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New Challenge
to Anglo-Israelism and the
Lost Ten Tribes Theory
Jews are the Genetic Brothers of Palestinians,
Syrians, and Lebanese but not to Non-Jewish Europeans
New York,
NY - According to a new scientific study, Jews are the
genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, and they all
share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years.
This genetic brotherhood does not include non-Jewish Europeans.
This
finding differs from the Anglo-Israelism teachings of the British Israel
World Federation, and a number of off-beat American televangelists including
Arnold
Murray of the Shepherd's Chapel in Gravette, Arkansas; and the WGN
Sunday morning Church of God duo Roderick C.
Meredith and
Gerald Flurry. It also runs counter to the notions of
Steven M. Collins in his dizzyingly speculative The "Lost"
Ten Tribes of Israel...Found! (Collins
1995), the teachings of Israeli author Yair Davidy in his three books
The Tribes: The Israelite Origins of Western Peoples
(Davidy 1993), Ephraim
(Davidy 1994), and Lost Israelite Identity
(Davidy 1996),
and the United Church of God's curious new booklet The United States and
Britain in Bible Prophecy (Foster
2001).
"Jews and Arabs are all really children of
Abraham," says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics
Program at New York University School of
Medicine, an author of the new
study by an international team of researchersF1 in the United States,
Europe, and Israel. "And all have preserved their Middle Eastern
genetic roots over 4,000 years," he says.
The researchers analyzed the Y chromosome, which is
usually passed unchanged from father to son, of more than 1,000 men
worldwide. Throughout human history, alterations have occurred in the
sequence of chemical bases that make up the DNA in this so-called male
chromosome, leaving variations that can be pinpointed with modern
genetic techniques. Related populations carry the same specific
variations. In this way, scientists can track descendants of large
populations and determine their common ancestors. Specific regions of the Y chromosome were analyzed in
1,371 men from 29 worldwide populations, including Jews and non-Jews
from the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe.
The study, published in the June
6, 2000, issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (on-line May 9,
2000), found that Jewish men
shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle
East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and these
signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this
region. Consequently, Jews and Arabs share a common ancestor and are
more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of
the world (See
Study or obtain PDF
Download).
The study also revealed that despite the complex history
of Jewish migration in the Diaspora (the time since BCE 556 when Jews
migrated out of Palestine), Jewish communities have generally not
intermixed with non-Jewish populations. If they had, then Jewish men
from different regions of the world would not share the same genetic
signatures in their Y chromosome.
"Because ancient Jewish law states that Jewish
religious affiliation is assigned maternally, our study afforded the
opportunity to assess the contribution of non-Jewish men to present-day
Jewish genetic diversity," says Michael Hammer, Ph.D., from the
University of Arizona, Tucson, who is the lead author of the new study.
"It was surprising", he says, "to see how significant the Middle Eastern
genetic signal was in Jewish men from different communities in the
Diaspora."
In 1998 BibArch called for a scientific
approach to study of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (see
Who Are the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel from the Nov./Dec. 1998
issue of Perspectives). Why? The heated debate as to whether or not the
Lost Ten Tribes of Israel compose the biblical and therefore the prophetic
identity of the United States, Britain, and several European
countries, continues to seethe. While the findings of historians, linguists and archeologists are of great
import they have not established with any certainty that Americans of northern European
descent, the British, and northern European peoples are indeed the descendants of the Ten
Lost Tribes of the House of Israel. While the study is not conclusive in
explaining the fate of the Ten Lost Tribes it is a giant
step in the direction of bringing scientific evidence to bear.
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