Date: July 24, 2006 9:17:35 PM PDT
Subject: On Cain and Abel, Blood-Brothers, and Fratricide, the Original Sin
Isaiah 14:1: "For the LORD will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet
choose Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers shall
be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob."
History:
'The devastation caused by the failed revolt [of 70 AD] surely sent some
Palestinian Jews to join their cousins in Babylonia, or around the
Mediterranean. But there was no massive exile as there was at the
time of the destruction of the First Temple. Sixty-five years later,
when the Bar Kochba revolt failed (135 CE), the Romans expelled
the Jews from Judea. But these expelled Jews simply settled
in other parts of Palestine.
During the third century CE, economic troubles in the Roman Empire
seem to have induced many Jews to leave Roman-ruled Palestine for
the more prosperous Babylonia (which was part of the territory of the
other "superpower" of the time, Sassanid Persia). Yet, down to the
end of the rabbinic period, Palestine continued to be a major center
of Jewish life and thought. In the early seventh century CE, on the eve
of the Arab conquest, there were still enough Jews in Palestine to be an
important military factor in the territorial struggles between the Romans
and the Persians.
(What happened to these Palestinian Jews? It's anybody's guess.
But my own guess is that they gradually converted to Islam
under the pressure of the Arab rulers of Palestine, and that
Scientific research:
'Previous investigations based on binary Y chromosome polymorphisms
suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living
in the Middle East (Santachiara-Benerecetti et al. 1993; Hammer et al.
2000). Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes
demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%)
and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome
pool (Nebel et al. 2000). Of those Palestinian chromosomes, approximately
one-third formed a group of very closely related haplotypes that were only
rarely found in Jews. Altogether, the findings indicated a remarkable degree
of genetic continuity in both Jews and Arabs, despite their long separation
and the wide geographic dispersal of Jews.
..
We propose that the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin
represent, to a large extent, early lineages derived from the Neolithic
inhabitants of the area and additional lineages from more-recent population
movements. The early lineages are part of the common chromosome pool
shared with Jews (Nebel et al. 2000). According to our working model,
the more-recent migrations were mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, as is
seen in the Arab-specific Eu 10 chromosomes that include the modal
haplotypes observed in Palestinians and Bedouin. These haplotypes and
their one-step microsatellite neighbors constitute a substantial portion of
the total Palestinian (29%) and Bedouin (37.5%) Y chromosome pools
and were not found in any of the non-Arab populations in the present study.
The peripheral position of the modal haplotypes, with few links in the
network (fig. 5), suggests that the Arab-specific chromosomes are a result
of recent gene flow. Historical records describe tribal migrations from Arabia
to the southern Levant in the Byzantine period, migrations that reached their
climax with the Muslim conquest 633-640 A.D.; Patrich 1995). Indeed,
Arab-specific haplotypes have been observed at significant frequencies in
Muslim Arabs from Sena (56%) and the Hadramaut (16%) in the Yemen
(Thomas et al. 2000). Thus, although Y chromosome data of Arabian
populations are limited, it seems very likely that populations from the
Arabian Peninsula were the source of these chromosomes. ..'
