New genetic evidence links Spanish Americans of Southwest to Jews

[Steve from Colorado]

Is this why the “homies” in south central L.A. say, “djuuu got it
mein”?


http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/09/28/3089635/new-genetic-evidence-links-spanish-americans-of-southwest-to-jews

New genetic evidence links Spanish Americans of Southwest to Jews
By Talia Bloch · September 28, 2011

NEW YORK (JTA) -- In 1995, Demetrio Valdez, his wife, Olive, and some
of their neighbors in Conjehos County, Colo., started a kosher food co-
op.

“We wanted to harvest our own meat, but we couldn’t get a good price
for it, so we decided to do it kosher to make more money,” said
Valdez, 64, who has raised cattle all his life.

The co-op members, all non-Jews, flew in a rabbi from New York to
instruct them in kosher slaughter. To Valdez’s surprise, many of the
practices introduced by the rabbi were ones that Valdez, a Catholic,
had grown up with and maintained on his ranch.

“I saw that we do a lot of things the same,” he recalled. “The rabbi
was surprised, too.”

Financial woes and a fire forced the co-op to close soon after it
started, but Valdez’s experiences with the rabbi -- the first Jew he
had ever met -- lingered.

Since childhood he had heard rumors that his family had Jewish
ancestors dating back to colonial New Spain when, as historical
records show, a good number of Converso Jews -- Jews and their
descendants forcibly converted during the Spanish Inquisition -- came
to the New World. Many of the Conversos who had made the trek over had
become Catholics in name only. They were Crypto Jews who in traveling
across the Atlantic were attempting to flee the Inquisition.

“My parents never spoke about it, but everyone knew there was
something there,” said Valdez.

Now a new study in the Journal of Human Genetics has turned up fresh
scientific evidence that the Spanish Americans of the Southwest must
have had some Jewish forbears.

A group of researchers in the United States and Ecuador analyzed DNA
from two communities who trace back to Spanish colonial times: one in
the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico,
which includes Conjehos County, and one in the Loja Province of
southern Ecuador.

The study found “observable Sephardic ancestry” in both communities
and calculated Jewish ancestry among the Lojanos at about 5 to 10
percent and among the Spanish Americans, also called Hispanos, at
about 1 to 5 percent.

“This study provides firmer evidence for what people have been
conjecturing for up to 20 years now,” said the study’s director, Dr.
Harry Ostrer, director of genetics and genomic testing at Montefiore
Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Over the past several decades, scholars have been pursuing stories
like Valdez’s and claim to have found remnants of Crypto-Jewish
practices in communities in the U.S. Southwest and Latin America. Some
Hispanos and Latin Americans also have come forward to claim a Crypto-
Jewish past, with a small number embracing a Jewish identity outright.

“The ancestry is really dispersed throughout the communities,” Ostrer
said of his findings, which also concluded that along the maternal
line, Native American ancestry is as high as 30 to 40 percent.

“You can’t say person A has Jewish ancestry and person B does not.
These genes were introduced some 500 years ago,” he said. “Originally
there was a fair amount of intermarriage, and then the communities
remained isolated.”

As the historical hypothesis goes, once the Inquisition arrived in the
New World, Crypto Jews pushed on to the remote corners of the Spanish
empire, such as New Mexico and Colorado, to escape the Church’s reach.
The San Luis Valley and Loja -- both located in the farthest corners
of what were once Spanish holdings -- would therefore be expected to
have discernable Jewish ancestry.

But the groundswell of interest in a Crypto-Jewish past among those of
Spanish origin, particularly in the American Southwest, also has
sparked controversy. A number of scholars have vociferously disputed
any present-day evidence of Judaism, arguing that practices reported
as Jewish had their origins in Seventh-day Adventism or fundamental
Christianity.

“It certainly wasn’t my intention to take sides in this argument,”
said Ostrer.

Rather, he and his team were, in part, picking up on previous genetic
and clinical studies that found something surprising: Genetic
mutations viewed as predominantly Jewish for a number of diseases,
like breast cancer or Bloom’s syndrome, were popping up at a notable
rate among Hispanos.

A mutation for breast cancer called 185 del AG that is much more
common among Ashkenazi Jews than other populations, for example, turns
out to be prevalent among Hispanos as well. According to Dr. Paul
Duncan, a medical oncologist in private practice in Albuquerque, N.M.,
only his Hispano and Ashkenazi Jewish patients carry the mutation.

This surprising overlap between Jews and Hispanos is the basis for a
new book, "The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion,
and DNA," by Jeff Wheelwright, to be published in January (W. W.
Norton). Wheelwright, a freelance journalist, helped to set up
Ostrer's study in the San Luis Valley.

Curiously, scientists calculate that 185 del AG arose approximately
2,000 years ago prior to any split between Ashkenazim and Sephardim.

In Loja, genetic traces of ancestry are even more apparent. Scattered
across the remote villages of the province are nearly 100 people with
Laron syndrome, which is marked by a severe short stature. When Dr.
Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, a diabetes specialist based in Quito, Ecuador,
who collaborated with Ostrer on his study, first began treating this
group in 1987, the referring physician told him that legend had it
that these people all descended from the same Sephardic Jew who had
come over with the explorers.

In 1992 and 1993, scientists discovered that all Lojanos with Laron's
carried the same mutation and shared it with one person in Israel and
nine others in Latin America.

“When I saw this I thought there is a strong possibility that the
story was true,” said Guevara-Aguirre, because “what are the chances
that in the billions of nucleotides the same mutation would happen
twice at random? But Harry’s study confirms it for the first time.”

Ostrer’s study stands out from previous studies in its scope. It is
the first time that any researcher has looked beyond particular
disease mutations or shared individual genetic markers to view the
entire genome for large chunks of DNA that indicate shared ancestry.

“Statistically it is very difficult to see it any other way” other
than that “these people [in Ostrer’s study] were descendant from
Conversos,” agreed Duncan.

Back in the San Luis Valley, Maria Clara Martinez, a retiree who edits
the local paper, La Sierra, said she wasn’t “at all surprised” by
Ostrer’s findings. A genealogist who has amassed a database of more
than 77,000 individuals from New Mexico and southern Colorado
extending back to 1598, Martinez explained that everyone in the area
is somehow related.

Martinez helped to publicized Ostrer’s study, but did not get tested
herself because, she said, “I’m afraid of needles.”

Although she said she never heard of any ancestors in her own family
who were Jewish, she has heard others speak of Jewish forbears or
family practices. And then there was an ancestor of hers who married a
woman from Portugal whose father was tried by the Inquisition.

“Community members were jealous of him, so they reported him, saying
he had a tail," Martinez recalled. "He was cleared, but it’s very
likely he was Jewish, although it was never proven.”

[69ingch...@park.com]

Hitler was into kosher slaughter also . he was very concerned about
kosher .