This is a question that has puzzled me for a long time, and modern DNA analysis should be able to answer the question: are the OT Jews the same genetic stock as those people calling themselves Jews today?
My understanding is that :
(1) Judaism was never a proselytizing religion like Christainity
(2) after the destruction of the temple, the jews migrated out around the ancient world
Years ago I read a book by Arthur Koestler, who made the claim that the Jews of today are descended from the Khazars-a tribe from the Caucasia region of Central Asia-has this ever been proven?
And, of course, there are the semitic people from Ethiopia (Falasha) who claim to be descended from the ancient Jews.
Who is correct? And, has any serious DNA research been done on this?The combination of (rare) conversions and strong tribal identity argues forthe jews remaining unmixed, but who knows?
Given that the the Jews were kicked out of the province of Judea by the Romans in 135 AD and sent into exile in Europe and North Africa, and given that there has been considerable intermarriage with Gentiles, not to mention the the occasional rape by Cossacks, one would have to assume that the current genetic makeup of world Jewry has very little in common with the genetic map of Moses and his neighbors. If one conducted random genetic testing among the US Jewish population, I’m sure there would be markers of some kind in mitochondrial DNA pointing to common ancestry.
The guy I’m currently dating is blue-eyed, blonde, and Jewish, so I’m pretty sure Judaism is more tradition and culture being passed down than genes. Go figure.
As a matter of fact, such a DNA analysis has been done on a wide cross-section of the Jewish community, and it was indeed found that over 90% of the tested group that identified themselves as Jewish shared a common male ancestor approximately 4000 years ago. There was a similar project focusing specifically on Jews who consider themselves to be Kohanim (a word usually badly translated as “priests”), descendants of Aaron, and it was indeed determined that ove 90% most of those who identified themselves as Kohanim shared a common male ancestor some centuries later who was not shared by most of those who do not identify themselves as Kohanim.
I’ll do my best to find a cite for these studies. But I know they’ve been done, and that to this degree, the claims of modern Jews have been vindicated.
The Khazar thing is so far off the mark as to be laughable. There was a tribe of Khazars which converted to Judaism en masse. However, if I recall correctly, most of them were wiped out in a war, and certainly they do not account for the entirety, or even the majority, of today’s world Jewry.
And intermarriage has been pretty rare until this century, in fact, until the latter half of this century.
Hey, CM, I saw that show, too! It was a NOVA, I think. I’ll go look over at pbs.org.
Hah! I LOVE the Internet.
It was a NOVA called “The Lost Tribes of Israel.” They were trying to find out whether this tribe of South African black Jews were really from one of the 10 Lost Tribes, and along the way they talked about genetic analysis of “Cohanim”, meaning Cohens. (In the transcript they spell it with a “C”). They ended up proving that the Lembas (the Africans) actually came from a lost city in Yemen, but that yeah, they were genetically Jewish, because there had been a sizeable Jewish community in this city. They all packed up and emigrated to Zimbabwe back in the Middle Ages sometime.
So in order to prove that the Lemba were Jewish, they relied on genetic testing of Jews that proved that the Y chromosome of the Cohens was basically unchanged for the last 3,000 years. Read the transcript, it’s fascinating.
Are the Jews of the Old Testament the same as today?
Well … I do see several parallels between the genocide committed throughout the Land of Canaan in the Book of Joshua, and what’s going on on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in modern times…
BAD tracer!! No doggie treat!! 
Seriously, on these issues, once CMK or his cohorts speak, it’s all over. He is (as usual) right. (Damn, I’m starting to sound like a dittohead)
I recently read in the newspaper (SF Chronicle) that a DNA study in Israel has shown the Jews are more closely related to each other than any other ethnic group. The group they are most closely related to after that is Palestinians. I found this bit of news rather surprising, because the Israeli Jewish population is split pretty close to 50/50 on Sephardi/Ashkenazi lines, and were seperated grographically for many years. However, as CMKeller has noted, before this century, intermarriage was quite uncommon - Ashkenazim intermarried at a rate of only 5%, as opposed to 50% in the US today. I don’t have a similar number for Sephardim, but I imagine it is probably about the same. (Without going into history, Jews have usually been treated as “seperate and almost equal” in Islamic society.) Jews today are not exactly genetically similar to those who lived 3,000 years ago (I doubt very many looked like me!), but what people are?
I just tried to find the article that mentioned this study, but it was AP, and the Chronicle can only search for AP stories within the last five days, and I read this a couple weeks ago.