Links:
Links:
to collect genealogical, medical and family history data pertaining to individuals belonging to families of jewish origin, having settled or descending from settlers of mediterranean countries. Most of these populations derive from refugees who escaped from Spain and Portugal (Sephardic Jews), although this definition might not apply in all cases: examples are the Jews from Rome or from the island of Djerba, who settled there in pre-sephardic times. In addition, those Ashkenazim who settled in places like Italy readily integrated in the local environment, thus becoming quickly diluted in the local gene pool.
2. Locations:
Ideally, the selected location should allow close connections with economically important cities (Milano, Torino, Genova, Roma) and close to the region of Tuscany and its major cities. This is quite relevant for the following reasons: (a) the existence at the Universities of Pisa and Firenze of History Departments with great expertise in the history of Mediterranean Jewry (Professors Michele Luzzati, Bruno Di Porto, Dora Liscia Bemporad and Lucia Frattarelli-Fischer among others); and (b) the Medici Archive Project located in Firenze, with a section dedicated to the history of the jewish population under Medicean rule (http://www.medici.org/jewish/).
3. Possible projects:
a preliminary genealogical database of Italian Jewry, consisting of more than 195,000 individuals all interconnected by marriage, has been assembled by Marco Soria in Milano. Ample opportunities exist for further expansion of this database, based on an Internet network of genealogical researchers with similar interests in the US, in Israel and in France.
Italian Jewry, especially those that settled in the coastal city of Livorno, has frequently intermarried with Jewish populations of other mediterranean countries for reasons of trade or to escape persecutions. Databases of Tunisian Jewry, whose descendants are nowadays in France, Canada, the US, or Israel, will contain a sizeable number of families originally from Italy. The same would apply to Jewish populations from Lybia, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, etc.
Of great interest would be the opportunity to study the incidence in these populations of recently discovered cancer genes. It is now thought that the mutation arose among Jewish people before they split into Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups. At least one study, from the British Journal of Cancer (http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v79/n7/abs/6690208a.html) has found the mutation in a Spanish woman of Sephardic descent. These efforts would effectively complement those ongoing in Israel on ethnic groups that settled there coming from Sephardic-Mediterranean countries, like Morocco or Tunisia. Efforts would also be directed at raising the awareness of how these studies are important also in other ethnic groups of Jewish descent, and whose collaboration is usually difficult to obtain.
For instance, a networking function of a center located in Italy might act as an ideal geographical and cultural bridge between communities of Iranian Jews, in order to foster efforts to reach these communities in Israel, in Italy (Milano) or in the US (Los Angeles, New York). In these locations, the latter ethnic subgroup has now settled after centuries of isolation in Iranian enclaves like the city of Mashad, at the crossroads of trade routes with the Orient and the Russian Empire. Results of preliminary efforts at studying this community with the tools of modern molecular medicine indicate that it would be ideally suited to explore the relationships between genotype and the environment. This is by analogy to other highly inbred Jewish groups, like those who emigrated to Israel from Kurdistan, that are currently subject to interesting observations on population genetics and molecular medicine.
Finally, intra-European collaborations might be established with the Center for Genetic Anthropology of University College in London (TCGA), where Professor Vivian Moses is the organiser of the Eastern European Jewish ancestors project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/), and with the private company deCODE Genetics of Iceland, where Kari Stefansson is studying the Icelandic population (http://www.decode.is). In the US, many companies are offering DNA testing services, notably Family Tree DNA (http://www.familytreedna.com).
