Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters' Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness:
For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told in print that 'Hitler would certainly have been very pleased' by your work can’t be pleasant. But that’s what happened in 2010 to Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, when he and his colleagues published a study showing that Jews in three different geographical areas had certain collections of genes that made them more biologically similar to one another than they were to non-Jews in the same regions. The work also showed that Jews around the world could trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago; that meant, however, that certain genetic signatures ...
