(Behar, D. 2010)

Genetics and the Case against British-Israelism

…Enjoin certain persons not to teach different doctrines,

Nor to devote themselves to myths and interminable genealogies

Which produce curious inquiries rather than God’s stewardship in faith.

                     1 Timothy 1:3-4, Translation by David Bentley Hart

The belief that the people of Britain and the United States are descended from the Biblical patriarch Jacob (Israel) is a fundamental tenet of Armstrongism. This arcane knowledge has been characterized by Herbert W. Armstrong as the key that unlocks Biblical prophecy. The case based on genetics against this idea, however, is strong. That case will be presented in this essay.

At the outset, I must state that my background is not in genetics or any of the biological sciences. I have a technical background in a quantitative field. There is no information written by professional geneticists on the British as descendants of Israel. It is likely that no geneticist has encountered and explored this unconventional idea. So the literature research is mine and I have endeavored to convey the underlying data with fidelity. 

Identity of the Jews the Cohen Modal Haplotype

It is surprising to me that I must include this subtopic in this essay. HWA never doubted that he was dealing with authentic Jews when he visited Israel. But now there are Armstrongists that call Jewish identity into question. Some Armstrongists wish to defend British-Israelism by identifying a European people as the true Jews in order to posit a Jewish genetic profile that is compatible with the British. In so doing, they have gravitated toward other interest groups that wish to see Jewish identity altered. The groups include principally: 1) Atheists who wish to deny that the Jews ever really existed at all and 2) White nationalist and supremacist groups who want to recast Christ as Western European racially. 

At the center of Jewish genetics is the Cohen Model Haplotype (CMH). CMH is a high frequency genetic configuration that is associated with those Jews who by tradition are descended from Aaron the brother of Moses. These Cohens are the priestly class within the Jewish community. This configuration is a special version of haplogroup J1 and is regarded as the predominant, original Israelite haplogroup. How this was determined can be found on the internet in an article by Ellen Levy-Coffman entitled “A Mosaic of People: The Jewish Story and a Reassessment of the DNA Evidence” (https://jogg.info/pages/11/coffman.pdf). The information is contained in the section of the article entitled “The DNA Evidence for Israelite Ancestry: The Jewish Priests and Cohanim DNA Study.”


I will not go over the detail of this text here because of the length of such a presentation but I will respond to a statement made by a critic of this research. The person stated in a blog post directed to me that I should be apprised that the idea that Jews are haplogroup J originated from a mere claim made by some guy that the researcher encountered. The full story on which this criticism is based is related in the section of the article by Levy-Coffman cited above. But the “guy” was not just anyone and his words were not just frivolous hearsay. He was a Sephardic Cohen who was conducting services in a synagogue. This Cohen had behind him the full weight of the history of the Sephardic Jews, their culture, their traditions and their continuous occupancy in Palestine prior to the Diaspora. As Paul stated in Romans, “…unto them were committed the oracles of God.”

In brief, here are a number of reasons why the people we call Jews are actually Jews:

1. According to Dr. Spencer Wells, a popular Harvard educated geneticist, the Ashekanzi and the Adnani Arabs both claim descent from Abraham. Both groups share haplogroup J which tell us that Abraham and his antecedents were haplogroup J. The claim of the Ashkenazi and the Adnani is consistent with the Biblical record.

2. J1 is shared by the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim with the same frequency. This means that this genetic signal was present in the Pre-Diaspora Jewish population in ancient Israel and is a founder haplogroup. It was not a later acquisition. Levy-Coffman states of haplogroup J1: “Its presence among contemporary Sephardic and Ashkenazi populations indicates the preservation of Israelite Semitic ancestry.” Note: There are other founder haplogroups: J2, E and G.

3. J1 anchors the Jews in the Middle East because J1 is restricted almost completely to Middle Eastern populations such as the Bedouins and Palestinians – geographically near to the ancient Jewish homeland. Haplogroups G and E are much more widespread and may have resulted from incursive populations.

4. Autosomal Principal Component Analysis (PCA) charts (see the graphic accompanying this essay) indicate that the Mizrahi Jews (Jews living in Iraq (Babylon) and Iran (Persia) who never entered the Diaspora), cluster in the middle of other haplogroup J peoples of the Middle East. The Ashkenazi cluster is between the Mizrahi and Europeans as one would expect because of their admixture with Europeans. 

Haplogroups are just one piece of genetic data. Autosomal studies augment haplogroup studies and take into consideration the entire genome. Autosomal studies are used by genetic testing services to indicate what percentage of various ethnic groups one might be. PCA is a mathematical means of representing similarities in autosomal data graphically.

5. John 1:11 states of Jesus: “He came to those things that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him.” Jesus did not come to a group of Celts living in the Britain. He came to a group of people who have lived continuously in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East prior to the time of Christ until modern times.

The Incompatibility of Israel and the British

The founder haplogroups for the Jews are: J1, J2, G and E (Levy-Coffman). The principal haplogroup for the Western Europeans, including most of the British, is R1b. There are other haplogroups found in the British Isles such as R1a, I, E, A and traces of others. It is important to note that Britain does not have its own haplogroup. Besides Britain, R1b is largely represented in Ireland, Western Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, among the Basques and scattered elsewhere in Europe. These people are referred to by geneticists as Atlantics because they live on the European continent nearest the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantics have their own extensive history and archaeology (see Dr. David Reich, “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past”). Their most common genetic configuration is called the Atlantic Modal Haplotype (AMH). I am haplogroup R1b-M269 and have the AMH. This is very common in Western Europe.

If Israel were haplogroup R like the British, he could not have fathered the Jews. If Israel were haplogroup J like the Jews, he could not have fathered the British. It is not possible for a man to produce more than one haplogroup. This is a simple and inviolable rule. Actually, for this thought experiment to work, we do not need to know that the Jews are haplogroup J1, J2, E and G and the British are haplogroup R1b. We need only know that the Jews and the British differ in haplogroup. The evidence as presently known is that all of the descendants of Israel are haplogroup J and are unrelated to the British. Likewise, this principle may be applied to all of the purported modern day “Tribes of Israel” living in Western Europe. For example, the Swedes, who are supposed to be the tribe of Naphtali, the brother of Judah, are haplogroup R1a and I. The Swedes do not have the genetic profile to be descended from Israel.

This can be seen by once again examining the autosomal PCA graphic that accompanies this essay. The French may be used as a surrogate for the British. Both are predominately R1b. Note that they do not cluster with the Jews at all. They cluster with other Europeans. The Ashkenazim and Sephardim cluster midway between the Europeans and the Mizrahi Jews of Iraq and Iran. This is because both the Ashkenazim and Sephardim have some admixture with Europeans.

A last point is that haplogroups exist in a hierarchy and are assigned letters of the alphabet. Though it is only a rough measure, the distance in number of letters is indicative of biological difference. Haplogroup A is much closer biologically to haplogroup C than it is to haplogroup Q. Haplogroup R is very distant from haplogroup J. The British people are about as distant from the Jewish people as Native Americans are. The effect of this is that the British people could not have mutated from J to R1b within the last few thousand years. Mutation is not a mechanism that works that quickly. 

Haplogroup R1b Among the Jews

Jews are not purely haplogroup J1 as we have seen. A substantial fraction of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have the R1b haplogroup. Dutch Jews are about 25% R1b. Is this not an argument for Jews possibly being related to the British? Perhaps, the R1b Jews are the real Jews and the haplogroup J Jews are imposters.

This question can be resolved by comparing the Ashkenazi and Sephardim to the Mizrahi. The two former groups both entered the Diaspora and resettled in Western and Eastern Europe. The Mizrahi Jews of Iraq are in communities that date from the first Babylonian Exile circa 586 BC and have been continuously present in the Middle East into modern times. We know there are R1b Jews among both the Ashkenazi and Sephardim. But the Mizrahi have almost no R1b (https://jewishdna.net/R1b-Europe.html and Behar, “The Genome-wide Structure of the Jewish People", Supplementary Table 4). If the two groups that entered Europe have R1b and the group that did not enter Europe has no significant amount of R1b, then R1b was acquired in Gentile Europe. Doron Behar acknowledges that these haplogroups (R1b, R1a, I) were probably “indicative of European admixture” (Levy-Coffman).

Additional support for this data is to be found in the autosomal PCA graphic accompanying this essay. The Mizrahi Jews of Iraq and Iran cluster in the middle of other Middle Eastern Groups and are remote from the European haplogroup R clusters.

The Future of British-Israelism among Armstrongists

The future of British-Israelism is not bright. An area that has yet to be extensively explored is the archaeogenetics of ancient Israel. This would involve extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient bones whose in situ provenance can provide not only raw population genetics data but a fuller social and cultural context. I anticipate that based on what we know of current Jewish data we can anticipate that we will see no haplogroup R in ancient Israel and the presence of E and G may be explained. Archaeogenetics will simply strengthen the case against British-Israelism in the future.

The question that arises is “What is so bad about being Gentile?” Paul speaks of how the Gentiles have been grafted into Israel and have become “spiritual Jews” and the middle wall of partition between the Jews and Gentiles has been broken down. Yet for some Armstrongists there must be a racial component to their ethnocentric sense of self-esteem. For others, perhaps, the idea that the United States is just another Gentile empire, among the many other Gentile empires in the history of the world, and will have its moment in the sun and fade out is just unacceptable.

Nobody in the scientific community is likely to look at the validity of British-Israelism directly. It is a fringe idea that would not be worth research dollars in academia. But as more genetic data is accumulated, the scrutiny brought to bear on British-Israelism will be increased. When this happens, people who find British-Israelism to be critical to their sense of self-worth will defend this idea. Very likely this will take the form of declaring that the real Jews are imposters and that Abraham and his family were all haplogroup R1b. In so doing, they, or perhaps the entire Armstrongist movement, will in viewpoint move towards the White Supremacist groups that now populate the American landscape in growing numbers.

However British-Israelism may be politicized or weaponized in the future, it will remain a mythology, a fairy tale, a fantasy, a footnote. The genetics demonstrates this.

submitted by Neo

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