Bringing the 'Lost Tribes' Home Israel's Law of Return puts the state in the position of answering a complex question: Who is Jewish and who isn't?

摘要

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the relationship between genetics and Judaism is how little use both Jewish religious law and Israeli law have made of genetic data on identity issues-despite considerable evidence of shared genetic heritage among most groups of Jews.This is not to say that the possibility that genetics could identify Jews has excited no interest. The ten lost tribes, after all, are still lost, and have never ceased to intrigue. Old assertions that the Pashtun of the Hindu Kush descend from the lost tribes were revived by the notion that high frequencies among them of Y-chro-mosome haplogroups Rlala-M198 and the presence of G2c-M377 may signal a link with ancient Jews. There was international press coverage when genetic testing showed that the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking, southern African tribal people with a tradition of exotic origin, has a high incidence of the Y-chromosome hap-lotype common among the cohanim, the Jewish priests said to be descendants of the biblical Aaron, Moses' brother. But even if DNA could tell us that the ancestors of the Pashtun, Lemba or some other group were Jewish, it would not ipso facto make their modern descendants Jewish.