The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess

by Jeff Wheelwright

  He worried occasionally about where ancestry-testing was headed—the risks of ethnic branding, as he called it. On the other hand, he wrote in an e-mail: Who knows, Jeff, you might be 8.35 percent Ashkenazi Jewish and related to [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright and [Virginia senator] George Allen.

  Unannounced, Beatrice Martinez Wright and her husband, Tim, arrived in Culebra. It was the fall of 2001, the aspens turning yellow on la sierra and the frost pinching the Vega. Bea brought with her a printout of the Martinez family pedigree. Males were designated by squares and females by circles, and the cancers among her relatives were marked as black bites on the symbols. The black bites almost certainly indicated the presence of 185delAG.

  Bea knew the records were incomplete. Some of her relatives were missing from the chart, and she didn’t have addresses for all those she was sure of. She was advised to see Maria Clara Martinez (no immediate relation) because Clara was the authority on the community, having compiled many local genealogies. Clara also was the editor and sole reporter of the weekly newspaper, La Sierra. Bea went to the newspaper office in San Luis.

  Clara showed Bea three or four crisscrossing Martinez lineages, reaching back fifteen generations to the clan’s progenitor, a Spanish American with a double surname, Martín Serrano. More important, Clara produced an in-depth chart of Bea’s relatives, along with health information that she’d gleaned. She [Beatrice] was a cancer survivor, Clara recalled, and had other relatives who died, and she wanted to know how she got it, so I did her chart. But Clara was unfamiliar with the 185delAG mutation and knew nothing of any Jewish ancestors. She had heard about crypto-Jews, though. Which was no big deal since Clara doesn’t get too excited about anything.

  In San Luis, Bea wanted to locate her father’s sister Dorothy—Dorothy Martinez Medina. Someone told her that her aunt lived in Alamosa, but to be sure, she should check with Dorothy’s son Joe, who lived a few miles down the road. Look for the place where they’re building a restaurant. It’s just before the turn to San Francisco. Her first cousin Joseph!

  When Bea drove up, Joseph and Marianne didn’t know who she was. I introduced myself, Bea said, and I told them I’d just been through a bout of breast cancer. They turned white as a ghost. They said, We just lost our daughter.

  The two cousins had some catching up to do. A little later, Bea said to Joseph, Well, we’re Jewish.

  Bea recounted the goings-on in their grandmother Andrellita’s house, the covert things that she thought might have been Jewish. They were taught to stay quiet, to not say anything, Bea said. When you were growing up, she asked Joseph, did anyone ever light special candles?

  Nonplussed by this turn of events, Joseph thought for a minute. He recollected that one of the aunts used to light bonfires on the nights counting down to Christmas—first ten fires, then nine, and so forth until a single fire burned on Christmas eve. Was that a Jewish practice?

  (No, probably it was Las Posadas, an old tradition of the season. Candles, luminarias, or bonfires are lit, but in the opposite order from what Joseph remembered: one, two, three, etc., until nine lights are burning in expectation of the baby Jesus. The nights of Las Posadas reenact Mary and Joseph’s search for an inn. Some have argued that converso families in New Mexico conflated Las Posadas with the Hanukkah celebration, since both customs featured lights, and that the nine fires stood for the nine candles on a menorah.)

  Joseph retrieved another item from his memory. He had heard that in order to protect a newborn baby from a witch’s spell, or was it from ojo, the evil eye, you were supposed to have a man named John dribble water from his mouth onto the child. Was that Jewish?

  (No, basic Hispano. Men named Juan indeed were believed to have power over witches. In dribbling the water on the infant, probably they were imitating John the Baptist.)

  Beatrice drove off, looking for additional family members to talk to. A year or two later, after a newspaper article on the genetic disorders of San Luis Valley mentioned Bea and her deceased cousin Shonnie, Joseph and Marianne were approached by two members of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies. Watching Marianne baking at the restaurant, the visitors said, Hmm, the making of bread. In the eyes of the beholders baking was a telltale Jewish tradition. Some went so far as to speculate that the tortilla was a crypto-Jewish carryover of unleavened bread, and that certain red chile dishes featured what looked to be matzo balls.

  Stanley Hordes, meanwhile, decided to incorporate the 185delAG mutation into his historical research program. He was persuaded that it was a better indicator of Jewish ancestry than a Middle Eastern Y chromosome or the pemphigus vulgaris skin disorder. Broadening his territory beyond New Mexico, Hordes tracked the historical footprints of Sephardic Jews and New Christians in Peru and the Caribbean islands. I start with people today, people in those countries who acknowledge Jewish heritage or who carry 185delAG, he explained. It’s a place to begin to ask questions. Then I do the historical and genealogical work.

  Hordes added a panel on genetics to the annual meeting of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies. These meetings were lively, learned affairs. Typical topics addressed by speakers were: “Anti-Judaism and the Theology of Forced Conversions: A Textual Analysis of the Sermons of Vicente Ferrer [1350–1419],” “The Jew That Is Not One: Contemporary Theoretical Approaches and Crypto-Jewish Cultural Production,” and “So Your Ancestors were Crypto-Jews: Now What? A Conceptual Model for Helping Hispanos Evaluate the Significance of their Ancestral Past and its Meaning in their Spiritual Present.” To which Hordes added: “Issues in the Identification, Counseling, and Treatment of Patients with Genetic Diseases Associated with Jewish Populations,” for Stan tried to keep in mind, as Harry bore in mind, that using DNA in a historical inquiry often involves people who are ill.

  At the society’s gatherings, the wannabes were a wild card for Stan to manage. To characterize them more kindly, these were the participants who longed to identify with Jews. Such as the Hispano woman who confessed privately, I love the Jewish people and I am a member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. I would love to be Jewish, from the chosen people, even if it means persecution or a higher risk for cancer.

  The emotional climax of the 2007 meeting, which was held in Albuquerque, was a talk titled simply “Crypto-Jewish Crucifix?” The speaker unfurled his story in an understated manner. During his childhood, the man recounted, there was a wooden crucifix that was kept hidden except on rare occasions. His grandmother, shushing his questions about it, would take out the piece and hang it on a bedroom wall, where it was visible for a few hours, a single day at most. Then it was whisked away.

  Now that he was grown, he had come to regard the crucifix as the symbol of his family’s secret faith. And as he was speaking, the man’s face reddened. He started to weep. Dramatically he pulled out the crucifix, which was about eighteen inches high, and he held it before the audience. He slid the ivory-colored Christ off the wood, revealing hidden candle holes and a slot that was meant, he said, for a mezuzah. There were oohs and aahs all around.

  Father Bill Sanchez interrupted—he the Hispano-Jewish padre with the cohanim Y chromosome. Father Bill said dryly, Why don’t you see if the Christ fits into the slot? He was asking if the piece would stand vertically, with the cross as its base. Oops, it did. Stanley squirmed in his seat. That’s just the sort of thing he hates. The artifact could be a normal Catholic devotional object, he said later, or it could be just what its owner said it was. Objects do not speak for themselves.

  Early in 2009 Harry e-mailed me: So my question for you is, How would you like to be involved in research? You are the person who I know is best connected to the Hispanic community in the San Luis Valley. My efforts to collect data about them from geneticists and epidemiologists have been nonproductive. So how would you like to help me collect blood samples from the community?

  We could spend 1–2 days together
in NM, he sweetly continued, depending on when we went, and we could even fit in a bit of skiing. My study has IRB [institutional review board, which monitors ethics] approval and, as you have seen, I am willing to travel to inform and [obtain] consent [from] people and collect their samples. You would get a great story for which you could write a firsthand account.

  To explain what Harry Ostrer was after in Culebra—he was after Jewish DNA, not to beat around the bush. But to justify this search for Jewishness, which was different from Stanley’s search, it might be good to review the scientific issues surrounding race. For Harry was interested in race and ethnicity and the restless mingling of human populations. He once spoke of himself as an Ashkenazi Jewish mutt, because even so tight a group as the Ashkenazim blended people from different villages of Central and Eastern Europe.

  The concept of race is straightforward for the other creatures of the natural world: Populations of the same species that don’t overlap in breeding territory can safely be called races. The geographic separation usually has caused a divergence in appearance between the groups. A race is akin to a subspecies. Race science, a term you no longer hear, was built on the assumption that the human animal had diverged into subspecies, and that the races of this species were promiscuously undermining the natural barriers set between them.

  The heyday of race science occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as a serious discipline it had ended with the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, Jews and Hispanics and many other peoples of the world that biologists had counted as races were downgraded to ethnic groups. But race as a compilation of variable traits such as skin color carried on, like an ocean liner after its engines have been cut. Sociologists and anthropologists took potshots at race, peppering the phenotypes of physical difference until they were full of holes, and then the geneticists torpedoed race by showing the overwhelming similarities among human beings at the DNA level, below the waterline of the skin. Still, since cultural and socioeconomic distinctions between ethnic groups do accord with color, and since most people in thinking about race and ethnicity are rather like ocean liners, understandably the U.S. Census Bureau and other institutions have continued to recognize race. Half-sociological, half-biological, race still applies to real life.

  After genomics came into play—the human genome project and the rest—the race concept made a comeback in science, although now it went by another name, continent of ancestry. Using the latest technology, geneticists found they could classify people by their continents of ancestry, which were congruent with race. If individuals were admixed, like African Americans and Hispanos, the proportions of the original, geographical DNA could be calculated. How did this new science of discrimination come about?

  The human genome is so long that, even in the face of great similarity, wrinkles of difference appear. When you compare the genomic texts of any two humans, they are 99 percent identical, even greater than 99 percent. But since you have available more than three billion bases of DNA for comparison—actually six billion when you count the full complement of letters in the paired chromosomes—that 1 percent of difference looms large. Approximately twenty-four million letters differentiate one person’s DNA from another’s, easy enough for computers to analyze.

  Before determining the geography of someone’s ancestry, the computer has to have done the necessary homework on the DNA patterns of the world’s peoples. These patterns started to form fifty thousand years ago, after bands of Homo sapiens had left Africa and migrated over the world’s continents. Mating within their own spheres, humans stopped exchanging genes broadly. Entered on a graph of genetic variation, the individuals constituting a particular population cluster together. Although the same genetic variants might occur in another group half a world away, the frequencies or distributions of the variants aren’t the same, and a few of the variants might be exclusive. The two populations will form separate clusters. Now peer into one of the clusters. Great similarity is again the rule, but some of the sites where a pair of human beings is identical are not by accident. Two people may have the same DNA because they have descended from a common ancestor, and on the graph of the world’s populations their shared history will make them cluster together.

  Ancestry-informative markers, AIMs for short, are the raw material of such studies. AIMs aren’t genes; for the most part they are repetitive blocks of DNA sequence or isolated letters interspersed between the genes. A single AIM won’t be revealing of a person’s forebears because that one marker probably can be found elsewhere. But a panel of markers, each chosen for being common in one population and rare in another, can be used to make a reliable prediction about the race—er, continental ancestry—of the subject. In a proper ancestral study, AIMs across the entire genome are assayed, it should be emphasized, not just snippets of the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, the stuff of many online testing services. Incidentally, the 185delAG mutation, although highly indicative of a particular ancestry, isn’t used by scientists in AIM research. Compared with other DNA markers, this variant doesn’t show up often enough in random surveys to be helpful. In most populations it’s simply too rare.

  As genomics programs have become more powerful and the differential markers of human DNA have multiplied, the computers do not need to refer to the geographical baselines stored in the data banks. Crunching half a million DNA sites for each individual, the programs are able to place anybody in a population cluster. Results are so accurate that they almost never fail to conform with the person’s own understanding of his racial or ethnic background. If someone is an Ashkenazi Jew but denies that, the computer will be able to diagnose him all the same. Likewise for a Hispanic, although the clustering of Hispanics on the graph is fuzzy, since subgroups of Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc., overlap. The computer cannot be positive of the nationality of a Hispanic.

  What if a Hispano, a kind of Hispanic from Old New Mexico, comes in with a DNA sample and claims that he’s Ashkenazi? The computer will tell him he’s mistaken. If the Hispano tells the computer, No, I meant to say I have Sephardic ancestry, making me a Jew, right?, the computer is going to have to think about it. Maybe yes, maybe no. That’s why Harry Ostrer visited Culebra—to improve his profession’s capacity to discriminate among racial and ethnic clusters, to bring a remote and blended population, Hispanos, into higher resolution than before, and to identify Jewish markers in Hispanos if they were there. Jewish genes having flowed into the New World under cover of the Spanish conquest, Harry wanted to know the fractions of the admixture.

  He wasn’t starting from scratch. In a recent study he and a team of researchers had compared the admixture proportions in Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico. All the populations combined European, Native American, and African DNA, and the allocation of the ancestral markers had been shaped by each group’s colonial history, which was not a new insight to report. But the Ostrer team noticed an additional element, a tiny feature in the standard mix. Some Hispanics had Y-chromosomal markers deriving not from Europe (the colonizers), nor the Americas (the colonized), nor Africa (the smaller contribution of imported slaves), but from long-ago Middle Easterners or North Africans who were either Jews or Arabs. Here might be a sign of the crypto-Jews. Believers like Father Bill Sanchez would certainly embrace this finding, but the scientists themselves were cautious about it. Harry was hoping that the vein of Jewishness would be richer in San Luis Valley than in other parts of New Spain, thanks to the proven strike of 185delAG.

  As for what the Culebrans might make of the information he was going to extract from them, Harry, unlike Stanley, wasn’t concerned with identity. Their identity was up to them to work out. Both men had deep feelings about Jewish blood, but the cultural and biological aspects of Judaism were not entangled in Harry’s mind the way they seemed to be in Stanley’s. To Harry, genes were not identity, nor did he think that identity could be determined b
y genealogy. At the same time, Harry was pleased that Jewish DNA had survived in the broken populations that he had followed to far corners of the world, to Serbia, Greece, Ecuador, and now to the San Luis Valley. Traditionally, he observed, Jews have held a mourning ritual for the Jews who married out or converted, or for those whose faith was taken away by force. Harry took heart from the fact that their DNA had not disappeared, even if the markers had become separated from what they marked.

  When he made his entrada into the Valley, driving from Denver with winter’s stars twinkling over the mountains, the New Yorker looked forward to his meeting with the Hispanos. Already he felt a bond with these folks, stemming from their shared social experience, not their DNA. For in striving to overcome prejudice and become good Americans, the Hispanos were not unlike the Jews. They feel they have a place at the table, Harry explained. They’ve claimed a place at the table. I recognize them at a certain level. The older people—he was speaking of the European immigrants from his own tribe, but it applied to the Hispanos also—tend to feel they are just guests in someone else’s country. The younger people don’t feel that.

  He made his way through the dark village of San Luis to his room at El Convento. Tomorrow’s sampling session had been billed on posters and in the local paper as the Hispano DNA Project, a basic admixture study, sidestepping the role of crypto-Jews. Yet Harry was confident that Jewish ancestry wouldn’t faze the Culebrans. These people are already hybrids, he said. They are comfortable with being mongrels. He meant nothing pejorative by that, because Harry was trained to pass through the firewalls of race and ethnicity and access the DNA that each person had downloaded, so to speak, from scattered, ancestral servers. As a medical geneticist, he was well aware that where your DNA comes from can have implications for your health, and that racial or ethnic labels can help guide physicians. But race was only a way station, just as Harry’s admixture studies were only a means. Someday fairly soon, when the technology and the cost allow it and the hype of the DNA age has died down, the genomes of every individual will be known for their unique pluses and minuses, and then doctors won’t need categories like race and ethnicity.