Yemen and the Yemeni Jews
In my Substack post Under pressure: the paradox of the diamond I said this: The implication of these DNA results is that Yemeni Jews are by and large descended from […]
The Jewish people: genetic unity in diversity
The Western WallThe religion of the Jews has had a great influence on the history of the world. Both Christianity and and Islam look to the Jewish tradition. Figures such as Moses are iconic in the Abrahamic context as lawgivers, setting a precedent fo…
On the semiotics of “Judeo-Christian” as a misdirection
Recently on Twitter there emerged another flare-up of the debate as to whether the term “Judeo-Christian” was coherent, useful, and defensible. In general, I take a very skeptical view of the term, because I think it misleads the public as to the nature of some important facts and dynamics in the history of the West. […]
The Jewish Diaspora: not an empire of the mind
Berber queen?
In light of the previous post you know that I was going to post on the new paper in PNAS, North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Additionally, the press people at Albert Einstein did reach …
Abraham’s genetic threads
Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness:
For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told i…
Clusters where they “shouldn’t be”….
Uyghur girls A few people have pointed me to the paper, Implications for health and disease in the genetic signature of the Ashkenazi Jewish population. You should check it out if you don’t have academic access to papers, it’s not gated. Rather, I want to focus on a methodological issue. In the genetics reader survey […]
The Assyrians and Jews: 3,000 years of common history
2 Kings, 17:
[5] Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.
[6] In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in H…
More Jews, fewer markers
At around the same time that the two big Jewish genetics papers came out, there was another one in BMC Genetics which I had overlooked. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing, but seems like they used 32 STR’s as markers. Their primary finding about Jewish populations was that there was a […]
Jews and genetics
Over at Discover Blogs I have a very long post up on Jews & Genetics. In particular the recent paper in AJHG. One observation I have to make about Jewish genetics: when it comes to PCA plots which illustrate the relationship of Jews, in particular Ashkenazi Jews, to other populations I’ve noticed that two different […]