groups in the Caucasus and Middle East share a relatively high risk of diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

The investigation should help fine-tune a fast-expanding branch of genomics, which looks at single-change DNA mutations that are linked with inherited disease, adds Elhaik.

Go here to see the full text of Dr. Elhaik's article.

Dr. Elhaik's study is coming under attack, such as in this column by Seth Frantzman in the Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2013:

A recent study (‘The missing link of Jewish European Ancestry’) published online by the Oxford journal Genome Biology and Evolution concluded that “the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Romans and Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans, and their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.”

The article has been gaining some buzz in a variety of places, from neo-Nazi websites to radical left-wing blogs, as proof that the Jewish people are not a distinct “people” and that their origins are in the Caucuses, not the Middle East.

The author of the article, post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik of the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins University, based his conclusion on what he describes as the “Khazar hypothesis,” which he accepts as a reasonable hypothesis that should be tested.

The Khazar theory for the origin of the Jews was invented by the womanizing communist intellectual Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe. The Khazars, a Turkish polity that came to dominate the Caucuses in the 7th century, disappeared eventually several hundred years later, like many other tribal mini-states established in that area during the period. Some of the Khazar elite supposedly converted to Judaism.

Koestler wrote his book without historical training in the history of the Caucuses and primarily as an intellectual provocation about the history of the Jews.

When he came to the part about the fall of the Khazar empire, he noted that “where the historians’ resources give out, legend and folklore provide useful hints.”

Based on his intellectual exercise, which was grounded in nothing more than whimsical thinking, Koestler concluded: “Here, then, we have the cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry.”

Elhaik, whose previous articles have dealt with such subjects as the genome sequence of the Leafcutter ant, decided that he could use his background to divine the true origins of the Jewish people.

He analyzed data on 1,287 “unrelated individuals of 8 Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations,” the article said.

“As Judeans and Khazars have been vanquished…contemporary Middle Eastern and Caucasian populations were used as surrogates,” Elhaik writes. “Palestinians were considered proto-Judeans” and Armenians and Georgians were considered “proto-Khazars because they emerged from the same cohort as Khazars.”

THE AUTHOR sets out with the claim that he is interested in studying the European Jewish link to the Khazars since European-descended Jews are the “largest ethno-religious aggregate of modern Jewish communities, accounting for nearly 90 percent of over 13 million Jews worldwide.”

The analysis then fits the model.

According to the author, some 70% of European Jews “and almost all Eastern European Jews cluster with Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani Jews.” Surprisingly some 15% of Central European Jews are similar to the Druse and Cypriots.

The author notes that “strong evidence” for the Khazar hypothesis is that Eastern European Jews closely resemble Jews from the Caucuses. “Because Caucasus populations remained isolated in the Caucasus region, and because there are no records of Caucasus populations mass-migrating to Eastern and Central Europe prior to the fall of Khazaria, these findings imply a shared origin for European Jews and Caucasus populations.”

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. However, in the case of Elhaik, the evidence is not only weak and misleading, it is based on numerous sources that are not historical, instead employing conjectures and leaps in logic, as well as claims that cannot be substantiated.

One of Elhaik’s very first claims, that “contemporary Eastern European Jews comprise the largest ethno-religious aggregate of modern Jewish communities, accounting for nearly 90% of over 13 million Jews worldwide” is said to be based on a publication by the United Jewish Communities in 2003, titled the “National Jewish Population Survey, 2000-01.”

Except this source deals with the demographics of Jews in the United States.

An inquiry with Dr. Elhaik resulted in a note that this was a mistake that would be corrected, and that the actual source should be Harry Ostrer’s 2001 paper in genetics, “A Genetic Profile of Contemporary Jewish Populations.”

Except Ostrer wrote that “contemporary Jewry is comprised of ~13 million people… Among the Jews of the United States, ~90% are of Ashkenazi origin.” So right from the beginning Elhaik has made a basic flaw in his use of sources, one that was neither caught by the editors of Genome Biology and Evolution, nor the peer reviewers of his paper.

Yet it is a claim that should have been caught, for most people who study Jews know that 90% of them are not Ashkenazi and their population is much more diverse than that presented by Elhaik.

However, the real flaws in this new research are historical. The author claims a massive knowledge of history that has major implications for his findings.

“There are no records of Caucasus populations mass-migrating to Eastern and Central Europe prior to the fall of Khazaria.”

The footnote for this is another genetic research study, but a claim like this requires historical knowledge of the Caucuses. In fact, the Caucuses were a place of great human movement from the 15th to 19th centuries. Cossacks, Circassians, Chechans, Tatars and numerous other groups roamed the region in the period, some of whom, like the Khazars, vanished to history.

The author claims that his evidence shows that “Judaized Greco-Roman male-driven migration directly to Khazaria is consistent with historical demographic migrations and could have created the observed pattern.” Following in the footsteps of Tel Aviv University academic Shlomo Sand’s work, The Invention of the Jewish People, Elhaik claims “no Jewish historiography was produced from the time of Josephus Flavius (1st century CE) to the 19th century.”

But the source, Sand, is not an expert on Jewish history in the period – his book, like Koester’s, was more a polemic.

Elhaik goes further, noting that “the religious conversion of the Khazars encompassed all the Empire’s citizens and subordinate tribes and lasted for the next 400 years…the Judeo- Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and later migrated to Central Europe and admixing with the neighboring populations.”

There is actually no evidence of this; the general view has been that only some of the Khazar elite converted to Judaism.

Yet Elhaik even claims to know the details of the Judeo-Khazar life. “After the decline of their Empire, the Judeo-Khazars refugees sought shelter in the emerging Polish Kingdom and other Eastern European communities, where their expertise in economics, finances, and politics were valued.”

The source for much of this is Koestler, passed off as fact with no mention that Koestler simply inferred most of it from his imagination and theories. The author argues that his study showed a remarkably “high genetic similarity” between Jews and Armenians, but not Georgians.

In order to explain similarities between Jews and Druse, the author argues that the Druse have “Turkish-Southern Caucuses origins… the genetic similarity between European Jews and Druse therefore supports the Khazarian Hypothesis.”

Yet the author is not a historian of the Druse, and has not investigated the Druse religion. He claims the Druse migrated to Syria and Palestine, but doesn’t bother to mention that they migrated from Egypt, not modern-day Turkey.

Still, the author is convinced that the Druse-Jewish connection “should not be confused with a Semitic origin,” – as evidently the author knows, without having genetically tested the Druse, that they are not Semites or Arabs.

Because the author believes his data shows that Jews are related to Armenians, he posits that “our findings support a largescale conversion scenario that influenced the majority of the [Khazar] population.”

THE TROUBLING issue with Elhaik’s paper is that it was accepted for publication by an academic journal. It is a problem because it becomes part of the historical record, so that the Koestler thesis can now be said to be supported by “genetic evidence.”

Commentators who have written about it now embrace the science as a “groundbreaking study.” Rev. Ted Pike posted an enthusiastic message on his blog noting that “new genetic research confirms Koestler’s Khazar theory.” Therefore, Pike concludes, the Jews “are proselytes who seized land in Palestine that never belonged to their true ancestors.”

But what is equally disturbing is that even the genetic evidence Elhaik presents is unclear. He argues that modern-day Ashkenazi Jews share around 30% of their ancestry with modern-day people in the Caucuses, such as Armenians. From this he postulates that Jews and Armenians share Khazar ancestry.

But one might equally conclude that in fact many Armenians are simply descended from Jews.

Similarly with the Druse, rather than concluding that the Druse have a convoluted Caucuses ancestry, one could note that many Druse share some genetics with Jews – since Jews and Druse once lived in similar areas in the Middle East, such as Alexandria, where they both were significant populations in the 11th century.

The author’s claim that there are “significantly smaller” genetic distances between Jews and Armenians and Georgians than between Jews and Palestinians, the Beduin and Jordanians, is based on the odd assumption that the Beduin in Jordan should necessarily share genetic material with Jews.

Why would modern-day Palestinians be any better stand-ins for 1st century Jews than, say, modern Jews? Why would anyone assume the Jews and Beduin are related? The data presented also doesn’t appear to show “significant” differences, with scores of .234 and .2387 provided as evidence of “genetic distance” between Caucuses and Middle Eastern origins of Jewish populations– without an explanation of the significance of the scores (i.e what is the score of a Japanese person and an Icelander?). The author also doesn’t include a dummy variable or control for the fact that neither the Beduin or Armenians are good stand-ins for Jewish ancestry.

If we think of the Elhaik study in another context, consider this: If one did a genetic study of African-Americans and white Americans and found that both of them share 30% of their ancestry with the British, one would not be correct in concluding that African-Americans have their origins in London.

Yet the author has seemingly made this leap of logic.

This points to the sad tragedy that due to an obsessive interest in the “true” origins of the Jewish people, all sorts of scientific norms are discarded in favor of embracing any wild theory.

That Elhaik, not previously an expert on Jewish genetics or history, can publish an academic paper “proving” the origins of the Jews, is evidence of this tendency.

March 7, 2026 update: As reported by Jo Elizabeth of All Israel News, March 7, 2026:

The theory that Jewish people are descended not from the 12 tribes of Israel but from an Eastern European kingdom called Khazar has been gaining traction again, but is there any truth to it?

Academic and specialist in Semitic languages, Dr. Michael G. Wechsler, has collated evidence pointing to the contrary, declaring the theory “scholastically debunked.” In a video released last Monday, Wechsler explains that this theory, lately promoted by the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, has been widely rejected by historians, archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists.

Proponents of the theory say the Khazars, a nomadic people group of central Asia who converted to Judaism around the 9th century, were the true ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews today. Wechsler highlights the 1972 book by Hoshaat Harkavi, “Arab Attitudes to Israel,” which describes how this claim has been “peddled in the Arab world as an ideological weapon, targeting the legitimacy of the state of Israel.”

Strangely, another book, “The Thirteenth Tribe” by Arthur Koestler in 1978, also endorsed this theory, despite Koestler being Jewish. He believed that distancing the Jewish people from the 12 tribes of Israel would deflect antisemitic hate, but in fact, it was antisemites who embraced the Khazar Theory with enthusiasm.

The Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations claimed that the theory “negated Israel’s right to exist," and neo-Nazi magazine, "The Thunderbolt"declared it the “political bombshell of the century” (Scammell, Michael. Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, 2009, p. 547). Today, the theory is popular among Palestinians, with the Palestinian Authority. President Mahmoud Abbas, religious leaders, and the media have all reinforced these claims.

The theory suggests that after the fall of the Khazar Empire in the latter half of the 10th century, the converted Khazars emigrated to Europe, establishing what is known as Ashkenazi European Jewry today, despite the fact that Jews had long been living in Europe before the Khazar Empire's dissolution.

Wechsler points out that the majority of Israeli Jews today are, in any case, not Ashkenazi but descended from Mizrachi and Sephardi Jews, “who have an established and well documented history in the Middle East and Mediterranean basin, including the land of Israel,” and blasted the Khazar Theory as “soundly disproven by the meticulous work of manifold scholars and scientists.”

Summarizing the main reasons for its rejection, Wechsler first outlines the unreliability of the few historical sources that might support the claim. He refers to “a handful of references in Muslim Arabic works, which were either contemporaneous with the Khazar Empire or composed soon after it was conquered by Svyatoslav of Rus around 970 CE,” which he says are based on “rumor and hearsay.”

There are also two Hebrew documents, a letter by the supposed king of the Khazars to the prominent Andalusian Jew Ḥasdai ibn Shapruṭ and an account of the Khazars' supposed conversion, which he says contradict each other and have been rightly judged to be pseudepigraphal.

Wechsler then argues that the notable silence from other classical Muslim historians and geographers, as well as from contemporary Jewish and Christian sources, also undermines the theory. That the Khazars existed is documented; that they were Jewish, not so much.

Professor Charles Stampper wrote, "In addition to this broad textual silence, there is no material evidence for the conversion of the Kazars to Judaism, or even for the presence of a significant Jewish community in Khazar lands.”

As an expert in Semitic languages, Wechsler also notes the absence of linguistic elements linking Ashkenazi Jews to the Khazars.
Neither the Germanic Yiddish language nor Jewish names show any influence from Central Asian languages. Rather, the linguistic roots support the veracity of the “long accepted scholarly view that Ashkenazi or European Jewry arose through migration up the Italian peninsula into the trading cities of the Rhine Valley, whence, after adopting the German stock of Yiddish, they eventually branched out into Europe and eastward into Russia,” he says.

The way Khazars are recorded as bowing prostrate to honor other men also casts serious doubt on claims that they had converted to Judaism, since Jews refuse to bow to anyone except God, which is what got Mordechai in such trouble in the biblical book of Esther.

A Jewish commentary by Saadia Gaon from around 935 C.E. states of the Khazars, "before the man of the best qualities among them, they do indeed prostrate themselves and worship him." Not exactly kosher.

In addition to all this historical evidence, Wechsler also cites proof that there is no meaningful genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jews and the Khazari people. He states that a 2012 paper, which made the link, has been rejected by the majority of geneticists because of several severe methodological flaws,” since it uses Caucasians, Armenians, and Georgians as DNA proxies for the long-gone Khazars, “despite there being no proven link between these groups.”

Conversely, he presents a plethora of work on Jewish genome history by other researchers, including some of the field's leading geneticists such as Harry Ostrer, Michael Hammer, Gil Atzmon, and Doron Behar, saying their work consistently confirmed Behar’s conclusion that “Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations,” which trace back to the Levant.

“Even if there were some partial genetic link between the Khazars and Ashkenazi Jewry,” says Wechsler, “this would not matter since the borders of Jewish ethnicity have always been permeable to inclusion by means of conversion.”

He continues, “The theoretical infusion of Khazar DNA into the collective Jewish genome would have no more bearing on the issue of collective Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel than the actual infusion of Arab DNA into the collective Egyptian genome has on the issue of collective Egyptian indigeneity to Egypt,” before outlining the many different ethnic backgrounds that make up the Palestinian populace today.

Wechsler believes that the Khazar Theory, so often wielded against Jewish claims to indigeneity to the land of Israel, is roundly debunked due to its lack of strong historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence. “Even if partial Khazar ancestry existed, it would not invalidate Jewish identity or indigeneity,” he concludes.

Genetic map of Jewish diasporas supports record of ancient settlement in North Africa

Another backlog item, as reported by Ynet News, October 8, 2012 (link inserted by blogger):

A new genetic analysis focusing on Jews from North Africa has provided an overall genetic map of the Jewish Diasporas. The findings support the historical record of Middle Eastern Jews settling in North Africa during Classical Antiquity, proselytizing and marrying local populations, and, in the process, forming distinct populations that stayed largely intact for more than 2,000 years.

The study, led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, was published online recently in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

“Our new findings define North African Jews, complete the overall population structure for the various groups of the Jewish Diaspora, and enhance the case for a biological basis for Jewishness,” said study leader Harry Ostrer, M.D., professor of pathology, of genetics and of pediatrics at Einstein and director of genetic and genomic testing for the division of clinical pathology at Montefiore Medical Center.

Dr. Ostrer noted that obtaining a comprehensive genetic fingerprint of various Jewish subpopulations can help reveal genetic links to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other common diseases.

In a previous genetic analysis, the researchers showed that modern-day Sephardic (Greek and Turkish), Ashkenazi (Eastern European) and Mizrahi (Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian) Jews that originated in Europe and the Middle East are more related to each other than to their contemporary non-Jewish neighbors, with each group forming its own cluster within the larger Jewish population.

Further, each group demonstrated Middle-Eastern ancestry and varying degrees of mixing with surrounding populations. Two of the major Jewish populations - Middle Eastern and European Jews - were found to have diverged from each other approximately 2,500 years ago.

The current study extends that analysis to North African Jews – the second largest Jewish Diaspora group. Their relatedness to each other, to other Jewish Diaspora groups, and to their non-Jewish North African neighbors had not been well defined.

The study also included members of Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Yemen and Georgia. In all, the researchers analyzed the genetic make-up of 509 Jews from 15 populations along with genetic data on 114 individuals from seven North African non-Jewish populations.

North African Jews exhibited a high degree of endogamy, or marriage within their own religious and cultural group in accordance with custom. Two major subgroups within this overall population were identified: Moroccan/Algerian Jews and Djerban (Tunisian)/Libyan Jews.

The two subgroups varied in their degree of European mixture, with Moroccan/Algerian Jews tending to be more related to Europeans - most likely stemming from the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain during the Inquisition, starting in 1492. Ethiopian and Yemenite Jewish populations also formed distinctive genetically linked clusters, as did Georgian Jews.

Dr. Ostrer’s paper is titled, “North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters.”

Mayas in Mexico aren't expecting the end of the world on December 21, 2012

My rough translation of an article in French by Judith Lachapelle that appeared in the Montreal newspaper La Presse on July 7, 2012:

CANCUN--"I don't believe it will be the end of the world. The Mayas likewise say that it will be the end of a cycle, or something like that. So, no, I don't think it will be the end of the world."

Mariana was there to extol the charms of Cancun, celebrated spa of the Mexican Riviera. She wasn't dodging the famous question on the imminence of the end of the world on account of December 21, 2012, it is believed in certain interpretations of the Maya calendar.

"You say "I believe." Aren't you sure?"

Mariana appeared disconcerted for several seconds. "It's true that many things happen since the beginning of the year, she candidly reflected in a high voice. I was in Mexico in March when there was an earthquake. I tell myself after all, maybe it's the end of the world, or "of one" world...No?"

Why not? Everything is sold, even the end of the world. The promise is based on a strongly doubtful interpretation of the Maya calendar, but business and tourism in Cancun leapt to the occasion. Talk about it for good, or talk about it for evil, but talk about it, as they say...

So, tour operators have found a "spiritual" message to transmit: end of the world or not, it's the ideal occasion "to make the point, to reflect on what we want to change in our life, and on the planet," recites Paula Gomez, representative of the tourist association who drew in May a group of journalists to extol the Maya Riviera, end of the world version.

The Yucatan peninsula evidently has all that's necessary to wash and purify the human spirit before the final Judgment. To start lots of of salt water and good temperature.

But it's not only on the sea that one surfs: spas now offer "Maya care," spectacles of grand unfolding and Maya ceremonies, and "Maya gastronomy" is repeated on the tablecloths.

And the Mayas inside there? They haven't disappeared--famines and diseases drove away their venerable cities before the arrival of the Spanish, but the Mayas, their language and their culture are still present in several regions of Mexico. But to find the authentic Maya in the carnival of the end of the world, it is necessary to go back to the sources.

A trip in the ancient cities of Tulum, Chichen Itza and especialy Coba, allows for better understanding of the roots of this advanced civilization which had--like many others of its contemporaries elsewhere--devised its own calendar. A calendar that has previewed, thus far, the end of a cycle of 5300 years in December 2012.

And after the end of the cycle? Herculano Kuyoccan, our May guide in Coba, lifts his eyes to the sky. And it's not to invoke Bolan Ok Te, the deity who is supposed to come at the end of the year. After December 2012? "Another cycle begins again. That's all."

Jewish and Navajo leaders exchange dialogue about sacred lands

As reported by Edmon J. Rodman of Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 29, 2012:

LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- A Reform rabbi, a Navajo medicine man and a professor walk into a museum.

It sounds like the opening of a joke, but on a recent May Shabbat at Window Rock, Ariz., capital of the Navajo Nation, it’s the beginning of a cross-cultural discussion that pondered the question “What makes land sacred?”

The dialogue featuring the spiritual leaders of two tribes, Navajo medicine man Johnson Dennison and Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld of the Reform Congregation Albert in Albuquerque, N.M., was held at the Navajo Nation Museum.

Anthropologist Gordon Bronitsky moderated the event with an audience of more than 40 Jews and Navajos.

It was the second in a series of Navajo-Jewish exchanges.

The first program was held in November at Congregation Albert, where the duo wrestled with how each group managed living in “Two Worlds” -- one of tradition, the other of contemporary life.

Bronitsky, the program organizer and a longtime resident of the Southwest, took a Navajo language course in college and knew some Hebrew. The former university professor suspected that when it came to land and sacredness, the two unlikely desert neighbors had some views to share.

Before the second event, Bronitsky observed that the Navajo have a phrase, “dineh bikeyah” (the people’s land), that expresses a feeling of rightful ownership.

It is similar, he said, to when Jews say “Artzeinu” (our land) -- as in the "Hatikvah" verse, “Lihyot ’am chofshi be’artzeinu,” “To be a free people in our land.”

Opening the discussion with “Shabbat shalom,” the kippah-wearing, white-bearded Rosenfeld explained that the Hebrew word for “holy” was “kadosh,” and that the word for profane, “chol,” was the same as the word for “sand” -- something, an audience member later pointed out, that both groups had seen much of.

“The biblical land of Israel is sacred land for the Jews,” Rosenfeld said, sidestepping the charged issue of boundaries.

“It is sacred because God promised it,” added the rabbi, who in his previous pulpit in Anchorage, Alaska, had worked with native peoples.

Dennison, wearing a turquoise necklace typical of the Navajo, greeted the audience in both English and his native language. “You are all welcome to the Navajo land, it is a sacred place,” he said.

For Dennison, a medicine man with a master's degree in educational administration, Navajo land is both a homeland where he found “harmony and beauty” as well a place where, he related later, his family could raise a flock of sheep and a herd of goats.

“There is a spiritual and emotional connection to the land,” he said.

Dennison defined Navajo land as lying between “four sacred peaks” that “were established by the holy people as the cornerstones of Navajo country”: Blanca Peak to the east, Mount Taylor to the south, San Francisco Peak to the west and Mount Hesperus to the north...

...As for the Jews' attachment to their holy land, Rosenfeld pointed out that “you don’t have to live on it.”

At the same time, he stressed -- quoting Psalm 137, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” -- Jews are not allowed to forget their attachment.

Both speakers saw rays of sacredness emanating from the east.

Dennison remarked that the traditional Navajo home, the hogan, was to this day oriented with its entrance to the east.

“The tip of light of where the rising sun first strikes is considered sacred," he said. "First light enters our whole being.”

Rosenfeld saw “spirituality coming from the east,” east being the symbol of Jerusalem. “Jews face east when they pray,” he said.

Several audience members, speaking in Navajo or in English with a bit of Hebrew, also spotted similarities in experience and ritual.

Navajo Lydell James saw a connection between his tribe's Long Walk and the Holocaust. The Long Walk, known as “Bosque Redondo,” was an 1864-66 forced relocation of the Navajo from their historic tribal lands to an area around Fort Sumner, N.M.

“The hurt doesn’t end,” he said.

Laura Jijon, who is Jewish and works with the Navajo as an adult education administrator at the University of New Mexico Extension in nearby Gallup, N.M., cited a similarity to the spiritual significance that Dennison placed on the four directions and the six directions that Jews wave the lulav on Sukkot.

She also pointed out that “the hogan and the sukkah are both sacred dwellings.”

As to the generational challenges facing each group, the rabbi and medicine man acknowledged that their respective people's commitment and sense of holiness about their lands could be at risk.

“We don’t own the land," Dennison said. "It’s a Western concept of marking the land and water. It becomes a property. In the future we could lose sight of the sacredness of the land.

“How do we keep the fire burning?” he asked.

“Is something inherently holy? Only if a community takes it as such,” said Rosenfeld. “Fifty-nine percent of American Jews have not been to Israel.”

Historically, Navajos and other Southwest Indian tribes have long had some ties with Jews.

In the 19th century, Solomon Bibo, a Jewish immigrant from Poland and New Mexico trader, “was the only white man ever to be the chief of an Acoma pueblo,” Bronitsky said.

And before the event Bronitsky, standing before a photo display of Miss Navajo contest winners, pointed to the photo of the second winner, in 1954-55, Ida Gail Organick.

“She was married to a Jewish doctor,” he said.

Colorado's Mexican Indians share a genetic marker with Ashkenazi Jews

As reported by RT News, May 31, 2012:

A population of native American Indians from the US state of Colorado has been found to have a genetic mutation typical of Ashkenazi Jews. The finding suggests the presence of common roots that date back to the days of Christopher Columbus.

­The so-called “Ashkenazi mutation” is a deleterious modification in BRCA1 gene which increases risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Researchers from the Sheba Medical Center in Israel have found it in the DNA of descendants of those Indians who moved from Mexico to Colorado some 200 years ago.

The same very mutation was earlier tracked in Hispanic Americans whose ancestors also arrived in the United States from Mexico and South America.

Computer analysis of genetic data has revealed that the two groups should have a common ancestor – a Jewish person who moved from Europe to the New World as long as 600 years ago. It was the time when Christopher Columbus discovered America, and the Jewish population was expelled from Spain.

In their publication in the European Journal of Human Genetics, the team, led by Eitan Friedman, notes that Colorado’s Mexican Indians do not seem to have any traditions that would link them to Jews.

Genomic study shows that Jews throughout the world share a genetic history

This item is a couple of years old, but still relevant. As reported by Dudi Goldman of Ynet News, June 9, 2010:

A new study, the largest of its kind ever conducted, reveals that the Jewish people shares clear genomic significance. Apparently, the genetic similarity between a Jewish Italian and a Jewish Pole is larger than the similarity between Jewish Pole and a Christian Pole, for instance.

"The Jewish communities share much more (genetic information) between Jews rather than non-Jews in the same geographic area," Dr. Gil Atzmon, co-author of the study and professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Genetics, told the New York Post.

Some 237 Jews of representing the three major Diaspora communities, including Ashkenazi Jews from throughout Europe, Sephardim, and Mizrahim from Syria, Iran, and Iraq, participated in the study.

Shared genetic history

The study found that Ashkenazim share genetic density that could suggest that most of them are ancestors of a small number of original mothers. The researchers noted that the level of relatedness among Ashkenazi Jews is similar to the level of relatedness between fifth-degree cousins.

This is not the first study attempting to isolate a genetic thread among Jews. However, it is the first to show clear and unequivocal genetic significance. The study, titled "The Children of Abraham in the Genome Era," was recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

"We found that Jewish communities created their own genetic clusters," said Atzmon.

Genetic analysis from the study showed that two major groups of Jews, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, diverged nearly 2500 years ago.

"The study supports the idea of a Jewish people linked by a shared genetic history," explained the study's senior author, Prof. Harry Ostrer of New York University.

"The goal of the study was to determine a genomic baseline,” said lead author Gil Atzmon, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and of genetics at Einstein. “With this established, we’ll be able to more easily identify genes associated with complex disorders like diabetes that are determined by multiple variants across the genome. Armed with this information, we will be better positioned to treat patients.”

Go here to see the original article in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Jewish populations in Yemen and Ethiopia have distinct histories

From the abstract of the article Mitochondrial DNA reveals distinct evolutionary histories for Jewish populations in Yemen and Ethiopia by Amy L. Non, Ali Al-Meeri, et. al., published in the January 2011 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology:

A high frequency of sub-Saharan African L haplogroups was found in both Jewish populations, indicating a significant African maternal contribution unlike other Jewish Diaspora populations. However, no identical haplotypes were shared between the Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish populations, suggesting very little gene flow between the populations and potentially distinct maternal population histories...Specifically, Yemenite Jewish mitochondrial diversity reflects potential descent from ancient Israeli exiles and shared African and Middle Eastern ancestry with little evidence for large-scale conversion of local Yemeni. In contrast, the Ethiopian Jewish population appears to be a subset of the larger Ethiopian population suggesting descent primarily through conversion of local women.