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Chances are we have what you're looking for. Even if you're looking for everything. WE PROVIDE FIRST QUALITY MATERIALS AND QUALIFIED CONTRACTOR REFERRALS. Ua 11 39 314OINI / Ito 4 8 MILE 474-6610 28575 GRAND RIVER, FARMINGTON, MI .nos coirviv ecDTMAIZMQ 1 10AQ Come home to quality Andersen their typically dark, Mediter- ranean features, were in some way related to their fair- skinned co-religionists a world away, in the crowded shtetls of Poland and Russia? The key question, however, is: If such a genetic link ex- ists, does that explain the cultural isolation of Jews for more than 25 centuries? "That is certainly one con- clusion you could draw from Karlin's data." Feldman says, noting that he, himself, chooses to take a noncommit- tal positon. Karlin, however, insists that "there is no such thing as a Jewish gene pool unless you speak of it as . . . an outgrowth of the Jewish population bottleneck which occurred in 1500." Since "the end of the Mid- dle Ages," he says, "the con- tribution of non-Jews to the Jewish gene pool has been ex- tremely small," while the genetic flow in the other direction from the Jewish population to the non-Jewish population via conversion — was significant. Other scientists, mean- while, have interpreted the genetic data differently. Dorit Carmelli, a senior biostatis- tician at the Stanford Re- search Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., for example, worked with Karlin in the 1970s at the Weizmann, where she received her doctor- ate. The author of The Genetic Origin of the Jews, Carmelli says succinctly, "I don't be- TM lieve that the Jews were iso- lated." She believes, instead, that genetic mixing must have taken place during the 2,000 years of Diaspora life. Through her own research of 12 Jewish and 20 non-Jew- ish groups, in fact, she no- ticed genetic mixing within Sephardi and Ashkenazi sub- groups even though all those Jews supposedly had a com- mon Mideastern origin. That research would sug- gest that the halachic pro- hibition against inter- marriage was, in fact, not observed. One thing all three Bay Area scientists agree on is the impossibility of determining anything remotely resem- bling a "Jewish race." "It is extremely difficult to make a racial classification on what we know about genes to- day," says Feldman, a native of Perth, Australia. By way of example, he points to his soft curls and says, "Take my hair. Most people of African extraction also have curly hair, but so do a great number of people of Jewish and Arab extraction." As for the future of gene- tics, Feldman is optimistic. The possibility of "DNA fingerprinting" may be in the offing. And genetic research undoubtedly will impact on medical fields. "A fairly high frequency of Mediterranean Jews have a hemoglobin disorder called thalassemia," he notes. "Sephardic Jews are known to have a certain enzyme de- ficiency that is restricted to their populations, and, of course, there's 'Thy-Sachs. "The closer we get to iso- lating these diseases, their populations, and where they appear on the DNA molecule, the nearer we get to finding a cure." Meanwhile, Carmelli re- members the first human genetic conference held in Jerusalem in 1962, an event that became a springboard for studying Israel's distinct Jewish ethnic groups "while they still were new immi- grants and before intermar- riage would make genetic research of that kind virtual- ly impossible." But no matter what tools researchers use, she adds, "one can say that Jews pos- sess a genetic profile that makes them more similar with each other than with non-Jews." As the child "growing up in Israel during the '50s and '60s" she continues, "you can't imagine how fascinating it was for me to hear Jews speaking so many languages and looking so different from one another." But the inherent homoge- neity of the Jews, she in- dicates, ultimately took her past a quest to find genetic similarities to visceral ap- preciation c f Am Yisrael, one people of Israel. Winston Pickett is a staff writer for the Northern California Jewish Bulletin.