Re: Jewish poker professionals
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A jew is a jew by religion only. It is not a race. If a person in the year 1200 converted to judaism and is now the great great great grandfather of thousands of jews, would we even know? There could be hundreds of thousands of jews that are the product of converts.
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The word "race" is a problematic one--it refers to a cultural construct, not to anything biological or genetic. The descent from innumerable generations of fathers is irrelevant as to who is a Jew. Jews are matrilineal--Jews are the children of Jewish mothers. Their fathers may or may not be Jewish--it doesn't matter.
Further recent studies of DNA (both mitochondrial and Y-chromosome) have verified that Jews do in fact constitute a distinct gene pool (well, there are some differences between the genetic profiles of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews). DNA studies have even verified that those families (like my own paternal family)that have maintained the traditional identity of Kohanim (high priests) through the millennia are in fact linked by distinctive patterns of DNA on the Y-chromosome. Of course, there have been converts and also Jewish women have been long subject to rape by hostile populations--and these factors have introduced various genes into the patterns of Jewish DNA. This can certainly be seen in the physical appearance of Jews. Not all of us look Levantine (Middle Eastern). I myself have extremely fair skin, gray eyes, and the smallest, straightest nose on the planet (no rhinoplasty needed). But essentially modern genetics has told the Jews that we are who we think we are.
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