Small genetically unique populations are a perennial topic for DNA studies. They all have a fascinating set of genetic diseases and there is the captivating puzzle of where the population might have came from. The most studied of these small populations is the Ashkenazi Jews, while Finns are not far behind.
It seems that finally the origins of Ashkenazi Jews have been settled. The recent paper [1] presents a quite reasonable model and I can add only very few suggestions to that general layout. The article confirms what several studies have found: more than 50% pf Ashkenazi genes are European, the rest are from the Middle East. The article gives estimates ranging from 49% to 67% for the European admixture and at one sentence suggests that 60% may be the best figure for the European admixture. The remaining 40% of genes are from the Middle East and almost all from the Levant: the article uses three Middle Eastern populations, Levant, Southern Middle-East, and Druze.
The article proposes two admixture events and a bottleneck. The first admixture was in Italy 24-49 generations ago. After that came the bottleneck 25-35 generations ago and the second admixture event was in Eastern Europe 10-20 generations ago. 15-25% of the European genes were due to the second admixture and 75-85% due to the first admixture.
A generation is roughly 30 years. It is always more than 25 years in humans: the first child is obtained earlier, but a generation is an average over all children. A generation as counted from female lineages is a bit over 28 years and from male lineages it is 30-32 years. I will use the customary figure of 30 years for a generation.
The bottleneck was in this case in the interval 950-1250 AD. The size of the Ashkenazi population dropped to some 350 people. Gregory Cochran in his blog (West Hunter) claims that the mutation rate leading to the bottleneck estimate of 25-35 generations is too high and therefore the bottleneck was a bit earlier and the population dropped to 500. His is a minority opinion, not being an expert on this field I accept the majority opinion.
The time of the bottleneck is before the Black Death in 1350 AD. Ashkenazi Jews moved to Eastern Europe around 1300-1350 AD, so we can conclude that the bottleneck happened in Western and Central Europe. The first mentions of Ashkenazi communities are from 9th century. It is before the estimated bottleneck time.
The bottleneck may be the founding bottleneck, as it is called in [1] and as Cochran claims, but the time frame fits best to the time of the first crusade around 1100 AD. From that time are known several pogroms of German Jews, such as the Rhineland massacres 1096 AD. The size of the Ashkenazi population before the bottleneck cannot have been very large and a few massacres may have reduced it to 350.
According to [1], the first admixture was in Southern Europe, most probably in Italy, 24-49 generations are and there was no mixture with Italians before this time. As the first admixture was before the bottleneck, it happened between 550 AD and 1100 AD.
Jews proselytized non-Jews in the first century, as is told by Josephus Flavius and the New Testament, and occasionally married Christians up to the 5th century, but not any more in 550 AD. The Catholic Church was against intermarriages, because in such marriages Christians converted to Judaism. That means that Christian women married Jewish men, which agrees with Josephus and Paul that Jews converted mainly women. Men were reluctant to be circumcised as adults and very few men converted to Judaism.
Ashkenazi Jews moved to Rhineland from Northern Italy, which at that time was Kingdom of Lombardy and Lombards (Langobards) had fully converted to the Catholic faith by the end of the 7th century. We may assume that Ashkenazi Jews could not marry Catholic Lombards. The Ashkenazi admixture with Italians in the time frame 550-1100 AD can only have been by Jewish males having children with Italian slave girls. The Torah accepts this practice: a man can have sex with only one wife and his slave girls. Many of the sons of Patriarch Jacob were with slave girls. As Langobards conquered most of Italy, they obtained many Italian slaves.
Slave trade was a traditional Jewish occupation. The best known Jewish slave traders in Europe were the Radhanite Jews, who mostly traded spices and slaves. They had close contacts with Khazaria. Radhanites were not the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews, but it is also known that in the 14th century the Christian population feared Ashkenazi Jews, who were known as slave traders. Therefore it is very likely that the population, which developed to Ashkenazi Jews, were slave traders or at least had Italian slaves.
The second admixture occurred according to [1] in Eastern Europe 10-20 generations ago. That gives the time span 1400-1700 AD. No mass conversions to Judaism are known from early Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Also here the admixture can be best explained with slave girls. There was slavery in Poland during the Piast dynasty from AD 930 to AD 1370, that is, during the time Jews moved to Poland. Casimir the Great may have abolished slavery in 1347, but in practice it continued to the end of the 14th century.
The first Jews in Lithuania and Poland were Karaites from Crimea, a known center of white slave trade. It is very likely that Karaites had Slavic admixture from relations with slave women. Karaites mostly assimilated with Ashkenazi Jews and their numbers were small.
Slave girls also explain why Sephardic Jews have more European admixture than Ashkenazi Jews. In Christian countries Catholic Church forbade Jews to own Christian slaves. When Poland abolished slavery, Jews could not obtain European slaves in Christian Europe, but it was different in the Caliphate of Andalusia. The Sephardic Jewish community grew large in Andalusia. In the Islamic world Jews were allowed to own Christian slaves and Sephardic Jews have a higher European admixture.
Similar argument explains why there is small amount of Sub-Saharan admixture in all Arabic countries but not in the Jewish populations of these countries. The admixture is from black slaves from the time of Islam. Slave traders of these slaves were Arabic. Slave traders of white slave trade to Islamic countries were mainly Jewish. Thus, Jews do not have black admixture and if they have admixture, it is European.
One interesting finding in [1] is that there was no European admixture before AD 550. Yet, the first admixture happened in Italy and there have been Italian Jews since Roman times. These Italian Jews were most certainly admixed as Jews proselytized in the first century and married Christians up to the 5th century. The first admixture in Ashkenazi history is after AD 550 and before that time they had only Middle Eastern, mainly Levantine, genes. This means that Ashkenazi Jews did not derive from Italian Jews but from Levantine Jews after 550 AD. The article [1] suggests that the reason may have been that the pro-Ashkenazi population was not in Italy before 550 AD. This explanation is logical.
There is such a time when Levantine Jews may have arrived to Italy. Emperor Heraclius of Byzantine demanded in 630 AD that Jews convert to Christianity. It was after the Jews had joined Sassanids (Persians) in a war against Heraclius, briefly captured Jerusalem and finally lost to Heraclius. The emperor did not execute all Jews but demanded that either they convert to Christianity or leave.
If some Jews moved to Europe, which did not belong to the Byzantine Empire, they did not have many choices. After Justinian conquests almost all of known Europe belonged to the Byzantine. In AD 565 when Justinian died, only the Kingdom of the Franks (France), the Kingdom of the Visigoths (Spain with the exception of the south) and the Kingdom of the Lombards (Northern Italy) were outside of Byzantine, assuming that the Jews tried to stay close to the familiar Mediterranean. By the time of Heraclius not much had changed, only that Lombards had taken more areas in Italy.
In all of these three kingdoms (Franks, Visigoths and Langobards) Jews were treated rather well up to the time of the Jewish rebel against Heraclius in AD 613. The only restrictions seem to have been that the Catholic Church tried to discourage marriage of Christians to Jews mainly in order to hinder Christian conversion to Judaism.
In AD 613 this changed. In Spain the Visigoth king Sisebut’s ordered in AD 613 that the Jews either convert to Christianity or be expelled, some left, most converted, but under the next king they converted back to Judaism. Somewhat later, in AD 694 at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo Jews were ordered to slavery since they had confessed to a plot to overthrow the Visigoths. The accusation of treason was correct: Jews helped Muslims to take over Visigoth cities. Later Spanish Jews had their golden time in Muslim Andalusia.
In France King Dagobert of the Franks expulsed in AD 629 Jews who do not convert to Christianity. Part of Southern France belonged to the Kingdom of the Visigoths, and there Jews stayed and prospered (up to AD 694).
In Italy, Langobards never persecuted Jews. Expulsions of Jews of Italy started only after the change of the millennium. Clearly, the best place and actually the only country for the Jews escaping Heraclius was the Kingdom of Lombardia in Northern Italy. This is where the Ashkenazi community is believed to have originated. Langobards spoke a Germanic language, which disappeared by the 7th century, but may have been the origins of Yiddish. The name Langobards also shows that they kept their beards long, a custom which may have been adopted by Ashkenazi Jews. Finally, a name of a pawn shop in Polish is Lombard. Lombard is a medieval word referring to Lombard banking, which evolved in Lombardia. It is a way of going around the canonical law of taking interest on loans. In the Middle Ages Lombard were usually owned by Jews. It seems that some Italian Jews moved directly to Poland, not first to Germany and later from there to Poland.
The first admixture gave about 80% of European genes and [1] estimates that about 60% of Ashkenazi genes may be European. This means that the first admixture was about 50% Italian, 50% Middle Eastern. This indicates that the Jews were almost only men. It suggests that they were soldiers and it is very possible that they were soldiers from the army of Nehemiah ben Husiel. His army is supposed to have had 20,000 Jewish men.
Most of the spiritual leaders of Ashkenazi Jews in the time of the First Crusade and earlier were from the family of Kalonymos. This family founded a pietistic movement with the name Chasidim Ashkenazi. Something is known of Moses ben Kalonymos, who moved from Lucca, Northern Italy, to Maintz, France, and who became the leader of Ashkenazi Jews there. A history is told in the Chronicles of Ahimaaz. The author, Ahimaaz ben Patiel, was himself from an old Italian Jewish family, which according to the family tradition had been taken to Italy as slaves by Titus after the First Jewish War. The chronicle describes the family traditions of Ahimaaz family, but it has a section telling of a wonder worker Abu Aharon of Babylon. He is also known as Aaron Samuel ben Moses Shalom of Kremnitz and as Abu Aaron ben Samuel ha-Nasi of Babylonia. Ha-Nasi, the Prince, is a title of the Exilarch, so Aaron was a son of Exilarch Samuel ha-Nasi, who lived around 773-816 AD. Aaron traveled to Italy in AD 870 and Moses ben Kalonymos was his student. Aaron taught of using God’s name in spells (the Ba’al Shem tradition), making a golem and working miracles.
The chronicle confirms that the family of Kalonymos and the Chasidei Ashkenazi movement brought practical cabbalism to Europe. Practical cabbalism was connected to almost all cases of ritual murder accusations against Jews.
Exilarch Samuel ha-Nasi is not known from Exilarch lists (neither Talmudic nor Karaite), but is thought to be a real person. There is another Exilarch, who is not appearing in Exilarch lists, Nehemiah ben Husiel. Exilarch Nehemiah ben Husiel and exceedingly rich Benjamin of Tiberias raised up a Jewish army, according to the Book of Zerubbabel from Khorasan, Persia. Mohammed followed this rebellion against Heraclius. He supported the Christian emperor (though the Sassanid king was not anti-Christian, he had a Christian wife).
It is for that reason that the Islamic Anti-Christ al-Masih Al-Dajjal (the lying messiah) comes with an army of Jews from Khorasan. In reality the Jewish presence in Khorasan (Afghanistan) is only from the 8th century. Genetically they were Levantine Jews at that time. In the 10th century is become widely believed that the lost tribes of Israel were in Khorasan, e.g. Benjamin of Tudela (d. 1173) thought so. This Islamic story is not from Koran but from a later legend of the Red Jews, i.e., the lost tribes, who will attack at the end of the times.
Koran also blames Jews for practicing usury. We may assume that the Jews of Levant at the time of Mohammed practiced usury. Therefore Ashkenazi Jews probably practiced usury from the very beginning when their community was forming.
In a Jewish apocalypse, the book of Zerubbabel, Nehemiah is called Messiah ben Josef, the suffering messiah. It is generally believed that Nehemiah was a real person, but he was not from the Exilarch family. There was no Exilarch during the rebel. Exilarch Haninai was executed in AD 591 and his son Bostanai was Exilarch since AD 640. It looks like Nehemiah ben Husiel was a prophet messiah, who took the title of Exilarch, the Prince. Exilarch Samuel ha-Nasi may be his descendant. The Exilarch lists do not tell the whole story and there may have been another Exilarch family supported by some sect.
This history of Ashkenazi Jews explains their gene admixture and the problems these Jews had in Europe. They apparently started as rebels against the Byzantine in AD 613 and lost. Since Jews had rebelled against Heraclius, they were distrusted in the Kingdom of the Franks and the Kingdom of the Visigoths. In the latter kingdom Jews were finally enslaved since they had tried to overthrow the Visigoths and were helping the Muslim invaders.
The Kingdom of the Lombards was the only Mediterranean European country where Jewish soldiers, who had fought against Heraclius, could escape to. A male group moved there and they adopted a Germanic language from Langobards, later developing it to Yiddish. They practiced such trades as usury and white slave trade. Later they developed the pawn shop, Lombard, as a way to go around rules against usury.
Around AD 870 the community adopted Jewish magic from a wandering teacher Abu Aharon. These magical tricks become practical cabbalism, which had a very negative influence on Jewish-Christian relations. From that time on Jews were being accused of ritual murders and host desecration.
The initial studies of the genetic ancestry of Jews tried to show that Jews are one people and they originate from the Levant. These results were also given as a justification for their right to the land of Israel. It is today known that Ashkenazi Jews have less than half of Levantine genes while Lebanonians, Palestinians, Druze and Beduins are genetically very close to people, who lived in those areas millenniums before Christ, see Figure 4 in [2]. Jews do have the genetic origin in the Levant and the male founders of different Jewish communities are originally from one Levantine people, Palestine Jews, but there has been quite much admixture. It is doubtful if Jewish genetic origin, or any ethnic genetic origin, can justify right to any land.
References:
[1] James Xue et al, “The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history,” 2017, Plos Genetics, http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006644
[2] Verena j. Schuenemann et al, “Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods,” Nature, 2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
92 Comments
If there were so many euro slave girls being mixed into the Jewish population from eastern europe there would not be such a very few mitochondrial haplogroups from the same ancient mothers present in the Ashkenazi mta. The types of mother mta would be more diverse. It is postulated the mothers were probably from the admix with the Italians, not the eastern europeans.
There were two admixtures, the larger one in Italy when it seems that it is 50%, the second one much later in Eastern Europe. The second one is smaller. The larger admixture in Italy has the strange feature that it is around 600-800 AD, not before. This means that the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews were not in Italy before that time. Then they come and had 50% admixture. The problem with this is that Italy was at that time Catholic and the Church strongly discouraged intermarriage. It is also clear that there is little Y-DNA admixture and that very few non-Jewish men converted to Judaism. Put together I get the following. The first 50% admixture is women from Italy but they did not marry the Jewish men. How can that be? They were slaves, but from Italy, not slaves from Slavish countries as later. The second smaller admixture has similar features. This admixture happened in Eastern Europe around 1300-1400 AD. At that time there were Ashkenazi Jews in Crakow area and there were a small number of Karaite Jews in Poland, who later assimilated with Ashkenazi. Karaites came from Crimea, which was a slave trade center. Again the admixture was mostly women, since Y-DNA does not show much admixture, again Catholic Church opposed marriages of Christians to Jews as it implied conversion to Judaism. For the same reason as before I suggest slave girls, but this is a smaller admixture. You argue that there would have been a wider diversity of mtDNA haplogroups assuming that the first admixture was free Italians rather than slave Italians. I cannot see why the diversity would be any different, they would have been from a small area in Italy anyway. Langobards conquered most of Italy. I do not know if they took slaves, but as a Germanic people invading former Western Rome I think they did. There was slavery in Rome and elsewhere. Slavery in Europe disappeared only later because of the Catholic Church. The mtDNA diversity of Ashkenazi Jews is indeed small, and it has been (unsuccessfully) argued that the mother lineages are from Levant, but the 50% autosomal DNA admixture shows that this cannot be the case. It is exactly the mother lineages that must carry this 50% admixture in the first admixture event. Then asking who were these men and why they did not have women with them, there could be many answers, like travelling merchants. For the time I suggest they were not travelling merchants as the trade routes were run by Radhanite Jews and these were not them. So they were soldiers escaping Byzantium. There probably were not so many of them and the women they took could be from a small number of mtDNA lineages. I do not see any contradiction here, but in your comment I see that you start by If..slave girls..from eastern europe. This is wrong, the first admixture was in Italy, so if..slave girls..from Italy would be what I wrote in the post. Does this answer your question? (I understand that suggesting that the women were slaves can be offensive, but see the reasons why I di not think Jewish men could marry Italian girls in the time frame 600-800 AD. They could and did do such earlier, but those were Italian, French and Spanish Jews, some of whom were expelled and some enslaved because of the rebellion against Byzantine, or for helping the Caliphate).
I add still a clarifying comment why I concluded as I did. If Ashkenazi Jews coming to Italy after 600 AD had got their 50% admixture, or a sizable part of it, by mixing with Italian Jews, who had admixture with Italians before 400 AD, then the admixture analysis of the paper I comment should have concluded that Ashkenazi Jews had an admixture with Europeans before 600 AD. This is NOT what the paper concluded. Therefore, assuming that the paper is correct and making only minor comments on how the scenario is possible, Italian Jews did not have a measurable admixture with Ashkenazi Jews. As Langobardi were Germanic and moved there from elsewhere, I also do not think the Ashkenazi got the Italian admixture from them. So, I am left with essentially the proposal that I made. The Italian women that Ashkenazi mixed with, had been in Italy very long, as the most common mtDNA lineages in Ashkenazi are old European and specifically Italian, and as in old times people did not move that much, these common lineages could have been common in a large area of Northern Italy before Langobardi and other Germanic Barbarians invaded Rome. It is not possible to tell the difference by looking at the mtDNA if the mother lineages were married to Levant males or Italian males before 600-800 AD. I think the latter case is more probable. The women were there, the men killed other men and that’s what human history in Europe always has looked like.
I agree with your anaylisis from the evidence discovered in the article . It makes sense that Jews from the Levantine participated in a failed rebellion against the Byzantine Empire and the surviving rebels who did not convert to Christianity fled to Central Italy. I had read that the closest DNA found in the world to Ashkenazi people was in the people living in Tuscany.
I also read that thousands of Jews departed the Roman Province of Palestine in the first century during the first Jewish revolt around 76 AD and than again during the second revolt around 126 AD. The Jews departed during these two revolts to Spain, North Africa, ports on the Northern Shores of the Black Sea but primarily to Naples and Southern Italy . Almost a quarter of Southern Italian males have the Y DNA which traces directly to the Middle East and 15% of Spanish males in Southwestern Spain have Y-DNA that is Middle Easteen. These Jews in Spain became the Sephardic Jews and was forced to leave Spain after the Muslims were conquered by the Christians. The vast majority which remained converted to Catholicism. The majority of Jews which arrived in Italy after the first and second revolts converted to Catholism around 400 AD.
The people who are Ashkenazi are not descended from the Jews which arrived in Italy during Roman times but as you said they arrived after 613 AD and mixed genetically with Italian women who were slaves.
I have a few questions .
I believe that after 300 years living in Italy and mixing with Italian women , a minority of the descendants of these Jews who had arrived after 613 AD departed Italy for the northern Rhine River cities within the Holy Roman Empire ( Germany ) around 950 AD. The majority of the Jews who had arrived after 613 AD converted eventually to Catholiscm but this minority still held on to Judaism. It was probably a small population perhaps a thousand or more men and women that migrated to Germany in around 950 AD.
Upon arrival in Germany these Jews were not permitted to marry Christians and possibly lived in segregated areas but had opportunities to conduct businesses not available to the German population. They flourished but due to their segregation married among themselves.
Is this when the Ashkenazi population first came into existence just after 950 AD ?
I don’t think it existed before this time because only in the cities in Germany did they marry among themselves and not with Germans.
Second question
I know the Bottleneck happened sometime during the Crusades when several massacres of Ashkenazi people living in Germany took place and the population declined from probably a few thousand people to between only 350 to 500. ( Breeding age men and women ). The genetic research seems to indicate this is what happened.
Around 1300 the majority of the Ashkenazi who survived migrated east to Poland and were not persecuted but began to prosper and increase dramatically their population. They could not marry Catholics but continued to intermarry among themselves having many children. Poland was not hit hard during the Black Death which killed off almost half of the European population . The Ashkenazi living in Poland were mostly spared the massive death toll. They continued to increase in population and spread to Lithuania, Ukraine , BeloRussia which in the 1500s were part of the Polish Kingdom. It was the second largest country in Europe.
It was during this time ( 1500s ) that Ashkenazi people migrated into present day Austria, Romania , Chech Republic , Russia , etc. They also started to mix a little with Slavic women.
I notice that the majority of Ashkenazi people have German surnames and very little Slavic surnames.
Is this because they adopted the German names prior to 1300 when they were living in Germany ?
In your statements above you explained that the Ashkenazi people speak a language called Yiddish which they adopted when their ancestors lived in Northern Italy under the Lombards , a Germanic Tribe which conquered Italy.
I don’t think this is correct because the ancestors of the Ashkenazi lived in Italy after 613 AD to around 950 AD and would have picked up not just German words but many Italian words living all those years in Italy.
I think the Ashkenazi people adopted the German dialect after they arrived in Germany in 950 AD. Sometime between 950 AD and 1300 AD when they lived in Germany they must have developed the Yiddish language. They also chose German last names while living in Germany because in 1300 AD when they arrived in Poland they already had the German names. If they had not already had German names they would have chosen Polish last names while living in Poland.
My ancestry is mostly from western Ireland and Britain , there is probably a lot of interbreeding in the isolated coastal towns .
. The Basque are another closely related people as well as the Finns who are related to Hungarians and Estonians. Mostly a mix of Asian and European DNA. The Gypsies are another closely related people with origins in India. Many Albanian , Greek and Italian towns isolated in mountainous regions have closely related populations.
DNA research is fascinating and it verify the history.
Thanks for you comment. To your first question the answer is yes, what you explain is how I think it happened, they came to the Rhine area maybe a bit earlier, from 800 AD forward, but definitely they came there from Italy. To your suggestion that Yiddish developed in Germany, this is certainly possible. It is the main stream view. However, there is a minority view that Yiddish did not develop from German in Germany but from some other language. There is a theory that it was originally a Slavic language, but most discard this theory, so do I. It is Germanic, but possibly not Rhine Germanic. It may be Lombard Germanic. Their language, now lost, was a Germanic language. As it was somewhat different from German, it could have had any Slavic or other influences. We for sure know that Yiddish did not develop from Goth, though that is also Germanic, but of Lombard nobody knows much anything. You suggest that people in Lombardia spoke Italian around 650-950 AD. It was not so, in Rome they spoke common Latin, which developed to Italian, but the germanic tribe of Lombards, who conquered almost whole of Italy, must have originally used their own language. Italian was the language of slaves Lombards most probably took when conquering Italy. (everybody took slaves in wars those days, why not also Lombards). So, I do not see it necessary that Yiddish would have got Italian words even if it developed in Northern Italy. But as said, the majority view agrees with you. The your last question was of German surnames. Firstly, surnames are not that old. Except for nobles people did not use surnames before around 1600-1700. The same is with Jews. They did not use surnames. They also have had a habit of changing their names very often. Thus Rothschild was originally Bauer and changed the name around 1700. I think most took Yiddish names. Some Polish Jews had Polish names, like Izrael Poznansky, a very rich Jew in Lodz, Poland at the end of the 19th century. The reason Jews have German sounding names is that they are Yiddish names. All Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, also in Poland and all these other Eastern European countries.
An argument might be made that Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry comes from the Israelites such as in Chapter 10 of the book “The Jews of Khazaria”, Second Edition, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2006.
However, we can certainly challenge the logic.
“the main ethnic element of … most modern Jewish populations of the world is Israelite,”
but supports this with
“the Israelite haplotypes fall into Y-DNA haplogroups J and E.”
However, earlier the book stated that “the Y-DNA haplogroups J and E … are typical of the Middle East” but not limited to Israel.
So the logic seems to be:
* All jews are (haplogroups J and E)
* All (haplogroups J and E) are middle eastern; the latter including “Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian Arab, Lebanese, Syrian, and Anatolian Turkish peoples”
From this we could conclude the family heritage with middle eastern peoples, not Israel simply. And if Turks are lumped in with that group, as the book does, there is no contradiction in the assertion that they are not the true Israelites. Indeed, coming full circle in that way shows the absurdity of the “rebuttal.”
The “middle east” is taken to include Armenians, Arabs, and Turks, and this itself shows the difficulty of these studies using samples after the mixing has occurred. Unless they can get enough DNA from the ancients, there is a great deal of assumption that must be mixed in. This is similar to the claim a while ago that some Negroes were descended from Thomas Jefferson. You can go up the chain, with 1/2 admixing at every step, then you have to go back down the chain, with 1/2 mixing at every step. And the DNA at each of the “1/2 admixing” steps, if it were available at all, is also the result of such a series of 1/2 admixtures.
Later, the author identifies Khazars as Europeans, which is absurd.
I’d like to find out more? I’d love to find out some
additional information.
I do not know if I can answer but can you propose some questions of the type you mean? I can try to write another post on this topic. Usually takes some time.
The Palestinians , and Bedouins do not resemble early populations as the author claims. In fact European Jews show a remarkable similarity on a y chromosome level to Samaritan communities who never left the area, which Palestinians and Bedouins diverge from remarkably.
How can people get away with making such false claims when we have science to prove them wrong? And with the last few statements from this author, trying to make a parallel about why Jews don’t have claim to Israel… it just seems so obvious that there are alteriror motives here.
There are no alterior motives in my articles or my comments. About science, science today is not free. You better check everything yourself.
Y-DNA haplotypes are a poor identifiers of genetic origins. Finns, for instance, have Y-DNA haplotype N1c1 in 59%, but have only 15% of Siberian autosomal DNA and in all respect autosomal DNA is the one that determines who you genetically are, not the small Y chromosome (which mostly has genes for sperm production, not for instance for intelligence). As for ancient autosomal DNA in Levant, there are only few tested samples. If we go to very early times, there are the Natufians. They are not like present Jews in Y-DNA, where they had haplogroup E1b1 and CT, mtDNA included J2 and N1b (N1b is found in Jews), and autosomal admixture is Basal Eurasian and Unknown Hunter Gatherer. Very likely Natufians resembled early Egyptians, modern Egyptians have admixture. Samaritans have Assyrian admixture according to Tanakh, so they should not be so similar to Jews, despite present similarity in Y-DNA. Palestinians are naturally also admixed. Some Palestinian families have roots in Israelites, who remained there. Many families moved there later. Present Ashkenazi Jews have 55-65% of European autosomal admixture and cannot be considered genetically similar to ancient Israelites or Jews of the time of the First Roman-Jewish War. Israel has not published DNA studies of ancient remains, so much more than that cannot be said. What I wrote of Palestinian DNA agrees, to my best knowledge, with the current view of genetics researchers. I am no researcher of genetics, but I have followed the field. I do not remember having claimed that present Palestinians and Beduins resemble early populations genetically. Genetically (almost) no modern population resembles very closely early populations. (There was news that one Chinese ethnic group was very similar to early inhabitants of that area, but this is an exception to the rule.)
Nonetheless, the similarity between Askenazi y chromosomes and those of the Samaritans , as opposed to differences with Palestinians count for something.I cannot agree that y choromosomes do not tell us about ancestry. They account for a small percentage of the genome but that percentage is significant, and tells us something of paternal lineages.Historically, we also know that the majority of Palestinians came from all over the Middle East during the Ottoman period, and as late as the 1930’s.Many studies therefore do not find them to be good examples of a proto-Levantine population.
There are less than 800 Samaritans and they belong to four paternal families.
Thus, the y-dna data from them is only three haplogroups, two in subclades of J2, one
a subclade of J1 and one a subclade of E3b1. Ashkenazi Jews have quite a number of
Y-DNA haplogroups and their subclades, including R1a, R1b and Q1, of these R1b and Q1
are not of Middle Eastern origin. Not much can be concluded from the similarity of
Ashkenazi Jews to Samaritans in y-dna. Mainly that Samaritans are indeed descendants of
Israelites, which nobody doubts, and that Ashkenazi Jewish male lineages are largely from
the Middle East.
Have you ever seen Finns? Do they look like 60% East Asian to you? No,
they look fully European. Despite of that their male lineages are 60% East Asian. The case is
that men from Far East and married locals, some thousands of years ago. Female DNA has for
all practical purposes diluted all East Asian DNA Finnish men once had. There is about 15%
Siberian DNA left. With the Ashkenazi Jews it is more or less similar, though Palestine was
lost about 2000 years ago, so somewhat more recently. Ashkenazi Jews cluster extremely closely
with Sicilians and Cypriots in PCA analysis. Many of them have their distinctive looks, just like
Finns look a bit different from other Europeans and some people think they see something Asian.
Just like all different ethnic groups, which have mostly married among themselves (which is the
case with all nationalities for geographic reasons, Ashkenazi are much more intermixed than e.g.
Finns or Poles, just check Polish y-dna, it is all R1a, then check Ashkenazi y-dna. What was the
y-dna of Abraham and why the children have so many y-dna haplogroups if not by marrying outside
their group.)
About Palestinians, I understand that Ashkenazi Jews would like to claim that they have more genetic
right to Israel than Palestinians, but this is simply not true. Ashkenazi Jews genetically cluster
with Southern Europeans, even though they have paternal heritage from the Middle East, like Finns
have paternal heritage from Far East. That does not matter as DNA gets diluted quite well by marrying
local women. Palestinians have always lived in the Middle East, not only in the area of Israel
as that area was just a part of the Caliphate. Some original Israelians converted to Christianity and
then to Islam. Some kept their religion, and some group ended to Europe and grew to Ashkenazi Jews.
Whatever the original dna in that are was (originally it was E3b or E3a in Natufian time), all genes
have got changed. As an example, I can trace my family to 1650 and have y-dna from the other lineage
of the family which separated just 1650, two brothers. The y-dna in 64 markers has only 2 mutation
differences, however counting 20 generations (10 from today to 1650 and 10 back) means that we do
not share a single gene, except for the y-dna. There is no genetic birth right to a piece of land,
there never was, and certainly there is no genetic right to return after 2000 years. Otherwise we
should say that all Americans have the right to come to Europe as they left from there. Well, they
do not have such a return right.
If what you said about Ashkenazi Jews genetically clustering with Southern Europeans were true… then it would not be possible for it to also be true that our genetic markers have more in common with other Ashkenazi Jews than they do with other non Jewish Europeans….which is what my 23 and me results say. Also a lot of Palestinians have Jewish and even Ashkenazi Jewish dna… but regardless I think your seemingly biased and alterior motives for writing this piece speak for themself. The historical facts of the conflict in Israel are so much more complex then what you’ve included here and to try to minimize the conflict in this way is in my opinion negligible…. there have also been scientific studies that show the type of behavior you’re exhibiting by trying to make the parallels you did are significantly contributing to the rise in violent anti Semitic attacks.
Firstly, I do not contribute to any rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks. I have good statistics of the number of people reading this blog and it is so small that it will not cause any problems of this type. What is causing anti-Semitism is the behavior of Israel and some American Jews.
Secondly, that Ashkenazi Jews have more genes shared between themselves than with Southern Europeans only shows that the admixture with South Europeans (Italians) happened long time ago and after that time there has not been admixture. As Ashkenazi Jews were in Eastern Europe since 1300 AD and in the Rhine area around 800-1000 AD, the admixture with Italians had to be before that time. The article I referred to dates the admixture to 600-800 AD, which seems correct. Ashkenazi Jews are also more closely related to Sephardic Jews (and Maroccoan Jews) than to Southern Europeans, which is no mystery: there has been later admixture by travellers.
Thirdly, there were few Ashkenazi Jews, who moved to Palestine (Cabbalists and ultra-religious) before the 20th century, but they mostly did not mix with Palestinians. If there is Ashkenazi Jewish dna in Palestinians, it probably is very recent. But they should have some original Palestinian Jewish dna.
Finally, I do not have alterior motives and I am not biased. Additionally, the historical facts of the conflict are not not complex. It is a very simple case of trying to set up a new country on an area which already was inhabited. There is also a very simple solution: one state, equal rights and compensation of the damage done.
I would also add that the Assyrian admixture of the Samaritans applies to their maternal lineages, as opposed to their paternal lineages, very much in keeping with the Biblical narrative that these Jews married Assyrian women.
As an Ashkenazi Jew I find your writing very interesting. I have often wondered why we Ashkenazi Jews are light in skin compared to Middle Eastern People. The DNA research of Ashkenazi Jews has among other things enabled us to understand the possible roots of both Levant (Israel) and European ancestors along with the movements of Ashkenazi Jews.
Many Thanks!
Thanks for your comment. I try to answer, though I am no expert on the topic. The time spell of 1000 years is not enough to change skin color only by natural selection to lower UV radiation starting from a few light skin allele carriers, thus the reason must be that admixture brought light skin alleles to the population in large quantities. European light skin color is caused by alleles of three genes: SLC24A5, SLC45A2 and TYR. As you can see in the map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color#/media/File:Ala111Thr_allele_frequency_distribution0.png
SLC24A5 has been almost fixed on the light skin allele Ala111Thr in Levant as it is in Europe, probably since the start of agriculture. Even Yemenite Jews are nearly fixed on the light skin allele of this gene and I guess their skin is a bit darker. To get a Northern European skin color to Ashkenazi they must have genes SLC45A2 and TYR. Italians have all three genes and light skinned alleles, so admixture with Italians explains it. Admixture and some natural selection for lower UV radiation should be possible in 1000 years. Italians are probably only more tanned and not darker skinned.
You have to take founder effect into account. If the Ashkenazi Jewish founder population before the major bottleneck was lighter than expected for a mix of Italians and Levantines the Ashkenazi Jewish populations could easily be notably lighter pigmented.
The Modern Samaritans are good example of this. At the turn of the last century they were barely 150 people over four families. Among this population the MC1R variant R151C was much more common than typical for Levantines (although other MC1R variants were lacking). Over the last century the Samaritan population grew over 5 times that population. Now we are have a population lighter complexioned than the last time the Samaritans numbered over 800.
So, your point is that the light complexion of Ashenazi Jews many be a result of a genetic bottleneck. This is of course possible. But the autosomal DNA and PC1/PC2 plots place them rather well between Italians and Middle Eastern populations. I am no expert on this topic, I only commented a paper. I also am not willing to study this topic further, as there are too many angry commenters, apparently Jewish. Thanks for your comment. I still think many studies that have shown that over 50% of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA is European, mainly Italian, are correct. Many Ashkenazi Jews look so European that it could not be otherwise, A genetic bottleneck does not have this effect. But I am personally through with this problem. It is not a problem people want solved. I solve problems people want solved.
It makes sense. Thanks Jorma!
Hi, I have a question for you, you wrote, “The larger admixture in Italy has the strange feature that it is around 600-800 AD, not before. This means that the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews were not in Italy before that time.” Prior to 600-800 CE where were the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews? Per Ancestry.com I’m 89% Ashkenazi, 5% Southern Europe (Italy/Greece) and 3% Middle East, & <1% a few others. 2 of my Grand Parents were from Western Ukraine, 1 was from Poland, & 1 was from the Lithuania-Latvian Border area. I'm interested in where my ancestors were at prior to being in Eastern Europe. In order for the results of my DNA test to be meaningful, it's important to know the origins of Ashkenazi Jews. I appreciate any help you could provide.
So, the result that the Italian mixture is from 600-800 AD is from the research article I referred to, not from me. I take this result as the starting point. From that result it follows that Ashkenazi Jews could not be in Italy before this time as otherwise there had been earlier admixture. Jews and Christians intermarried before 300-400 AD. Thus, the Ashkenazi Jews were not in Italy but came there around 600-800 AD. You ask where they were before that. I can only offer a guess: in the Byzantine. I guess that these Jews moved to Northern Italy, which was under Langobard rule and outside the Byzantine Empire because the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius
had beaten Parthians and Jews who had joined Parthians in the war against Byzantine, and Heraclius required the Jews in Byzantine to convert to Christianity or to leave. I think Ashkenazi Jews were those who left. They may be from Levant or from Anatolia. I think they adopted the Germanic language from Langobards. But this is only my guess. You can think of some other place where from these Jews came to Italy, but Byzantine and the time of Heraclius fits to everything. In Ancestry Ashkenazi Jews are taken as one population, so you get 89% Ashkenazi. Dropping Ashkenazi from the alternatives you probably get about 60% European and 40% Middle East, as Ashkenazi is originally an admixture. Likewise, I get 100% Finnish, but as Finns are 15% East Asian and 85% European, dropping Finns would give me this latter admixture.
Nearly all the population genetics studies on Ashkenazi Jews are highly politicized and quite biased.
For example NO paper to date has included Sicilians/South Italians/Peloponnese Greeks and Cretans in their reference samples to compare with Ashkenazi Jews.
All of the above mentioned populations are highly likely to be the closest living genetic groups to Ashkenazi Jews on an autosomal level, even closer than Italian Jews(Yehudim Italkim) or true Sephardic Jews of southern Europe.
Using Northern Italians and Sardinians to represent Italy in a paper is a very deceptive way to skew a study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032072/
Reference sample bias like that in the above paper will give a skewed data set.
Another Issue is that the non European heritage of Ashkenazi Jews is very hard to pigeonhole and to me looks like it has a patchwork of Turkish/Iranian/Armenian/Druze/Samaritan/Kurdish/Georgian.
J2a-M67 Haplogroup found
in at least 5% of Ashkenazi Jews is deeply embedded and associated with the Northern Caucasus.
I personally think there is ample evidence that the Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews have larger European or non Israelite non European ancestry than most will admit.
Ashkenazim have 30% R haplogroup with 2/3 being R1a1 and the rest being R1b (Shen et al. 2004).
Haplogroup Q appears in 23 out of 442 Ashkenazi results in Behar’s study, or approximately 5% of the total results (Behar et al. 2004b, Supplementary Material).
Haplogroup G2 appears almost exclusively in eastern Ashkenazim, comprising approximately 2% of the results (Behar et al. 2004b, Supplementary Material). The restriction to eastern Ashkenazim argues in favor of admixture with Eastern European or Khazarian ancestors. This group also exhibits high diversity and lack of a dominant modal haplotype, indicative of multiple founders or genetic drift.
Three other sub-clades appear in Jewish populations and invite further examination of their origins. Sub-clade J-M92* appears only in Ashkenazi populations at a frequency of 4.9%. The fact that it is absent in Sephardim indicates that the origin of this group among Ashkenazim may be attributed to European gene flow. While J-M92* appears in small percentages among Iraqi (1.3%) and Lebanese (2.5%) groups, it occurs in higher frequencies and is much more diversified in Turkish, Balkan and Italian populations (Semino et al. 2004).
Sub-clade J-M67* presents an equally complex picture among Jewish populations. Ashkenazi Jews have 4.9% and Sephardim have 2.4% (Semino et al. 2004). Again, J-67* is present among populations in the northern Levant (Iraqis have 4.5% and Lebanese have 2.5%), but frequency and variance is significantly greater in Europe and Turkey than in the Middle East (Semino et al. 2004). Thus, whether Jews obtained their J-M67* ancestry from Israelite, European, or a mixture of ancestors remains unknown at this point in time.
“It seems that finally the origins of Ashkenazi Jews have been settled.”
I disagree.
Will explain why…
“The remaining 40% of genes are from the Middle East and almost all from the Levant: the article uses three Middle Eastern populations, Levant, Anatolia and Druze.”
Incorrect.
James Xue, et al populations used were:
(link)https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/figure/image?size=large&id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006644.t001
Levant: Palestinian;Lebanese;Syrian; Jordanian.
South Middle East:
Egyptian;Bedouin;Saudi.
Druze:
Israeli and Lebanese.
No Anatolian, Iranian, or Caucasus samples were used.
This is a massive flaw in his study and this flaw was pointed out by Dr.Eran Elhaik and rightly so.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5478715/
A good study, but again tainted by reference population bias.
It would have been quite simple for James Xue, et al to include Iranian, Anatolian and Caucasus samples, the fact that he didn’t makes his study incomplete and tainted.
In defense of James Xue, et al, he did do the first study comparing Ashkenazi Jews to Sicilians/Central Italians.
I neglected to mention that in my previous post.
Still incomplete…😃
You find autosomal DNA plots of Anatolian (Turkish) and Caucasian DNA from this blog. They are somewhat similar to Ashkenazi DNA, also in the plots, but not so similar that Elhaik’s tool should have located Ashkenazis to North-East Turkey.
https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/turkey-not-very-turkic-a-genetic-history-of-the-turkic-peoples/
Iranian DNA plots are also easy to find, they are similar to Iranian Jewish DNA, but not to Ashkenazi. I checked the four village names in Elhaik, could find only Iskenaz (Ezkenaz is Ashkenazi in Turkish). I doubt village names can be 1200 years old, old place names are usually mountains, lakes, such stuff. So, I doubt Elhaik’s paper. When it appeared i sent an email to him and asked if he is serious, he did answer and claimed he was, but I doubt, the paper was written to get publicity, there is very little to support it.
Sicilian DNA is very much mixed, just like Ashkenazi. In PCA plots they are similar, but in autosomal DNA plots not so much. I do not think there is a single place where the Ashkenazi got their genes. They are mixed people, 60% European, 40% Near or Middle Eastern. Elhait did object to Middle Eastern, he just wanted to differentiate with Near Eastern (Levant) and Middle Eastern (wider area).
“Sicilian DNA is very much mixed, just like Ashkenazi. In PCA plots they are similar, but in autosomal DNA plots not so much.”
Totally disagree with that.
I will show you why.
GEDmatch uses autosomal DNA for comparsion, and I have 4 Ashkenazi Grandparents, here is my Eurogenes K13 Oracle results:
Single Population Sharing:
Population (source) Distance
1 Italian_Abruzzo 7.23
2 West_Sicilian 7.33
3 Tuscan 9.02
4 Ashkenazi 9.13
5 East_Sicilian 9.27
6 Greek_Thessaly 9.39
7 Central_Greek 9.73
8 South_Italian 10.91
9 Sephardic_Jewish 13.41
10 Italian_Jewish 13.57
11 North_Italian 14.6
12 Algerian_Jewish 14.89
13 Bulgarian 15.78
14 Romanian 16.78
15 Tunisian_Jewish 17.35
16 Libyan_Jewish 17.98
17 Serbian 20.02
18 Portuguese 21.42
19 Spanish_Extremadura 21.6
20 Spanish_Murcia 22.29
Most Jewish kits I enter are very close to South/Central Italians and Sicilians, Plus central Greeks.
As for Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry from outside Europe, the story goes they’re decedents of ancient Israelite’s.
Now that has morphed into “middle eastern,” there is ample data to suggest that R1a1, a major Y-DNA haplogroup in Ashkenazi Jews has much of it’s origins in Iran.
Is Iran in the middle east?
Yes.
Are Iranians even Semitic, or do they claimed to be ancestors of the biblical Israelite’s?
No.
ANY study that excludes Iranians, Turks and Caucasus samples is skewed and not accurate at all.
My paternal haplogroup is J-M67 (found in at least 5% of Ashkenazi Jews) and in the heart of former Khazarian Khaganate over 50% of the male population and up to nearly 90% are J-M67.
Can we really dismiss Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus?
Is “middle eastern” synonymous with descended from the Israelite’s?
Look at the diagram at
http://bga101.blogspot.com/2013/11/updated-eurogenes-k13-at-gedmatch.html
and notice that Fst distance, though it is from autosomal DNA, is essentially Principal Component Analysis (PCA). As I wrote, in PCA plots Sicilians and Ashkenazi are very close. Just to mention, some 15 years ago I read a book where the Finns were closest to the Dutch in Fst, also from PCA analysis and it is autosomal DNA, but naturally, the Finns are not really close to the Dutch. Thus, Fst usually shows correctly and can show incorrectly. I think is is a demonstrated fact that Ashkenazi are closest to Italians of all populations in autosomal DNA. Your results confirm it. Whether this Italy is Sicily or some other part of Southern italy is not so clear. If you look at Sicilian history, they have had lots of migration waves, including Sephardic Jews who moved there from Spain after expulsion. So Sicilian population is mixed. But you are quite correct that Ashkenazi Jews do not have so much Levantine ancestry. And even if they had, they still had no right to take the country from people who lived there. One commenter, Ari, just pointed to me a village Ein Zeitun close to Safed. Haganah murdered there tens of Palestinians in 1948. That is not the correct way. Even if Ashkenazi had 100% Levantine DNA, they still should not steal the land. And in reality, Middle Eastern DNA is not the same as Israelite DNA. In Jesus’ time Hasmonean and Herodian kings had occupied the area of Israel. It was not Judea of the Persian time. There lived many people, like Edomites and remains of Canaanites. Jews in Babylon/Persia write a history that the area had once belonged to them, while one may very well doubt it ever belonged to them. Only a part ever belonged to the Jews. This is why the Israelites of Jesus’ time were not a single people and had different DNA.
First of all Jews didn’t “steal land”… it was not “Palestinian” land because it was the British Mandate of Palestine, and the flag had a Jewish star on it. Honestly the way that you are so broadly trying to discuss what is in fact an extremely complex and multi layered conflict is negligible, and you’re outright contributing to the rise in violent attacks on Jews. With how biased you sound it’s hard to even try to take your genetics info seriously, because it’s just so obvious you’re using it with a very specific agenda against Jewish rights to our homeland. Palestinian people have Jewish dna so what’s your point? Except of course for the Palestinians who are Arab and we know historically how they got there, and it was through an invasion. If Native American people got the opportunity to take control of America again I think it would be good, and there are many tribes so it would be …. once again… a complex issue.
I do not have any agenda wither for Jews or against Jews. For me Jews are just like the people in Iceland: just another people, but the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews seems to be a puzzle and I solve puzzles.
About stealing the land I say like this. After the First World War the Great Britain as one of the winners of the war got Palestine as a mandate. Before the war it belonged to Turkey. But conquering a land does not mean that you are the rightful owner of the land. The land did not belong to Turks before the war and to English after the war. The land belonged to the people who had lived there up to that time. And there is a limit in the time. If that land had once long ago belonged to some people, it depends on how long ago it was whether the claim is still valid. Israelites lived in Palestine before it become Christian and after that Islamic. This claim is far too old to be valid. The fact is that if you take by force something from somebody, or scare them to leave it to you, it is not yours, you have stolen it. It is not the occupation, but building new settlements.
I do not see the problem in Palestine as an extremely complex one. Freemasons and some Jewish bankers created Zionism. They forced the Great Britain to give the promise of a homeland and they lifted Hitler to power in order that he pushes the unwilling Jews to the new homeland, causing millions of Jewish deaths while doing it. Zionists wanted to create a new Israel and for that reason they conquered the land and created the refugee problem. We others are very tired with you not being capable of finding a solution to the problem. Every other nation would already have solved the problem in a peaceful way.
Arabs of Palestine did not all come there by invasion. It is well-known in history that when Muslims invaded to the Byzantine Empire, a large part of the population of Palestine converted to Islam on their own will as they did not like the Byzantine rule. This includes those Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity after the failed rebel. Thus, the Palestinians have some ancestry in the area.
Native Americans lost their land in the 19th century and those were still the old times and we cannot go back to undo the wrongs done in the old times. However, Native Americans are fully equal Americans and can leave the reservations and live in the old areas where they used to live. Israel should do the same (at least): allow the Palestinians the right to return, give them equal rights as citizens, and in my opinion compensate for the property and land that was taken from them in the 20th century, as from deeds done during that century some justice can be expected from a democratic country.
Totally wrong jorma, Zionism is the Jewish right of self determination. Obviously you shouldn’t say things you have no clue of. We Jews were their first. Palestinians are Invaders. Ashkenazim originated in the levant and the female line is from southern Italy central Italian and Greek women NOT northern italy only an idiot would believe that. We Ashkenazim overlap with Sicilians southern Italian central Italian Greek women Cretans mainly Maltese Cypriots and sephardic. All DNa studies place us in southern italy . Ashkenazim are Roman exiled Judeans who married southern Italian central Italian and Greek women and than moved to northern italy. We Jews mixed before the 600s with Italians.
We already discussed this in email, but I will repeat the argument here.
The reason why I do not find correct the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews developed from Italian Jews is that the admixture of Ashkenazi Jews with Italian (women) is dated to 600-800 AD. Italian Jews were in Rome already 60 BC. Mostly they were not staves taken after the wars of Pompeius the Great around 60 BC or from the war of 66-73 AD. Hyrcanus II asked Romans to help him in the civil war against his brother Aristobulus II. From this time on Jews moved to much of the Roman Empire, to cities, in search of better living conditions. Thus, the diaspora started as economic immigration. Up to 135 AD Christianity was a Jewish sect and Jews married freely with Jewish Christians. Up to 400 AD Jews could (and did) intermarry with Christians. After that time the Catholic Church did not accept the marriage of Christian women to Jewish men (practically no men converther to Judaism because circumcision in adulthood was too dangerous). Thus, Italian Jews have Italian non-Jewish admixture dating to 60 BC to 400 AD. But Ashkenazi Jews have admixture dated to 600-800 AD. This means they could not arise from Italian Jewish communities, which had Jewish women that Ashkenazi founders could marry. Ashkenazi founders had to marry non-Jews when the community started. That implies that a group of Ashkenazi men moved to Italy around 600 AD and before that
time they lived far away from Italians not to have Italian admixture. This suggests that the founders (men) came from the Eastern part of the Byzantine Empire: Anatolia, Levant or Egypt. We can exclude Egypt as there would be documents from Alexandria had the founders come from there. Thus, Anatolia or Levant.
The fact that there are shared genes between Ashkenazi and Jews of Southern Italy and Sicily only points out that Jewish communities have intermarried. The Jews of Sicily for instance are mainly from Spain, Sephardic Jews who were expelled in 1490s. Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews share genes: both are European Jews and there has been intermarriages.
The problem comes from the timing of the admixture between Italian women and Ashkenazi men to 600-800 AD. At that time all Italy was Catholic. Also Langobards (a Germanic tribe that had conquered most of Italy) were Catholic, not Arian Christians as before. The Catholic Church did not allow marriages between Jews and Christians after 400 AD. Jews also did not allow them after that time. Thus, these Ashkenazi men could not marry an Italian woman at that time, regardless of if she was from South or Central Italy or from North Italy. A Jewish man could, however, had sex with slave girls. The Torah allows a man one wife and slave girls for sex. A Jewish man could accept the children as his. And this is the only way this admixture could have happened: Langobards when conquering Central and South Italy took slaves, sold them to Jews as a Catholic Christian could not keep another Christian as a slave. These Jewish men had children with some 7 slave women who become the funding mothers. Then, naturally, the DNA of these women points to South and Central Italy, not to Langobards. Jews could not marry Langobards or take them as slave girls, but Ashkenazi communities were in North Italy. They did not earlier live in South Italy or Sicily.
Zionism is not the Jewish right to self-determination. Zionism originates in the messianic idea of Jews returning to the Promised Land. Later this idea was formulated as a political movement without religious overtones because religious Jews did not accept the return before the Messiah comes. If you check what forces were behind Zionism, you will find Freemasons, like Mordecai Noah, and bankers, like Rothschilds, Christian Zionists like Shaftesbury, Kabbalists, like Kalischer, and socialists like Moses Hess. Before these people you find religious messianism.
Palestinian DNA differs somewhat from Beduin DNA and also from DNA of other peoples in the area. There is no doubt that there were people in that area before Jews started moving to Palestine. Jews were also not the first in the area since the first were Nabuteans, then Canaanites. Jews, who moved to Palestine from all over the world, are clearly recent invaders to the Near East moving in the last 150 years. The people who lived in the Near East had lived there for about a thousand years. The Crusaders fought them in the 12th to 14th century. There was a very small Jewish community, mainly Cabbalists and ultra-religious Jews up to the writing of the Palestinian Talmud and a bit later Cabbalists waiting for the Messiah, but that does not mean that Jews were the first as there were Gentile Christians since the time of Paul. Jerusalem was a Jebusite city and one of you prophets says it has a Hittite father and Amorite mother. Actually, it is difficult to say which if the religions, Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, or Islam, is the correct descendant of Second temple Judaism. I would vote for Christianity. it is the oldest and with the clearest roots to Jewish messianism.
Wrong Jews were living in Sicily before the Spanish expulsion. You shouldn’t talk about things you have no clue of. Second Ashkenazim migrated to northern Italy from southern italy and central ITALY. The kalynomos family migrated from Lucca. Lucca is in central italy Tuscany. The oldest Ashkenazim community dates back to the third century in the Rheinland in cologne and Orleans. Many Jews migrated to Germany in the 10th and 11th century from ITALY but the earliest Ashkenazim came in the third century. Even genetically in all studies whether it is ostrer, behars, perreira, Antonio torroni, richard, Skorecki we overlap with Sicilians southern Italian central Italian Greek women Cretans mainly Maltese Cypriots on the female line of their DNa. The male traces back to Israelite man from the southern part of Israel known as JUDEA. These judeans were taken as slaves after the roman Jewish wars to italy. Yiddish developed through migration it contains Hebrew aramaic romance germanic slavic. When we arrived in italy as slaves we spoke Hebrew and Judeo aramaic which spoken in JUDEA in italy we picked up roman words or latin to be specific and influence from other italic in Germany we picked up germanic and in eastern Europe we picked up Slavic words. Genetically we are a hybrid population of levantines and southern Italians central Italian Greek women. Zionism is the Jewish right of self determination. Jews prayed in EXILE next year in Jerusalem as a promise to return to our genetic homeland Eretz Y’Israel. Since the Romans exiled us we had to adapt to European lifestyle but still managed to preserve our history culture language. Wrong Jews didn’t force hitler to power to fullfil their dream of return. You have to be careful with those words. It exposes you as an antisemite. Basically what you are saying is that we are fault for the holocaust are you serious. In one email to me you even wrote that also the pogroms in Europe were our fault. You have no clue what you are talking about. Facts don’t care about your feelings. I know you as a Finn have a palestinian agenda as Finland is anti Israel but you shouldn’t mix facts with feelings. We JEWS were brought to Europe as slaves on slave ships in chains after the roman Jewish wars and we did mix with southern Italian central Italian Greek women which called the Graeco-Roman admixture. Those women were NOT Christian’s.we didn’t teleport ourself to northern italy from the levant. We didn’t fall from the sky. We had to be and live somewhere before and that is southern and central italy and JUDEA.
Your DNa isn’t upon but under your skin. Levantines can look light skin , Olive skin and Brown skinned. In FACT Most Israelis are Mizraim , THAN sephardic and THAN Ashkenazim. So what are you talkin about. By the way the female Line in Ashkenazim is southern ITALIAN, central Italian and Greek. The male line traces back to the levant. Ashkenazim cluster closest together with sephardic. Ashkenazim are even related to the so called palestinian. So they are semitic and we are going nowhere.
Jews are NOT European.
Upload Ashkenazim and sephardic DNa on Gedmatch and it breaks it down into levantines and Mediterranean. BOTH of are semitic and Mediterranean. Ashkenazim cluster with levantines and Samaritans as well as palestinian . You guys always forget that their is BOTH a paternal line (male) and a female line. Ashkenazim are semitic and Mediterranean. We overlap with Sicilians southern Italians Greeks (Cretans mainly) Maltese as well as Cypriots Greek ones as well as the levantines including lebanese, sephardic , syrians, palestinian, jordanians, druze, bedouins, Samaritans, Mizraim etc. By the way Samaritans descend from the tribe of Joseph. Jews descend from JUDEA (Judah Benjamin simeon and Levi) . Samaritans are from Joseph as they are like JEWS Am Y’Israel.
Nonsense it isn’t absent . Ashkenazim and sephardic cluster closest together as they are BOTH semitic and Mediterranean. Ashkenazim are genetic 100 % Mediterranean. The paternal line (male) is levantines and the female line of their DNa is Mediterranean from southern Italian central Italian and Greek women. This is known as the Graeco-Roman admixture in Ashkenazim. It was roman JEWS from ITALY who settled in Germany (Ashkenaz ) and later migrated eastwards. You probably haven’t seen an Ashkenazim most look levantine and southern Italian. That’s why we overly with Sicilians southern Italian Greeks ( Cretans mainly) Maltese and sephardics. Ashkenazim are Italkim .
Ashkenazim and sephardic are genetically the same. Even if you upload our DNa on Gedmatch it breaks it down into levantine and Mediterranean admixture .Ashkenazim and sephardic BOTH are semitic and Mediterranean. IT was Roman jews WHO settled in Germany from italy. We Ashkenazim are EXILED Judeans and southern ITALIAN. Upload Ashkenazim and sephardic DNa on Gedmatch and it breaks IT down into levantine and Mediterranean admixture BOTH are semitic and Mediterranean. SAMARITANS are the PUREST ISRAELITES as they never left the middle East and Mizraim too. Yet Samaritans are purer.
I am 25 % Jew my dad is half atheist Jew and me , my father , his brothers look southern Italian , my grandfather looked Greek and my great grandfather looked like a dark skinned Arab and his siblings had the Jewish semitic look. Jews are genetically different than eastern Euros we lived there as a minority like gypsys or Inuits or tatars in Russia. We are exiled Semites.
Ashkenazi Jews are semites and southern Italians even tough they lived in Eastern Europe and Western Europe. After the three roman Jewish wars 66ad to 70ad , 114 to 117 ad and 132 ad to 135 ad the Roman exiled the Jews from judea on Ships and brought them to Europe (Rome) . Most of the population was exiled into slavery from Judea by the Romans. It is historically wrong to call ashkenazi European because they trace their DNA back to the Levant in Israel. Many idiots think they are European because they lived there but the reason is it is because they were exiled from the middle East 2000 years ago. In Rome those middle eastern men were scattered some left for Spain and became known later as sephardic Jews (genetically a mix of levantine from biblical Israel and Spanish/Portuguese) while their brothers the ashkenazi Jews stayed and we’re scattered in other parts of southern Italy ( Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, apulia, basilicata, molise, Rome and Calabria) . These ashkenazi Jews took on local wives that’s why they are a Mix of levantine Judeans from Israel and southern Italian . Generations later many Jews left Italy and migrated to the Rhineland in Germany(Ashkenaz Hebrew name for the region where the Roman Jews settled). Due to persecution, oppression and discrimination Jews were forced to flee and many of them went to Eastern Europe where later they suffered from the pogroms against them. Jews are the only ethnic group which preserved it’s identity, culture, tradition and history in exile. Ashkenazi Jews are from judea (Israel) and the Mediterranean (both ashkenazi and sephardic). Even tough they lived in eastern Europe they are NOT Slavic. Slavs are Indo European and have the Haplogroup R1a from Ukraine (dnjepr and dnjestr river) and Slavic people are a mix of scythians/sarmatians and balts.
Sephardic Jews (levantine and Spanish/Portuguese)
Ashkenazi Jews (levantine and southern Italian).
Ashkenazim are semitic and southern Italian
sephardic are Israelites and Spanish / Portuguese
Mizraim and Samaritans are the purest Israelites
If the links don’t work just copy and paste them
Gallery :
http://ashkenazim.weebly.com/gallery.html . This how ashkenazi jews look (middle eastern and mediterrenean) like
Other famous Jews: Gina bellman, Gina gershon, oded fehr, peter falk, Paul Ben Victor, David proval who played richie aprile on the sopranos is in fact a Jew, the guy who played Bobby is half Italian and half Jewish, Sarah Silverman, Zach braff, Ben Stiller, Jeff Goldblum, David Schwimmer, Josh radnor, jermemy stoppelman, Ari arison, Josh Gad, Gal Gadot, Sasha Baron Cohen, Adam Sandler, Jon bernthal, Alan arkin, Richard Benjamin, Maggie siff, Ali McGraw, Ben Shapiro and even the guy who played Hector salamanca on breaking bad is a Jew in real life
GENETIC VERIFIED ALL PROVEN BY SERIOUS EDUCATED SCIENTIST Studies: READ ALL OF THEM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#Y-DNA_of_Ashkenazi_Jews
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Levantine-or-Middle-Eastern-ancestry-of-Ashkenazic-Jews-over-time-Nine-genomic_fig1_318745856
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3543766/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ngOuW68xB8
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/07/canaanite-bible-ancient-dna-lebanon-genetics-archaeology/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9IkAPhX_I
http://ashkenazim.weebly.com/gallery.html . This how ashkenazi jews look (middle eastern and mediterrenean) like
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30276-8
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-canaanites-werent-annihilated-they-just-moved-to-lebanon/ over 90% of modern Lebanese ancestry, a trait they share with ancient Israelites
I answer only some issues in your long comment that I remember here.
Surely there were some Jews in Sicily before 1490s. In Sicily there have been people from many ethnic groups. Yet, their main Y-DNA haplogroup is R1b and the similarity with Ashkenazi Jews is not so close as between Ashkenazi Jews and e.g. Cypriots.
Ashkenazi Jews are not descendant of Jews that were taken as captives from the three Jewish-Roman wars. If this were the case, you would have maternal admixture with Italian women from the first and second centuries, but you do not. Italian and Sephardic Jews do have this earlier admixture.
I am no anti-Semite and what i commented of pogroms in the Ukraininan cossac uprising in 1630 or so, that had a reason: Ukrainians felt that they were exploited by Jews who Polish and Lithuanian nobility had set as farm managers. This is a historical fact. Some 28,000 Jews probably died in these pogroms. Nevertheless, Poland was attacked by Sweden just after that and one third of Poles died in the Swedish flood, so Jews did not suffer more than others. But the pogroms in Russia in the 19th century were provoked for some reason and that reason was connected with the wish of pre-Zionists to get Jews to Palestine. This seems also have been the idea in Hitler’s purges. He wanted to move Jews to Palestine, he underlined a sentence saying this in a book in his library and he made the Haavara agreement.
Finns are not anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. But we see what is happening there and many Finns do not approve Israel’s actions, like the building of the wall and building more settlements on the West Bank.
Ashkenazi Jews are not 100% Mediterranean. They have some admixture from East Europe. Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews are not identical in DNA, which is shown by Ashkenazi specific diseases.
I do not continue answering all your comments. You can find refutation to them from literature if you study the topic.
I would prefer to leave geopolitics out of discussions of population genetics.
Too much inherent bias when they’re inserted.
My interest is DNA and science based, and when it comes to Ashkenazi Jews nearly ALL the “science” is already clouded with personal feelings one way or another.
Ashkenazi Jews are more heterogeneous than most are willing to admit, So were the Israelite’s by their own historical record, as you correctly pointed out.
A small minority of Ashkenazi Jews cluster autosomally somewhat closer to Greek Cypriots, many more cluster in the Greek Island of Crete and the Peloponnese/Central Greek.
Many Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe such as myself cluster in Abruzzo, which is geographically Central Italy but economically and culturally tied to South Italy.
Hard to really pin down exactly where the majority of Ashkenazim cluster on an autosomal level, my GedMatch research seems to show South Italy and Sicily in a larger proportion than anywhere else.
I made a graph to show just how close Ashkenazi Jews are on the autosomal level to Greeks/Italians on the population averages of GedMatch K13 calculator.
This chart is a couple of years old and the data is probably a little out of date.
I will get around to making a new one with Abruzzo added…
http://oi68.tinypic.com/zqoih.jpg
About geopolitics, yes, we can leave it out. Sorry about it. Your plot is very interesting. I think it supports the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have a bit more Eastern Mediterranean admixture than Italians. About this Iranian and Middle Eastern admixture, I think it fits to my view that when Benjamin of Tiberius financed an army of Jews to join Persians, many were from Iran, mercenaries and so on. When Persians and Jews lost, these soldiers had to move out of Rome. There was Langobardia, at that time Langobards had conquered most of Italy. Jews could not marry Langobards, as they were already Catholics, but they could take slaves from conquered parts of Italy. This could explain South Italian admixture and Yiddish, which may have developed from Langobardian. This is just my theory, not so serious. However, it fits well with the dates of admixture. About Greeks and Creta, that is old Eastern Mediterranean DNA. Jews were partially Hellenized, so Greek mixture is to be expected, so is Crete, a part of the same culture.
All good with politics, I just don’t like to mix them in with a science thread.
Be happy to talk about it on a thread covering the middle east situation…
Give me a link if you have one.
The eastern med in Ashkenazim is over-sampled a bit on Eurogenes K13;
likely due to a lack of Eastern Euro and Central Euro Ashkenazim results and an oversampling of Southern Euro Ashkenazim.
I will post a link below of a K15 population averages chart which has a more reasonable and realistic estimate of Ashkenazi East Med, in my educated opinion.
https://i.imgur.com/zFvpcyZ.png
I can’t go by history or word of mouth as to the genetic composition of Ashkenazim, although it can help shed some valuable clues.
My research tells me that Ashkenazim maternal lines are likely wholly of non-Israelite origin and overwhelmingly European or from the Caucasus/Iran.
My maternal Haplogroup is W3b1 and it has been deep in Eastern Europe since the end of the last ice-age.
Y-DNA of Ashkenazi is much more complex.
The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history study by James Xue et al, clearly shows that Ashkenazi Jews have larger IBD segments shared between themselves and Eastern Europeans than any other group in his study.
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/figure/image?size=large&id=info:doi/10.1371/jisournal.pgen.1006644.g005
Most of this Eastern European admixture is relatively recent and came long after the mixing in South Europe, and is likely due to Y-DNA of Slavic populations that has been woefully discounted by nearly all studies of Ashkenazi Jews genome.
Ashkenazi Jews also have substantial Y-DNA from Western Europe that is nearly always totally ignored and hidden from studies.
The non European Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews is closer to modern Armenians/Kurds/Turkish/Druze/Iranians/Circassians, than to the modern populations of the southern Levant.
Are Druze native to the ancient Levant?
Not on the genetic level or historically, either.
Look at where they cluster, between Armenians and Abkhazian in the Caucasus region.
https://media.nature.com/lw926/nature-assets/srep/2016/161116/srep35837/images/srep35837-f1.jpg
In the admixture plot Druze seem to me closest to Syrians. They have less North-East Asian admixture than
Iranians. By Y-DNA and mt-DNA Druze are very mixed and their tradition also claims so. I know the Elhaik has
located Druze to a region close to Zagros mountains and Armenia, but again, I do not much trust his GPS method.
I think Druze are an Arab population that once was Christian, then turned to Islam by Al-Mahdi and at the time
of Al-Hakim turned to Druze and since 1034 are a closed group. DNA studies in such an area like Near East do not
clearly point to a specific location as this area has had many migrations. Originally, at the start of argiculture,
Anatolia was Y-DNA G2a and mt-DNA mostly K. This population spread to Europe. The Natufians belonged to Y-DNA Hg. E1b1b,
which was in all Levand and Egypt, North African DNA. From Zagros mountains (Iran etc) where were herders/argicultivists
with P, R, L, J Y-DNA. Probably J was older in Arabia. It is certain that some tribes from Zagros migrated to Levant and
Israelites were not supposed to be Canaan people but from the North. I guess the same with Druze. From Wiki I found one theory
of Druze that I thought interesting: Druze from Iturea and Iturea from Nabatean Arabs with the name Zabateans. Hasmonean
kings conquered these areas and converted (forced for sure) to Judaism. I find it interesting since in Galileons were the
Sons of Zabadeus, who may have been sons of Judas of Galilea and maybe were Itureans. I will comment the rest of your text after a while.
I looked at your first plot. It is a bit difficult to read as the numbers cover the plot and each other, but
it shows that the studied populations are close. Which is of course the case, they are all Mediterranean. Greeks
colonized South Italy and the starting point already was a rather homogeneous agricultural population. About the
longer IBD sequences, they are longer if the admixture was recent. Naturally European Jewish groups have had admixture
among themselves and Ashkenazi have some more recent admixture with East Europeans. Many Ashkenazi Jewish men when old
look just like many old Polish men. What I consider relevant is the timing of the admixture with Italians. In the paper
I referred to it was timed by DNA to 600-800 AD. If so, then one can use history as history tells where from these Jews
(men basically) could have come to Italy. Unlike Italian Jews they were not there in the first century. So, the only place
is the East, that is Byzantium. And why did they move? There was two reasons to move: to move with trade routes or to be
expelled. The European trade routes were ruled by other Jews, Radhenite, not Ashkenazi. Radhenite Jews traded with
South Russian powers at that time and bought slaves from vikings, sold slaves to Europe and the Islamic world. But this was not Ashkenazi. So Ashkenazi were expelled. And they had practical cabbalism around 800 AD. That is, before Spanish (Sephardic) kabbalism. This was a family business, Kalynomus, Chasidei Ashkenazi. As this form of kabbalism is clearly Messianic (which
form of Kabbalism is not?) I think the origin of these Jews who moved to Italy from the Bysantium was Messianic. Then it is
fairly obvious that we are talking about the events of the Book of Zerubbabel. Thye Jewish Messiah joining Parsians, losing
and Jews being expelled from the Byzantium.
“Be happy to talk about it on a thread covering the middle east situation…
Give me a link if you have one.”
I do not cover this middle east thing, all I wrote about it is just some small comments
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/05/04/70-years-from-1948/
“I know the Elhaik has
located Druze to a region close to Zagros mountains and Armenia, but again, I do not much trust his GPS method.”
More than just Elhaik’s paper.
Doron M. Behar and his colleagues, who I don’t trust and who use purposefully ambiguous terms like “near east” or “western Eurasia”, worked on a paper about the Druze and found:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2324201/
“The demographic modeling in the current study indicates most recent divergence of the Druze from an ancestral population shared with Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Adygeis and Greeks”
2 out of 4 of those groups autosomally plot outside of the Levant and in southern Europe, and one the Adygei is in the Northwest Caucasus region.
Also from Behar’s study:
“It is thus likely that the global diversity of this haplogroup evolved in the Near East and adjacent regions of western Eurasia, during a long incubation period coinciding with and following the most recent out of Africa expansion as dated by mtDNA coalescence simulations.”
“Near East” and adjacent regions of “western Eurasia.”
sounds VERY ambiguous and hardly specific at all the the LEVANT where many “scientists” would love to be able to assign genetic origins to the Druze.
Are most Syrians “Arabs” or Arabized populations of non Arab stock?
I would say strongly suggest the latter.
Naturally you understand that I have read the paper you pointed out long ago and that the populations
“Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Adygeis and Greeks” are quite far apart. I do not see your point in all this.
Do you try to imply that Ashkenazi Jews have no Levantine ancestry or what?
“Are most Syrians “Arabs” or Arabized populations of non Arab stock?
I would say strongly suggest the latter.”
Most Syrians are Arabized populations of non Arab stock.
“Do you try to imply that Ashkenazi Jews have no Levantine ancestry or what?”
Never said that or implied that in the least.
What I have been unsuccessfully attempting to convey is that Ashkenazim are more closely related to Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Anatolian’s, Armenians and other populations of the Caucasus region, than to populations such as Arabs from Gaza and the Judea and Samaria Area.
Do NON Levantine populations have some genetic affinity to the Levant?
Did not the Ottoman Turks have a massive historic presence in the Levant and exchange gene flow both ways?
Yes on both counts.
Having some genetic affinity with the modern Levant would be natural for populations of the Middle east, outside of the Levant, same for Caucasus populations, where J1 and J2 are very abundant haplogroups found in extremely high rates.
Are Ashkenazim genetically a European/MODERN Levantine population?
No way, not even close to being that.
“Naturally you understand that I have read the paper you pointed out long ago and that the populations
“Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Adygeis and Greeks” are quite far apart.”
No, Ashkenazim and Greeks can be called genetic cousins are are very closely related on an autosomal level.
Adygei have been shown to share genetic affinity to Ashkenazim
on several studies, even by the notorious huckster and cherry-picker Gil Atzmon in his infamous paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032072/
Why is a nation in the North Caucasus showing genetic affinity with a group of people that are allegedly genetically homogeneous to the southern Levantine populations?
Interesting that Behar didn’t use any Italian samples, not surprised, though…
So as I said I don’t trust Doron M. Behar, he’s ideologically driven and quite a cherry-picker in his reference populations and extremely vague with his fuzzy geographical terminology.
You said you read Behar’s paper, but on this very thread article you posted and still didn’t correct:
“the article uses three Middle Eastern populations, Levant, Anatolia and Druze.”
James Xue, et al paper never tested Anatolian populations at all and you didn’t seem to carefully read his paper, so how can anyone trust that you read Behar’s paper thoroughly?
The fact that Behar’s study showed most recent divergence of the Druze from an ancestral population shared with Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Adygeis and Greeks, would strongly indicate a large NON Levantine genetic cline of the Druze.
Behar also used a very small sample population, for instance only 67 for Egyptians out of a nation of over 80 million.
55 Ashkenazim samples were used out of a population that has quite a bit of regional variability and numbers at over 11 million…
Dr. Eran Elhaik whom you criticized used 393 Ashkenazic, Iranian, and mountain Jews and over 600 non-Jewish genomes demonstrated that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, and Turks exhibit the highest genetic similarity with AJs.”
His conclusions are solid on that and I 100% agree with his findings.
Is GPS Origins biogeographical accurate?
Likely more accurate than any data yet to date.
Behar et al. (2013), included both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews mapped Ashkenazic Jews to Eastern Turkey, ~600km away from ancient Ashkenaz.
So is Behar also seeking publicity?
https://khazardnaproject.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/responding-to-the-criticism-for-des-et-al-2016/
“the article uses three Middle Eastern populations, Levant, Anatolia and Druze.”
Corrected now, thanks.
“Adygei have been shown to share genetic affinity to Ashkenazim
on several studies”
on more recent studies they are not that close.
“Are Ashkenazim genetically a European/MODERN Levantine population?”
There have been gene flows to the area, yet the Middle Eastern origins of Ashkenazi derives from 600-800 AD
and we only need to look at the generic/historical landscape at that time. Turkish peoples have Middle Asian admixture, usually shown in red color in plots. You can verify how much this mixture there is in modern Levant.
The Druze have diverse origins as it started as an open religion and only a bit later was closed.
The problem with Elhaik’s GPS method is the following logical issue. Assume we have populations A and B adjacent to each other. In the area between these population we often find mixture AB. But assume we find mixture AB from some area C. It does not imply that this population migrated from the area between A and B. It is just as possible that some A migrated to C and some B migrated to C, and they mixed there, neither populations were never even close to the area between A and B. This seems to e the case with the Druze, whom Elhaik locates with his GPS to a specific area, while Fatimid history, family history of leading Druze families, Druze tradition, and some genetic studies all agree that the Druze population has diverse origins.
You think that without locating the Middle or Near East genes of Ashkenazi more precisely, we cannot deduce the origin of Ashkenazi. This is wrong. We only need to time the admixture with Europeans and map it to history. The later admixture with East Europeans is easily explained and does not interest us. The admixture withy Italians is timed to 600-800 AD. If this timing is correct, and it is from IBD sequence length, then history tells us where from the Jews may have come from. We do not need to look at their non-European genes at all. They could have Far-Eastern or Australian genes, it would not make any difference, as long as we can time the admixture with Italians to 600-800 AD, history tells the rest. This is why I do not
think Elhaik’s method is useful and why I do not see any need for it in this problem. It may help in some other problem, but Ashkenazi origins is solved in an easier way.
Ashkenazim are more closely related to Iranians? Or do you mean Iran… because H6a1b shows that my maternal line came through Saudi Arabia… but I’m an Ashkenazi Jew … and I can tell you right now that Iranian isn’t on my dna test. I think it’s fair to mention that the historic geographic lines of Israel used to include parts of Iraq and Northern Africa.
I have not said that Ashkenazi are more closely related to Iranians. In the article I suggest that Ashkenazi are a mixture of Italians and Jews, who escaped from the Byzantine Empire when they were obliged to convert after they rebelled against the Emperor. Individual Ashkenazi Jews may have any maternal or paternal ancestry as there has been admixture with other Jews and non-Jews since that time. In all fairness we can say that the historic borders of Israel have never included parts of Iraq and Northern Africa. Israel of Jehu was the northern kingdom and quite limited. Judea was the southern kingdom, and even more limited. There is no historical knowledge if they were preceded by a joint kingdom of David and Salomon and what the borders were at that time. Then there is the province Judea in Persia, a very limited area. Then there is the Hasmonean Israel, at the maximum it had about the same borders as now. They were also the borders of Israel in the time of Herod the Great. After that Israel was only briefly under one rule, under Herod I Agrippa. Israel has no claim to parts of Iraq or Northern Africa, not any more than they have to Poland or the USA where Jews also live or have lived. What you mean is God’s promise to Abraham in the Torah, but the Torah was written in Babylonian and Persian times and there was no such promise by any God.
Your article is full of poorly researched and sourced assumptions, poorly written and largely incorrect.
While you sound ‘academic’ you are anything but.
Further, your assertions do not match the historical evidence or known facts; nor do they match availabile genetic data.
You spend an awful lot of time discussing the slave trade. To what end, I wonder?
Can you mention the exact places where you think the article is incorrect and give your arguments why you claim it is incorrect? The post is based on a published paper, I am not a DNA researcher but I found the paper I comment very well justified. My small contributions to it are only putting the scenario to a historical setting using known history. As for the post being poorly written and poorly researched, it is exactly as well written and researched as I have seen suitable for a post in my blog. That is, naturally one can write a monograph or a dissertation on any topic, but the article is simply a post in my blog. Some of the posts, especially those written to look like papers, are more from my field and based on more research, the ones that look like simple posts are faster written and based less on my own research. If you do not like the articles in my blog, do not read this blog.
Slave trade I mention in connection with Radhenite Jews. White slaves (Slavs mostly from Ukraine) mainly to Islamic countries (eunuchs, boys and female slaves for sex) were the main product that Radhenite Jews took back from Europe, the main product they sold to Europe were spices. I also mention that slave trade was the main profession of Roman Jews in Imperial Roman times. These I mention in order to explain why Ashkenazi Jews did not move to Europe because of trade routes, as was the case in the starting of many Jewish populations: the trade routes in Europe were already run by other Jews: Radhenite Jews and Sephardic and Italian Jews. Ashkenazi Jews moved to Europe for some other reason, probably because they were expelled from the Byzantine Empire.
You claim that I am not at all ‘academic’ by which you probably mean that I do not have scientific publications or have not held professorships in universities. So, write my name to scholar.google.fi, you will find my name from this blog. I was tenured professor in one university and 5-year full professor in two other universities. Therefore, I worked in an academic profession, now retired.
I did put the name Joel Cornfield to the scholar.google.fi search machine. I found one Joel Cornfield, he was an urolog, three joint papers, a google search showed he was a practicing urolog and also an Assistant Professor, that is an assistant. I do not think you are this Joel Cornfield. I do not believe a urolog would write a comment like you did. He would be more academic in justifying his claims. However, I found a comment by one (most probably another) Joel Cornfield from another blog. This Joel writes the most extreme and negative comment in the blog and does seem much like you. I think that you are not academic at all and you use a false name, as is common for trolls.
You ask why I mention slave trade. The reason is to exclude trade routes as the explanation for Ashkenazi to have moved to Italy. I write a blog for a 1.5 years as many people write blogs and service providers offer platforms for blog. There is nothing wrong in writing blogs. I do not offend anybody with my articles and I write what I found to be true after thinking of it. If you have a different opinion, write it to your own blog.
But I wonder to what end you wrote your opinion on this post? Let me guess. There are trolls who search the Internet for articles and write very negative comments on them. The trolls I have seen attack writers who mention anything of Jews and Israel that is not so positive. These trolls think they are warriors defending their cause (and apparently Hasbara trolls get paid for writing nasty comments), but they are defending lies and the philosophy of supremacy. They are not the good guys, they are the evil trolls.
You say that you have no ulterior motives, yet you make case after case expressing what I’ll generously call a less than neutral opinion. That is a clear bias and a surefire sign of the ulterior motives you claim not to have. Moreover, your entire article is based around a single study that just happens to support your views on the Middle East despite the fact that there are more than half a dozen that disagree with this study. Someone without bias and ulterior motives would weigh the combination of source materials. I concur with a previous poster: you’ve done a good job sounding academic and perhaps you are better with other subjects, but if you’re honest with yourself you’ll know that you are cherry picking.
Then again, at least you haven’t based your argument on Elhaik’s bogus study.
You are very wrong. I do not have ulterior motives and there is no intentional bias in the article. I do not have my own views of the Middle East that the article would have supported. In fact, for me it is totally irrelevant who lives in the Middle East and in general, I am not at all interested in Jews. Strangely, I wrote of the origin of Finns and Saami people. the post has been read about as many times as the one on Ashkenazi Jews, but no Finn of Saami has written comments. Apparently Ashkenazi Jews have some problem with their origins but Finns and Saami do not. Let me also make this very clear, I am not cherry picking anything. If you have some specific places in my post that you want to claim are incorrect, cherry picked, or reflect some external motives, then please, explain what they might be, so I will give you the arguments why I see it as I wrote.
I did not write a scholarly paper on this topic, only commented one paper that I found interesting. There are other papers, I have read many of them, but this one I found more interesting and decided to comment it. Had I wanted to write a definitive article on Ashkenazi Jews to be published in some journal, I surely would have commented what I think is lacking in those half a dozen of studies you mention. However, this is simply a blog and I commented simply one interesting paper.
I commented the article because it gave me an idea that can be called a small contribution to the topic: where did the Ashkenazi Jews come from to Italy, in case the claims in the article are correct. If they are correct, then Ashkenazi Jews hardly could have come from any other place than the Byzantine Empire after they were expelled. We may of course ask if the claims in the article are correct.
Maybe I will one day write another article on this topic if I see another interesting paper on it, as I do not personally study the origin of Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt that I would care to write. there are too many angry commenters, apparently Jews, who have some external (political) motives and for some reason want to express them here.
If Jews want to claim that they have more genetic similarity to original inhabitants of the Levant (say, the Natufians, who mainly had Y-DNA Haplogroup E) than e.g. Palestinians, who have lived there for the last thousand years, then it is something political. It is most definitely a highly questionable claim, as neither people closely resemble the original inhabitants. I have no interest in Middle Eastern politics.
About Elhaik’s study, I do find it incorrect.
I accept this comment now, but next Jewish commenter, who claims that I have some external motives in this post will be trashed. I have no such motives, but suggesting that I must have will surely result to a negative reception of the comment.
When I wrote this post of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, I had no personal experiences of Jews, Ashkenazi or other, I had once been in Israel, but had neither negative nor positive experiences from that trip, a country as a country. I had identified the Masonic conspiracy, where Jewish bankers and Frankists played some role, but that was not Jews as people. I also had studied the Holocaust death toll and came up with a smaller figure that 6 million. But I had no motives for or against Jews. I still do not have, but at the time of writing this post I actually could not have as I had no opinion on Jews, any more than I had opinion on Australians. People that I hardly had met. But with these Jewish commenters, and especially with Jewish commenters on The Unz Forum, I can say that I have some negative experiences. I also have some positive experiences, like Ron Unz seems OK, and about Israel or the Middle East I do not much care, and whether Ashkenazi Jews around 800 AD made children with Italian slaves (as they could not marry Catholics and Langobards were Catholics at that time), if that is a problem for some Jewish commenters, then forget it. Swedes were Vikings at that time.
This is not any political blog. If you want to make a comment of a post, please make it, though I do not ask for comments, Finns seldom give comments and never expect them. But if you comment, do not decorate it with your false claims of my suspected motives. I do not have such motives and comments hinting that I do will be considered trolling. Also Jewish commenters have to learn how to write decent comments in a normal way.
I have about 17% Azhkenazi admixture on my maternal side. My Mitochondrial haplogroup however is H6a1a5 which from my reading I am lead to understand has deep European roots. In fact it appears to trace back to central Asia. After reading this article it seems reasonable to me to assume that this haplogroup entered the Ashkenazi population during the second admixture event 1400-1700 years ago in Eastern Europe. Thoughts?
There is another article of Ashkenazi mt-DNA. It does not mention H6a1a5 but gives some light to the picture, though I interpret the results in a different way than the authors. See this one
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/106314/1/106314.pdf
Mt-DNA haplogroup is considered Jewish. I do not know if exclusively Jewish, but mostly. It has deep European origins and these origins put it to 2000+ years ago. So, when did the Ashkenazi Jewish community get this clane?
Both H6a1a and H6a1b are from the Pontus Steppe, so they are Indo-European Bronze Age clanes. These people migrated to all Europe and also to Italy. The age of H6a1a and H6a1b may be 4500+ years or so. Then you have subclade H6a1a5, which is mainly or maybe only Jewish. Ashkenazi Jews most probably got it from Europe, as it seems that 80% of the mt-DNA is from Europe. But the clane is older than some 1400-1200 years. If it appears with Italian or Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews might have got it by marrying them, but I doubt it. The clane H6a1 appears e.g. in Southern Italy in non-Jewish population. I think it is most likely that there was some small Italian tribe, which had this your clane H6a1a5. They were conquered by Langobards, a Germanic tribe, around 600 AD and taken to prisoners, or killed. As prisoners or killed, they could not build families and this clane disappeared from Italy, and if it had developed there in some small tribe, it in general disappeared form Europeans. But Ashkenzi made children with slave women as they did not have women with them and could not marry Catholic Langobards: the slaves were converted to Judaism, though not taken as Jews. But their children were taken as full Jews and in this way the European clane can be present only in Ashkenazi Jews and not in Europeans, though it is 2000+ years old and Ashkenazi Jews did not get the clane 2000+ years ago. So, this is my explanation, but it is only a suggestion.
That sounds like a plausible if horrifying possibility. I am no stranger to history and its brutalities. However I was not aware that the Lombard conquest of Italy involved slavery not that that surprises me.
There is only little information of Lombards, so I also do not have a reference confirming it, but as they conquered most of Italy, they most certainly must have killed and enslaved them, what else was warfare in those times? There was slavery in Rome and it did not disappear after the Western Rome fell before Christianity finally stopped it: first by forbidding keeping Christians as slaves (but anybody, including Jews, could keep non-Christians as slaves). This is the same time when Vikings raided countries. In Viking conquests many slaves were taken. Jews were the major slave merchants of that time. They bought slaves from Vikings and sold them largely to Islamic caliphates (hence the name slave, it comes from Slavs). It is not the most horrible fate for a woman of a conquered tribe to be taken as a slave girl for making children. This is the most logical reason why Ashkenazi Jews have Mt-DNA clanes, which are old European, yet do not appear in Europeans. This indicates that the European tribe that had developed these clanes become extinct, apart of some women, who become mother lines of Ashkenazi Jews. It was not possible for Catholic Christian women to marry Jews after 400 AD, so marriages with Christians cannot explain these clanes in Ashkenazi, as Ashkenaz were not in Europe before 600-800 AD. Had these clanes come to Ashkenazi Jews in any place, we would expect that they occur in non-Jews in some place still today. As some such clanes do not, then the European population, that had them, must have become extinct, probably destroyed.
Hello “jorma,” this is a great post on the origins of Ashkenazi Jews and probably the only one I have found that actually puts a date on their genetic origin. I am not an expert on this stuff but I wanted to share some things I have noticed. From this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eIADs7Ct-Q), you can see that the Byzantines ultimately took over the disputed land of the Levant from the Sassanids in 626 but quickly soon after again lost it to the Rashidun Caliphate which held steady reign over it from that point. The Caliphate, being an Arab empire, was presumably how the Levantine Jews would have wanted the state of affairs to be. In your post, you mention a similar historical event in which the Jews under the Visigoths accused of Muslim sympathies and threatened with expulsion mostly converted superficially but then reconverted to Judaism when the Muslims actually took over. Would this have been the case among Byzantine Jews, that most would have been passive and converted for the short stretch of time until the Caliphate took over? And if only a minority of Jews left, would it not matter how few their numbers were in order to found the genetically Ashkenazi Jewish population, now huge in size? Also what percent of Ashkenazi Jews in Italy do you suspect relocated for the Frankish Empire and Holy Roman Empire starting around 800 when Franco-Germanic Europe was then territorially connected with Italy, or was the number of genetically Ashkenazi Jews still small as a nascent group and the majority of the group easily migrated in tandem? Or did some stay and eventually assimilate with the long-existing Italian Jews and Sephardi Jews? Thanks for reading.
Thanks for your kind comment. I will try to answer your questions, but those are good questions and should deserve a separate study by some expert (which I am not).
According to history, Islamic conquerors were welcomed in Levant by local Christians, who disliked the Byzantine Empire. It is likely that Jews, who had been recently forced to convert to Christianity, helped Islamic conquerors as Islam allowed them to practice Judaism as one of the people of the book. After Christianity become the official religion of Rome, only Judaism had been allowed aside of Christianity in the last 300 years, thus only Jews could have been forced to convert recently. They most probably were the local Christians, who disliked the Byzantine Empire.
I assume that only a small number of Jews escaped to Italy and founded the Ashkenazi community. I reason this as follows: there was a later genetic bottleneck of 350 Ashkenazi Jews around 1300. This sets the lower bound to the founding population in 600-800: it cannot be smaller than 350, or another bottleneck would be seen in DNA. After the bottleneck the Ashkenazi Jewish population doubled every 50 years. From 700 to 1300 is 600 years, so it could support 12 doublings, if these Jews had an opportunity to grow. 12 doublings means that the initial population would grow 4000 times larger. Clearly, it did not grow so fast. We can estimate that there were some tens of thousands of Ashkenazi Jews before the bottleneck. Thus, the population growth is not a limiting factor. My guess is that about 1000 Jewish men started the Ashkenazi population. It should be on the range of 500-small thousands.
Ashkenazi Jews have intermarried with other Jews (and recently have done it in Israel and the USA), but they did not intermarry so much that the Ashkenazi population had been absorbed by Italian of Sephardic Jews. That would have happened if they mostly took wives from those communities, but they did not get absorbed and developed slightly different rites: it shows that intermarrying was only sporadic. (We know that there were contacts, like Jacob Frank moved to Turkey to a crypto-Sephardic community (Donmeh), and so on). I do not think it is any more possible to find out how much admixture Ashkenazi Jews got from Italian or Sephardic Jews in the short time period of 600-800 AD. All these populations are genetically similar as the Y0DNA is mainly Levantic and mt-DNA is Italian/European, and they later intermarried to a small extent, and recently to a larger extent. Most data in DNA to poinpoint the amount of admixture get confused with this history.
Jews lived on the local population by practicing usury and other similar trades. Thus, their population growth was limited by the local population growth and their possibility to expand to new areas. Jewish population could not grow above the limit that the local population could support in any single location. Because of this, they expanded to Franco-Germanic lands, but did not leave Northern Italy as a group. According to Ariel Toaff there still was an Ashkenazi community in Northern Italy at the time of Simon of Trent. Whether there still was such a community before the WWII, I do not know. Later many Jews made an aliyah to Israel.
These long-existing ( 1 BC-1 AD) Italian and Sephardic Jewish communities probably developed at the time when Jews converted gentiles in the first century. Josephus tells that there were Jewish communities in all cities. Many of these may be related to Jewish Christians of the type that Paul in 2. Cor. 11:20-23 describes. They converted women and lived on them. Paul called them false apostles. Pseudo-epigraphic 2. Tim. 3:6 describes these false apostles, as does John of Patmos in Rev. 3:7. Other Jews were originally taken as prisoners to Rome in 60 BC or 70 AD and later freed. I think a large fraction of them were Jewish Christians and when Christianity become the state religion, most adopted gentile Christianity while some remained Jewish. This would explain why once 1/4th of the Roman Empire was said to have been Jewish, and after 400 AD this Jewish population disappeared. (It was not exterminated, they did not migrate anywhere, they simply vanished, just like if they were Jewish Christians first counted as Jews, then as Christians).
“jorma, from this website (https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/35864-When-was-the-Ashkenazi-bottleneck?p=546841&viewfull=1#post546841), it is claimed that in 1490 there were 120,000 Jews in Italy. This was before the expulsions of Sephardi Jews, so most of them must have been Italian Jews or Ashkenazi Jews. Do you believe the figure is accurate and what percent of that number do you believe consisted of Ashkenazi Jews?”
I think the figure 120,000 is much too high. Kingdom of Naples expelled or forced Jews to convert in 1288/1292, so most Jews in most of Italy in 1490 were Sephardic after Spain expelled them. I would imagine that the number of Italian Jews was more like 10,000 and there were small Ashkenazi communities in Northern cities, like Venice, but only numbering something like 500 households each.
“If in 1490 there were 80,000 Jews in Germany, 30,000 in Poland-Lithuania, between 0 and 120,000 in Italy, and none in France as they were expelled entirely in 1394, does a figure for the world Ashkenazi Jewish population in 1490 of 110,000-230,000 sound right to you?”
If is difficult to estimate Jewish population growth from data of one country as they used to move. From Poland you get half times like 69 years for 1340-1772 and 63 years for 1650-1770, but Jews moved from Poland to the neighbor countries. I think the halftime of 50 years is fairly good. Calculating from the year 1770 to the bottleneck of 350 with the 50 year halftime, we get the bottleneck to 1190. It may be 1090, in any case during the crusades. So, that seems OK. If the bottleneck was 1090, then to 1490 is 400 years. From an exponential function exp (growth rate * time) = increase
growth rate * time = ln (increase)
Time=1490-1090=400
growth rate = ln 2/halftime=0.69/50=0.0138
increase = exp(0.0138*400)=250
If in 1090 was 350, so in 1490 was 87,500. Based on this, I think 110,00-230,000 may be a bit high. I do not think the halftime was smaller than 50 years. That is a long time average I got from two different data.
“I have also heard thrown around a figure that 80% of world Jewry lived in Poland-Lithuania by some time in the middle of the 16th century, and in 1580, 100,000-150,000 Jews lived in Poland-Lithuania.”
Incorrect. At most it refers to Europe. In Islamic countries there were Jewish communities, in fact, from some reference i remember a claim that around that time 50% of Jews were Karaites.
jorma, will other European ethnicities enter the Ashkenazi genome just as Eastern European had when Jews moved to Poland-Lithuania? Certainly Jews have intermarried with people of British/Irish descent after moving to the United States, Canada, England, Australia, South Africa, and Australia, people of French/German descent after emigration to or being annexed into Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, and the United States, people of Spanish/Portuguese descent in Argentina, and people of Balkan/Greek descent in Romania and Moldova. Why is the unique Ashkenazi genome only considered to have taken its final form after the introduction of some Eastern Europeans?
Today Ashkenazi Jewish DNA-pool is being changed as Jews in the USA and Israel and elsewhere intermarry with non-Jews. But the term Ashkenazi Jews refers to East European Jews before the WWII (or earlier) when such admixture was very small. Thus, today, if you want to study genes of Ashkenazi Jews, you first have to find families, which have not mixed with non-Ashkenazi Jews for the past 100 years or so. You still find them from Hasidic communities. Seems to be that some people are interested in studying Ashkenazi Jewish diseases, Ashkenazi Jewish IQ, and Ashkenazi Jewish origins, as there are many scientific papers on them. I personally do not see any merit in keeping the DNA pool as it was, Ashkenazi Jews were a too closed community and they accumulated too many genetic diseases, not healthy. Maybe later researchers forget these Ashkenazi Jews and start stydying Israel Jews or USA Jews. But e.g. for IQ studies, people prefer to study Ashkenazi Jews with their 108 IQ average rather than Israel Jews with their 95 IQ average. (and in the USA, the Jewish IQ average is not any more 108 either, it may be 102-103 today). I guess people just like to remember the glorious past.
jorma, could the Ashkenazi Jewish IQ have been even higher before they mixed with Eastern European gentiles who have IQ’s of ~100?
IQ is partially genetic (60-80%), partially cultural (20-40%). Most of Ashkenazi Jewish high measered IQ was most probably cultural: they were city people, boys learned to read, a larger fraction of Jews went to school and university. Most gentiles in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were farmers and for a very long time land slaves. In the USA Ashkenazi Jews were measured many times, but with unrepresentative and very small sample. Scores like 115-125 show two effects: better education and selection of a unrepresentative sample for the IQ test. Larger samples do not show higher IQ than 108 and that is for US Jews from 20-30 years ago. It still reflects better average education than other White Americans, and the genetic IQ is smaller.
It is possible that the group of Jews, who migrated to the USA were selected for higher IQ: lower IQ people usually do not have the money to migrate. Usually high IQ people do not migrate as they find good jobs in the home country, but many Ashkenazi Jews lost good jobs in Russia and immigrated, also there has been brain drain to the USA from many countries as high intelligence people can make a good career there. But I think it is fairly stabilized also there and the Jewish genetic IQ is most probably around 102-103 in the USA. Estimating the IQ from recent winners of school competitions, or from highly intelligent criminals of given ethnic origins, or other ways, leads to something like 103.
Genetically Ashkenazi IQ is probably 102-103, about the same as Northern Italians, or ethnic Germans, as Northern Italians are ethnically Germanic. Northern Mediterranean IQ is around 95-97, and the Jewish male founders of the Ashkenazi Jewish population most probably had genetic IQ in this range, then mixing with Italians it went up. There could have been some selection for IQ in the population bottleneck around 1200. But such a bottleneck is not an intentional selection for IQ. One cannot expect it to give a group with very much higher average IQ. You can be selected for many reasons, including being from a rich family, having good luck or being the most unscrupulous. It is not only IQ.
So, I think Ashkenazi Jews in Poland had the genetic IQ average of about 102-103. The admixture with East Europeans was rather minor and selective (Jews become businessmen and secular Jews married from similar gentile businessmen circles, the same IQ level), it most probably did not change their IQ average.5
I think all of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is from admixture and migration selection. They could not have natural selection increasing IQ as all men had to marry as a rule, the population growth was fast, the kahal helped poor families to survive and raise their children, and usury and selling used clothes requires no high IQ. Under those conditions, there was no selection that removes stupid men. There was more of such selection in the gentile side, where a high proportion stupid men ended up to army draft soldiers and did not raise a family.
because I thought they got their IQ boost before they went to Poland-Lithuania
jorma, does the way it work that if Jewish genes are mixed with non-Jewish genes, the Jewish traits are completely or partially lost, or are they still present as long as there is any Jewish admixture at all? For example, my 23andme results say I am 1.0% Ashkenazi Jewish, so can I inherit Jewish traits in full just as a 100% Ashkenazi Jew?
Jorma
Jorma, I came across an interesting claim that I would be grateful if you could comment on it. I recently read that in the mid-14th century, 6,000 Jews lived in Mainz. According to yourself the Jewish population during this time doubled in size every 50 years, so that means in the middle of the 14th century the total Ashkenazi Jewish population would have been about 11,200. Does the fact that 6000/11200*100%=54% of Ashkenazi Jews lived in Mainz around 1350 sound right to you? Also I read that around the end of the 14th century, about 3,000 Jews were living in Prague, so could that mean that 3000/22400*100%=13% of Ashkenazi Jews at that time were living in Prague? 22,400 is the calculated total number of Ashkenazi Jews. Thanks
In the 14th century Jews started moving to Poland. In mid 14th century there should have been only few Polish Jews. To countries like Hungary they spread later. Ashkenazi Jews had to be somewhere, so where. You have to take the map of Europe in the 14th century. Jews were expelled from France and England. Jews in the Spanish penisula were Sephardic. There actually remains only the Holy Roman Empire, where Jews had been expelled from many cities and allowed to stay in some other cities. There were old Ashkenazi communities in Mainz and Prague. There also were small Ashkenazi communities in Northern Italian cities. I think your calculation could well be correct, however surprising it may sound. I think they indeed could have been mainly in those cities. But I have not studied this question.
Jorma what are the odds that I could have obtained the hypothetical high-intelligence Ashkenazi genes if they exist at all through the part of my ancestry that is 1.0% Ashkenazi Jewish? Thanks
Assuming that the Ashkenazi Jewish IQ average is 110 (and not e.g. 103, like I suspect) and the average IQ of your other genome is 100, then you simply weight and add these: 0.01*110+0.99*100=1.1+99=100.1. This is your expected average IQ, the variance is the same 15. So, basically you have the same probabilities of being intelligent, so you still have about 2.2% probability of having a higher IQ than 130 (2 standard deviations).
Assuming you have a high IQ and ask if your high IQ could be because of Ashkenazi genes, the answer is no. We have to analyze this with two assumptions. One is the customary one, that IQ is polygenic additive (inherited by an additive effect of a large number of genes, where each gene has a small effect. This is the present claim, but it is not proven to be true), and my own believe that IQ is inherited by combinations of genes, so the effect is nonadditive.
First the case that IQ is polygenic additive (like e.g. height).
You would have only 1% of Ashkenazi IQ increasing genes, so something like 10 genes. No single gene has much effect to your IQ, so 10 genes could not matter much. In one 2017 GWAS it was found that 1041 genes explain 5% of IQ variance. This means they give a standard deviation 3.35 IQ points. (That is, the standard deviation is 15, its square is the variance 225. 5% of the variance is 11.25. This is the variance of the 1041 IQ genes compoment, its square root is the standard deviation 3.35).
Just divide this 3.35 by 10 to get the estimated effect of 10 genes. (That is, variances add by weight*value. Weight is proportional to the amount, so if 1000 genes has some weight, 10 genes have 1/100 of the weight. Then taking the square root to get to standard deviation this 1/100 goes to 1/10.)
Your Ashkenazi genes would give the IQ average of 110 (this just changes the average form 100 to 100.1) and variance of 0.335 (almost nothing), so they could not give such a contribution that would explain your IQ if it is over 110.
So, if IQ is polygenic additive, you did not inherit your high IQ from Ashkenazi Jews. What about if IQ is caused by combinations pof genes? In that case some combinations are good, some are not good. In order to have good combinations of some ethnic population, you should have a large fraction of your genes from this ethnic group. If you have only 1%, you are extremely unlikely to have any good combination from that population. This theory that IQ is a result of combinations of genes predicts that crosses between two far away populations typically have somewhat lower genetic intelligence than the average of the two populations mathematically gives. But cultural intelligence (education) can cover this difference, so it may not be measurable.
These Ashkenazi Jews are not real Jews. In the Bible in Revelations 2:9 and Revelation 3:9 God says He knows about those who say they are Jews and are not. They lie and are the Synagogue of Satan. In my student Bible over around Turkey of a old map. It says Ashkenaz there. There are 10 lost tribes of Israel. So far they only found 3 the Tribe of Dan from Ethiopia, Africa. And the tribe of Manasseh in Asia I forgot the other one. Yet they have not found the House of Judah(real Jews)as of yet.
Samaritans are descendants of the inhabitants of Israel and (in my opinion correctly, as they have lived there all the time and not intermarried, but they are mixed with Assyrians from the time Israel was conquered, 8th century BC) claim that their ancestors were the tribes of Ephraim and Manessah (the two tribes from Joseph), and their priests fro the tribe of Levi. Samaritans have only 4 male lineages (J1, J2, J2 and E) left because of the genetic bottleneck in 529 AD. These paternal lineages group with paternal lineages of other Jews. Maternal do not (no study on autosomal, but we can assume it does not group with Ashkenazi Jews autosomal, as Ashkenazi group with Italians).
Beta Israel (of Ethiopia, which you mention) has a minority of paternal lineages of J, which are the only ones that can be from Israel. Autosomal and maternal DNA is completely African. I would not count them as Israelites. They have had some Israelian/Jewish paternal founders, that’s all.
Of Ashkenazi being in Turkey. Ashkenaz was a son of Gomer, son of Japhet, according to the Old Testament, but the name was reused later. Khazars were thought to derive from Gomer, and the German Jewish population was given the name Ashkenazi, most probably because the sect Chasidei Ashkenazi (German pietism) received massianic/kabbalistic tradition from some source around 800 AD. I think this source was in Egypt, the community in Old Cairo, whose texts can be found in Cairo Geniza. (The texts include the Damascus Document and magical texts). I do not think this community, which genetically is a mixture of Italians and Middle Eastern Jews, could be the population that John of Patmos calls Jews who are not Jews but a Synagogue of Satan. John may refer to converts to Judaism, they are mentioned in Josephus: women converted to Judaism in Eastern provinces of Rome. For Essenes (I think John of Patmos descended from Essenes) only pure Jewish ancestry was acceptable. He refers to Gentile Christians as the lambs around the Christ (the nations given to God of Israel through Jesus), so they are also not the Synagogue of Satan (so, it is not Paul’s Christians he attacks). I think it is likely that the Synagogue of Satan were assimilated Jews, who did not accept Jesus and have adopted some Hellenistic practices. But I find it difficult to identify the group, it may be something else.
jorma.
Jorma look at this graphic which shows the relative rates of admixture of the major races in different Jewish groups. The Ashkenazi Jews have less MENA ancestry than Sephardi Jews who have even less than the Italki Jews. How accurate do you think this is? You said that the Italki Jews should be more extensively mixed with Europeans. Also do you know what the origin of Sephardi Jews is and how they got their European admixture? How did the Sephardi Jewish population become distributed after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal? Before their expulsion, they numbered several hundred thousand in Iberia, but by the 1930s there were scarcely any Jews living there while at the same there were 50,000 in Italy, 70,000 in Yugoslavia, 50,000 in Bulgaria, and 100,000 in Greece. Did the Sephardi Jews not largely settle in Italy?
You ask how accurate I think is the admixture plot. There are 20 vertical blocks and 6 categories in that admixture plot. As 20/6 is not an integer, it is a bit difficult to say where exactly are the divisions, but the plot seems correct: Asian Jews have mainly Asian DNA, African Jews largely African DNA. Mizraim Jews (Iran+Iraq) have Middle Eastern North African (MENA) DNA. In this case it is because their mother lines resemble Iranian and Iraqian mother lines. Ashkenazi Jews are 60% European by DNA. Sephardi Jews (Spanish and Portuguese Jews before expulsion) have a bit more DNA, that is here classified as Jewish, while Jewish DNA is just Eastern Mediterranean DNA and in Mediterranean countries you have this DNA everywhere (Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Balkans). After expulsion of Jews from Spain 1492, many converted and the majority moved to Sicily and Turkey. In Turkey mainly to the European part of Turkey, now called Balkan, and also to Istanbul. There was once a large Jewish population in Sicily. What happened to it is unknown. Sicilian DNA is totally mixed from so many different invaders and groups that individual contributions cannot be tracked. As Jews seldom convert in masse unless forced, I think they moved to Turkey. I do not think Sephardi Jews moved to mainland Italy in large numbers, there were Italian Jews occupying the Jewish niche. Sephardi Jews were therefore the origin of Turkish and Balkan Jews, who today are mainly in Israel. They were quite close in DNA to Ashkenazi Jews, but lacked traces of Eastern European DNA. Portuguese Jews largely moved to Netherlands, where they mixed with gentiles. (Portugal was the country of Spinoza, a heretic. Many of these Jews become followers of Spinoza and mixed with gentiles.) Some of these Portuguese Jews moved to England in 1665, so before Ashkenazi Jews started moving to England in late 18th century, the small Jewish population in England was Sephardi. Italian Jews are the descendants of Jews, who moved to Rome in Roman times (including captives from 70 BC and 70 AD, converts in the 1st century, immigrant merchants and so on, also Jewish Christians, who stayed Jewish). Thus, they have Mediterranean DNA (here marked as Jewish and European). Thus, the plot seems correct to me. However, one may ask what the category Jewish means. We actually do not know what the DNA of Jews was.
I will elaborate this Jewish DNA a bit. Assuming that the Old Testament is correct and Jews are children of Abraham, then Abraham must have had only one Y-DNA haplotype. Assuming that Ishmael was Abraham’s son and the founder of Arabs, Abraham’s Y-DNA haplogroup must have been J1. (Arabs are mainly J1, also the Cohen lines of Jews and Samaritans should derive from Aaron, brother of Moses, from Israelite parents, who from the male side were from sons of Jacob, so all J1. All Cohen lines should be J1. All Abraham’s male children should be J1. But Jews and even Samaritans have several Y-DNA haplogroups (this is not the case with all peoples, like Irish men do almost all have the same Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b, but Jews are heavily mixed and have many Y-DNA haplogroups). The promise of the Promised Land was given in the Bible to Abraham, so most Jews do not have a share in this promise. Then the mother lineages. In the Old Testament they do not even mention the daughters of Jacob. Obviously because women moved to another family and lineage was tracked by the male line. Thus, women of other people were taken to the Israelite community, but there are clear efforts to prevent it (like Ezra, who forced Jews to divorce foreign wives). Indeed, the Bible states that the son of a slave girl (Ishmael) cannot inherit Abraham. Thus, as Ashkenazi Jews are a mixture of Jewish men and Italian women, and these women must have been slaves, as the time of the mixture is when Christian women could not marry Jews (600-800 AD) in Italy, we must conclude that Ashkenazi Jews do not have a share in God’s promise to Abraham. So, when did all these Y-DNA haplogroups come to Jews? According to the Bible is could only have been in Hasmonean times: Hasmoneans converted Edomites (Idumeans) and other tribes of Israel to Judaism by force, and in the 1st century Jews converted gentiles, mainly women but also some men, like the king of Adiabene. The result in any case was that Jews of the first century AD were mixed and basically typical Eastern Mediterranean people, lots of Y-DNA J2 (Greek, Syrian), E (Egyptian) and so on. A more realistic scenario than the Bible gives is that Israelites were never slaves in Egypt and when Israel first appeared as a people (1200 BC), it was formed by mixed people living in the hill country of Levant. A religious reform was born, not any children of Abraham. If this is the case, then Israelites from the very beginning, 1200 BC, were a mixed people, typical Eastern Mediterranean DNA. This is why it is difficult to specify what is the Jewish DNA in present Jewish groups. We should only say, what is the Levant DNA, which is similar to what there is now in the Near East (not Middle East, like Iran and Iraq).
You ask why Ashkenazi Jews have less other Middle Eastern and North African (other MENA) DNA than Sephardi and other (e.g. Italian) Jews. This most probably indicates that Sephardi and Italian Jews were in a closer contact with Jews in Iraq (the diaspora Jewish center, that wrote the Babylonian Talmud) and intermarried, while Ashkenazi Jews had less contact with them.
Sephardi Jews were Jews of Spain and Portugal. There were Sephardi Jews in Spain before the Muslim conquest of Spain, therefore the map you link to is a bit misleading. Not all Sephardi Jews came from North Africa to the Caliphate in Spain in Islamic times. There already was a community and this community had moved to Spain and Southern France in Roman times. They got their European admixture in Roman times because Judaism (and Jewish Christianity) was a growing religion in Rome. Many Roman women were converted to Judaism. Before the 4th century AD Christians (still at that time a persecuted minority) could marry Jews (a protected minority, but not much liked by many Romans).
Sephardi Jews of Spain moved to Sicily, Turkey and to European colonies in the New World (where they has a role in slave trade). The Jews on Balkan (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece) included large numbers of Sephardi Jews. For instance, Shabbatai Zevi was a Sephardi Jew in Greece. There were also Sephardi Jews in Istanbul and other Asian parts of west Turkey. Sephardi Jews did settle Sicily in large numbers for some time, but later this community must have moved further East. Eastern Mediterranean DNA in South Italy is mainly from Greeks of the classical times, I do not see Sephardi DNA in any part of Italy in large amount. Most probably Sephardi Jews did not in large numbers mix with Italian Jews.
These are my answers, or guesses, I am no expert on Jewish origins.
Graphic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Masastan/comments/d0ir0w/masamap_15_jewish_diaspora_and_genetics/
Also I have something else interesting to say about Sephardi Jews. I have looked at Charles Murray’s list of significant figures in the arts and sciences which is part of his book Human Accomplishment and separated those born in Italy during the time period beginning when Jews by their working years would have been involved in and entered academia just like Gentiles and ending with the year wherein significant figures born after which are not examined by Murray. This time period is thus about 1830-1910 and by working age Gentiles and Jews in Italy should theoretically experience the same cultural impact on their rates of significant figures in the arts and sciences. There were 42 Gentile and 8 Jewish significant figures born in Italy from 1830-1910 and therefore there were approximately 1.25 Gentile significant figures per million Italians and 160 Jewish significant figures per million Italian Jews between 1830 and 1910. This is the highest number of significant figures per capita among the sizable Jewish populations that existed in Europe during this time. The next highest numbers of significant figures per capita are 68.3 per million Jews in Germany, 64 per million Jews in Austria proper, 33.3 per million Jews in Czech, and 20 per million Jews in Hungary. 7 of these 8 Jews are non-Ashkenazi and yet they have performed at Ashkenazi rates of accomplishment. Perhaps the reason we do not hear about the Sephardi Jews much is because they do not live in great numbers in countries with more effective environments for producing significant figures. There were hardly many significant figures at all born between 1830 and 1910 in European countries under the Ottoman Empire at a total of 7 of whom, and none were Jewish.
Your numbers are undoubtedly correct. In a similar way we can take classical Greeks. In the classical time Greeks produced an astonishing number of geniuses, though the average IQ of Greeks is now estimated as about 94. The issue is that every population has much more potentially talented people than there are chances for any of them to be acknowledged as a significant person. In the times when the majority of the population was illiterate rural and poor and so on, being literate, urban, having some education, having money, was a very great advantage. Italian Jews had this opportunity 1830-1910, which incidentally is the time when Carbonaries and Freemasons controlled Italy. If you look at Finland around that time, you will find that the Swedish speaking minority was heavily over-represented in significant persons, yet it only shows that they were a dominant minority. Today the Swedish speaking minority is measured to have a slightly lower average IQ than the Finnish majority.
As for this Ashkenazi Jewish talent and high IQ, you can compare NAEP math. and reading scores in the US states, you find the analysis of Audacious Epigone from the web for 2019. Audacious has separated results for non-hispanic whites, thus the group includes only Jews and Non-Jewish, Non-Hispanic Whites. There is no difference in the scores for New York (Jews 8.9%, Non-Hispanic Whites 42.78%, so of Non-Hispanic Whites 20.8% are Jews, 79.2% non-Jews) and say Minnesota (where of non-Hispanic Whites 0.8% are Jews, 82.95% are non-Jews). If American Jews had average IQ of 110, we should see 2 point difference in these results caused by this Jewish IQ, but we see nothing of that type. All we see is that white IQ in different states differs a bit because of environmental reasons. So, also the Jewish achievement was for environmental reasons. They had better opportunities, being maybe helped by their friends (Jewish and Masonic), so they got good results. There is nothing wrong with good results and for sure the people, who made them, were talented. Only, there is much more talent that is not found, in all populations. There is never any shortage of talent. It is always shortage of opportunity to use it.
jorma look at this map that plots many of the populations of the world: http://i.imgur.com/uVCtkmb.png
Here is a 3D version: https://plot.ly/~PortalAntropologiczny/10.embed
Do you know of any way from your experience to find the optimum grouping of these populations into races? It would seem to me the optimum way to group points would be to have the distances between the points within the same group vary as little as possible for every group and have the distances between every group vary as little as possible.
See this image (https://imgur.com/a/fgRmgvK). Say we have a group of points where the distances between all of them do not vary much and they form a somewhat circular cluster. The more that one point strays from the circular cluster and thus the more that the distances between the points vary, the more we can say that straying point is of its own group and the remaining points are of their own group. Likewise, if we have multiple groups of points where the distances between all the groups do not vary much and one group strays off so that the distances between the groups varies more, we can more say the straying group is of its own group and the remaining groups are of their own group. So basically, I believe the best arrangement of groups that one can put points into would be the one where the within-group distances vary the least and the between-group distances vary the least.
I believe it would be a great insight to find the actual and best racial classifications that populations can be put into. I would like to find the race that Jews would then be part of and see if that race produces disproportionate achievements in arts and sciences compared to the other races which could be measured by using Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment data. Do you have any idea of how this could be done from the knowledge you have?
Thanks for your comment. Seems like an interesting question and I will look at it in just a few days. I am just finishing a paper on quantum gravity, everything is done, just to write it to a paper, so it will not take more than a few days and then I make a break with physics and look at this. I hope to be able to solve it, but I have have to think about it first.
The short answer to your question is:
– Cluster analysis is the customary way to group data point into clusters. It does very much the same as you suggest and the mathematical form of the method is readily available.
– All Jews do not cluster into the same race in such a classification of DNA data points into races. Mizraim (Iran+Iraq) Jews form a cluster, Yemen Jews are a cluster, Ashkenazi+Shepardim(Spanish=Turkish today)+Moroccoan Jews can be chosen to cluster as one group, or as three.
– Achievements in science fall to European Jews, though e.g. Michael Atiyah was a Lebanese Jew from origin. My opinion, after having looked at the work of Einstein and Feynman, is that as a race European origin Jews do not have any special intellectual superiority. They did have a larger number of educated people, especially at the time when very few people went to universities. Accomplished Jewish scientists took mainly Jewish students to their group, at least in physics. Jews have got far more recognition from their work than non-Jews. Why, for instance, Julius Wess did not get a Nobel from supersymmetry? It certainly was as good an idea as what most Jewish physics Nobelists made. But as it is, there is a favoring system in evaluations of this type. Therefore Human Accomplishment data does not show the potential of different populations (races). It shows the acknowledged achievement, which can be strongly affected by science politics and preferred treatment of some people. If you look at the number of Nobel prizes Germans got after WWII, then it does not correlate with their estimated IQ and other intellectual capabilities, but it correlates well with them losing the WWII. If you look at the number oj Jewish science professors in the USA, then you can correlate it with the number of Jewish students in prestigious US universities, with the leading role of US universities in the world today (as the USA is the dominating country, before it was some other country: England, France). So, you would expect that many Nobel prizes go to leading professors in leading American universities (for the work done there by the researchers, largely European and Chinese) and the leading professors are those who got their papers praised by colleagues, and they largely were students of prestigious American universities, so you have lots of Jews. But as an intelligent non-Jew, like me, checks the achievements and finds lots of errors, like in the work of Einstein, then it makes you wonder how did these people get the fame if not with some help from their friends.
But this is not the answer I give you. I will look at the data and your problem setting more carefully and see if I can write a post. Unfortunately I do not have Murray’s book and nowadays I do not buy expensive books (or much anything). I have the books I have so far and reread them.
Hi justwondering,
Can I download the data for the 3-dim plot as a raw data from some site? I can make clusters for the data, but I need it in some format I can turn to an ascii file. I guess the raw data has four PCA values and some identifier information (like the ethnic group) for every sample. We can discuss this problem through email. Mine is jorma.o.jormakka@gmail.com
Justwondering,
I found this site:
https://antropologia-fizyczna.pl/wielocechowe-analizy-statystyczne/genetyka-populacyjna/globalne/analizy-autosomalnego-dna/k15-eurogenes-wielocechowa-analiza-audna-dla-populacji-z-calego-swiata
and there is the file k15-pca.xls
Is this the correct one, just to get the starting point agreed.
Jorma
jorma, was wondering if you would like to see all the Spanish-born and Italian-born people who made it on Charles Murray’s list of most significant figures in the arts and sciences from his book “Human Accomplishment.”
Born in Spain and year at age 40:
1058 Avicebron (ibn Gabirol) (Jew)
1070 al-Zarqali (Arzachel)
1166 Averroës (ibn Rushd)
1166 Averroës (ibn Rushd)
1175 Maimonides, Moses (Jew)
1261 Alfonso X of Castile
1322 Juan Manuel
1323 Ruiz, Juan (Archpriest of Hita)
1490 Berruguete, Pedro
1505 Rojas, Fernando de (Jew)
1528 Berruguete, Alonso
1530 Boscán, Juan
1536 Garcilaso de la Vega
1540 Milán, Luis de
1540 Morales, Cristóbal de
1540 Narváez, Luys de
1548 Mudarra, Alonso
1550 Rueda, Lope de
1550 Cabezón, Antonio de
1551 Servetus, Michael (Jew)
1555 Teresa de Jesus (Cepeda), Santa (Jew)
1567 Guerrero, Francisco
1568 Luis de Leon, Fray (Jew)
1574 Herrera, Fernando de
1582 Juan de la Cruz, San (Jew)
1587 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
1587 Alemán, Mateo (Jew)
1588 Victoria, Tomás de (Jew)
1601 Gongora y Argote, Luis de (Jew)
1602 Lope de Vega
1613 Pujol, Juan Pablo
1620 Quevedo y Vallegas, Francisco de
1620 Molina, Tirso de (Tellez)
1631 Ribera, Jusepe de
1638 Zurbaran, Francisco
1639 Velazquez, Diego y (Jew)
1640 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro
1641 Gracian y Morales, Baltazar
1641 Cano, Alonso
1657 Murillo, Bartolome
1658 Moreto y Cabana, Augustin
1662 Valdés Leal, Juan de
1769 Soler, Antonio
1786 Goya,Francisco
1795 Elhuyar, Fausto D’
1804 Rio, Andres del
1842 Espronceda, Jose de
1857 Zorrilla y Moral, Jose
1870 Bécquer, Gustavo
1873 Alarcón, Pedro de
1873 Pereda, Jose Maria de
1873 Echegaray y Eizaguirre, Jose
1883 Perez Galdos, Benito
1892 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago
1900 Albéniz, Isaac
1903 Santayana, George
1904 Unamuno, Miguel de
1906 Benavente y Martinez, Jacinto
1907 Granados, Enrique
1912 Baroja y Nessi, Pio
1915 Machado, Antonio
1916 Falla, Manuel de
1916 Gonzalez, Julio
1921 Jimenez, Juan
1921 Picasso, Pablo
1927 Gris, Juan (Gonzalez)
1933 Miro, Joan (Jew)
1935 Cierva, Juan de la
1936 Garcia Lorca, Frederico
1936 Gerhard, Roberto
1942 Alberti, Rafael
1944 Dali, Salvador
1945 Ochoa, Severo
Born in Italy and year at age 40:
1073-1610 215, all gentiles
1610 Rossi, Salamone (Jew)
1611-1900 149, all gentiles
1900 Volterra, Vito (Jew)
1901 Svevo, Italo (Schmitz) (Jew)
1903 d’Annunzio, Gabriele
1903 Mascagni, Pietro
1903 Riva-Rocci, Scipione
1906 Busoni, Ferruccio
1907 Pirandello, Luigi
1911 Deledda, Grazia
1911 Balla, Giacomo
1912 Tsvet, Mikhail
1913 Levi-Civita, Tullio (Jew)
1914 Marconi, Guglielmo
1915 Alfano, Franco
1916 Boccioni, Umberto
1916 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno
1917 Cerletti, Ugo
1918 Apollinaire, Guillaume
1919 Respighi, Ottorino
1920 Modigliani, Amedeo (Jew)
1920 Pizzetti, Ildebrando
1921 Carra, Carlo
1922 Malipiero, Gian
1923 Casella, Alfredo
1923 Severini, Gino
1930 Morandi, Giorgio
1936 Montale, Eugenio
1940 Silone, Ignazio (Tranquilli)
1941 Quasimodo, Salvatore
1941 Fermi, Enrico
1943 Natta, Giulio
1944 Dallapiccola, Luigi
1944 Petrassi, Goffredo
1945 Rossi, Bruno (Jew)
1945 Segrè, Emilio (Jew)
1947 Moravia, Alberto (Pincherle) (Jew)
1948 Vittorini, Elio
1948 Pavese, Cesare
1949 Levi-Montalcini, Rita (Jew)
There are many significant figures of course who were born in the time of ancient Rome but I didn’t look at them.
Sephardi Jews born elsewhere that are on the list and year at age 40:
1522 Ribeiro, Bernardim (Portuguese Jew)
1573 Montaigne, Michel de (French Jew)
1672 Spinoza, Benedict (Dutch Jew)
1844 Disraeli, Benjamin (British Jew)
1870 Pissarro,Camille(Danish West Indian Jew)
1911 Zemlinsky, Alexander von (Austrian Jew)
1926 Rivera, Diego (Mexican Jew)
1932 Milhaud, Darius (French Jew)
1941 Bernal, John (British Jew)
What do you think, it is interesting right?
I am not so familiar with Spanish or Italian painters and scientists to say if the list is comprehensive. Some names indicated as Jews I have never heard. I checked Velazques, seems to be two of his grandparents were Jewish conversos, that is a half-Jew.
We have to notice that the majority of the population in those times worked in agriculture and did not have any education to qualify them to work in science or arts. Later, in the 20th century, Jews were heavily over-represented, but still you have to notice that before the WWII the situation with the majority of the population had not much changed and after the WWII there was a situation where achievements of some people were much easier recognized than those of some other people. To taken an example, look at Finland. You will see a heavy over-representation of the Swedish speaking minority. What, according to you, might that indicate? As for the IQ, for instance, it is now quite well measured and there is no difference.
As for explanations for Jewish achievements, I think they can be all explained by environmental reasons. I a few days ago read a report from Israel where they analyzed the poor achievements in PISA math by Israel. As expected, there was a gap in favor of hebrew speakers over Arabic speakers. That may well have a genetic component, though the gap is too large to be explained only in that way. However, the Hebrew speakers were much below the leading countries, like Finland, and also the average of developed countries. This did not surprise me as the results reflect the school system. What surprised me was that there was no two peaks in the distribution of Hebrew speakers. This shows wrong a paper by Lynn and some Israel researcher that there were a large 12 point difference in IQ between Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizraim in Israel. There is no gap there, or very small, like 3 points. The same observation I concluded from an Israel paper analyzing women conscripts (they were given IQ tests, no two peaks there either) These results contradict every genetic explanation for the 110 IQ of American Jews. These results are cultural. Look only for environmental reasons. The same goes to your list.
The author of this paper does not provide sources for his data and information (bottleneck of 350, for instance). His tale is elaborate but not supported. His pseudo science claims of IQ provenance is built on quicksand. I could go on and on, but this is enough for me to give an F grade to this paper.
The source of the bottleneck of 350 is a very well known article in nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5835
There is a newer article, also in nature, finding a bottleneck 100
generations ago, but it is not in conflict with the earlier result.
Literature results of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ are all built on quicksand
and deception. It is unlikely that they have any different IQ than
other Europeans, IQ measurements in Israel give the average 95.
The measured higher IQ scores in the USA and some other countries are
fully explainable by more years of education compared to the main
White population and selective emigration to the USA.
My post is not a paper, as a paper means a scientific article. This
is a post in a blog and not prepared to be published or submitted
anywhere. For my scientific papers, go to ResearchGate.
The anonymous commenter’s email reveals his name as Harry A. Shamir,
a retired owner of SaEF Technologies, R&DA, Marinair Ltd, and Principal
& Head Coach at MA South Shore SaEF Fencing Clubs. Checking from
scholar.google.com he is no scientist and has no competence in the
field of this post, nor any education to qualify him to say what
is pseudo-science and what is not and when a reference should be given
and when not. No journal would ask him to be a referee.
Sephardic Jews do not have more European ancestry than Ashkenazi Jews. Also in some of your comments you claimed that anti-Semitism is because of Israel and the actions of some American Jews (?). Anti-Semitism is ancient and is based on false stereotypes, greed, and the demonisation of Jewish people as killers of Jesus and parasites on society. You are very obviously pushing an agenda.
I am not pushing any agenda, could you stop such nonsense. The reasons for antisemitism in the past were multiple. The first recorded incidence in Alexandria between Greeks and Jews was that Alexandria was a city built by Greeks and Jews insisted on having the same privileges as Greeks. In the time of Greek-Roman antique this was not an accepted principle. Romans had more rights everywhere in the Roman empire, The common rule was like Greeks stated it. In Rome there was antisemitism because Jews took much gold from Rome to Jerusalem. In early Middle Ages Jews were disliked for several reasons: they were usurers (usury is not money lending in the modern sense, its goal is to ruin the victim, it is illegal in most countries), they were suspected of ritual murders, they offended on purpose Christian practices, they were suspected of spreading plague by selling infected used clothes, they were smugglers and they stole boys to be sold as slaves to Muslim countries. Later the accusations were mainly usury and ritual murders. But today Jews are no longer doing usury and there are no ritual murder accusations. Jews are disliked in many countries because people see in the television that Israel soldiers destroy Palestinian houses. About actions of American Jews I do not remember having written, but some Americans are asking why Jews have so much power in the USA and why the USA is supporting Israel economically and in the UN and why the USA is fighting wars for Israel, the examples being the wars against Saddam. Many Americans also suspect that 9/11 was done by Jews, and some think Jews killed Kennedy. As for Jews being accused for killing Jesus, this has never been any reason for antisemitism. It is Jewish false explanation. The New Testament, letters of Paul, especially says that Jews will be saved and are God’s people, so Christians do not accuse Jews. They do acknowledge that Jews gave Jesus to Romans to be crucified and that Jews so far reject Jesus. About Jews being parasites on the society, that is not a reason for antisemitism. Gypsies are also in a sense parasites on the society, and that does not mean that Gypsies would have been expelled from any country. Jews were expelled from many countries and it always was because of usury and ritual murder suspicions. No people have ever been expelled from many countries because there was a stereotype of them being greedy. Such is nonsense. You should study Jewish history from reliable sources, not from Jewish nor from antisemitic sources. Find the truth of Jews in Europe. Always the reaction of native people to foreigners is determined by what these foreigners do. If they do good, they are liked. If they do bad, they are disliked. If they are disliked everywhere, they must do something wrong.As an example, American Indians and American Blacks do not like White Americans. It is not caused by any stereotypes, it is caused by what these White people did to them. The same is true concerning Jews in Europe. They did something to create antisemitism. In a country, like Finland where I am living, there is no antisemitism because Jews never lived there. In Poland, where I have lived, there is antisemitism (though mostly hidden) because Jews lived there and did something to cause this antisemitism. It is always coming from what you do.
I will still comment this your claim: “Sephardic Jews do not have more European ancestry than Ashkenazi Jews.” Your claim is wrong according to DNA studies. Maybe you mean the combination of Mizraim and Sephardhim Jews in Israel. They naturally are largely Middle Eastern genetically. Sephardhim Jews were the Jews of Spain, who later migrated to Portugal and e.g to England and Holland. There are very few left in Europe as Jews were expulsed, but their DNA shows larger admixture with Europeans than Ashkenazi Jews. Why this is so is not known. It is in fact not known where the Sephardhim Jews originate. There are theories that they might have been the early migrants after Rome conquered Judea around 60 BC. Italian Jews originate from that time. They may have moved there during the Roman Empire later. But there is also the theory that they may have been originally Carthageans who switched to Judaism after the Punic Wars. In any case, before 400 AD Jews and Christians did intermarry to some extent. Later it was forbidden. Christianity was a forbidden religion, Judaism was allowed. Some early Christian sects were Jewish Christian, there also was a time when Jews converted Gentiles to Judaism, Paul tells about it. Anyway, your claim is false and I think you are pushing some agenda, looks like you may be a troll, but please, study Jewish DNA and study Jewish history. Maybe you will see the light.