A brief update by Dr. Elhaik

[HHW]

The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the
Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses

On December 14th 2012, my paper was published in Genome Biology and
Evolution. Alongside the paper, the Journal chose to publish a
highlighted assay: Highligh:Out of Khazaria-Evidence for "Jewish
Genome" Lacking that further discussed the study

Although highly unorthodox, to allow readers to fully evaluate my work
I decided to publish the Reveiwer's comments and my response, as is
required by journals like Biology Direct. There was only one round of
comments. I hope that you will find it helpful.

The Missing Link refutes the Rhineland Hypothesis, which is the basis
of all genetic research done on European Jews, along with 63 years of
Jewish population genetics that emerged at the early 50's. You may
ask, how is it possible that so many people followed the wrong path
for for so long? In 2003, Dr. Kirsh's work (Kirsh 2003) may provide
some answers. She reviewed papers published between 1951-1965 by
Israel, Jews, and non-Jews about Jews. She concluded that "During this
period the Israeli human geneticists and physicians emphasized the
sociological and historical aspects of their research and used their
work, among other things, as a vehicle for establishing a national
identity and confirming the Zionist narrative." Dr. Kirsh was very
generous and avoid using the term "lied" or "cooked" as bloggers put
it. Dr. Kirsh's study reviewed papers up to 1963, but this practice
never stopped.

With time, the bad science practices (i.e., lies and misconception)
became more sophisticated (it took me months to figure it all out) but
with time the amount of data grew rapidly and the lies became harder
to conceive. Kirsh (2003) filled two pages with the bad practices of
Israeli and Jews geneticists in their attempt to manipulate the data
and the results so they will not conflict with the Zionist narrative.
I didn't find it necessary to do a similar project because then I
would run out of space. Instead, I focused on the supernatural element
of the Rhineland Hypothesis and the fact that it was completely made
up to support the narrative.

Most troubling is that papers that were refuted like the Levite and
Cohnim genes (Zoossmann-Diskin 2006, Zoossmann-Diskin 2000) are still
being disucssed asif nothing happened. This particular practice of
ignoring "Negative" papers was also mentioned in Kirsh (2003). My
study can therefore expects a similar faith, but I hope one day
someone will study the huge cost both in tax-payers dollars and health
that the adoption of Zionist narrative (Rhineland hypothesis) cost the
American people.

Myths and religions of any kind are better left outside of science.



Reference:
Kirsh, N. 2003. Population genetics in Israel in the 1950s. The
unconscious internalization of ideology. Isis. 94:631-655.
Zoossmann-Diskin, A. 2006. Ashkenazi levites' "Y modal
haplotype" (LMH) - an artificially created phenomenon? HOMO - Journal
of Comparative Human Biology. 57:87-100.
Zoossmann-Diskin, A. 2000, Are today’s Jewish priests descended from
the old ones? Stammen die heutigen j�dischen Priester von den alten
ab? HOMO: Journal of Comparative Human Biology - Zeitschrift fuer
Vergleichende Biologie des Menschen, Vol. 51, No. 2-3,, pp.156-162.

[drahcir]

You've already completely refuted below with your wonderful post here:

http://tinyurl.com/a3eus82

Here's a better link in case you forgot what you posted:

http://tinyurl.com/beozfwd

For those who are mouse-impaired, here's the text that HHW posted,
which completely refutes what he posted in that to which I am here
replying. Tough thing about usenet, H, is that you can't take it back.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! CAN YOU HONESTLY DENY BEING THE
CARNIVAL CLOWN OF SCI??? CAN YOU???

HERE'S THE TEXT OF WHAT HHW POSTED JUST SHORT WHILE AGO:

Israeli Researcher Challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel, Calls Those
Who Disagree 'Nazi Sympathizers'
Comment Now Follow Comments
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24

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9

The Genetic Literacy Project reports that the ongoing conflict between
Israel and its neighbors over the origins of the �Jewish people� has
surfaced again as an issue of great controversy�with science in the
crosshairs.

It�s particularly troublesome when a scientist�in this case, an
Israeli molecular geneticist whose motivations appear more personal
and ideological than scientific�stokes the contretemps. The current
brouhaha arises over a recent study by Eran Elhaik and is accompanied
by his personal attacks on more mainstream scientists who have
eviscerated his work. In the face of overwhelming evidence from dozens
of studies over twenty years from geneticists and historians around
the world, Elhaik is aggressively stumping on behalf of his belief
that most Jews trace their seminal ancestry not to the Middle East but
to the Caucuses and Eastern Europe.

Elhaik, who is now a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins, is
recirculating the debunked �Khazarian hypothesis� promoted by
journalist Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe,
written before scientists had the tools to compare genomes and
challenge his conclusion.

Khazarian myth

The Khazarian theory�which historians and scientists now believe
should more accurately be called a myth�was more recently recycled (to
great applause by anti-Israeli activists and some pro-Palestinian
groups) in no less convincing form by Israeli French historian Shlomo
Sand in The Invention of the Jewish People, published in 2008�a book
panned by both historians and geneticists.

Elhaik reengaged the controversy late last year when the Oxford
journal Genome Biology and Evolution published his study, �The Missing

Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the

Khazarian Hypotheses.� The young Jewish researcher challenged the
so-called �Rhineland hypothesis��the broadly accepted genetic and
historic evidence that about 80 percent of Jewish Ashkenazi males
trace their ancestry to a core population of approximately 20,000
Eastern European Jews who originated in the Middle East. Elhaik wrote
that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, although
historians believe and genetic evidence confirms that only a fraction
of the population converted, including almost certainly royalty and
some members of the aristocracy.

A paper published in 2000 by geneticists Harry Ostrer, a professor of
genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of
Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer showed
that most Ashkenazis, Italians, North Africans, Iraqi, Iranian,
Kurdish and Yemenite Jews share common Y-DNA haplotypes that are also
found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Only a
small percentage of the Y-DNA of Jews originated outside of the Middle
East�some in the Caucuses.

The competing Rhineland and Khazarian theories were most recently
discussed by Ostrer in two studies published in 2012 and in his well
received book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. He
found that geographically and culturally distant Jews still have more
genes in common than they do with non-Jews around them, and that those
genes can be traced back to the Levant, an area including modern-day
Israel. �All European [Ashkenazi] Jews seem connected on the order of
fourth or fifth cousins, Ostrer has said.

The concept of the �Jewish people� remains controversial. The Law of
Return, the Israeli law that established the right of Jews around the
world to settle in Israel and which remains in force today, was a
central tenet of Zionism. The DNA that links Ashkenazi, Sephardi and
Mizrahi, three prominent culturally and geographically distinct Jewish
groups, could conceivably be used to support Zionist territorial
claims �except, as Ostrer has pointed out, some of the same markers
can be found in Palestinians, distant genetic cousins of the Jews, as
well. Palestinians, understandably, want their own �right of return�.

That disagreement over the interpretations of Middle Eastern DNA also
pits Jewish traditionalists against a particular strain of secular
Jewish ultra-liberals who have joined with anti-Israeli Arabs and many
non-Jews to argue for an end to Israel as a Jewish nation. Their hero
is the Austrian-born Shlomo Sand�and now Elhaik. His study gained buzz
in neo-Nazi websites and radical anti-Israeli and more radical
pro-Palestinian blogs. For example, the notorious former Ku Klux
Klansman David Duke actually attacked Elhaik in his latest anti-Jewish
rant�Duke�s anti-Semitic beliefs hang on the fact that Jews are
genetically cohesive and conspiratorial. �The disruptive and
conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist
activities through the millennia strongly suggests that Jews have
remained more or less genetically uniform and have � developed a group
evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity �
something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory,� Duke
wrote in his blog in February.

While Elhaik�s work has provided ideological support for those seeking
the destruction of Israel, it�s fallen flat among established
scientists, who peer reviewed his work and found it sloppy at best and
political at worst.

�He�s just wrong,� said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a
leading researcher in Jewish genetics. �If you take all of the careful
genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years�
there�s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin,� he said. He
added that Elhaik�s paper �is sort of a one-off.�

�It�s an unrealistic premise,� said University of Arizona geneticist
Michael Hammer, one of the world�s top Y-chromosomal researchers.

Discover�s Razib Khan did a textured critique in his Gene Expression
blog, noting the study�s historical fuzziness and its selective use of
data to come up with what seems like a pre-cooked conclusion. As Razib
writes, it�s hardly surprising that we would find a small but sizable
Khazarian contribution to the �Jewish gene pool�. In fact the male
line of my own family traces to the Caucuses, suggesting I�m one of
the 20 percent or so of Jews whose lineage traces to converted royal
Khazarians. But that view is widely acknowledged by Ostrer, Hammer,
Feldman, Michael Thomas and every major researcher in this area�as
summarized in my book, Abraham�s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA
of the Chosen People.

The rebuke of Elhaik�s study apparently has irked the beleaguered and
brash researcher. He�s launched a new offensive�the double entendre is
intentional�as chronicled in the Jewish Forward. Elhaik is now calling
the world�s top geneticists �liars� and �frauds.� When I weighed in on
the magazine�s discussion board, Elhaik responded with academic
restraint, claiming my reporting was no better than the geneticists he
trashed, saying it shared �common ground with the Nazism (sic)
ideology.�

Judaism�s tribal roots

Unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism is not solely a faith-based
religion. Its origins, as is the case with the other prominent
surviving ancient religion, Zoroastrianism, are tribal. The blood
connections mentioned endlessly in the Hebrew Bible are not just
symbolic; the Jews of ancient Israel were a clan of connected tribes
who coalesced over hundreds of years. While Jesus and later Mohammad
transformed the notion of �blood� into �faith��one could become a
Christian or Muslim through faith alone�Judaism has always retained an
ancestral component.

In the Torah, that blood link is patrilineal, passed on from father to
son. That tradition is preserved today in the Jewish priesthood, known
as the Aaronite line. According to the Bible
(and we have no way to know if this is historical or apocryphal),
Aaron was anointed as the first Jewish priest and his sons and their
descendants became the seed population of the Jewish priesthood.
Jewish Cohanim�the word means �priests� in Hebrew�supervised the inner
sanctum until the destruction of the Second Temple in the first
century, after which the Aaronite line was preserved by tradition,
with Cohanim having special privileges and responsibilities to this
day.

Are present day Cohanim descended from Aaron? That question is
unanswerable; we do not even know for certain that Aaron or Moses even
existed. However, DNA studies of the Y chromosome have determined that
a majority of self-proclaimed Cohanim (it�s an oral tradition) has a
set of genetic markers that trace back approximately three thousand
years to a single common ancestor. In other words, if there was no
Aaron, there was certainly a High Priest early in the Jewish tradition
whose ancestors have retained evidence of that tradition in their DNA.

As discussed in Abraham�s Children, Judaism has always retained its
tribal roots even as faith-based religions flourished. In the
centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple in the first
century, Jewish lineage became defined through the mother rather than
the father. Jewishness is now based on a triple helix: belief in God
(although many Jews are agnostic or atheist); recognition of ancient
Israel as a Biblical homeland; and literal blood connection with other
Jews, passed on from generation to generation.

To many people�including and especially Jews sensitive to the Nazi
branding of Jews as a race, which led to the near extinction of the
religion�acknowledging the genetic cohesiveness of Judaism is
uncomfortable. Anything that marks Jews as essentially different runs
the risk of stirring either anti- or philo-Semitism. But that doesn�t
mean we can ignore the factual reality of what Ostrer calls the
�biological basis of Jewishness� and �Jewish genetics.� Acknowledging
the genetic distinctiveness of Jews is �fraught with peril,� but we
must grapple with the hard evidence of �human differences� if we seek
to understand their implications of the age of genetics.

More on genetics and science literacy at the Genetic Literacy Project

Follow Jon on Twitter

Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a
senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS
(Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.

>the old ones? Stammen die heutigen j?dischen Priester von den alten

[drahcir]

<snip most of Elhaik's incredibly poorly written, panicked attempt at
defending his idiocy>

"My study can therefore expects a similar faith, but I hope one day
someone will study the huge cost both in tax-payers dollars and health
that the adoption of Zionist narrative (Rhineland hypothesis) cost the
American people. "

Well, now we finally get down to Elhaik's bottom line. This really has
nothing to do with genetics or truth. It's that he proposes that the
truth is too expensive for the American people, so let's just make up
a nice story that will be cheaper.

He is Pappe's mini-me, nothing more.

Sheesh, this has been fun, H. Thanks.

[drahcir]

shit, sorry, meant Sand's mini-me.

[drahcir]

...when the fire is under your ass.

"Elhaik used some of the same statistical tests as Behar and others,
but he chose different comparisons. Elhaik compared “genetic
signatures” found in Jewish populations with those of modern-day
Armenians and Georgians, which he uses as a stand-in for the
long-extinct Khazarians because they live in the same area as the
medieval state.

“It’s an unrealistic premise,” said University of Arizona geneticist
Michael Hammer, one of Behar’s co-authors, of Elhaik’s paper. Hammer
notes that Armenians have Middle Eastern roots, which, he says, is why
they appeared to be genetically related to Ashkenazi Jews in Elhaik’s
study.

Hammer, who also co-wrote the first paper that showed modern-day
Kohanim are descended from a single male ancestor, calls Elhaik and
other Khazarian Hypothesis proponents “outlier folks… who have a
minority view that’s not supported scientifically. I think the
arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know.”

Feldman, director of Stanford’s Morrison Institute for Population and
Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. “If you take all of the careful

genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years…
there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin,” he said. He

added that Elhaik’s paper “is sort of a one-off.”

Elhaik’s statistical analysis would not pass muster with most
contemporary scholars, Feldman said: “He appears to be applying the
statistics in a way that gives him different results from what
everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data.”"

http://hebrewvisionnews.info/?cat=83