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worship away from the Temple and into homes and synagogues.
Today the tribe of Levi, consisting of Cohanim and Levites, is the
only one of the Israelite tribes not to have been lost, either figuratively
or literally. Similar to the modern-day Cohanim, non-Cohen Levites
are estimated to account for some 4 percent of the contemporary
Ashkenazi community and somewhat less of the Sephardi population.
They are found in synagogues all over the world; in more observant
congregations, Levites continue to discharge their historical religious
functions. They are called up second (after Cohanim) to read passages
from the Torah. And while they no longer have occasion to enforce
rectitude at sword point as they once did, in some congregations
they still wash the hands of the Cohanim before the contemporary
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looki ng out for number two
 priests deliver their blessings. Neil Bradman, a Levite as far as he
knows, often complains rather melodramatically that his lot in life will
forever be hand washing.
Still, even today being number two is not without its privileges. Un-
like Israelites (Jews not of Cohen or Levitic lineage), Levites do not
have to pay a Cohen the ritual tax of five silver shekels on the birth of a
first son.4 And because he is not a priest, a modern Levite is also free of
certain restrictions a Cohen faces. A Levite can, for example, marry a
convert or a divorcee; he can also enter a cemetery. Such restrictions on
Cohanim are enforced in the modern state of Israel, where religious
doctrine influences some aspects of law (for example, marital law).
Historical position in the priestly hierarchy (for example, Levite
versus Cohen) or in Jewish society at large (for example, Levite versus
Israelite) is not the only way to classify a heterogeneous ethnic group
such as the Jews. Geography is another. This approach has a direct
bearing on the genetic origins of at least one group of Levites.
The two most numerous and, prior to the explosion of Zionist
resettlement in twentieth-century Palestine, historically separated
Jewish communities are the Ashkenazim and Sephardim. The term
Sephardi originally described Jews descended from the communities
that existed in Spain prior to the expulsion of all Jews in 1492 c.e.
Now it is sometimes also used of descendants of the communities of
North Africa and the Near East who follow the Sephardi rite of wor-
ship and cultural traditions.
The geographic origins and movements of Ashkenazi Jews are less
well known. The term Ashkenaz appears in the Bible on several occa-
sions and seems to refer to both a land and a people found somewhere
close to the upper Euphrates and present-day Armenia.5 Hundreds
of years later (though probably no later than the sixth century c.e.),
it came to be applied to the area populated by Jews in northern Ger-
many between the Meuse and the Rhine. From the tenth century,
Ashkenazi Jews spoke a common language (Yiddish) written with
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looki ng out for number two
Hebrew characters but with a lexicon borrowed mostly from German.
By the sixteenth century, Jews speaking this language and following
the Ashkenazi religious rites and cultural tradition populated com-
munities extending from the Loire Valley in France in the west to the
Dnieper River fl owing through Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in the
east and from Rome in the south to the Danish border in the north.
The Ashkenazi population continued to grow during the subsequent
five centuries and is believed to have peaked at approximately thirteen
million just prior to the outbreak of World War II.
Our studies of the Cohanim established that present-day Ashkenazi
and Sephardi Cohanim are more genetically similar to one another
than they are to either Israelites or non-Jews. Those studies also gave
us an inkling that the Y chromosomes of the Ashkenazi Levites are
different from those of the Cohanim, the Israelites, and even the Se-
phardi Levites. What they did not do was reveal a clear Levite-specific
genetic signature comparable to the Cohen Modal Haplotype.
In fact, when we looked closely at the data, at the haplogroup [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]