Among the 44 respondents to Why Should I Care About Hitler’s Big Lie, only one by Fizziks was coherent. The remainder ranged from unstable to ad hominem. Fizziks referred the reader to the article titled “A Jewish history: fact and myth”. Most of that article answered questions which were never asked; namely, regarding the Khazar origin theory of Jewish Europeans. The author did a good job of debunking that hoax. So there’s no need to revisit it here since we here at C.A.U.S.E. (Citizens All United to Stop Extremism) concur.
Let’s break down the parts of that article which are relevant to our purposes. Under the subheading “The evidence: Genetics”, Fizziks posits four arguments for a Middle Eastern origin for Jewish Europeans (aka, Hitler’s Big Lie.) Number one: “the major conclusion is that there is a high degree of similarity in the Y-chromosomes of Jewish men throughout the world, and similarity between Jewish men and the Arab inhabitants of the Levant. For instance, around 80% of Askenazic [sic] men have the Y-chromosome classification E or J, both of which are uncommon in Northern Europe…but ubiquitous throughout the middle [sic] East. This indicates that the Jewish population of Europe has a large founding influence of people with Middle Eastern origin.” True, but misleading. It is true that E and J haplogroups are uncommon in northern Europe. But that is not where Ashkenazim first appear. The earliest conversions of Europeans to Judaism occur on the fringes of the Roman Empire – where Hellenism’s influence was weak and the power of Rome not absolute. (Incidentally, in those same places where Protestantism later made its first converts and for the exact same reasons.) It is misleading that Fizziks fails to mention that non-Jewish communities in southern and central Europe–the Rhineland–exhibit similar ubiquity of E and J haplogroups which, of course, throws out his argument.
Number two: “In the conclusion of a Y-chromosome study published in PNAS (M. Hammer et al., 1999), ‘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…’” True again, and misleading once more. Recent DNA research has established that this particular genetic migration to Europe from a Middle Eastern ancestral population took place approximately 30,000 years ago. Long, long before there were any Jews anywhere.
Number three: “It is also interesting to study the Y-chromosomes of men belonging to the so-called ‘Cohenim’ or priestly class (generally those with the last name Cohen, Kohn, Kahn, and so on). Cohen men throughout the world have the same Y-chromosome mutation at a very high rate, indicating that they are actually descended patrilineally from one common ancestor…In the words of a paper on a study of Cohen Y-chromosomes published in Nature (M. Thomas et al., 1998) ‘Given the relative isolation of Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities over the past 500 years, the presence of the same modal haplotype in the Cohanim of both communities strongly suggests a common origin.’”
This time, Fizziks is not misleading but simply wrong. The original scientific research was based on the discovery that a majority of present-day Jewish Kohanim either share, or are only one step removed from, a pattern of values for 6 Y-STR markers, which researchers named the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH). However it subsequently became clear that this six marker pattern was widespread in many communities where men had Y chromosomes which fell into haplogroup J; the six-marker CMH was not specific just to Cohens, nor even just to Jews, but was a survival from the origins of Haplogroup J, about 30,000 years ago as a result of the migration of Cro-Magnons from the Middle East to Europe at that time 30 ka ago…long before any Jews existed (unless, of course, you believe the earth was created in 4,004 B.C.) In addition, Leon Poliakov, in his monumental The History of Anti-Semitism, wrote that many Polish and Russian Jews coming to the U.S. changed their Slavic surnames to Cohen to appear higher class/caste. This accounts for the disproportionate number of Cohens in the U.S. versus other Jewish communities throughout the world.
Number four: “Lastly, there is Mitochondrial DNA evidence, which shows that a very high proportion - up to 40% - of Ashkenazim are descended matrilineally from as few as four (!) women, and other Jewish populations throughout the world show descent from these women…” True, not true and misleading at the same time. Ashkenazi Jewish Europeans in the 11th century made up 3% of the world Jewish population. Today, they make up 80% despite the Holocaust affecting them in far disproportionate absolute numbers compared to other Jewish communities worldwide. So it is not unreasonable to surmise that such a small group of European Jewish women would be the ancestral gene pool for so many Jewish Europeans. No other Jewish community outside of Europe shows descent from these women, further substantiating that those conversions must have taken place long, long ago in Europe and further debunking Adolf Hitler’s exile theory.
Curiously, Fizziks doesn’t quote any blind studies. The only accredited genetic blind study was conducted by the Hebrew University of Israel and published in the American Journal of Human Genetics (November, 2001.) The study, headed by Ariella Oppenheim, revealed that Ashkenazi Jews have a closer genetic relationship to Armenians than to the Arab inhabitants of the Levant or any other Semitic group anywhere. And Armenians are Indo-Europeans who originated in western Asia Minor and migrated east…and not a Semitic nor a Turkic people. This study was primarily funded by the government of India so it wouldn’t be tainted as so many of Israel’s genetic “studies” have been in the quest to support the foundation mythology of some fanciful Return.
A recent case in point of this history of hoodwinking occurred last month on February 19, 2011. Michael B. Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times “Israel has been proud to be the only Middle Eastern democracy.” But Ambassador Oren knows that the nation of Turkey is a democracy and, the last time I checked, Turkey is in the Middle East (which the Ambassador also knows.) Why would the Ambassador lie so casually and carelessly about something he knows not to be true? Of course, never let the facts get in the way of a good storyline. But there’s something far more insidious at work here. If the Israeli Ambassador to the United States could openly lie about something so obvious and so evident with no compunction nor reservation, imagine what he’s capable of if he were able to hide the facts/truth.
In conclusion, there are no DNA sequences common to all Jews and absent from all non-Jews. There is nothing in the human genome that makes or diagnoses a person as a Jew.