Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations SHARE a Common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes
PNAS
(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
""... A series of analyses was performed to address whether modern Jewish Y-chromosome diversity derives mainly from a common Middle Eastern source population or from admixture with neighboring non-Jewish populations during and after the Diaspora.
Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were Not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.
Admixture estimates suggested Low levels of European Y-chromosome gene flow into Ashkenazi and Roman Jewish communities.
A multidimensional scaling plot placed six of the seven Jewish populations in a relatively Tight cluster that was interspersed with Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations, including Palestinians and Syrians.
Pairwise differentiation tests further indicated that these Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations were not statistically different.
The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora....."
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Evidence for Common Jewish Origins.
Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors.
First, six of the seven Jewish populations analyzed here formed a relatively tight cluster in the MDS analysis (Fig. 2). The only exception was the Ethiopian Jews, who were affiliated more closely with non-Jewish Ethiopians and other North Africans. Our results are consistent with other studies of Ethiopian Jews based on a variety of markers (16, 23, 46). However, as in other studies where Ethiopian Jews exhibited markers that are characteristic of both African and Middle Eastern populations, they had Y-chromosome haplotypes (e.g., haplotypes Med and YAP+4S) that were common in other Jewish populations.
Second, despite their high degree of geographic dispersion, Jewish populations from Europe, North Africa, and the Near East were less diverged genetically from each other than any other group of populations in this study (Table 2). The statistically significant correlation between genetic and geographic distances in our non-Jewish populations from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa is suggestive of spatial differentiation, whereas the lack of such a correlation for Jewish populations is more compatible with a model of recent dispersal and subsequent isolation during and after the Diaspora..""
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Middle Eastern Affinities.
A Middle Eastern origin of the Jewish gene pool is generally assumed because of the detailed documentation of Jewish history and religion. There are not many genetic studies that have attempted to infer the genetic relationships among Diaspora Jews and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations. A number of earlier studies found evidence for Middle Eastern affinities of Jewish genes (4, 5, 7, 51); however, results have depended to a great extent on which loci were being compared, possibly because of the confounding effects of selection (4). Although the NRY tends to behave as a single genetic locus (52), the DNA results presented here are less likely to be biased by selective effects.
The extremely close affinity of Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations observed here (Tables 2 and 3)
supports the hypothesis of a common Middle Eastern origin. Of the Middle Eastern populations included in this study, only the Syrian and Palestinian samples mapped within the central cluster of Jewish populations (Fig. 2)...."
again, above excerpted from the longer:
Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes ? PNAS
