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This reminds me of the situation with Tay-Sachs disease. It’s also more common in Ashkenazi Jewish communities. It’s a disorder where if you have one copy of the gene it helps to protect you against TB, but having two copies leads to a fatal disease in early childhood.

Similar situation with sickle cell anaemia in Africa. One copy protects from Malaria.

Why ashkenazi Jews? A few years ago I went down the rabbit hole of cystic fibrosis and found that it asymmetrically is found is ashlenazi Jews and is also extremely rare in African descent.

Has anyone figured out the correlation/causation of this yet?

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Huh. Interesting. I’m Ashkenazi and when I got TB at age 12, my body sort of encapsulated it (I don’t know how else to describe it) and I was able to take medicine twice a day for 6 months until it was cleared. I cried myself to sleep every night thinking I was going to die.

Given the culture and beliefs a thousand years ago in the Holy Roman Empire it is not inconceivable that a specific enclave of people that come to be known to be resistant to sickness that infect medieval towns could take on the cultural characteristics of having a kind mystical influence or power.

I wonder about that, too. I wish someone could explain it to me. I know that in some parts of the world, people have hereditary issues due to too many inter-family marriages.

CF is big in Ireland too, as is Crone's disease. The former is due to the relatively small gene pool, the latter is a great way to survive a British induced starvation

Because Ashkenazi Jews generally marry other Ashkenazi Jews, so we all end up with similar genes, which means similar deformities (for lack of a better term).