The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  The questioning meandered off-topic as the session wound down. Fidgety and flushed with lemonade, the kids acted as litmus strips for the moods of their parents. Debbie Rich-Crane wanted to know Shaw’s opinion of homeopathic therapy for cancer. Though firmly against it, the counselor tiptoed around the subject, having been clued in that it was a Medina issue. I don’t know much about it, he said. Exercise can reduce the risks . . . It’s not my area.

  How did this family get the gene? At long last—the crucial question. A few members of the group already knew the story of the mutation’s ancestral source. They’d been told by Debbie or another cousin who had come across the story while investigating the family cancers. Indeed, at least one of Joseph’s brothers had stayed away from today’s meeting because he refused to accept the story that the Martinezes and Medinas, Spanish on the surface, with some Native American below, were also descended from Jews.

  Yes, Jews. You hear all the time that America is a melting pot, but if so, the mix is lumpy and the ingredients may not be as stated in the family recipes. For the Hispano Catholics of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, Jewish ancestry was a will-o’-the-wisp of memory and culture, which many people had heard about without knowing if it was true. Again: What was a Jewish gene doing in people who maintained they were Spanish?

  Jeffrey Shaw hesitated. Several years before, Shaw himself had helped to uncover the surprising fact. Essentially, the DNA that he and his colleagues found in the San Luis Valley confirmed events that had happened centuries earlier in Spain and that were echoing still. Perhaps the genetic counselor didn’t care to stray into a social minefield. Researchers have been told to get out of Hispano households when they mentioned Jewish genes. In any event, Shaw stopped speaking and turned around, looking for assistance. How did this family get the gene?

  That was my call to speak. The story I gave was a digest of information that will be given in later chapters of the book. Most likely the mutation arrived by way of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism half a millennium ago under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition. The Martinez descendants listened, not exactly blankly, their faces incorporating the story of their Jewish forebears for further review. As stucco is smoothed over adobe, people may layer an identity for themselves at odds with what lies beneath, and no longer recall having done so.

  Taking over again, Shaw fleshed out the specifics of the family mutation. He explained that BRCA1 was a very long gene, thousands of biochemical letters long, and therefore it had thousands of places where misspellings could occur. So at letter number 185, he said, there’s been a deletion of the A and the G; A, for adenine, and G, for guanine, are two of the four letters of the DNA code. That’s why the boo-boo is called 185delAG, he said. When we test members of this family, Myriad [Myriad Genetics, the company with a patent on the gene test] will look at only that one place in the gene.

  When Shaw then characterized 185delAG as a Jewish marker, his voice quite properly put quotes around the phrase, for Jewish marker or Jewish gene is misleading. Jewish ancestral marker is a better way to put it because carriers of the mutation may also have ancestors who were not Jews, clearly the case here.

  Shaw then made his good-byes, mingling for a few minutes, and took off for Colorado Springs. That was a shame, because he missed the afterpiece, wherein the members of the Martinez and Medina clan dropped their seriousness and celebrated their family reunion. People produced digital cameras and took pictures of one another, to much oohing and aahing. The room filled with happy noise. Dorothy Martinez, the smiling senior member, looked somewhat like a party pretzel with her bent back, sticklike limbs, and salt-colored hair. Requests were called out for Joseph to sing, and while he obligingly got the equipment ready, a master of ceremonies materialized.

  Bill Kramer was Joseph’s brother-in-law. He and his wife, Wanda, lived in Alamosa, the Anglo hub of the Valley. Pale, with a shaved head and dancing, glacier-blue eyes, Bill poked fun at himself as the so-called German outlaw of the family. For employment, he was a quiltmaker and a snow-shoveler, among other jobs, while Wanda earned money cleaning houses. The answering machine where they lived was maxed out with unculled messages. Joseph Medina, as the head of the family, was not unfriendly to Bill, but he was puzzled by his artistic tastes and offbeat ideas. In another era, Bill might have been a troubadour, or a holy fool running after Saint Francis, or a gypsy. He had a big, overflowing heart.

  So Bill commanded the floor at T-ana’s. He told an elaborate joke about hunters in the woods, acting out two or three of the parts and almost pinching himself in delight. He didn’t want any of his in-laws to go home early. After Joseph started singing—faster music than the night before—Bill jumped up and began line-dancing with his wife and sisters-in-law and some of the female cousins. “Boot-Scootin’ Boogie,” yeah, came pulsing from the karaoke speakers. Line-dancing was a contemporary Western form belonging more to Alamosa than Culebra, but the exuberance on display was all Hispano. Joseph’s sisters Lupita and Chavela especially could twirl. Between songs Bill had to admit, with a whoop of laughter, that it sure didn’t look like a Jewish dance. Taking the mike himself, he sang, “Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp),” and it went surprisingly well.

  If Shonnie had been here, she would have been right at the center of the singing and dancing. To deflect their admiration of her, sooner or later people would have started to tease her or tell stories about her. The blonde, the airhead, they called her, because she was klutzy as well as beautiful. How she always got her fishing line tangled. Not paying attention and running out of gas. How about the time the blanket slipped off the roof of the car and got caught in the axle, and Shonnie driving along without a clue until the car stopped dead in the middle of the road? MICHAEL, she would wail—that heedless, histrionic wail of hers—summoning her husband to the rescue. If only Shonnie had been here.

  Wanda Kramer, Shonnie’s aunt, looked better than she had at the beginning of the afternoon. A warm woman with cascading black ringlets of hair, Wanda was convinced that she had a breast tumor. Some weeks earlier, a radiologist had spotted a lesion on her ultrasound scan. Alarmed, the radiologist had urged additional tests. Bill Kramer and the radiologist had butted heads over the necessity for a biopsy. Another issue was cost, since the couple didn’t have health insurance.

  Bill related all this privately, as the party at T-ana’s ebbed. The good news was that the lesion in Wanda’s breast had started to shrink, Bill said, thanks to her stringent diet and other measures of natural healing. A student and part-time salesman of alternative medical approaches, Bill spoke confidently about the body’s response to synergistic blends of essential oils. I believe in mind–body, he said, his brow glistening from the dancing. That’s my paradigm. I’ve seen so many amazing stories. I’m waiting for the doctors to become more open-minded. And if we’re going to do natural healing anyway, why does a biopsy matter? A biopsy would only cause it to spread, Bill concluded sunnily. If only the strategy had worked out.

  He talked about Shonnie, of whom he’d been very fond. While Shonnie was sick, Bill had the idea to raise money for her care from sales of his handmade quilts. He set up a table outside the supermarket and made a sign saying, I am raising money to help my niece who has breast cancer. He was able to give her $640 from the proceeds.

  An emotional man, Bill teared up. Shonnie always saw the good in everyone, he said. She told me—I remember how it cheered me up—she told me, I see an elder in you. Uncle Bill, you will become an elder.

  Shonnie believed that Bill was a good enough person to become an elder in the local congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. For she, Bill, Wanda, Iona, Joseph, Marianne, Dorothy, and a number of other Medinas had converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1980s, rejecting the Catholic religion they’d known as children. The serene millenarianism of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had taken root in the thin air of Culebra, like an epiphyte growing up
on a Catholic tree but taking no nourishment from it. Perhaps that’s why Bill was so upbeat. The nettlesome questions of life and death and race and strife didn’t bother the Witnesses as much as other people, because of the promise of the last days and the Earthly Paradise soon to come.

  The Jehovah’s Witnesses were at the far end of a revolution that had been in motion in the Western world since the Crucifixion. The Christians had rejected the Jews, the Protestants the Catholics, and then the Witnesses had broken from the Protestants and all who came before or since, each new group maintaining they had returned to the fundamentals of the faith. How plastic are the choices that human beings make, ever spinning off to new landscapes. But if you are a genetic determinist, you wonder about the centripetal pull of DNA.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  THE WANDERING GENE

  So God instructed Abraham to go and found a great nation in the land of Canaan. Abraham did as he was told. Abraham was a Jewish knight-errant. After sallying back and forth, he fathered a family and settled in Palestine. This happened (if it happened that way) three or four thousand years ago. Armed by an agreement with their God, the Jewish people came into being. First a family, then a clan, then a tribe, finally they became a family of tribes wresting territory from other tribes. The land they took over was dry, and was watered by dikes and channels in the manner of the Culebran acequias.

  Politically they were called Hebrews or Israelites or Judeans. Genetically they were blends of the peoples of the region, combining DNA from the original Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, and others. None of the other Semitic groups lasted, and why didn’t they? Their genes live on in today’s Jews, but the cultural cladding for their genes sloughed off and fell away. Naturally, peoples and nations rise and fall. Why not the Hebrews then? Living at the busiest intersection of the Mediterranean, they suffered heavy-footed incursions from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome—much bigger civilizations that did not last either.

  And again, whenever the Jews were fragmented and forced from Palestine, which happened more than once, still they held together. Along the highways of the ancient world, all sorts of peoples, not just Jews, were constantly being dispersed by famines, epidemics, conquests, and other upheavals. The refugees assimilated where they landed, surrendering their ethnic passports to the locals, as it were, and distributing their genes accordingly. But not the Jews. Or not readily, at any rate. It’s as if history attached a locator-beacon to them, a cultural GPS, so that Jewish communities can be tracked around the world and down through time.

  As told in the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites’ fierce prophets kept them united during their displacement by reminding them of their obligations to God. Having drifted from Canaan to Egypt, they were guided and goaded back to the promised land by Moses. After Jerusalem was destroyed in the sixth century BCE, and the heart of Jewry was deported weeping to Babylon, a hot-eyed patriot named Ezekiel came forward. Ezekiel had visions of bones in the desert coming to life, of Jerusalem restored. The prophet lectured the Babylonian exiles on maintaining their blood purity. He urged them to guard their sacred separateness lest the pagans around them swallow them up. Reiterating God’s covenant, Ezekiel said that God would bless the Jewish people and multiply them, and that God would set His sanctuary in the midst of them forever. Consider the image of the sanctuary, physically set in the middle of them. The sanctuary was like the nucleus of their cell. Their backs turned to outsiders, their eyes locked upon the sanctuary, the Jews seemed to some a stiff-necked people.

  Ezekiel’s successors, Ezra and Nehemiah, hammered upon the hatefulness of intermarriage. The holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands, Ezra inveighed. He demanded that men get rid of their foreign wives. Indeed, the Hebrew Bible’s repeated admonitions against taking up with foreign women suggest that the practice was fairly common. Hence also the emphasis in the scriptures on genealogy, on continuity of lineage, on all those tongue-twisting names connected by begat. Judaism’s bond was like an epoxy, the resin of religion mixed with the hardener of blood, nature interlocking with nurture. But of the two agents, blood was the more telling. Any person with Jewish forebears, traditionally through the mother’s line, was deemed to be a Jew—that was his or her default identity. What the person actually attested to was secondary, even irrelevant.

  So Jewishness had an in-going, biological dimension, and genealogy was the means of affirming it. It is in this period that the idea of a Jewish race starts to take shape, race representing a seamless new construct of blood and culture, more potent than either blood or culture separately. Formerly, the units of encounter between populations were tribal rather than racial, and the typical Middle Eastern emigrant would have found his genes advancing ahead of him, so to speak. The individuals he or she met would be distantly familiar, striking a chord from earlier, unremembered exchanges of DNA. Racial awareness changed the perspectives of both parties. When a proud and self-contained people such as the Jews, riding the high trajectory of their faith, splashed down in a foreign territory, they probably stirred up more than a garden-variety fear of strangers.

  But Jerusalem—Jerusalem was their home. When a portion of the Judeans returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, foreigners abounded in their citadel. The high priests felt the national identity needed to be tightened. If DNA analysis had been available, the Hebrew prophets might have become even tougher guardians of the racial purity of Jews. A panel of Jewish genetic markers might have been created. Lining up at the rebuilt Temple, the people would have provided DNA swabbed from their cheeks. The racial test—analyzing the entire genome or inventory of their genetic material—would have allowed for the earlier borrowings from Semitic groups. That is, a certain percentage of Canaanite heritage would be expected, and, within ranges, other foreign genes would be grandfathered into the criteria as well. Conversely, among the diagnostic markers of Jewishness, the new breast-cancer mutation 185delAG might have been flagged because it’s nearly surefire proof of Jewish ancestry.

  In any event, by looking at a sufficient number of locations in people’s genomes, science would be able to tell the religious authorities who was a Jew and who was not, and men would be advised whom they could marry and not. Tests like this exist today and are starting to be used, and sharp-tongued prophets of genetics are being heard too.

  In 2001, Dr. Harry Ostrer, head of the Human Genetics Program at the New York University School of Medicine, published a deeply researched paper in which he declared that Jewishness is not determined exclusively by DNA but that DNA can help to provide dispersed populations of Jews with a group identity. Ostrer thought that, thanks to modern genetics, the issue of whether Jews constituted a race, a people, or a genetic isolate could be confronted head-on.

  Asked to elaborate, he e-mailed: The Jewish genome is like a series of Cluny tapestries. Threads have been woven in at different times, but once there, they become recognizable—recognizably Jewish. In our parlance, they become ancestry-informative markers. These threads are influenced by genetic isolation, drift and selection, which makes them prevalent in a large number of Jews.

  But I was making the point in my paper, Harry continued, that Jewishness is also a religion, so you, waspy Jeff Wheelwright, could study Talmud with a rabbi, pass a Beit Din (rabbinical court), and take a mikvah (ritual bath) and be just as Jewish as I am. (Circumcision is a requirement too, if not performed already.)

  The Hebrews’ insistence on blood purity had biological consequences. One term that Ostrer noted in his e-mail was genetic isolation. It means that because of inward mating practices, the group’s DNA was walled off from other populations. Endogamy and consanguinity are related terms he might have used, steering away from that old-fashioned pejorative, inbreeding. But inbreeding and its opposite, outbreeding, are simple, sturdy concepts. Outbreeding is nature’s way of keeping harmful genetic mutations from building up within a popula
tion. As a rule, DNA faithfully reproduces its text, handing down identically spelled genes across the generations, but with so many genetic reproductions taking place, mistakes in printing inevitably occur, and a few of the mistakes cause disease. If a harmful mutation can now be compared with a rock flung into a lake, you’ll observe that the ripples from the mutation lengthen, suggesting that the altered gene can show up in multiple descendants. Just as important, the ripples weaken as the effect spreads outward. Half of the time a new mutation is not passed down at all. With outbreeding, harmful mutations diffuse and disappear into the swirling lake of humanity.

  Now when the same rock is thrown into a small pool, the ripples hit the sides of the pool, slosh back and merge with succeeding ripples (the following generations), magnifying the effect. That’s inbreeding. The blood ties of an inbred group overlap, and carriers of mutations who unknowingly are cousins are more likely to meet each other and reproduce. Genetic drift, another mechanism that Harry Ostrer mentioned, evokes the haphazardness of the DNA rippling in the pool. Genetic drift refers to the role of chance in increasing or reducing the frequency of a mutation. Because of drift, a mutation affecting a few families in a small, inbred population may gain an outsize place in the population once that group expands. And the Jews did expand, if only by virtue of their longevity—two dogged steps forward in the world for every painful step back.