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

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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

Customer Rating:

Summary: Fascinating but superficial-- journalism, not scholarship
Comment: This is a very interesting book, but in the end contradictions and missing citations undermine its
authority:

Consider, for example, p. 175-176: "One study estimates that from 1150 to
1300, Jews made up about 15% of the educated world's top scientists...Jewish scholars wrote noted
poetry..." but later, p. 298, "Even in the golden age of Sephardic Jewry in Spain, except for
Maimonides, and until the 1800s, except for Spinoza, Jews were almost absent from the annals of
great science and art."

So, what is Entine's claim about Jewish contributions to art
and science prior to the 19th century? Should the reader believe it? If Entine believes Maimonides
is remembered for contributions to art and science, then its not clear his opinion should matter
much-- Maimonides' science is part of the corpus of Arabic medicine, but is more derviative than
original. It is his philosophical and religious work that is most noteworthy.

On page
260, we are told "Geneticists are now convinced that using such percentage claims paints a
misleading picture of group differences." The text surrounding this statement makes a good case
that the "percentage claims" referred to are indeed problematic. But what is accomplished
describing what geneticists are "convinced" of? Was there a poll? Is Entine somehow empowered to
speak for the discipline? On what basis is Entine making this claim?

More troublesome
unsourced claims are not hard to find: On p. 249 "When Israel's War of Independence began, Jews
controlled less than 7 percent of Palestine; after Jewish victory, at the signing of an armistice in
December 1949, they occupied about 80 percent of ther land." No source for this claim is provided,
nor is there an explanation for what is meant by "controlled", "occupied" or even Palestine (what
are its borders?). Looking at a map, the only obvious understanding to be had is that the Negev
desert is not "controlled" before the war, but is "occupied" when hostilities cease. Why does the
reader have to guess?

Numerous comparable examples could be offered-- claims are
made, sources are too often missing, and details are too often left to the reader's imagination.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Fantastic synthesis
Comment: 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.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Meaning in the genes
Comment: 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 (Rav Shaul) 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.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Greatly Exceeded Expectations
Comment: I wasn't sure I was going to read this book because of the controversy over IQ that it's stirred.
That would have been a big mistake. That's such a minor portion of the book, and after reading it,
the author could not have avoided the subject. After all, throughout history, except for the modern
period, Jews have been considered a "race" and have considered themselves a "race." This book
discusses race and the history of "race" very thoughtfully and not polemically. The real strength of
the book, and why I heartily recommend it, is its fascinating narrative on the origins of Judaism
and Christianity, and the story of the Israelites. Bible lovers like me (and I'm not a strong
believer, I just love history), won't be able to put this book down. It weaves history, archaeology,
and genetic anthropology. In some cases, such as in the story of Aaron and his descendants, the
Jewish priests, it provides genetic witness to Biblical claims. But it's not afraid to follow the
facts when science challenges the literal text. It reviews everything from Christ's genealogy to the
story of the Lost Tribes to the real origins and ancestral make-up of today's Jews -- a hot potato
to those challenging the so-called "right of return" by Jews to what they say is their ancient
homeland. It's not pro-Jewish. In fact it's neutral on political issues. It seems all about
challenging the reader to think outside their comfort zone. This book reminds me of Jared Diamond's
"Guns, Germs and Steal." I loved it.

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