The investigators found clues to the past in extensive DNA markers and sequences that are identical and linked on the same copy of a chromosome – a sign of shared ancestry. Carmi and his team report the sequencing of the genomes of 128 modern Ashkenazi individuals.
In a paper from 2014 in Nature Communications, Dr. Genetic evidence, also incomplete, compares modern human genomes or their parts against a backdrop of geographic origins and known migration patterns to glimpse what might have happened. Many survivors dragged themselves in pitiful migrations to Eastern Europe. The fourteenth century saw wholesale evictions of Jews from Western Europe, and by the fifteenth century, very few were left in Germany and France. On a spring day in 1171 in Blois, France, for example, the entire, albeit small, Jewish part of the community was burned at the stake.īy the thirteenth century the small-scale murders of Jews had grown into mass killings. They applied new computational tools to expose how a severe population crash 30 or so generations ago, followed by an infusion of Eastern European DNA, brewed the Ashkenazi gene pool of today.įrom 1095 through 1291, Jews, regarded as killers of Jesus Christ, faced choices: convert to Christianity, be killed, or commit suicide. Any of these dozen or so conditions, from A (Alport syndrome) to Z (Zellweger syndrome), appears when an individual inherits two copies of the same recessive mutation from parents who shared a recent ancestor, like a great-grandparent.Īfter the Pittsburgh massacre, I searched for further info on the genomic scars of anti-Semitism, and quickly found a compelling report in PLOSGenetics. “The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history,” from Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University and his colleagues, is from 2017. The so-called “Jewish genetic diseases” are a legacy of repeated episodes of persecution. The Ashkenazim have managed to survive an undulation of population bottlenecks, a choreography of hatred that has serially strangled the diversity of our gene pool since our origins in the Levant (Egypt, Cyprus, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey) during Biblical times. Accumulation of DNA sequence changes takes time – hence, the molecular clock of evolution. The different mutation rates of different genes are based on the nuances of the DNA base sequence, which affects the likelihood of an error occurring as the DNA replicates, which can in turn replace one DNA base with another. A classic example is the current cheetah population its near genetic uniformity today is a consequence of the ice age that ended about 11,700 years ago and, more recently, poaching.ĭifferences in DNA sequence among modern human genomes provide a backward-ticking “molecular clock,” possible because genes mutate at known and measurable rates. A population bottleneck back then led to much of the genetic similarity seen among modern Ashkenazim.Ī bottleneck is a term from population genetics used to describe the near decimation of a group followed by restoration of numbers from just a few individuals, which amplifies persisting gene variants. Genome-wide signals of past anti-Semitism come from farther back, especially from the near-extinction of the Jews during the Crusades. I cover that story in my gene therapy book.
The elevated frequency of mutations in the gene behind Canavan disease in the U.S., for example, traces back to at least two of the 250 or so souls who survived the massacre in the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania by running into the forest, in September 1943. Nazi Germany’s failed “final solution” left marks in our DNA, from genes to genomes. That’s the case for the Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestry traces back to Eastern Europe, not so very long ago. History books and the media chronicle the hatred and misplaced sense of superiority that fuels destruction of a people, like the remembrances of Kristallnacht. The anniversary comes just 13 days after the massacre of innocents at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, a chilling reminder that the flame of anti-Semitism burns on. Some say the event marked the start of the Holocaust.
Scars of life another tomorrow windows#
Tomorrow is the 80 th anniversary of Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9 and 10, 1938, Storm Troopers, Hitler Youth, and civilians rampaged through Nazi Germany, shattering the windows of more than a thousand synagogues, Jewish homes, and more than 7,000 businesses, arresting 30,000 Jews and transporting them to concentration camps.
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