Science Confirming a Myth and Sowing the Seeds of a New Reality

One of the longest running debate in Colombian culture is the one surrounding the Jewish origin of the people of the region of Antioquia (colloquially referred to as paisas). This debate has been bitter and long, with the participants usually taking extreme positions in the spectrum. The sides have claimed, at one moment or another of the debate, that either all paisas are of Jewish origin or that no Jews arrived to its luscious valleys looking for safety from the Inquisition. Prominent intellectuals like Luis López de Mesa, Jorge Isaacs, and José Carrasquilla contributed to the debate in the XIXth century. Today, the debate still rages on with the Catholic right and certain members of the Jewish community trying to minimize the Jewish heritage of the paisas, while other members of the community and the increasing number of returning anusim want to greatly exagerate its preponderance.

Jorge Isaacs

To our rescue comes science. Researchers from the University of Antioquia and the Imperial College of Medicine in London have researched a broad spectrum of paisa males (through particularities in the Y-chromosome) trying to ascertain the ethnic origin of the founders of the Antioqueño community. (Strong Amerind/White Sex Bias and a Possible Sephardic Contribution among the Founders of a Population in Northwest Colombia by Luis G. Carvajal-Carmona, Iván D. Soto, Nicolás Pineda, Daniel Ortíz-Barrientos, Constanza Duque, Jorge Ospina-Duque, Mark McCarthy, Patricia Montoya, Victor M. Alvarez, Gabriel Bedoya, and Andrés Ruiz-Linares. The American Journal of Human Genetics 67(5), November 2000). The results of the research were modest but enlightening:

a.) Most of the founders of the community were European males mating with native women.
b.) Most of the males came from Southern Spain.
c.) A fraction of the spectrum showed genetic particularities autochtonous to Semitic groups, most specifically Sephardic Jews.
d.) About 17% of the test subjects showed these Semitic markers showing a strong possibility of a Sephardic origin for this population bracket.

Here is the abstract of the study:

Historical and genetic evidences suggest that the recently founded population of Antioquia (Colombia) is potentially useful for the genetic mapping of complex traits. This population was established in the 16th–17th centuries through the admixture of Amerinds, Europeans, and Africans and grew in relative isolation until the late 19th century. To examine the origin of the founders of Antioquia, we typed 11 markers on the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome and four markers on mtDNA in a sample of individuals with confirmed Antioquian ancestry. The polymorphisms on the Y chromosome (five biallelic markers and six microsatellites) allow an approximation to the origin of founder men, and those on mtDNA identify the four major founder Native American lineages. These data indicate that ∼94% of the Y chromosomes are European, 5% are African, and 1% are Amerind. Y-chromosome data are consistent with an origin of founders predominantly in southern Spain but also suggest that a fraction came from northern Iberia and that some possibly had a Sephardic origin. In stark contrast with the Y-chromosome, ∼90% of the mtDNA gene pool of Antioquia is Amerind, with the frequency of the four Amerind founder lineages being closest to Native Americans currently living in the area. These results indicate a highly asymmetric pattern of mating in early Antioquia, involving mostly immigrant men and local native women. The discordance of our data with blood-group estimates of admixture suggests that the number of founder men was larger than that of women.

Here are also the conclusions of the study:

Data from Y-chromosome polymorphisms are consistent with the notion that a large proportion of the male founders of Antioquia originated in southern Spain, but they also suggest a northern Spanish and possibly a Sephardic contribution. The frequency of allele T at marker SRY-2627 has been assessed in several Iberian and European populations (Hurles et al. 1999). This allele is absent or has low frequencies in the populations surveyed, except for the Basque and Catalan, and its presence at a frequency of 5% in Antioquia suggests a northern Spanish origin for some Antioquian founders. The absence in Antioquia of the most common Catalan microsatellite haplotype and the relatively high frequency in Antioquia of the two most common Basque haplotypes suggests a direct contribution from the latter population. The relatively high frequency of large alleles at locus DYS388 and the genetic distances shown in table 3 are consistent with a Semitic contribution to the gene pool of Antioquia. This is in agreement with an origin of a considerable fraction of the Antioquian founders in southern Spain, since this area was under Arab rule for ∼8 centuries. Furthermore, recent autosomal microsatellite data from Andalucía confirm that there has been some genetic exchange between northern Africa and southern Spain (Bosch et al. 2000). Haplotype analysis suggests that the Semitic contribution to Antioquia might include a Sephardic component, since ∼14% of the Antioquian Y-chromosome haplotypes are shared with Jewish populations, including the CMH and other closely related haplotypes. Greater confidence in the possibility that these haplotypes reflect a Jewish ancestry in Antioquia requires a more extensive evaluation of their frequency in Mediterranean populations, particularly in northern Africa and southern Spain. Other genetic evidence indicative of a Sephardic ancestry for some of the initial Iberian migrants to the New World has recently been reported on the basis of the observation, in non-Jewish Latin American pedigrees, of disease-causing mutations mostly restricted to Jewish populations (Ellis et al. 1998; Lee et al. 1999).

Click here to read the whole article.

So, here is what this study can teach us about the Jewish origin of the paisas:

a.) Although the evidence needs to be corroborated, the current state of the art clearly hints at the plausibility of Jewish settlement in this area. (This plausibility is further increased by the historical material available, such as the chronicle of Antonio de Montesinos -published earlier in this blog-. Conclusive and foolproof evidence can only be provided through exhaustive anthropological research including the salvaging of relics -books, gravestones, tefilin, mikvaot- and through the collection of further historical evidence in the different colonial archives.)
b.) Given the plausibility of Jewish settlement in this area, there is an increasing need for scholarship in this area in Colombian universities. (If Jews indeed help settle Colombia, we need to study the extent of their contribution and their import in the development of Colombian culture and mores.)
c.) Concerning the important plight of the descendants of these Jews who want to return to the traditions of their forefathers, this study should serve -once again- as a wake up call to the competent halakhic authorities to validate their claims of authenticity while, at the same time, determining the specific halakhic framework in which their return to the Jewish people should be handled. (Given the fact that the markers of possible Jewish origin were transmitted through the males, it is clear that the benei anusim, in their vast majority, are not matrilineally connected to the Jewish people and, thus, need to complete a full conversion process according to halakha.)
d.) Science is showing us the way. Time to sow the seeds of a new reality!