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

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Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8924 EAN: 9780446580632 ISBN: 0446580635 Label: Grand Central Publishing Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 432 Publication Date: 2007-10-24 Publisher: Grand Central Publishing Studio: Grand Central Publishing
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Editorial Reviews: 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.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Interesting and thought-provoking book Comment: Jon Entine deserves congratulations for his well-written and thought-provoking book. As an introduction to the subject of Jewish identity, I would recommend a concise book by Avri Barr entitled "The Jewish Singularity: Genes, Memes, and Mystery" which appeared in 2006 and which covers a wide spectrum of issues, from basic elements of Genetics to Jewish history and traditions The Jewish Singularity: Genes, Memes, and Mystery. Customer Rating: Summary: Best DNA book I've ever read! Comment: Of the several DNA books and articles that I've read, in my opinion, this is truly an interesting book to read. It brings you information without making it boring. Reads like a DNA novel at times. I loved it. Customer Rating: Summary: Jews and Genetics Comment: 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 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." Customer Rating: Summary: Well written and insightful Comment: The author sets out to examine the physical identity of the Jews, as assessed by studies of their DNA. Do Jews have a coherent biological inheritance, i.e. are they a human race, or are they only a religious denomination? To answer these questions Jon Entine has to tell us a great deal about genetics, DNA, and how science can trace inheritance of individuals and groups. But, he also needs to examine the history of Jews. How did they originate, when and where did they migrate and who are they today. Entine's study thus casts a very wide net, which covers many topics in a mere 420 pages. He gives us an insightful, well written book. It would be too much to expect he got every answer perfectly right. No doubt he made mistakes, and further research will question some of his conclusions. The Biblical history of the Jews alone has occupied scholars for centuries and millions of pages, and is still much in dispute As to the major question, the answer is yes and no. Yes, there are several common biological threads uniting modern Jews, there are also many genes acquired from host population during their wanderings. Some Jewish groups have many common genes, others, though culturally Jewish, have virtually none. Hey, what else did you expect. Customer Rating: Summary: Breadth but not Depth Comment: Since a DNA test recently turned up the interesting fact that one branch of my family tree is Jewish (on the father's side) several generations back, I enjoyed the parts of this book that discuss how genetics can shed light on our family and ethnic histories. I like imaging that, sometime in the early 1800s, a very brave ancestor of mine immigrated to the US from some much put-upon Polish ghetto, looked around and decided that an utterly unpronounceable Jewish-Polish name would not be an asset here. Looking still further, he concluded that Randolph was a most respectable American name and adopted it. That shows good sense, a trait that's quite common in my family. In fact, I like that tale much better than the alternative, which apparently isn't true, that my poor dirt-farmer ancestors were somehow related to the snobbish and aristocratic Randolphs of Virginia. If the author had focused on that, this book would have rated five stars rather than three. But unfortunately he attempted to do much, much more, delving into complex histories that should take years of study. The author seems to have tried a shortcut, reading two are three good books on a topic and writing from them. But that doesn't really work. To write you must know and the more you write about, the more you need to know. Take eugenics, a topic I know all too well, having edited several books on it. On page 241, the author gives a long list of important people who, he said, "enthusiastically embraced what became known as 'positive eugenics,' including "even Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood." Not so. Sanger's entire life was dedicated to opposing positive eugenics, the idea that superior people like herself and her friends should be pressured into having more children. She loathed the idea of a "cradle race" between 'fit' and 'unfit' to an eager audience of mostly affluent and political progressive women. Let 'unfit' and the 'feeble-minded' (meaning the poor and recent immigrants), she said, reduce their birthrates. Don't tell us to have more children. That's why she founded what became today's Planned Parenthood and why her first birth control clinic was in New York City's Brownsville, a neighborhood of mostly Eastern European Jews and Italian Catholics. And that, incidentally, is why to this day there's bad blood between Catholics and Planned Parenthood. Catholic hostility to Sanger's organization is just as legitimate as black dislike of the Ku Klux Klan. I could list other examples where his history is dubious at best, but I think I've made my point. He should have spent more time on the theme of his book, "Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People" and less on a thousand other topics. And having said that, this remains a very interesting book about a field that's likely to prove even more interesting as time passes. Readers might also keep in mind that this sort of DNA tracking is still in the early, enthusiast stage. All those involved are so excited about its prospects, they're not examining its limitations as carefully as they should. Mother-derived mitochondrial DNA testing and father-derived X-chromosome testing only looks at a narrow slice of what we are genetically. It only looks at the branches of our family tree that are either maternal all the way or paternal all the way. It neglects the other parental source of our DNA in each generation. There's a lot more to what makes us up than this Adam and Eve in our distant pass, particularly when the group into which we marry becomes larger than a Middle Eastern village or a Polish ghetto. Michael W. Perry Editor of The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic and Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State More Reviews