Abstract
Kellermann surveys the question of whether trauma effects in Holocaust survivors can be passed to their children through epigenetic mechanisms, weighing the suggestive findings against the difficulty of separating biological inheritance from social transmission. A measured entry point to a contested topic.
Kellermann, N. P. F. (2013). Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 50(1), 33–39.
Key findings
- Plausible pathway — Reviews evidence that stress-related epigenetic marks may pass to offspring.
- Confounds remain — Social and intrauterine transmission are hard to disentangle from germline inheritance.
- Contested, not settled — Treats transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans as a hypothesis, not a fact.
When to open this
Open alongside Transgenerational memory for a cautious review of inherited trauma — read with the stronger empirical sources on the hub.