MORE ON JEWS AND GENES
Wandering Jews share genetic traits
By CHUCK BENNETT
Jews really are a tribe.
The Chosen People have more than 5,000 years of history and culture in common — they also share distinct genetic traits linking them by blood throughout the millennia, a new study found.
A genome analysis of 237 Jews representing the world’s three major Diaspora Jewish populations — Eastern Europe’s Ashkenazim; Southern Europe’s and Turkey’s Sephardim; and Syria, Iran and Iraq’s Mizrahim — found they are all genetically linked.
While the Jews studied also shared genetic traits with the surrounding gentile populations, they all had the same Middle Eastern ancestry, according to the study, “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“We found that Jewish communities created their own genetic clusters,” study co-author Gil Atzmon, a genetics professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told The Post.
“The Jewish communities share much more [genetic information] between Jews rather than non-Jews in the same geographic area,” he added.
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