From: "brat_olin" <brat_olin@yahoo.com>
Subject: GENY! (Lewiccy vs. Kochanscy)
Date: 7 stycznia 2010 17:05

Stare ale jare.  I chyba nigdy na sciepie nie bylo, choc wazkie:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/science/27GENE.html

Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 27, 2003

A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found
an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of
Ashkenazi descent. The signature is thought to have originated in Central
Asia, not the Near East, which is the ancestral home of Jews. The finding
raises the question of how the signature became so widespread among the
Levites, an ancient caste of hereditary Jewish priests.

The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a
few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago, just
as the Ashkenazim were beginning to be established in Europe. Ashkenazim,
from whom most American Jews descend, are one of the two main branches of
Jews, the other being the Sephardim, whose ancestors were expelled from
Spain.

The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of
Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United
States and England, who have been studying the genetics of Jewish
communities for the last six years.

They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular
genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found
less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the
Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe
whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the
researchers suggest.

Their reasoning is that the signature, a set of DNA variations known as
R1a1, is common in the region north of Georgia that was once occupied by the
Khazar kingdom. The signature did reach the Near East, probably before the
founding of the Jewish community, but it is still rare there. The scholars
say they cannot exclude the possibility that a Jewish founder brought the
signature on his Y chromosome to the Ashkenazi population, but they consider
that a less likely explanation.

The present descendants of the Khazars have not been identified. Dr. Michael
Hammer of the University of Arizona, one of the authors of the report, said
he was looking among the Chuvash, a Turkic-speaking people of the Volga
Valley, to see if they might have contributed the R1a1 signature.

Dr. Shaye Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard
University, said he could see no problem with outsiders being converted to
the Jewish community. He said he considered it less probable, however, that
outsiders would become Levites, let alone founding members of the Levite
community in Europe. The connection with the Khazars is "all hypothesis," he
said.

Even if the Khazar hypothesis is correct, it would have no practical effect
on who is a Levite today. "Genetics is not a reality under rabbinic law,"
Dr. Cohen said. "Second, the function of Levites is so minimal it doesn't
mean anything."

Six years ago Dr. Hammer and Dr. Karl Skorecki, of the Technion and Rambam
Medical Center in Haifa, looked at the Y chromosomes of both Levites and
Cohanim. Both are hereditary priesthoods passed from father to son. They
were important in ancient Israel, but sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500
their functions were taken over by rabbis, and Jewish status came to be
defined by the biologically more reliable standard of maternal descent.

If the patrilineal descent of the two priestly castes had indeed been
followed as tradition describes, then all Cohanim should be descended from
Aaron, the brother of Moses, and all Levites from Levi, the third son of the
patriarch Jacob. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki found that more than half the
Cohanim, in both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities, did indeed carry
the same genetic signature on their Y chromosome. Their ancestor lived some
3,000 years ago, based on genetic calculations, and may indeed have been
Aaron, Dr. Skorecki said.

But the picture among the Levites was less clear, suggesting that they had a
mixed ancestry. Dr. Hammer and Dr. Skorecki returned to the puzzle for their
new report, based on data gathered from nearly 1,000 men of Ashkenazi and
Sephardi origin and neighboring non-Jewish populations.

They found that the dominant signature among the Levites was the R1a1
signature, which is different from the Cohanim signature. The paternal
ancestry of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Levites is different, unlike the
Cohanim from the two branches, who resemble each other and presumably
originated before the two branches split. And the ancestor of the R1a1
signature apparently lived 2,000 years more recently than the founder of the
Cohanim signature.

The Levites' pedigree does not seem to accord with tradition as well as the
Cohanim one does but is venerable nonetheless. "How many people can trace
their ancestry back to the 17th century, let alone a thousand years?" Dr.
Hammer said.

--
Smart questions to stupid answers

To stare opracowania. Wiele tych bzdur na temat Cohenow i cholera wie kogo to prostu nieporozumienie. Na ustalenia trzeba jeszcze poczekac pare lat. Z tym ze wtedy bylo latwo wyniki interpretowac jak sie komu podobalo, jednak w pozniejszym czasie okazalo sie ze to troche nie trzyma sie kupy.
awe