The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  Ashkenazi Jews in both Europe and North America endorsed the idea of their race. The issue surrounding the Jewish, or Semite, race was where it fit into the fuzzy hierarchy. Were the Semites a secondary sort of Caucasian? Or a somewhat higher strain of African, as the antisemites in anthropology maintained? Or were they their own Middle Eastern race? Race science having become respectable, Jews too were interested in defining Jews—for it was dangerous to cede the interpretations to others.

  The boiling intellectual and political currents of the turn of the century, including Zionism, social Darwinism, and eugenics, are not going to be entered here. Enough to say that nearly all scientists endorsed the biology of race; the problem was defining the human types with any sort of precision. The established procedure was to measure people—to measure them strenuously in all their external aspects, not just their racial pigment and hair texture but also their eye color, height, weight, arm span, muscle structure, lung function, and so on, and particularly the width and length of their heads, which produced a ratio called the cephalic index. You might combine these measurements with looser indicators like nostrility, the fleshy placement of the nostrils high on the face. Prominent nostrility was a giveaway of the Ashkenazi Jew. Although this trait was first documented by Jewish scientists, who wrote it off as minor and unreliable, their antagonists in the profession regularly turned the Jewish scholarship to their own ends. The trouble, obviously, with the morphometric approach was that the physical measurements weren’t consistent within a single family, let alone across a racial type. Mindful of human beings specifically, Charles Darwin had warned that it was rash to attempt to define species using inconstant characteristics.

  Race science had grown into a large, shambling collection of phenotypes, crying out, in the brave new world of Mendel, for the underlying genotypes. Mendel, at last Gregor Mendel. Working with pea plants in a monastery half a century earlier, Mendel had discovered and published simple rules of heredity. After a curious lag in recognition, the rules of Mendelism were being employed enthusiastically. For biologists to be able to predict the transmission of genes and to observe phenotypic traits emerging was very satisfying, yet knowledge of the seminal material, DNA, lay as far in the future as Mendel’s work was in the past. Genes were abstractions, mysterious particles of inheritance, and as abstractions were flagrantly tossed about. You could argue that the racial characteristics of Jews or Africans or Mexicans were genetically controlled, but that’s all it was, an argument.

  For most of the twentieth century, the best statement on the question of Jewish race was ignored. In 1911, Maurice Fishberg, an anthropologist and physician at New York University, published The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment. Fishberg’s book made the case that Jews had been transformed by gradually interbreeding with their fellow Europeans. He had crunched the physical statistics and found that Jews in any given country were more like their gentile countrymen than like Jews living elsewhere. Whatever racial uniqueness they may have had was lost, he maintained.

  Fishberg had no way to quantify the admixture that had occurred. Modern genetic evidence suggests that the rate of outbreeding by Ashkenazim was as low as 0.5 percent per generation. Does that sink his argument? No, because some eighty generations have elapsed since the founding of the Ashkenazim. Tiny genetic leaks through the dikes guarding the population could have built up over centuries and dissolved some of their phenotypic differences with outsiders.

  In Maurice Fishberg’s optimistic vision of humanity, people were as plastic as sunflowers, responding rapidly to changes in the environment. He collaborated with another progressive anthropologist, Franz Boas, on a famous study of the environment’s effects on race. The study showed that the social conditions of America had altered the head sizes of Jews and other immigrant groups within one generation of their arrival from Europe. Fishberg thought that everything that made Jews distinctive, including the way they walked and talked, reflected the landscape of their clannish communities. Their traits stemmed from long isolation and persecution, not biology. If a type existed, Fishberg believed, it was a social type residing in the spirit of the Jew instead of his body. “It is not the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head which is characteristic,” he declared. “It is his soul which betrays his faith.”

  “Judaism prospers best under the iron rule of isolation,” Fishberg wrote, adding that what was good for Judaism was probably not good for Jewish people. Therefore he was eager for their assimilation. Assimilation was the answer to the Jewish problem in the West. Yet nothing Fishberg said or wrote could derail the ravenous applications of race science, which continued to their cruel climax in Josef Mengele’s laboratory at Auschwitz in 1944. It may be inflammatory and reductive to finish this history with Mengele. Moreover, it is not clear what Dr. Mengele was up to, although hunting for the internal pathways of Jewish genes was part of his assignment. If his experiments could identify the genetic components of Jewishness, the information could be used to extract members of the race from society, even when they had admixed with other Europeans. Mengele was the last researcher, if that’s the right word for him, to try to classify a people by pulling apart their bodies.

  Harry Ostrer took pride in his connection to Maurice Fishberg, a prophet in the scientific wilderness. Both men held posts at the New York University School of Medicine. Harry thought of himself as Fishberg’s heir, and sometimes he titled an article or lecture accordingly, such as in “Maurice Fishberg’s Legacy: Population Genetics in the 21st Century,” a talk he gave to his NYU colleagues.

  Harry was a voice in the wilderness too, but on the other side from Fishberg. He studied the genetic variants characteristic of Jews, the hardwired facts that might set them apart from other people. Race was passé, no need for him to fight that battle, but he wasn’t afraid to address the overlap of ethnicity and biology, politically incorrect though that might be.

  He launched an ambitious study of Jews’ origins and migrations called the Jewish HapMap Project. When he had time, he went into the field and collected their DNA himself. I am in Thessaloniki [Greece] recruiting for the Jewish HapMap Project, he e-mailed. As you know, it was a majority Jewish city prior to WWII. The small Jewish community now is comprised of Holocaust survivors, their children, and their grandchildren. Sometimes the tears appear when I draw blood from an arm on which a number has been tattooed and read a family history questionnaire that ends suddenly at Death Camps.

  In 2010, Ostrer and his colleagues published their analysis of seven Jewish populations from Europe and the Middle East. They detected genetic threads tying all of the populations together, regardless of the distance separating the groups today. Jews were distinguishable from their longtime neighbors of other creeds by means that Fishberg would never have thought possible. The work made an international splash. When a critic in Israel complained that Hitler would have been very pleased, Harry replied bluntly, We can tell who the Jews are genetically. Privately he wondered if he had produced the modern version of Nazi race science. He could be quick to second-guess himself.

  For what they’re worth, these further attributes of Harry Ostrer are offered: mercurial, hard to pin down, a big-picture man, a synthesizer of results, prickly about his reputation, uneasy in his alliances, happiest when working hardest, a thousand balls in the air, proud to be a Jew, proud to be an American, a macher, a tough kidder, a softie who hated seeing others in pain (he winced over and over when I told him what Shonnie went through), a terse, honest, invaluable guide.

  From the beginning of genetic science, some of its specialists (not Ostrer) have wanted to uncover a higher purpose in the function of genes. The mindless honing of DNA on the assembly line of evolution, the arbitrary forces of genetic drift, and especially the creation and persistence of disease mutations were disquieting to many in the field. They wondered whether the genetic instructions to the body had a purpose even when the body suffered. While most medical
geneticists focused on diseases and deficits, the theoreticians of carrier advantage sought to flip the work in a positive direction.

  The familiar example of carrier advantage is sickle-cell anemia, a blood disease seen mainly in Africa. It’s a recessive disorder, meaning that it takes two copies of the sickle-cell mutation to bring about the disease in carriers. However, bearers of one copy of the abnormal gene gain some protection from malarial infections while being spared the worst effects of the blood disorder. Evolution, it appears, has favored the continuation of the sickle-cell trait in human beings who have had to contend with mosquitoes and malaria. The math of the trade-off is straightforward. For every person who perished from inheriting a recessive illness, two or more healthy carriers went ahead with their fitness and survival enhanced.

  Tay-Sachs disease has served as the analogous disorder for Ashkenazi Jews, that is, for the scientists attempting to divine its recessive utility. By all appearances, Tay-Sachs—named for two doctors who described it at the end of the nineteenth century—has nothing in its favor. It was and is a very grim neurological condition. Affected infants start life healthy but begin to lose muscular control at six months. Their heads loll helplessly and their vision dims; after a period of convulsions, they slide into coma and death. How might the healthy carrier have an edge over those lacking the gene?

  In Maurice Fishberg’s day, Tay-Sachs was known as amaurotic family idiocy (a name that wouldn’t fly now for any disease). Fishberg thought the disorder might be inherited, but he would not attribute it to inbreeding, which he considered an ill-founded slur by prejudiced gentile doctors. Non-Jewish physicians were in agreement that the Jews of the urban ghettos were sickly, and prone to nervous disorders, and generally of inferior constitution—except, curiously, when they were exposed to tuberculosis and cholera. Just as Negroes seemed to resist malaria better than other races, Jews seemed to carry a protection against tuberculosis. This century-old observation was short of data and has been relegated to the urban-legend category, but back then it made for lively scientific discussions. Adopting a Darwinian line, Fishberg averred that constant exposure to tuberculosis in crowded European cities had weeded out the less-fit Jews—those excessively predisposed to infection, in his words—and that the protective result had carried over to the milieu of New York City.

  Fishberg knew nothing of DNA and carrier advantage. But half a century later, evolution-versed geneticists understood the transmission of recessive disorders and the potential of the healthy carrier. That’s when the possibility that Tay-Sachs might protect against TB was brought back and investigated. The inverse association between the two conditions was anecdotal: In surveys of Ashkenazi patients, accounts of tuberculosis in the patients’ families didn’t overlap with histories of Tay-Sachs. People remembered that their grandparents in Eastern Europe had suffered from one disease or the other but rarely both. Geographically, too, the disease histories didn’t overlap, as if one condition might be excluding the other. As an additional factor, Jews seemed underrepresented in sanatoriums for TB patients. Well, it was a good story as far as it went, but no biological mechanism was proposed, and the Tay-Sachs–TB association lost traction over the years.

  A new theory was advanced in 2005, this one having to do with Jewish IQ. Anthropologists in Utah published it in an obscure journal, and the New York Times jumped on it. Since Jews had always relied on their intelligence, Tay-Sachs mutations might have spurred brain growth, the researchers wrote. The Ashkenazim who carried a Tay-Sachs mutation, or a mutation for three somewhat similar disorders, might have been favored with greater mental development than other people. In the pressure-cooker of the ghetto, the smartest men would have done best in business, and would have spawned the largest families, which would have spread their intelligence genes. Hence the many Jewish Nobel Prize winners in the twentieth century. The rare recessive diseases were kind of an accidental by-product of Jews’ mental success.

  The Utah research team also managed to work 185delAG and two other Jewish BRCA mutations into their theory about IQ. Previously, scientists had speculated that during periods of famine the female carriers of a BRCA mutation may have gained an advantage in fertility or lactation, which could have helped their offspring to survive. The Utah anthropologists noted that BRCA1 and 2 were active in neuronal cells, where they appeared to take part in restraining cell proliferation. A neuronal cell normally has two working copies of the BRCA genes to perform this task. What if having a single defective copy slightly unleashed brain growth so as to be advantageous to Jews? Again, all well and good. You couldn’t prove it didn’t happen that way unless you conducted an experiment, and nobody was proposing to count the brain cells or measure the IQs of BRCA carriers, men and women who already were quite preoccupied with the gene’s drawbacks.

  The Utah researchers—Henry Harpending, Gregory Cochran, and Jason Hardy—were audacious to put an evolutionary spin on Jewish braininess, and they took a lot of criticism for doing so. Overshadowed in the IQ controversy was the implicit desire to discern order and progress in DNA. The forces of evolution, though blind, were not heartless, according to this view. Natural selection was a much more appealing explanation for the deleterious mutations than inbreeding, founder effects, bottlenecks, and drift, the Four Horsemen of genetic variation.

  Dismissing the Utah paper as poor, Harry sought to place it in a broader context. Historical phenotypes for Jews have been bandied about, both adaptive like this one and maladaptive, he said. He and other Jewish scientists labored under a double-edged sword. With the Holocaust still echoing, Jews didn’t want to be viewed as inferior but it wasn’t good to be seen as superior either. As he talked, he switched casually between the genetic and cultural sides of the story, now presenting one, now trying on another, a matador wielding a prayer shawl instead of a cape.

  So the Ashkenazi Jews endured their severest bottleneck, the Holocaust, and after World War II started to grow vigorously once more. Race science was dead; the science of genetics went forward. The genocentric age that is upon us will be discussed in a later chapter; a few more things must be asked about the Holocaust first. Was Jewish DNA rearranged because of it? Geneticists don’t know. It was not like earlier bottlenecks because the population was so much larger in the twentieth century, and it had spawned separate subpopulations. Two of these, the Romanian Jews and the Lithuanian Jews, the Holocaust removed from the map. Most probably, the DNA has been constant and only the raw numbers shifted—the millions who were terribly lost.

  A large part of the world’s 185delAG carriers perished as well. Regarding the remainder, not all of them Ashkenazi, Shonnie Medina and members of her family being highest in mind, consider the likelihood that every one is a descendant of a Judean who walked in the desert twenty-five hundred years ago. There’s a technical term for them: identical by descent. In a double sense these individuals were born to suffer: first from disease, if the full weight of the gene prevailed, and second from the biblical onus of the dispersed and chosen people.

  Identifying the 185delAG mutation could be more difficult in the future because of intermarriage and assimilation. The American Jewish community is the largest, most powerful Jewish community in all of history, including the era of the Second Temple, but half of young Jews are marrying outside of the faith, and the religious upbringing of their children is uncertain. Worldwide, the number of Jews has barely increased since 1970, in the face of growing numbers of people of other faiths. Maurice Fishberg observed that Judaism weakened when Jews were fully tolerated, just as persecution always made them strong. In the twenty-first century, it is the culture that is under threat of dissolving, or perhaps it will retreat to the strongholds of the Orthodox Jews and to Israel, while the mutation travels like a wind-blown wave, not weakening or slackening. For BRCA1.185delAG is a dominant force acting by itself, unlike the recessive agents, whose complete effect requires two partners.

  The Jews�
�� place in Western society remained a mild dilemma for Harry. The research by him and others showing a mix of European and Middle Eastern DNA hadn’t made the dilemma go away, only embellished it. We’re just like the rest, was the way he put it, versus We are special.

  We sometimes say we’re in a golden age, he mused. Golden for its tolerance of Jews and for the scientific studies of the Jewish population. But things could change. Golden ages end. We could go through tough times again.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  EL CONVENTO

  San Luis, the hub of Culebra, claims to be the oldest town in Colorado, finessing the fact that San Luis was part of New Mexico Territory when the town was established, in 1851. The town and its streets feel very small because the natural features and religious aura of the place are so large. A century-old church, the biggest building in town, anchors the central plaza, and a modern chapel, gleaming and marmoreal, overlooks San Luis from the steep mesa hugging the town. You are never out of sight of one structure or the other, the effect of which is to make the place bristle with symbols of Roman Catholicism. The vaulting sky and mountains dilute the impression somewhat.