Jews and Arabs Share Recent Ancestry

  Nadene Goldfoot                                                    

THE OLD JACOB AND ESAU FIGHT CAME AROUND: WE'RE FIGHTING OUR COUSINS

Jacob and Esau were Fraternal twins, sons of Isaac who was the son of Abraham.  This goes back to the 2nd millennium BCE, a good 3,000 years ago.  They were very different and even got into such a fight that Jacob left the homestead and didn't meet up with his twin until about 20 years later and came prepared with presents to hope their disagreements would be forgiven and they could make amends.  Jacob went on to be the father of 12 sons, who were the fathers of the 12 Tribes of Israel (Jacob's name after an out of body experience) changed to Israel.)                                                   

                        It's like Jacob was wrestling with his own soul in what must be done

Israel has a meaning;  that of 'God Contended', 'Wrestles with God', 'Triumphant with God.'  To live through that experience, no wonder he was given this name.

Today, 3,000 some years later, we Jews have returned to our homestead, Israel and find it was not easy.  We had to fight our cousins, the Arabs, to do so.  As it turns out, 73 years later, DNA testing has shown that the Arabs indeed are our very own distant cousins.  Michael Hammer was the chief geneticist on this case and praised the new study for "focusing in detail on the Jewish and Palestinian populations."  They found that 

               Jews and Arabs Share Recent Ancestry.

This is a revelation.  Up until now, tests were not conclusive, and were even discouraging such an idea.  Others were found to be closer, like the Kurds.

My father and his line of males had the Y haplogroup DNA test and were found to have the tag of QBZ67.  Other Jewish men were also carrying the Q1 line, but not a great many. The more common finding was that of the Cohen gene of J1/M267.  which many Arabs also carry.  Come to find out, there are other Arabs carrying Q1 as well including the Bedouins.  Our original finding was that Q1 originated in Siberia, parts of Turkey and migrated toward the Middle East.  Many Native Americans of North and South America bear this tag.  Somewhere, we broke off from them to enter the Middle East instead.

Seven Y chromosome major branches (E3b, G, J1, J2, Q, R1a1, and R1b) that are prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews account for 80 % or more of the total (Behar et al. 2004). Four of these (E3b, G, J1, J2, Q) were part of the ancestral gene pool transmitted by Jews who migrated from the Middle East, whereas R1b and certain sublineages within R1a may have entered the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe.                                     

                     Esau and Jacob talking it over

This new finding about Jews and Arabs being related was told by Ann Gibbons in a science journal/magazine  21 years ago so its not new to the field of science.  The study called it being closely related since it only happened within the last few thousand years ago.  Too bad it wasn't disclosed on LOOK or LIFE MAGAZINE. 

The results match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai.  They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times.  In a recent study of 1,371 men from around the world, geneticist, Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson, found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews!  

Geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men.  Her team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.  many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel  (those taken to Rome in 70 CE maybe?) or( traders even a little earlier??) in the past few generations (1881 Aliyote?).  

Most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer.  The Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they clustered into just 3 of many groups known as haplogroups.  other short segments of DNA called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common ancestors within the past several thousand years.  The study, reported at the Human Origins and Disease conference, will appear in an upcoming issue of Human Genetics. 

Oppenheimer's team found, for example, that Jews have mixed more with European population which makes sense because some of them lived in Europe during the last millennium.  

Resource

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2000/10/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543766/