Geneticist helps Mumbai Jews reinforce sense of identity

MUMBAI: It''s "a bit foolish", Tudor Parfitt says of a nickname he''s been given by the British tabloids. They''ve taken to calling him the ''Indiana Jones of Jewish studies'' because of his headline-grabbing work using DNA as a tool of historical research on the so-called lost tribes of Israel.
A director of Jewish Studies at London''s School of Oriental and African Studies and an acclaimed author, broadcaster and traveller, genetic anthropologist Dr Parfitt was recently in Mumbai to follow up on the DNA analysis of the Bene Israel community that he started four years ago.
The results of his study, reported by this newspaper in July, showed that the 4,000-strong Bene Israel community —based mainly in Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Ahmedabad—is descended from a hereditary Israelite priesthood whose lineage can be traced back 3,000 years to Aaron, the brother of Moses.
He has not seen Steven Spielberg''s Indiana Jones'', which featured the pistol-packing Harrison Ford as a maverick explorer. "But I take the business of travelling seriously," Dr Parfitt said.
"When I started, I had a passionate desire to use the journey a scientific way in the manner that people like Sir Richard Burton, or David Livingston had done, by using the sheer fact of walking on the surface of the earth to prove something. didn''t go down very well with my colleagues, of course."
When he launched his research on the Jewish community, Dr Parfitt and geneticist Neil Bradman zeroed in on the Y-chromosome to trace paternal ancestry because fathers pass their Y chromosome virtually unchanged to their sons.
The team initially focused on a black African tribe called the Lemba,which claim to be Jewish and have descended from the biblical patriarchs.
The team found that about half of the men in an elite Lemba family had the same genetic marker on the Y chromosome as that found the study of Cohanim—white males who claim to be descended from the Jewish priestly line of Aaron.
Similarly, the Bene Israel in India believed that their ancestors fled persecutions by the Syrian-Greek King Antiochus Epiphanes around 175 BC.
According to one tradition, 14 of these fleeing Jews were shipwrecked Navgaon on the Konkan coast. Although they adopted the language and dress of the local Hindu population, they kept the Jewish dietary laws, the Sabbath and some basic rituals and prayers.
As "a cold, objective scientist-historian", Dr Parfitt''s initial assumption was that the Bene Israel were probably a local community and were simply wrong about their belief of exotic ancestry. But the genetics proved that the community''s oral traditions were trustworthy: Bene Israeli men had the Cohen-specific haplotype genetic sequence that linked them to Middle-Eastern ancestors.
"The really exciting feature of the DNA, therefore, is that it confirms an unlikely story pretty incontrovertibly," Dr Parfitt elaborated.
"Furthermore, the DNA only tells us what the Y chromosome of this great-greatgreat-great ancestor looked like: we don''t know anything else about the shape of his nose, his ethnicity, his religion, whether he preferred cricket or football."
During his visit, Dr Parfitt also studied the impact of his research on the question of identity. He said he found it paradoxical that, on the one hand, genetics clearly demonstrated that there was no biological difference in humans in terms of race (since 99.9 per cent of our DNA is exactly identical).
Race was, therefore, a completely social construction. "Yet on the other hand is our work,which looked at origins of groups and other historical issues, and which claims that some groups are different from others. The Bene Israel, for example, were different from other groups in India," he said.
"This may appear to be contrary to the main point—that race is a cultural construction with little base in science. However, the bit of the DNA we''re looking at is the so-called junk DNA, which has no function: it does not make you nicer or nastier or better at cricket or what have you. It''s completely neutral with no racial connotations whatsoever."
However, those belonging to the lunatic Neo-Nazi fringe have also greeted Dr Parfitt''s research enthusiastically.
"The Nazis are happy with what they view as corroboration of their completely insane idea—that the Jews are not a religion but a separate and a vastly inferior people," he said.
"However, in terms of identity, meeting all those people at Mumbai''s Tiphereth Synagogue Hall was one of the most overpowering experiences imaginable, because in some sense, a whole people had been validated by our research."