Abraham's Children Quotes

“Mesopotamia in the fifth or fourth millennium BCE was a magnet for nomads, drawing Sumerian-speaking peoples from the mountains or sea cultures and Semitic tribes that left the arid Arab Peninsula and migrated into the Mesopotamian greenbelt.”
― Jon Entine, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People

“It’s believed that the man who originated the J lineage lived in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent thousands of years before some of his descendants migrated to the Middle East 7,500 years ago. It is found at its highest variety in the Zagros Mountains in western Iran and in Iraq, where 60 percent of the population test positive for it. One branch of J, designated by geneticists as J1, is restricted almost exclusively to Middle Eastern populations, and this is where the CMH marker is most commonly found. Another clade, J2, which also includes Ashkenazi Jews, is also common throughout the Mediterranean countries and into India.”
― Jon Entine, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People

“The discovery that Father Sánchez’s paternal line is haplogroup J1 is somewhat surprising, as Spain has no large population group from within that subhaplogroup—in fact, only about 7 percent of the Spanish population tests as J1. Given the relatively small percentage of this lineage in the rest of Europe, it can safely be assumed that many J1’s from Spain share a crypto-Judaic past, which is probably true of Father Sánchez. It is also interesting to note that the signature of the Cohanim—descendants of Jewish priests—is also found in haplogroup J1.”
― Jon Entine, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People