Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People

by Jon Entine

Book Overview

A riveting scientific detective story crossed with a provocative and controversial re-examination of the meaning of race, ethnicity, and religion. Could our sense of who we are really turn on a sliver... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446580635
• ISBN13: 9780446580632
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Jews and Genetics

This is a racily written amalgam of a book. The hard part of it is about genetics (and this is enlivened by journalistic sketches of some of the scientists involved in the work). As an appetizer, we learn about CMH (the Cohen Modal Haplotype) - 98½% of Jews who describe themselves as Cohanim (the descendants after 3,000 years of the Jewish priesthood in biblical times) do in fact have the same haplotype, compared with only 3% of the general Jewish population. Then the book goes into the history of the Jews, their relations to other peoples and their migrations and dispersions. The early part of this is linked to the accounts in the Bible, with the caveat that the biblical assertion that the Samaritans were not proper Jews was unjustifiable and politically motivated: the Samaritan DNA shows that the lineage of this group is even more homogeneous and over a longer time than that of the Jews who returned from the Babylonian captivity. The fact that from Ezra's time onwards Jewish teaching prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews - reinforced later by Christian rulers also forbidding it - contributes mightily to Jewish genetic identity. However, these prohibitions come relatively late in the history of Jewish genes, and are not likely to have been observed by the earliest male Jews who moved into new areas where there were no Jewish women. In any case, before the prohibitions, Jewish men did often marry non-Jewish women - there are plenty of references to this in the Bible. The male Y chromosome is pretty stable among a majority of Jews, and there is "powerful DNA evidence that Jews from around the world [i.e. whether Sephardi or Ashkenazi] share a common Near or Middle Eastern ancestry". (An exception seem to be some 50% of Ashkenazi Levites whose marker "does not even trace to the Middle East", leaving the possibility that some of these came from Khazars who converted to Judaism and took on the role of junior priests without being descendants of the biblical Levites. But all the Levites make up only 4% of the Jewish population.) Because of these early marriages between Jews and non-Jews, the mitochondrial DNA which comes from the females is more varied than the Y chromosomes which are passed down by Jewish men; and this is likely to account for the fact that some Jews look Middle-Eastern, some European, some Asian etc. Then there is a section describing the many far-fetched myths - some of them current even in this century - of what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, locating them anywhere from Louisiana to Japan. In Africa there are tribes which claim Jewish descent. The best known are the Beta Israel (better known as Falasha) of Ethiopia. Their Judaism must be that of conversion rather than descent, since their DNA does not have any of the most common Jewish genetic markers. The Lemba in Southern Africa, on the other hand, do have such markers; 9% of them even carry the CMH; but among one of their clans, the

Fantastic synthesis

Jon Entine is the rare author who gets the science and the history correct. I am qualified to say the former because I have been involved in DNA research since the mid seventies, when my thesis work was published in the journal Biochemistry on gene expression in developing muscle. I am an amateur concerning the history of the Jewish people, but it has been a focus of much of my reading for the past decade. Therefore, I will concentrate on the author's brilliant framing of the study of race. I have a number of colleagues that study mutations in the human genome that produce blindness, cystic fibrosis, and susceptibility to cancer. In order to receive funding from the overly political funding agencies, I would bet that the word "race" does not appear in their grant applications, even though it is clear from the pioneering work on sickle cell anemia that disease markers are powerful indicators of one's genetic legacy. Publishing articles using the term "race" in many of the leading (politically correct) journals would also meet with knee-jerk rejection. The author explains clearly how the idea that there is no genetic basis for race corrupted the field of population genetics for the past few decades. The author shows intestinal fortitude by naming the culprits central to candy-coating the subject. The author does not spend enough time, however, on founder effects. As a breeder of Norwegian Fjord horses, I understand what it takes to get traits stably integrated into a population. Unfortunately, this subject is only taught at agricultural colleges, and not at prestigious universities and medical schools. Founder effects, coupled with population bottlenecks, can make profound changes to a population's phenotype. The author should have spent more time on this central topic, so that readers could better understand why green-eyed Jews are not the half-breeds that antisemitic groups would claim that they are. Last, the author's writing style is wonderful. The book reads like a well-crafted novel and mixes ancient history, modern sociology, and molecular genetics into an extremely readable book. It is well worth reading.

Meaning in the genes

This weighty work encompasses genetics, history, spirituality, religion and includes travelogues to Israel and Jordan and many interviews. In Part One: IDENTITY, Entine explains how genetics became a personal concern after tragic deaths in his family due to particular gene faults. He calls the tome a story of faith and science, contending that religious identity extends beyond belief. And in a symbolic and literal way, a blood current with its source in the ancient Hebrews runs through Western civilization. The book addresses questions like: Did Abraham, Aaron, Moses and David really exist? What happened to the lost tribes of Israel? Can some modern Jews trace their ancestry to Aaron the High Priest? What happened to Spanish Jews who were forcibly converted during the Spanish Inquisition? What determines Jewishness? and Did people with Israelite ancestry have a hand in building Great Zimbabwe? For those readers who would prefer more concise answers to most of the above questions in a much shorter book, I highly recommend DNA and Tradition: The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman. For those unfamiliar with genetics, Entine provides charming descriptions of the elements involved: Genes: those portions of DNA containing the Recipe of Life Proteins: the sentences Amino Acids: the words Nucleotides: the letters At the outset he touches on the taboos of race, disease and intelligence and returns again to these in Part Three when dealing with the race theories of the 20th century, particularly in chapter 11: The End of Race, where various discredited notions, politics in genetic research, media myths, the sensitive issues of IQ and race and the DNA of identity are discussed. Understandably many people prefer to avoid the subject of racial differences, which would be unwise as DNA research promises tremendous benefits to mankind in the treatment and prevention of diseases. Entine discusses the case of Father William Sanchez of Albuquerque, a Catholic priest whose DNA test revealed Jewish ancestry and more remarkably, the distinct marker of the Cohanim or priests. In chapter 5 he explains what the intriguing Cohen Modal Haplotype is and where it is found. The CMH is a distinct marker on the Y (male) chromosome (passed unchanged from father to son) first identified in Jewish males from both Ashkenazi and Sephardi backgrounds in a famous 1990s study and confirmed in subsequent research. "Modal" means "most common" thus the CMH is a DNA marker found in most males with the surname Cohen and its many variants or who are from families with a priestly oral tradition. Less than 10% of other Jewish males carry this marker which is guestimated to have first appeared between 3180 and 2650 years ago. To come back to Part One (Entine is a hyperactive writer expert at interweaving different subjects in his narrative), he discusses the work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, author of The History and Geography of Human Genes. Chapter 4: Eve and

Another Home Run for Jon Entine

Jon Entine has hit another home run with "Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People." In this informative, well researched and at times controversial analysis of the aforementioned topics, Entine has managed to take what could have been a dry science lesson and brought it to life with a compelling story line that ties together the various threads of religion, history, genetics and geneology. In some narrative sections, it actually had me in tears. It's evocative of Hillel Halkin's "Across the Sabbath River" in its search for Jewish identity. This is a must read for anyone who's searching for their origins and a great read even for those who are secure in their origins and identity.

Abraham's Children by Jon Entine

This book was everything I had hoped it would be and more. Being an amateur genealogist and having just recently found out from a male Y chromosome Haplogroup DNA test what our grouping is, I was looking forward to finding out more about my family and did. Throughout the book I kept thinking that Jon Entine had done a fantastic job researching so much history and his DNA facts are up to date with the latest research in an area that is growing very fast. He speaks about the latest DNA tests in African tribes that share the Coheneem DNA. Anyone whose hobby is genealogy and extending to DNA results would appreciate this book.