Haplogroup R, at a DNA site labeled M117.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/jews-and-their-dna/
. . . Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe, has to do with the Khazars, a Turkish people living between the Black and Caspian Seas, whose royal house adopted Judaism (with what degree of rabbinical supervision, we have no way of knowing) in the 8th century c.e. A great deal is obscure in the history of the Khazar kingdom, which at its apogee ruled much of present-day Ukraine, and the degree of the Judaization of its population is uncertain.
Koestler and a small number of historians on whom he based himself are convinced that, following the destruction of this kingdom in the 11th century by its Slavic enemies, many of its Jews fled westward to form the nucleus of what was to become East European Jewry.
The Khazar theory never had many backers in scholarly circles; there was little evidence to support it and good reasons to be dubious about it. Why, for instance, does medieval rabbinic literature almost never mention the Khazars? Why, if they spoke a Turkish language, did East European Jewry become Yiddish-speaking?
“Y-Chromosome Evidence for a Founder Effect in Ashkenazi Jews,” was published in 2004 in the European Journal of Human Genetics by a small team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y-Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries,” appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2003.
Both studies discuss a mutation, widely found in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, that occurs in a Y-chromosome classification known as Haplogroup R, at a DNA site labeled M117.
The Hebrew University study states:
Recent genetic studies . . . showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to their host populations in Europe. However, Ashkenazim have an elevated frequency of R-M117, the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow [into the Ashkenazi population]. In the present study of 495 Y chromosomes of Ashkenazim, 57 (11.5 percent) were found to belong to R-M117.
As for the American-Israeli-British study, it was designed to ascertain whether Levites, who functioned as priests’ assistants in the ancient Temple and are supposedly also descended from Aaron, have a worldwide genetic signature similar to or the same as the Cohen Modal Haplotype.
The answer turned out to be negative, since the Y chromosomes of Levites from different geographical backgrounds proved to correlate no better with one another than they did with the Y chromosomes of non-Levitic Jews. And yet, rather astonishingly, Ashkenazi Levites, when taken separately, do have a “modal haplotype” of their own—and it is the same R-M117 mutation on which the Hebrew University study centered! Fifty-two percent of them have this mutation, which is rarely found in non-Ashkenazi Jews and has a clear non-Jewish provenance.
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What is one to make of this finding? An 11.5-percent incidence of R-M117 among Ashkenazi Jews in general is easily explainable: the mutation could have entered the Jewish gene pool slowly, in small increments in every generation, during the thousand years of Ashkenazi Jewry’s existence.
(This need not necessarily have been via conversion to Judaism and marriage to Jewish women. Pre- and extra-marital sexual relations, and even rape, widespread in times of anti-Jewish violence, were in all likelihood more common.)
But the 52-percent rate among Levites is something else. Here we are dealing not with a gradual, long-term process (for no imaginable process could have produced such results), but with a one-time event of some sort.
Such an event could obviously not have been a sudden influx of Levites into the Jewish community from a Gentile society. Both of our studies, therefore, raise the possibility that the original R-M117 Levites were Khazarian Jews who migrated westward upon the fall of the Khazar kingdom.
Of course, since all or most Khazarian Jews were converts (although some may have been Jews who came from elsewhere), few could have descended from Aaron. Yet it is quite possible that some became, or were designated, “honorary” Levites in the course of the Judaization of the Khazarian population.
But if R-M117 did enter the East European Jewish gene pool via a lineage of Khazar Levites, how many Khazars can be assumed to have joined the Ashkenazi community?
At this point, it becomes pure guesswork. Analyzing the data, the American-Israeli-British study concludes that the number of R-M117 Levites absorbed by Ashkenazi Jewry ranged from one to fifty individuals. But as much as we might like to do the rest of the arithmetic ourselves, we can’t.
-For one thing, we have no way of knowing what the percentage of Levites in the Khazarian Jewish population was.
-Nor do we know the percentage of Khazars possessing M117, which is found in 12 or 13 percent of Russian and Ukrainian males today. If these were also its proportions among the Khazars, there would have been seven non-M117 Khazars joining or founding Ashkenazi Jewry for every Khazar who had the mutation.
In sum, even if the R-M117 Levites are traceable to Khazaria, the total flow of Khazarians into the East European Jewish population could have been anywhere from a single person to many thousands. If it was the latter, the Khazar input was significant, as David Goldstein suspects it was; if the former, it was trivial, as Jon Entine believes. The last eight years of research in Jewish historical genetics have not left us any wiser in this respect.
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. . . I myself have long suspected, starting far before I knew anything of historical genetics or Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe, that I have Khazar blood in me.
One of my father’s sisters had distinctly slanty eyes. In one of her daughters, these are even more pronounced. The daughter’s daughter has features that could come straight from the steppes of Asia.
Hillel Halkin is a columnist for the New York Sun and a veteran contributor to COMMENTARY - http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/jews-and-their-dna/
