Was a Jefferson ancestor Jewish? -- genetic puzzle

[XemaSab]

Researchers studying Thomas Jefferson's Y chromosome have found it belongs to a lineage that is rare in Europe but common in the Middle East, raising the possibility that the third president of the United States had a Jewish ancestor many generations ago.

No biological samples of Jefferson remain, but his Y chromosome, the genetic element that determines maleness, is assumed to be the same as that carried by living descendants of Field Jefferson, his paternal uncle. These relatives donated cells for an inquiry into whether Jefferson had fathered a hidden family with his slave Sally Hemings, a possibility that most historians had scoffed at.

-------

Jefferson's Y chromosome belongs to the branch designated K2, which is quite rare. It occurs in a few men in Spain and Portugal and is most common in the Middle East and eastern Africa, being carried by about 10 percent of men in Oman and Somalia, the geneticists report in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/28/MNGG7OCIFQ1.DTL

[kestrel91316]

1. Perhaps a Spanish ancestor whose family were "secret Jews"?

During the Inquisition, Ferdinand and Isabella told the Jews to convert or die, and many who converted only did for show. Eventually most retained few, if any, Jewish traditions and were essentially assimilated into the Catholic population.

[valerief]

2. I thought Jewish was a religion. nt

[Hekate]

5. It's also a gene-pool reinforced by marriage restrictions

Which is why there's a Jewish "look" just as there is an Irish "look".

Obviously those tribal marriage laws aren't 100% effective, as you can see by looking at modern Israelis, whose parents and grandparents came from not only the Mid-East but from all over the European continent and Africa as well.

There's more to it, but that's the gist.

Hekate

[Hekate]

3. We are all 6th cousins, or something like that, so nothing would surprise me. nt

Or maybe our consaguinity is a little more removed... but for all that there are so many billions of us now there were far fewer ancestors, and they are common ancestors to all of us.

And yes, if any of Jefferson's ancestors were Moranos -- or if someone married a willing convert ... we're all related.

Hekate

[BenDavid]

4. I am amused by all

the research that goes in to finding out whether someone has a linkage to being Jewish. What is the big deal? You either is or you ain't....I is and proud to be, but maybe George Allen need not be a tribe member :nopity:

[Up2Late]

8. Not exactly, it depends who you ask or is asking the question.

Because, to a Nazi, I'm Jewish (Father's side), but ask a Rabbi and I'm not. My Mother was Irish-Catholic and I was raised Roman-Catholic. I now consider myself a Buddhist.

My family tree was full of Jews, non-religious Jews and non-Jews. Unfortunately, Hitler's final solution took care of most of that "problem." :-(

[Ignacio Upton]

15. If you're mom is Jewish, then you are officially Jewish

But "Jewish" is one of the few areas that can be an ethnicity (or quasi-ethnicity) in addition to being a religion.

[XemaSab]

16. I'm not Jewish, but it's interesting and surprising

to think that Jewish people were influential in the founding of the country, instead of just a bunch of crusty old English WASPs and a handful of slaves.

[Up2Late]

21. This might interest you then...

I think this might be how my Jewish ancestors came to Georgia before the Civil War, but I haven't researched it yet, so I don't know for sure.

<http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0798/savannah1.asp>

...Jews were an integral part of Savannah from its very foundation. The second boatload of colonists to land in Georgia, five months after James Ogelthorpe's original English settlers, was a group of 42 Jewish settlers who arrived on July 11, 1773, on a ship chartered by London's Sephardic synagogue.

The Jewish colonists thrived and in a few years numbered over 100 souls. For a period in the late 1740s, they were actually the majority settlers in the Georgia Colony....

[Chemical Bill]

22. The first Jews in Rhode Island came in 1658.

The oldest synagogue in the country that still stands was built in Newport before the revolution.

http://www.tourosynagogue.org/about.php

Check out what George Washington had to say:

http://www.tourosynagogue.org/GWLetter1.php

Rhode Island was founded to assure religious freedom to all. That's why everybody else hated us. ;-)

Bill

[Lurking Dem]

23. This was my family Temple

the members of who came via Charleston from Morocco:


http://www.templesinaisumter.com/


They don't show them in the pictures but each stained glass panel is dedicated to a member of my family.

This is the Temple in Charleston. My 2 greats grandfather was one of the founders of Jewish Reform and Penina Moise (mentioned in the text) was my 2 or 3 greats aunt.

http://www.kkbe.org/history.html

[barb162]

18. I am not so amused

As I suspect closet anti-Jewish stuff going on when I see articles like this. Why, for example, doesn't the article reference the major parts of his ancestry, rather than this one descendant several generations back. hmmmmm.

[XemaSab]

26. It sounds to me like they're looking at the Y chromosome.

The Y chromosome is a way to trace back male ancestors ad infinitum. The hitch is that you have to be male to have your ancestry traced in this way.

The flip side of this is looking at the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through the mother.

So you can trace your mother's mother's mother's mother, or your father's father's father (if you're a man), but tracing your mother's father or your father's mother is a challenge.

[Mend]

6. sounds like he had an African ancestor, a black one like his

slaves.

[anotherdrew]

7. "common in the Middle East" so maybe he had an Arab ancestor

of course that's not stated in the article

[Vidar]

9. Who the hell cares? We're all related at some level.

[martymar64]

10. going that far back . . .

It could be one of many ethnicities , from Moors, Berbers, Ethiopians, Arabs, Jews, Bantu, Roman, Carthaginian, etc. It's a pretty wide family tree for anybody, even if its just counting one side. National Geographic now has a program where you can have your own lineage traced via DNA.

[martymar64]

11. Going that far back . . .

It could be one of many ethnicities , from Moors, Berbers, Ethiopians, Arabs, Jews, Bantu, Roman, Carthaginian, etc. It's a pretty wide family tree for anybody, even if its just counting one side. National Geographic now has a program where you can have your own lineage traced via DNA.

[youngdem]

12. I thought all Christians claimed Jewish ancestry

:shrug:

[manic expression]

13. I hope not

that would be laughable. Christians probably claim a spiritual Jewish "heritage" via their Judeo-Christian religion, but to claim ethnic heritage would be insipid (at best). I think it has to do with the fact that Christianity comes out of the Jewish religious tradition.

[Alexander]

14. Not since Paul/Saul of Tarsus argued Gentiles can be Christians too.

Circa 60 AD, I think.

[rocktivity]

19. CHRIST certainly claimed Jewish ancestry!

rocknation

[Retrograde]

25. well, his mother *was* Jewish...

that part at least seems non-contested

[antiimperialist]

29. Not the indigenous people of the Americas, forced into Christianity

by the Conquistadores, or black slaves forced into Christianity as well.

[Lurking Dem]

33. Yet to believe in Christianity

one must accept Adam and Eve, no? So if you go back far enough, everyone is Jewish! ;-)

[barb162]

17. I wonder why the author brings up "Jewish" when it could be

any number of Semitic ethnicities.
"Hammer said he would "hazard a guess at Sephardic Jewish ancestry" for Jefferson, although any such interpretation was highly tentative."

[BenDavid]

20. Well, all I know is I was

riding a Greyhound bus back in the day through Texas, and this lovely lady got on the bus and sat down beside me. I noticed that she was distraught for some reason, and I said to her, "Excuse me but is there something wrong that I could help you with". She looked at me and said, "While I was in Texas I was wanting to make love to a Jewish cowboy".....and I looked at her and said "Mam, hello my name is Bucky Goldstein."

[Spider Jerusalem]

24. A VERY distant ancestor, perhaps.

Or, perhaps, it was some conscripted Roman soldier from somewhere in the Mediterranean or Northern Africa who served in the legions in Britain, and fathered a son with a local woman. Which is really equally likely.

And it's kind of a silly question anyway; given the sheer number of ancestors one has, say, 50 or 60 generations ago (far in excess of the number of humans who've ever lived), there's almost no chance at all that anyone of European, Middle Eastern or Northern African descent DOESN'T have at least some Jewish ancestry.

[XemaSab]

27. It's been roughly 80 generations since year 0

Everyone has two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents.

Quite frankly, if you look at the number 2 to the eightieth, it's a little embarrassing how many cousins must have been involved in bringing me here today. :blush:

[Spider Jerusalem]

31. The standard genealogists use is 30 years per generation...

so around 70, more or less--although the number of intervening generations from a given ancestor to their descendants, even in the same generation, can vary considerably; it could be as few as 60 or as many as 90 back to the year 1 AD for a given person (female lines involve more generations, generally speaking).

And even going back just 40 generations (to around 1000 AD or so) one has over a trillion ancestors (which is about 5000 times greater than the total number of humans in 1000 AD). Given that people's ancestors WEREN'T just random people from all over Europe (or Asia, or Africa), but instead were mostly German or English or Irish (or Chinese, or Inuit, or whatever), that means that most of any given person's ancestry is going to involve a tremendous amount of inbreeding (but at the same time, almost any person of English, or Irish, or French, or whatever European ethnic ancestry is probably ALSO going to be descended from Vikings, Normans, Anglo-Saxons, Magyars, Poles, Spanish Moors, Byzantine Greeks, Central Asian nomads, Goths and Vandals and Franks, and so on, because the genetic legacy of the exogamous marriages of the royalty and nobility eventually filtered down to the general population after several centuries). Go back far enough, and we're all cousins.

[XemaSab]

32. But the totally fascinating part

is that another Swede from the same part of Sweden my people come from (for example) is probably going to be related MANY times over... cousins hundreds of different ways... if not thousands. :P

At that point one almost BEGS for some Moorish or Mongol blood just to be less inbred. :scared:

[antiimperialist]

28. I hate when the media asks questions instead of answering them

"Was a Jefferson ancestor Jewish?
Well you tell me, you dumbass newspaper. I'm the reader! Investigate, or shut up.

[cambie]

30. DNA shows that we al have

fish in our ancestry if we take it back further. Too bad that most of the population never evolved far enough to understand anything Jefferson wrote.

[Bosso 63]

34. Melungeons?

I don't know much about them, but a possibility.

[Bridget Burke]

35. Or his ancestor could have been Muslim....

But they probably went North many centuries before Mohammad was born--or even before Abraham got the Message. People have been traveling by sea for thousands of years. Even if they don't settle, sailors eagerly spread their genetic material when they hit land! From another article:

Professor Jobling told BBC News: "Finding that Jefferson's Y chromosome was one mutational step away from an Egyptian type makes you think 'crikey, could he have a relatively recent origin in the Middle East?'

"Our point is that we find, at lower frequencies, French, British and Iberian K2s and they are jolly diverse. His fits into that picture of a west European sub-population of K2."

The DNA sequences of individual K2s - including those from Europe - are quite different from one another.

This "genetic diversity" has to accumulate over time, supporting the idea that Jefferson's haplogroup is not a recent introduction into Europe.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6332545.stm

The article mentions that Jefferson claimed Welsh ancestry. There are genetic & cultural links among the sea-facing peoples of the British Isles & Europe. Some of those cultural links have been called "Celtic"--but they go back far earlier than the arrival of the Celts in the West. (Or the arrival of a small group of Celtic elite--archaeology & genetics have not proven a fullscale invasion of the British Isles.) Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe wrote Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000 BC-AD 1500.
www.amazon.com/Facing-Ocean-Atlantic-Peoples-BC-AD/dp/0199240191/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-6060729-8091140?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1172863551&sr=1-2

As for the Middle Eastern link? In Medieval English Literature, we were told that Irish monasticism was influenced by Egyptian monasticism. Why the heck didn't I ask the professor how the Egyptians got to Ireland--or the Irish to Egypt?* They surely didn't walk. Bob Quinn's The Atlantean Irish: Ireland's Oriental & Maritime Heritage gives some possible answers. Many of his ideas would apply to Wales.
www.lilliputpress.ie/listbook.html?oid=2733139

No, the book doesn't have anything to do with Atlantis! Quinn is an inspired amateur, rather than an academic. But Barry Cunliffe (ahem, that's Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford) wrote the preface to this edition.

The more we know about genetics, the more complex things get. And any talk of a "pure" race is even more obvious balderdash than it ever was.
-----

* And why the heck didn't I ask why were studying translations from the Irish in an English literature course?

[kitty1]

36. There was a vast trade in tin between the Phonecians and the...

Cornish people in ancient times. This trade was abundant for many years until the Romans got in on this nicely kept secret and took their share.
That mixture contributed to the people of Cornwall having an apparent Mediteranean mix to them which is evident even today.
A good portion of the population is tall and dark, and have other physical qualities like that of the Mediterranean people.
Cornwall borders on Wales in proximity.
The Ancient Cornwish language has similar roots to that of the Chaldean and Phonecian language as well.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

37. That may be the connection

It makes sense to me anyway...
Thanks for the info. :hi: