re: #419 keloyd

Re Ashkenazi DNA - there’s an old Scientific American in a closet somewhere, that touched on this. Mostly it dealt with Mitochondrial DNA and humanity’s spread from Africa, but one little side box mentioned European Jews as a special case. I never would have guessed lactose intolerance was ~5% for Northern-Europeans, but like 70% for the European Jewish population. It’s very indirect evidence indeed, but the authors and I would have guessed at more inter-marriage (or other ways to intermingle DNA) than that genetic quirk would allow.

There was almost no intermarriage for most of the time that the Jews lived in Europe, and when it began to take place, the Jewish partner generally left the community and moved into the Gentile world rather than the other way around.

There was a case some years ago where a Palestinian American woman needed a marrow donor, and no one in the family was a match. They brought the search to the Jewish community, because an Ashkenazi is still more likely to be a match for an Arab than any other ‘Caucasians’ living around us will be.