Seed of Israel: DNA Guide To Tracing Your Jewish Ancestry by Joshua Robbin Marks, 48 pages including endnotes; available on Amazon.com for $14.99.
By Donald H. Harrison
Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Perhaps your friends or relatives have told you that they did a DNA test and found out about their ancestry, and now you’re wondering whether you should be tested similarly. Journalist Joshua Robbin Marks provides readers in this slim, jargon-filled volume with tips on how to go about it, and what you might expect.
In brief chapter essays, Marks tells about his own experience learning that he is 100 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, explains the basics of DNA – Jewish and otherwise –, and provides a brief summary of where and when contingents of Jews have settled over the centuries.
I was a bit daunted by this paragraph:
According to the website Levite DNA, Ashkenazi Jews display the greatest frequency of E haplogroup (21.89 %) on the Y-DNA side followed by J2 (17.83 %), J1 (17.77 %) R1b (11.50 %), G (9.94 %), R1a (9.29 %), Q (4.56 %), T (2.87 %), I (2.67 %), R2 (1.27%), L (O.27 %) and N (O.12 %).
Nevertheless, I plunged on, and I was glad that I did.
I learned from Marks that approximately 900 years ago, Jews who were descended from those who migrated from Judea to Italy were on the move again. They went to Germany, there becoming the progenitors of the Ashkenazim. This was not a mass movement such as described in the Biblical Exodus. It involved a relatively few families. who, over time, became even fewer.
“Ashkenazi Jews are all around 30th cousins or less because of a genetic bottleneck in the Medieval era of 600 to 800 years go of just 350 people,” Marks informs us.
Perhaps, then, I should say “Cousin Marks informs us.”
If you decide to genetically research your ancestry, Marks recommends that you start with “one of the major commercial DNA testing companies” such as Ancestry, 23 and Me, FamilyTreeDNA, or My Heritage.
After you get your results from one of them, in some cases you may upload those results to one of the other services, thereby compiling even more information about your genealogy and heredity.
My grandson Shor recently had a DNA test and learned, unsurprisingly, that he is 100 percent Jewish. I deduced that if he is 100 percent Jewish, then I must be too. But the routes that my ancestors may have traveled over the centuries – now there is information I’d love to learn.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
