have linked Ashkenazi and
Sephardic Jews, says Dr. Dia-
mond, to "many gentile peoples
of the eastern Mediterranean,
such as the Samaritans, Arme-
nians, Egyptian Copts, and Syr-
ian, Lebanese and Palestine
Arabs."
One could leave it at that and
let those who like to argue over
whether "Jews are a race" or
"Jews are a religion!' (how about
both?) select the facts that best
support their position. But it
seems that there is more to it.
There's also Darwin's rule of
natural selection.
Darwin has stated that, de-
pending on the environment,
certain traits are passed along
that enable living organisms to
better compete in the biological
struggle to survive, mate and
pass along genes. "Thus," ex-
plains Dr. Diamond, "two pop-
ulations derived from the same
ancestral population may di-
verge genetically in different en-
vironments, while populations
from different ancestral stocks
will tend to converge in the
same environment."
This natural selection, he
says, is evident in American
blacks, who have a lower fre-
quency of the antimalarial sick-
le-cell gene than their African
brethren. Likewise, Ashkenazi
Jews have a lower amount of
the antimalarial enzyme G6PD
than do Mediterranean people
— as they should, according to
natural selection, since produc-
ing G6PD no longer was neces-
sary once they moved to
malaria-free Eastern Europe.
The point, according to Dr.
Diamond, is that "just as skin
color adapts to local climate" so
do genetic antimalarials "adapt
to the local climate and pres-
ence or absence of malaria." So

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How is it that black
Ethiopians and
fair-skinned Soviet
Jews are part of the
same extended
Jewish family?

just as Eastern European Poles
or Ukrainians have little G6PD
in their systems, so do Jews
whose families spent centuries
in those areas.
There is still another in-
triguing element to this biolog-
ical puzzle: fingerprints, those
individualized amalgams of
loops, whorls and arches that
appear too similar for the un-
trained eye to tell apart. It turns
out that the people of Mada-
gascar have fingerprints like
those of the Indonesians from
whom they sailed away 1,500
years ago, while, Dr. Diamond
points out, "the fingerprints of
Ashkenazic Jews still resemble
those of their ancient Arab and
Egyptian neighbors, rather
than those of their recent Ger-
man neighbors ..."
Based on all the evidence —
which is far more complicated
than I have summarized in this
limited space — Dr. Diamond
concludes that it appears the
original gene pool of Ashkenazi
and Sephardic Jews has re-
mained relatively stable since
the days of the destruction of
the Second Temple and the
start of 2,000 years of Jewish
Diaspora.
True, he says, there have
been instances of large-scale
conversion, certainly among the
Khazars and perhaps among
the Ethiopian, Yemenite and
Indian Jews — groups that
were the most isolated of Jews.
But by and large, Jews have re-
mained genetically static and
the fact that British Jews look
and act so differently from Mo-
roccan Jews is simply a matter
of adaptation to their local phys-
ical and cultural environments.
Reached by telephone, Dr.
Diamond told me he draws no
"practical conclusions" from his
research. "This doesn't affect
how I personally define Ju-
daism or Jews," he says.
Agreed. Genetics is only a part
of the answer to the "who is a
Jew?" debate.
Still, I'm sure it will trouble
some to hear the evolution of
Jews likened to the develop-
ment of subspecies of yellow
wagtails and moths. I, for one,
do not mind. I'm left awe-struck
realizing how much a part of
the natural order Jews really
are.

MI DDLEBELT

pared to their Sephardic co-re-
ligionists. Ethiopian Jews are
as dark as their host population,
and the same can be said for In-
dian Jews.
Based on these superficial (in
a scientific sense, that is) char-
acteristics and early gene stud-
ies from the 1940s, it was easy
to argue — and it often was by
anti-Zionists and others — that
"being Jewish is more a matter
of belief than of genes," Dr. Di-
amond writes.
However, more recent ge-
netic studies have supported
just the opposite conclusion and