 |
Syrians are the 17th largest populated state out of the 48
Muslim majority states in the world. They are 90% Muslim of Sunni/Shio'a.
After 1880, many moved into Palestine, saying they were Syrians,
because they were looking for work with the new Russian Jews who were
building. Arabs came from other states as well, and all, Jew and Arab,
were called Palestinians. Arabs kept the name.
Studying the genetic relation between Jews and Syrians showed that the two populations share close affinity. Apparently, the cultural influence of Arab expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean in the seventh century was more prominent than the genetic influx. However, the expansion of Islam did leave an impact on Levantine genes.
Jewish religion and culture can be traced back to Semitic tribes that lived in the Middle East approximately 4,000 years ago. The Babylonian exile in 586 B.C. marked the beginning of major dispersals of Jewish populations from the Middle East and the development of various Jewish communities outside of present-day Israel.
In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested.
Kurdistan is a mountainous region divided among Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Jews went to Kurdistan way back in the time of Ezra (5th century BCE-400s BCE or 2,420 yrs ago).
For populations of the Jewish diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations show significant amounts of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Jews living in the North African, Italian, and Iberian regions show variable frequencies of admixture with the historical non-Jewish population along the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly southern European. Behar and colleagues have remarked on an especially close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians. Some studies show that the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, and the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, while very closely resembling the local populations of their native countries, may have some ancient Jewish descent.
|
 |
The paternal Y-DNA haplogroup J1, (also called the Jewish Cohen gene) which reaches its highest frequencies in Yemen 72.6% and Qatar 58.3%, accounted for 33.6% of Syrians. The J2 group accounted for 20.8% of Syrians; other Y-DNA haplogroups include the E1B1B 12.0%, I 5.0%, R1a 10.0% and R1b 15.0%. These are also common with the Jewish people.
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.
 |
| Ethiopian Jew, Muslim Druse, Christian Arab, Muslim Arab all in IDF of Israel |
In a study of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslim Arabs, more than 70% of the Jewish men and 82% of the Arab men whose DNA was studied, had inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors, who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. "Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool." In relation to the region of the Fertile Crescent, the same study noted; "In comparison with data available from other relevant populations in the region, Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors."
Approximately 35% to 43% of Jewish men are in the paternal line known as haplogroup J and its sub-haplogroups. This haplogroup is particularly present in the Middle East and Southern Europe.
15% to 30% are in haplogroup E1b1b(or E-M35) and its sub-haplogroups which is common in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe.
The Y chromosome of most Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews contains mutations that are common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population, according to a study of haplotypes of the Y chromosome by Michael Hammer, Harry Ostrer and others, published in 2000. According to Hammer et al. this suggests that the paternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East.
Religion drove Levantine Muslims to mix with other Muslim populations, who were close culturally despite the geographic distance, and this produced genetic similarities between Levantine Muslims and Moroccan and Yemeni populations.
Christians and Druze became a genetic isolate in the predominantly Islamic world.
Genetic tests on Syrians were included in many genetic studies. The genetic marker which identifies descendants of the ancient Levantines is found in Syrians in high proportion. Modern Syrians exhibit "high affinity to the Levant" based on studies comparing modern and ancient DNA samples. Syrians cluster closely with ancient Levantine populations of the Neolithic and Bronze ages. A Levantine ancestral genetic component was identified; it is estimated that the Levantine and the Arabian Peninsula/East African ancestral components diverged 23,700-15,500 years ago, while the divergence between the Levantine and European components happened 15,900-9,100 years ago. The Levantine ancestral component is the most recurrent in Levantines (42–68%); the Arabian Peninsula/East African ancestral components represent around 25% of Syrian genetic make-up.
The Syrians are closest to other Levantine populations: the Palestinians, Lebanese and Jordanians; this closeness can be explained with the common Canaanite ancestry and geographical unity which was broken only in the twentieth century with the advent of British and French mandates. Regarding the genetic relation between the Syrians and the Lebanese based on Y-DNA, Muslims from Lebanon show closer relation to Syrians than their Christian compatriots. The people of Western Syria show close relation with the people of Northern Lebanon.
Besides religious identities, the Syrian people are split among three identities, the Arab, Syriac, and Syrian identities. Many Muslims and some Arabic-speaking Christians describe themselves as Arabs, while many Aramaic-speaking Christians and some Muslims prefer to describe themselves as Syriacs or Arameans. Also some people from Syria, mainly Syrian nationalists, describe themselves only as Syrians or ethnic Syrians. Most of the divisions in ethnic nomenclature are actually due to religious backgrounds.
The researchers suggested that the approximately 12.7 percent of Ashkenazic Jews who have the Eu 19 chromosomes -- which are found among between 54 and 60 percent of Eastern European Christians -- descend paternally from eastern Europeans (such as Slavs) or Khazars. But the majority of Ashkenazic Jews, who possess Eu 9 and other chromosomes, descend paternally from Judeans who lived in Israel two thousand years ago. In the article in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics1, Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University of Israel wrote that this new study revealed that Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean (Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians) than to populations in the southern Mediterranean (Arabs and Bedouins).
Our data suggest that Eu 9 originated in the northern part, and Eu 10 in the southern part of the Fertile Crescent. Genetic dating yielded estimates of the expansion of both haplogroups that cover the Neolithic period in the region. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture.
Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin differed from the other Middle Eastern populations studied here, mainly in specific high-frequency Eu 10 haplotypes not found in the non-Arab groups. These chromosomes might have been introduced through migrations from the Arabian Peninsula during the last two millennia.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrians#:~:text=The%20Levantine%20ancestral%20component%20is,accounted%20for%2033.6%25%20of%20Syrians.
https://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6769 abstract
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews
http://www.jcfk.org/insight/132-the-genetic-bonds-between-kurds-and-jews
No comments:
Post a Comment