Are Taliban a Lost Tribe of Israel?

["David Altman" <altman_d@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lenin would have clipped all extraneous text before replying to a message, so should you.
~~~~~~~~~
This idea isn't as wacky as it may seem.  The article in the NY from which 
the following is exerpted got a lot of attention when it came out a couple 
of years ago..

Dave Altman

.....

May 9, 1999

Group in Africa Has Jewish Roots, DNA Indicates

By NICHOLAS WADE

he Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, have a tradition that 
they were led out of Judea by a man named Buba. They practice circumcision, 
keep one day a week holy and avoid eating pork or piglike animals, such as 
the hippopotamus. 

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be 
descended from Biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish 
connection. And there is no Buba in the records of Jewish history. 

But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly 
right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their 
male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, 
the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The priestly 
genetic signature is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the 
senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan. 

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the 
intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by 
geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth 
there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of 
Aaron, the elder brother of Moses. 

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center 
for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. 
Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, believes that 
he has discovered Senna, the mysterious northern city from which Lemba 
tradition maintains they came, and that he can retrace their steps from 
Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago. 

The genetic side of the story began when Dr. Karl Skorecki, a kidney expert 
at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was sitting in a synagogue 
in Toronto. Skorecki, who is a priest, wondered if a fellow cohen who was 
being called to attend the first Torah reading might be distantly related to 
him, as the tradition of priestly descent from Aaron implied. 

He called Dr. Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona, an expert who 
studies the genetics of human populations through the male or Y chromosome. 
Unlike the other chromosomes, the genetic material on the Y chromosome is 
not shuffled every generation, obscuring the lines of individual descent. Y 
chromosomes are bequeathed from father to son, more or less unchanged apart 
from the occasional mutation. 

The mutations are particularly helpful for reconstructing population history 
because each lineage of men has its own distinctive pattern of mutations. It 
was a Y chromosome study last year that confirmed the oral tradition among 
the descendants of the slave Sally Hemings that their ancestor was Thomas 
Jefferson, the nation's third President. 

Hammer, Skorecki and their colleagues reported in 1997 that they had 
analyzed the Y chromosomes of priests and lay Jews (priests, a hereditary 
caste, are different from rabbis and also from Levites). They found that a 
particular pattern of DNA changes was much more common among the priests 
than among laymen. The pattern was equally recognizable in Ashkenazic and 
Sephardic priests, even though these two branches of the Jewish population 
have long been geographically separated. 

A colleague in Hammer's and Skorecki's research was Neil Bradman, a 
businessman who is now chairman of the Center for Genetic Anthropology at 
University College, London. Bradman set about making a wider study of Jewish 
populations around the world through the lens of the Y chromosome 
technique. 

One recruit to Bradman's project is David B. Goldstein, a population 
geneticist at Oxford University in England. Goldstein set about refining 
Hammer's work so as to develop a better genetic signature of Jewish 
populations. 

"The problem is there has been intermingling with host populations, and that 
has obscured their common ancestry," Goldstein said. 

He looked at a set of three Y chromosome sites with stable genetic mutations 
and six sites at which mutations occur quite often, a mix designed to give 
good resolution between similar Y chromosomes during historical times. The 
mutations are all at sites that lie outside the genes, and thus do not 
contribute in any way to the individual's physical makeup. 

He found a particular set of genetic mutations at these nine sites that was 
strongly associated with the priestly caste, not so common among lay Jews, 
and very rare among non-Jewish populations. Unlike forensic DNA markers, 
which are chosen to be almost wholly specific to individuals, this 
cohen-associated genetic signature cannot be used to say who is or who is 
not a priest. But it is highly diagnostic of whether a population has Jewish 
ancestry, Goldstein said. 

He finds that 45 percent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 percent of Sephardic 
priests have the cohen genetic signature, while in Jewish populations in 
general the frequency is 3 to 5 percent. 

Some of his subjects had the cohen genetic signature but with slight 
variations caused by mutations. From the pattern and number of mutations, 
Goldstein was able to calculate when the present day bearers of the cohen 
genetic signature and its variations last shared a common ancestor. This 
date, when all the branches of the family tree coalesce into a single trunk, 
has a wide range of uncertainty and depends on several assumptions, like the 
number of years in a human generation and the rate of mutation. But assuming 
25 years to a generation on average, Goldstein calculated the coalescence 
time as 2,650 years ago, or 3,180 years with a 30-year generation time. 

Though they are only rough, these dates make an evocative match with the 
Jewish tradition that Moses assigned the priesthood to the male descendants 
of his brother Aaron after the Exodus from Egypt, believed to have occurred 
some 3,000 years ago. Goldstein and colleagues published this conclusion 
last July. 

"In studying the priesthood, we happened into this tool for distinguishing 
Jewish from non-Jewish populations," Goldstein said. As part of Bradman's 
project on the relationship of Jewish populations, he then tested DNA 
samples collected from the Lemba. And last month, at a conference on human 
evolution held at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, 
Goldstein reported that 9 percent of Lemba men carried the cohen genetic 
signature, and of those who said they belonged to the Buba clan, 53 percent 
had the distinctive sequences. These proportions are similar to those found 
among the major Jewish populations. 

Because the cohen genetic signature is rare or absent in all non-Jewish 
populations tested so far, the findings support the Lemba tradition of 
Jewish ancestry. Goldstein said his findings would be published in the 
American Journal of Human Genetics.


. . .



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