by Josh Forman, Head of Science, Education & Outreach
Batsheva Bonne was born in Jerusalem in 1932. Batsheva’s parents, Theba and Alfred, were immigrants from Munich, having arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1925. Alfred was a professor of economics and Dean of the Faculty at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. All three of the Bonne children, of which Batsheva was the youngest, earned doctorates in their own right.
Batsheva’s story encapsulates many of ideals of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine. Batsheva’s is a story of many fronts, specifically the Zionist ideologies around kibbutz life, defending the Jewish people and the establishment and building of the State of Israel on one hand, and pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge on the other, through the careful, thoughtful and systematic observation of the changing Israeli population.
When Batsheva graduated from high school, her father took up a sabbatical year at Columbia University. Batsheva went with her parents to New York and enrolled at Columbia, taking classes in English and Art, then Biology at Stephens (a Women’s college in Missouri).
This sojourn in the US did not last long, and after a year Batsheva returned to Israel to enlist in the Fighting Pioneer Youth unit of the IDF at Kibbutz Zorah. Whilst based at the Kibbutz, she developed a genuine love of the lifestyle – and it nearly tore her from her academic path. In fact, it contributed significantly to the direction of her research.
Batsheva moved into academic life, enrolling at The Hebrew University to study Social Sciences. Whilst at Hebrew U, she developed a keen interest in Anthropology, but had to go back to the United States as there was no provision for anthropology in Israel at the time. Bonne finished this master’s degree at the University of Chicago in 1960 and during this time, by chance came across a book about the Samaritans written by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s 2nd president.
Bonne became fascinated by the anthropology of the Samaritans, a tiny, isolated ethnic group in Holon, Israel and Nablus, Jordan. She identified that 40% of marriages were between first cousins – this was for a variety of reasons. This research developed, and in the summer of 1961, she took blood samples from 90 of the 150 Samaritans living in Israel to look for genetic traits specific to the community, such as colour blindness and various genetic disorders.
This led to Batsheva’s PhD thesis from the Boston University School of Medicine. By 1965, Batsheva had returned to Israel and, alongside colleagues from Tel HaShomer, founded the Human Genetics Department at the Tel Aviv University Medical School. It was around this time that Batsheva would have encountered Elisheva (Elisabeth) Goldschmidt – who was lecturing on Genetics at Hebrew U.
This focus on the genetic diversity of small, isolated communities across Israel continued. There is a great connection here with Elisabeth, as Batsheva was enthralled by the scientific insights that the genetic diversity present in Israel held. The idea of lots of disparate, genetically distinct groups coming together was an opportunity beyond just the building of the state.
Bonne studied groups such as the Habbanites, a small subsect of Yemeni Jews, and Bedouin Arabs in the Sinai. After the 1967 war and Israel gaining control of Nablus, Batsheva was able to access the ‘other half’ of the Samaritan community and develop her doctorate thesis. Amazingly, she discovered Usher Syndrome in the Nablus Samaritans, a rare, inherited condition not found in the Holon Samaritans.
As many scientists experience, Batsheva’s work broadened to different genetic conditions and different ethnic groups. In particular, she partnered with researchers at the University of Oxford to track genetic markers across 11 different Israeli ethnicities and 9 non-Israeli ethnicities to be able to calculate ‘genetic distances’, with a view to providing evidence of origin of when and where populations arose.
By the 1980’s Batsheva was working on mitochondrial DNA, a vehicle used to tract maternal lineage. She was part of the team that identified that the Jewish population of Israel, as diverse as it is, has a smaller group of founding mothers than the Arab population of Israel. She also demonstrated the closeness of Ashkenazi and Moroccan Jews on a genetic level – providing evidence of their shared origins in the recent past.
Bonne, by now Bonne-Tamir, became a professor in 1987, chaired the Human Genetics Department at TAU between 1977 and 1982, was appointed the Near East representative in the Human Genome Diversity Project in 1992, established the National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli Populations (NLGIP) – a biobank of frozen cell lines in 1995 and headed the Yoran Institute at TAU (which absorbed the NLGIP) from 1997 until she retired in 2004.
