New studies show that Jews and Palestinians are both descendants of the ancient Jewish people

20 Jun, 2010
 None    Politics


By Damien Marsic, PhD

By Damien Marsic, PhD

It has long been known that Jewish and Middle-Eastern populations were genetically related, thanks to numerous studies of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA. The recent development of DNA microarray technology allowed much finer genetic studies of human populations, by analyzing hundreds of thousands of nucleotides across the human genome. Last year, one such genome-wide study (1) revealed a distinct genetic signature for Ashkenazi Jews and suggested a Near-Eastern origin. Since then, two genome-wide studies, the first to include several Jewish populations, were published just a few days ago by two different teams (2, 3). Both confirmed a common Middle-Eastern ancestry for most worldwide Jewish populations, bringing an end to speculations that modern Jews could be mostly descended from converts with no link to the ancient Hebrews. However, there is another inescapable conclusion from those studies, that the authors did not address: Palestinians are genetically as close or closer to any modern Jewish population than are those Jewish populations to each other. In other words, genetic data is totally consistent with the idea that Palestinians are the direct descendants of ancient Jews who never left their ancestral land and who later converted to Christianity and to Islam (4, 5).

Behar's study, which is the most detailed, revealed that most Jewish populations (except Ethiopian and Indian Jews who are more closely related to their host populations) form a cluster with modern Middle-Eastern populations. There are actually three Jewish sub-clusters, one including Ashkenazi and Sephardi populations, another including Iraqi, Iranian and Caucasian Jews, and a third comprising Yemeni Jews. Remarkably, the Palestinian sub-cluster is located exactly in the middle of the three Jewish sub-clusters, suggesting that modern Palestinians are possibly even more closely related genetically to the ancient Hebrews than many modern Jews. In addition, any of the three Jewish sub-clusters is closer to the Palestinian sub-cluster than to the other two Jewish sub-clusters. This implies that if one considers Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Iraqi, Iranian, Caucasus and Yemeni Jews to all be part of the same Jewish people, then, from a genetic point of view, the Palestinians are an integral part of it.
