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Only His Geneticist Knows for Sure
A visit to the temple by a Canadian doctor and one-page letter to the journal Nature in 1997 started it all, a frenzied hunt for the multi-study, double-blind, placebo-controlled proof that Jewish men of the surname Cohen carried the same genes as the biblical patriarch Aaron, the mystical Cohen Modal Haplotype (Skorecki et al., 1997). Early testing showed that nearly half of men named Cohen—Cohanim in the Hebrew plural—had the same values at six locations on their Y chromosome. For the record, here are the magic numbers that first defined the “Y chromosome of Old Testament Priests”:
DYS19 - 14
DYS388 - 16
DYS390 - 23
DYS391 - 10
DYS392 - 11
DYS393 – 12
But having those scores did not make you a member of the club. As the authors of an article on the “extended CMH” finally appearing last year write, the original research by Thomas et al. (1998) “produced a ‘low resolution’ CHM that was shared among many non-Jewish populations” (M. F. Hammer et al., “Extended Y Chromosome Haplotypes Resolve Multiple and Unique Lineages of the Jewish Priesthood,” Human Genetics 126:707-17).
That would never do. Moreover, such sketchy data “did not provide the phylogenetic resolution needed to infer the geographic origin of the CHM lineage.”
So Hammer at the University of Arizona, partnering with the National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli Populations, spent ten years and millions of dollars narrowing down the definition of the CMH and pinpointing its origin in history. Glossing over the statistics, subjects and methods—are you ready—the extended CMH is not much different from the original CMH, only it has no living matches.
Yes, you read that right. Whereas Skorecki’s minimal 6-locus haplotype might be proudly shared by thousands who eagerly sent in their DNA samples to genetic testing companies over the years, the new and improved CMH of Hammer et al. with twice the definition or 12 loci when “compared with the YHRD [Y-STR Haplotype Reference Database in Berlin]. . . yielded zero out of 10,243 possible haplotypes in 66 populations” (711).
Way to go, I hear from Marketing.
From a dybbuk the CMH has gone to being a dynosaur. It was once doubted whether it existed. It is now proven to be extinct.
No further research is needed on this subject, not as far as I'm concerned.
Comments
LOL. What a product! I imagine all those Cohens and those with Cohen ancestors were surprised.
What does this mean as far as CMH studies that supposedly prove Lemba Jewish identity? Can such studies as presented by Parfitt, et al., be scientifically valid in establishing such claims?
The findings of Jewish DNA in the Lemba stand but it's up to the "haplotype police" to decide if they are still CMH.