Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 277
ancient migration from the northern Fertile Crescent to the area of Canaan
(the patriarch Abraham famously "made aliyah" from southern Iraq). Was
it possible that the finding corroborated the thesis that the Jews descended
from the Khazars, rather than from the seed of the venerable Abraham?
Speaking by telephone from Stanford University in the United States, the
respected scientist Professor Marc Feldman assured the correspondent that
there was no need to reach such an extreme conclusion—the particular mutation
in the Y chromosome of the Kurds, Armenians and Jews was also found
in other peoples in the region of the Fertile Crescent, not necessarily in the
Khazars, people forgotten by God and history.
Barely a year later, Haaretz came up with a new report. It was now quite
certain that the Jewish males originated in the Near East, but with respect to Jewish
women the investigation had run into an awkward difficulty. 41 A new scientific
study that investigated the mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited only from the
mother) in nine Jewish communities discovered that the origin of the supposedly
kosher Jewish women did not lie in the Near East at all. This worrisome finding
showed that "each community had a small number of founding mothers," but they
were not interconnected at all. The uncomfortable explanation was that Jewish
men had come from the Near East unattached and were forced to take local wives,
whom they undoubtedly converted to Judaism in the proper manner.
This last dubious revelation worried those rooting for the Jewish gene, and
a doctoral dissertation apparently began to be written at the Haifa Technion,
concluding that in spite of the ancient mothers' scandalous disrespect for
Jewish uniqueness, some 40 percent of all the Ashkenazis in the world
descend from four matriarchs (as in the Bible). Haaretz, as always, reported
the discovery faithfully and extensively. Maariv, a more popular daily, added
that those ancient grandmothers "were born about 1,500 years ago in Eretz
Israel, from whence their families migrated to Italy, later to the Rhine and the
Champagne regions." 42
A summary of this reassuring dissertation by Doron Behar about
"Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA" was published in the American Journal of
Human Genetics. 43 Its supervisor was Karl Skorecki, a veteran researcher in
Jewish genetics. This Orthodox professor, who came to the Technion's medical
41 Tamara Traubman, "The Ancient Jewish Males Have Origins in the Middle East:
The Origin of the Females Is Still a Mystery," Haaretz, 16 May 2002.
42 Tamara Traubman, "40% of the Ashkenazis Descend From Four Mothers," Haaretz,
January 14, 2006; Alex Doron, "40% of the Ashkenazis: Descendants of Four Mothers from
the 6th Century," Maariv, January 3, 2006.
43 Doron M, Behar et al., "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a
Recent Founder Event," American Journal of Human Genetics 78 (2006), 487-97,