Jews and Arabs share so much

Jews, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese have much more in common than might be expected given the politics that so divides the Middle East. All share a common ancestor and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world.

"Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham," said Dr Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Programme at New York University School of Medicine. A study of their genetic makeup indicates that they spring from the same lineage that stretches back thousands of years.

Dr Ostrer is one of a group of researchers who analysed the male Y chromosome from 1,371 men from the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. The team publishes its study this morning in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

The Y chromosome usually passes unchanged from father to son. Small alterations in its genetic blueprint can sometimes occur across generations, however, and these variations can be detected and pinpointed to determine a relatedness between populations. Closely related groups should share the same specific variations.

This was found to be very powerfully so with Jews, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, the authors found. They shared a common set of genetic signatures that diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of the Middle East.

The study also confirmed that after the Diaspora Jewish communities were generally very slow to intermix with non-Jewish populations. If they had, Jewish men from different regions of the world would not share the game genetic signatures in their Y chromosome. "It was surprising to see how significant the Middle Eastern genetic signal was in Jewish men from different communities in the Diaspora," Dr Ostrer said.