As a religious sect, the Samaritans broke away from the main stream of Judaism around the fifth century B.C. Some 650 individuals comprising the total group of present day Samaritans trace their ancestry over a period of more than 2,000 years to the Biblical Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Menashe. The Samaritan community in the Middle East survives as a distinct religious and cultural sect and constitutes one of the oldest and smallest ethnic minorities in the world. As a result of their uniparental mode of inheritance and lack of recombination these segments of the genome have been developed into highly informative systems with applications in evolutionary studies, forensics, medical genetics, and genealogical reconstruction. Samaritan community is a small, isolated, and highly endogamous group numbering some 650 members who have maintained extensive genealogical records for the past 13≡5 generations.ĭetailed and accurate genetic characterization of maternal and paternal lineages can be achieved by the analysis of the haploid compartments of the genome: mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining portion of the Y chromosome (NRY). Prior to the Diaspora you could not serve in the Temple without proving orally and on paper your Levitical lineage. I'm intrigued by the Samaritan Cohen haplotype because there is a observable pattern when compared with other unrelated individuals with Levite traditions, Sephardic (Spain) and Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern Europe) that have very similar E3b haplotypes, enough to suggest a possible 70 AD pre Diaspora connection. Each of the four remaining families claim they can trace their lineages by written and oral traditon, paternally, all the way back to three tribes, Ephraim, Manessah and Levi ( from the fourth son of Aaron, brother of Moses). My point of interest is with the Samaritan Priestly (Cohen) families that contain the E3b1 haplotype. I've included pieces of information based on the two major papers writen on the Samaritan DNA. I'm new to this venue but have been with Family Tree DNA for some time now. Hammer' s haplogroups database but not in the Ysearch one. In addition, I don't know if all my Samaritanians near matches have upgraded to 25 markers, since all but one of them, are in Dr.
My aim with my first post was to ask other forum participants their views on this subject.Īnyway, my near match (2/12) with a testee from Israel, might be with a Samaritanian. VictorA very sound and solid comment on this issue, Victor. It is just a general comment for new participants. I know you're not making any conclusion, of course. In the search for our deep roots we must not let our natural eagerness and inclination towards the exotic push us into farfetched explanations. We have to watch out ourselves and warn others in our projects about quickly jumping to conclusions. We need to strive for higher resolution matches to make more meaningful deductions. In conclusion, these 12 marker matches hint only at very loose relationships with certain geographical regions and peoples. Genetic distances over 6 aren't even on the chart, but I can guess that the TMRCA would be near 8 or 9 thousand years. So what does this tell us? I checked FTDNA's chart Interpreting Genetic Distance and found out that at a genetic distance of 6 it is possible that we shared a common ancestor in excess of 5,000 years ago. The interesting part came when we ran the same query at 25-markers! There they were, many of the same haplotypes (and surnames) from the first query but at a genetic distance of 9 and up. And sure enough we did find a couple of near matches at 2 or 3 steps and others at greater genetic distances.
We then ran a 12-marker based ysearch query for E3b haplotypes located not only in Belarus but in all Eastern Europe.
For example, in our DNA project some believed that our near (two step) Ashkenazi 12-marker matches in Belarus was a clear indication of our Jewish origin. What's more, I think these 12 marker matches can be decidedly misleading. Like Igmayka's previous comment, I also believe "12 markers isn't enough to tell much of anything". There's an important observation I made and it has to do with the number of markers used to make the comparison. Most of mine belong to central or eastern European countries.
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