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

Jon Entine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 24, 2007

Could our sense of who we are really turn on a sliver of DNA? In our multiethnic world, questions of individual identity are becoming increasingly unclear. Now in ABRAHAM'S CHILDREN bestselling author Jon Entine vividly brings to life the profound human implications of the Age of Genetics while illuminating one of today's most controversial topics: the connection between genetics and who we are, and specifically the question "Who is a Jew?"

Entine weaves a fascinating narrative, using breakthroughs in genetic genealogy to reconstruct the Jewish biblical tradition of the chosen people and the hereditary Israelite priestly caste of Cohanim. Synagogues in the mountains of India and China and Catholic churches with a Jewish identity in New Mexico and Colorado provide different patterns of connection within the tangled history of the Jewish diaspora. Legendary accounts of the Hebrew lineage of Ethiopian tribesmen, the building of Africa's Great Zimbabwe fortress, and even the so-called Lost Tribes are reexamined in light of advanced DNA technology. Entine also reveals the shared ancestry of Israelites and Christians.

As people from across the world discover their Israelite roots, their riveting stories unveil exciting new approaches to defining one's identity. Not least, Entine addresses possible connections between DNA and Jewish intelligence and the controversial notion that Jews are a "race apart." ABRAHAM'S CHILDREN is a compelling reinterpretation of biblical history and a challenging and exciting illustration of the promise and power of genetic research.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jewish law is quite clear on the question "Who is a Jew?" (anyone whose mother is Jewish), yet the question remains vexing, calling up issues of religion, history, culture and sometimes politics. In his second foray into the world of genetics and race, Entine (an American Enterprise Institute fellow and author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It) shows the degree to which genetics has been thrown into the mix. He presents fascinating evidence from DNA studies: the genes of Jewish males around the world can be traced back to the ancient Middle East; the genes of Jewish women cannot. Among Africans who claim Jewish ancestry, the Falashas of Ethiopia do not have Jewish genetic markers; but the less well known Lemba of South Africa do. A majority of cohanim, or priests, have a common genetic marker, but Levites (of whom priests are supposedly a subset) do not. But Entine can be sloppy (his grasp on the respective roles of high priests, priests and Levites is shaky; he seems unclear whether the Pilgrims were Quakers or Puritans), and he digresses from science to potted history, myths about the 10 Lost Tribes and an account of his trip to the West Bank. More problematic, his account of genetic science and DNA analysis is vague. Entine's final chapters broach the contentious topics of whether one can speak genetically of race and whether "Jewish genes" confer intellectual superiority on Ashkenazi Jews. While he cites scientists, some of the assumptions and conclusions (such as that medieval Jews' role as moneylenders contributed to a high IQ) are speculative.
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Review

Entine (Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, 2000) tackles the thorny matter of Jewish identity. Some of his conclusions may be surprising.

The author, a secular Jew and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been driven by family health crises to seek out the genetics of Judaism. In doing so, he unravels an epic tale of "The Chosen People." DNA acts as a starting point for discussion of Jewish origins--Chapter 1 is entitled, "The Dead Sea Scrolls of DNA"--as Entine explains how it is now possible through genetic testing for apparent non-Jews to discover Jewish ancestry, and for Jews (and others) to learn more about their origins. The author disputes conventional wisdom, which cautious scientists have advanced recently, that genetic differences between individuals are minute and superficial. Instead, he embraces genetics as a method of discovering more about the diverse breadth of humanity. Nevertheless, Entine realizes that Jewish DNA does not necessarily make a Jew. To explore the question of Jewish origins, Entine takes the reader on a global tour, exploring both mythic and factual migrations of Jews across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and finally into the Americas. DNA testing has allowed scientists to explore the validity of direct ancestry claims for far-flung Jewish communities in such places as South Africa and India, while it has also identified hidden enclaves of "crypto-Jews" in places such as the American Southwest. Entine goes on to discuss the touchy subject of race, and how Jewish identity has been perceived by both Jews and non-Jews through recent history and into the present. He also bluntly approaches modern (and historic) stereotypes of Jews and offers possible reasons for their formation, as well as their potential validity in certain cases. Because the author's approach is broad and inclusive, the book is sure to cause controversy, but it serves as an excellent catalyst for discussion as many continue to ask the question, "What does it mean to be Jewish?"

Engaging and informative reading for Jews and non-Jews alike. -- Kirkus Reviews

This book informs us of who were are, how we got here, and, why we do what we do. New methods of genetic study turn up fascinating connections and differences between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, not only in language and customs, but also in DNA. For example, studies of women's diseases show that one group has a higher incidence of breast cancer, and the other, a higher incidence of cervical cancer. Maps detail migration routes, and chapters discuss the history and rituals of various tribes and families. The book is full of information and it is a fascinating popular read. Highly recommended. -- Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter, September/October. Reviewed by Lee Wixman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (October 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446580635
• ISBN-13: 978-0446580632
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #424,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 74 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic synthesis December 31, 2007

By Jay A. Haron

Format:Hardcover

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.

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Jews and Genetics February 13, 2008

By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition

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) - 98˝% 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 Buba, it is as high as 53%. And the CMH is also prominent among the 4,000 or so Bene Israel group of Jews, living near Mumbai (Bombay) in India.

Certain diseases are known as "Jewish diseases" because of the high incidence of them among Jews (perhaps intensified by inbreeding) and because they are very much rarer among non-Jews. One disconcerting result is that the descendants of converts from Judaism often discover their Jewish ancestry because they develop these diseases. This is the case, for example, among many Spanish American women in the southern parts of the United States who develop particular types of breast or ovarian cancers. These denote that their ancestors were among the large number of conversos who had moved out of Mexico when the Inquisition was introduced there, into what was then called New Leon where the Inquisition was not so active.

Naturally, all this raises the still immensely controversial question of race, which is bedevilled by the way the concept has been and is being used by racists. All humans are genetically 99.9% identical, and that has led some people to the conclusion that there is no such thing as race. But if the figure of variables between different `population groups' (the word geneticists use to avoid the loaded word `race') is 0.1% (and it may actually be as high as 0.3%), that 0.1% contains some 3 million nucleotide pairs in the human genome; and these determine such things as differences in skin colour or susceptibility to certain diseases. On the basis of such significant differences, one geneticist frequently quoted by Entine has identified 491 broad population groups. Almost none of these will be "pure", since almost all of them have interbred with other population groups; but all of them are characterized by the prevalence of one or other group of genes which contribute to geneticists being able to differentiate between particular population groups.

Of course all this raises the intensely controversial question of whether the exceptionally high achievement of especially Ashkenazi Jews is due to their IQ being genetic or environmental. Entine's chapter on debates relating to this issue is extremely technical and, as far as I can tell, even-handed. Suggestions (and they are rarely claims of proof) that IQ has a strong genetic component have run into such a storm of hostility - some from scientists and some from anti-racist political correctness, some from Jews and some from non-Jews - that many geneticists have decided not to engage in this kind of research or even to give it up. It is clear that Entine sides with those who think that the research should continue. It may open (or re-open) Pandora's box; but asking and answering problematic questions "is what scientific enquiry is all about."

57 of 67 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Meaning in the genes December 29, 2007

By Pieter Uys HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

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 Adam, delves into human origins and the Book of Genesis. In this regard, a serious work on encryption Cracking the Bible Code by Jeffrey Satinover provides valuable insight. Whereas the Y Chromosome is passed through the male, the genes in the mitochondria (the cell's tiny engine) are passed on through the female. Called mtDNA, it was a discovery of major importance. Further interesting and easy-to-understand information on human genes and origins is available in Who Was Adam? by Fazale Rana.

Part Two: HISTORY, begins with a brief history of the Israelites from earliest times, including a passage on the Samaritans. In chapter 8: Sephardim - The Vanishing Jews Of Spain and the next, Ashkenazim - Converts Or Abraham's Children? those histories are more thoroughly explored, including migration to the Americas and the myth of Khazaria first popularized by Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe. It turns out the Ashkenazim came to Northern and Eastern Europe mainly via Italy and the Khazaria story is mostly nonsense.

Wandering Tribes deals with the lost ten tribes of Israel exiled in 722 BCE. This has proved to be a popular myth that has even exerted an influence on mostly respectable religious movements like Puritanism, Anglo-Israelism and Mormonism, and been and still is used by certain toxic cults like Armstrongism and various NeoNazi groups. Under the heading African Jews, Entine discusses the Beta Israel of Ethiopia who are not genetically close and the Lemba of Southern Africa who definitely are. Tudor Parfitt's compelling Journey To The Vanished City is a must-read on the Lemba and their connection to Southern Arabia. The CMH occurs in 9% of Lemba males and an astonishing 53% in the priestly Buba clan. The Lemba: A Lost Tribe of Israel in Southern Africa by Magdel le Roux is an authoritative ethnographic study with particular reference to their customs and traditions of Israelite origin.

In India people with Jewish genetic markers are the Bene Israel and Cochin, and those without are the Bene Menashe. As for the ten tribes, scripture indicates many of the northern Kingdom's people joined the Kingdom of Judah before and after the Assyrian exile. See Jeremiah 30:10, 31:17-20, Ezra 2:70, Zechariah 8:13, 15 & 23. In the book of Esther for example, the word "Jew" includes members of tribes other than Judah (Esth 2:5). In the New Testament, Luke 2:36 states that Anna belonged to the tribe of Asher whilst Paul refers to himself as a Benjaminite in the books of Romans and Philippians. Peter refers to his Jewish listeners as "all the house of Israel" in the book of Acts (2:36 and many more), as does John (Acts 13:24), and in Acts 26:7 Paul uses the words "the hope of our 12 tribes."

Research reveals that Middle Easterners like Lebanese, Arabs, Kurds and Armenians and in Europe Hungarians and Southern Italians have a high incidence of the CMH marker meaning they are closest to Jewish people, since the CMH could reasonably be assumed to be a signature of the historical Abraham. Fans of Leonard Cohen that find spiritual solace and comfort in his music will now understand the root of his muse.

Part Three: RACE, covers ideas of race, disease, identity, IQ, the Jewish Enlightenment, Zionism, Israel, recent Middle East history and the current situation. Appendices include Human Migration Maps, Haplotype Descriptions and information on how to trace one's ancestry using DNA with contact details of 5 genetic genealogy services, and Lists of diseases common to Ashkenazim in one and Sephardim plus other Jewish populations in the other. There are black & white maps throughout and the book concludes with 28pp of notes and an index.