Genetics Prove "Am Yisrael Chai"--The Jewish People Lives!

The New York Times reports that Jewish communities with origins in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from a common ancestral community in the Middle East some 3000 years ago. According to the published report:

A major surprise from both surveys is the genetic closeness of the two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim.

Jewish communities from Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus all have substantial genetic ancestry that traces back to the Levant; Ethiopian Jews and two Judaic communities in India are genetically much closer to their host populations.

Dr. [Gil] Atzmon and Dr. [Harry] Ostrer have developed a way of timing demographic events from the genetic elements shared by different Jewish communities. Their calculations show that Iraqi and Iranian Jews separated from other Jewish communities about 2,500 years ago. This genetic finding presumably reflects a historical event, the destruction of the First Temple at Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. and the exile of many Jews there to his capital at Babylon.

And so once again modern science bolsters the accuracy of the Biblical account of the history of the Jewish people. Moreover, this report demolishes the theory propounded by anti-Zionist, revisionist historian Shlomo Sand, in his 2009 book "The Invention of the Jewish People," in which he claimed that Jews have no common origin, and their peoplehood is a myth contrived by Zionists in the 19th Century in order to promote Jewish claims to the Land of Israel. Science now relegates Sand's theory to theory to the dustbin of history, while Am Yisrael Chai--the Jewish People Lives.