Spanish Arab and Jewish Genetic Heritage
By Juan Cole
President of the Global Americana Institute
December 16, 2008
Geneticists are now estimating that the Spanish
Inquisition led to large amounts of intermarriage
between nominally converted Muslims and Jews with
Catholics in Spain after 1492.
From that date, the Spanish state forbade all religions
but orthodox Catholicism in Spain, making Jews and
Christians who chose to remain convert.
A new study
finds that 1 in 10 of Spanish men has haplotypes (genetic
patterns) on the y chromosome identical with that of North
Africans (i.e. Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians). And this
study suggests that 1 in 5 have haplotypes identical with
Jewish males.
The evidence with regard to Spanish
women is inconclusive. (This article doesn't seem to
realize it, but this is because only a minority of Jewish
women have 'Palestinian' patterns in their mitochondrial
DNA; male Jewish merchant communities established around
the Mediterranean from about the 800s AD took local wives
and converted them, so the majority of Jewish women don't
have distinctive genetic markers.)
I'm not so sure
that the Inquisition can explain these results, since the
numbers seem incommensurate with the result.
There
were about 100,000 Marranos or forcibly-converted Jews in
Spain after 1492 (many Iberian Jews fled to Holland, North
Africa or Istanbul to retain their faith).
There
were initially some 315,000 Moriscoes or
forcibly-converted Muslims in the 1500s. But at the
beginning of the 1600s, these were expelled, as well. By
1609 it is estimated that all but 10,000 to 15,000 of
these Catholic secret Muslims had been expelled (France,
Italy, and North Africa were the major destinations of the
victims of this ethnic cleansing).
Spain's
population in the 1500s was about 8 million.
So I
don't see how 50,000 Marranos males could produce a
situation where 1/5 of the present-day male population is
descended from them. And, the huge Arab and Berber
population of medieval Spain and even the 300,000 there in
the 1500s, with whom there would have been intermarriage,
should have left a larger genetic heritage in Spain than
just 1/10. Moreover, I would challenge the idea that most
of the mixing only came after the conversions post-1492.
People sleep with each other across cultural boundaries
and don't tell the historians about it. And, people
convert from Islam to Catholicism and pretend they'd
always been Catholics, something that could have been
going on surreptitiously all through the centuries of the
Reconquista.
Anyway, the haplotypes distinctive to
Sephardic Jews are indistinguishable from those of
Palestinians and Lebanese. So my guess is that the
geneticists are finding descendants from the Phoenicians
and from Arab populations that invaded North Africa and
then Spain, along with descendants of Jews.
Work on
the
genetic history of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean is
now also being pursued.
This article was published first at:
http://www.juancole.com/2008/12/spanish-arab-and-jewish-genetic.html
13 Comments:
WEll I can only say that my LEbanese Christian father looked so much like Alan Ginsberg that whenever I saw Ginsberg in the street when I lived in NY, I would get this weird shiver, because he just looked so much like my dad in a way that few other men did.
And when my dad was in Paris one winter walking around in a black overcoat and a beret, he noticed that orthodox Jewish men in the hats and/or prayer shawls would greet him. THey just thought he was one of them. He looked like a rabbi, a Sephardic rabbi.
More than once I've been asked by proselytizing Lubavitchers if I were not Jewish. When I say no, they look at me and say "are you *sure*?" There's an uncanny "look" or feeling or something. And certain Jews have that look to me - they just look like I ought to "know" them somehow.
The cousinly connection is crystal clear.
Typo
From that date, the Spanish state forbade all religions but orthodox Catholicism in Spain, making Jews and Muslims who chose to remain convert.
I remember stopping in a deconsecrated church turned gallery in Santa Fe when I moved from NV to TX and being struck by several representations of a face with crossed fish for eyebrows. I asked a kindly gentleman, presumably the curator, about the provenance of the symbol. He mentioned that it came from the Bible, from the Book of Tobias. I had to look that one up.
The Book of Tobias was not a part of my mother's Ronald Knox, nor of any Christian Bible. That was my introduction to "new Christians" who filled out the crews of the Conquistadors and settled the New World for Spain.
Something about the story of Tobias and the curing of blindness with fishes must have resonated with the Mexicans. I saw that same icon again and again in TX.
In addition to Jewish new Christians settling New Spain there were Muslims as well. Falcon lake is named for Blaise Falcon, who was a Muslim new Christian. The Arabs were and are expert falconers.
Spending some few years in South TX I began to see Muslim and Jewish features mixed with the Coahuiltecan features of the Tejano people whose territory that is. Who knows how many of the hidalgos were new Christians?
I'd bet a good number. Spain was not the place to be after 1492 for new Christians, and they were robbed of whatever property they had had and left ripe for migration and conquest themselves. New Christians for the New World.
Mexicans think of themselves as Spanish, but in fact a great many of them are primarily "Indio"... with a good deal of Muslim and Jewish blood, more importantly culture, mixed in, apparently.
jricole@gmail.com
There were also quite a number of Jews arriing in Mexico. Check out this link: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Mexico.html
Mr Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, UK, has written and presented a documentary on a related subject matter which is being broadcast by BBC2 Television. Those living inside the UK (or those who can establish a VPN connection with a computer located inside the UK) can watch this documentary for a limited period of time free of charge. The pertinent details are as follows:
After Rome - Holy War and Conquest. Episode 1: Boris Johnson looks at the early history of Islam, BBC2.
I happen to have watched Episode 1 and can mention that it is a truly remarkable documentary.
BF.
Speaking of genetics, how do blue-eyed Jews claim descent from an ancient Middle-Eastern population?
I don't know anything about Arabs in New Mexico but I can tell you that every people in the old world had a falconry tradition.
An invention called 'the Jewish people'
“I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
“But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
“Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can’t explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn’t find any. Not one.
“That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands.”
Shlomo Sand argues that the ancient Jews never left the Holy Land and in fact converted to Islam and became today's Palestinian people.
To Leila,
My husband, a Palestinian Christian, gets the same comments. He is often mistaken for a Mizrahi Jew. His mother said it was because he favored her, and he family descends from the people of Ofrah.
To the last poster, you are right that the eye color is thought to have developed in Northern Europe, near the Baltic if I remember. Yet, ancestry comes from two peoples. I hear this comment often, being a descendant of a "blue" eyed Italian. What I tend to remind people is the practices of previous generations, like enslaving conquered peoples and trading them, means that there are many genetically mixed peoples today who are culturally one group, and genetically many others. In the end, I think ethnicity is being shown through genetic profiling, to be more of socialized construction than a genetic one.
An invention called 'the Jewish people'
Hasn't that very same DNA evidence concluded that many Jews (even the blue-eyed Jews of Poland and Russia) are indeed closely related to Palestinians?
I've seen no evidence to suggest that modern Palestinians are somehow the direct descendents of the Jewish people. The mere suggestion of that seems like a ploy to delegitimize any Jewish connection to the land.
We're all mongrelized brothers and sisters of each other. The sooner we accept that the better off we'll be.
The gene for blue eyes is recessive, meaning that its expression requires that both parents carry it. Consequently a blue-eyed person cannot claim an unbroken line of descent –male or female— from an ancient population that did not have blue-eyed members. This invalidates the founding myth of Israel, at least as far as blue-eyed Jews are concerned.
"People sleep with each other across cultural boundaries and don't tell the historians about it."
Well put, and the primary reason why there is only a single human "race."
To Anonymous:
That's a gross oversimplification of genetics. See
http://www.athro.com/evo/inherit.html
for a more in-depth explanation. Jews with blue eyes could indeed still be closely related to local populations of Palestine.