Jewish Genetics

[ConfusedJew]

Creating a new thread from another to prevent it from getting clogged.

Some of you think that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of random groups and I disagree. They are largely Levantine with some admixture from Europe when they migrated.

Feel free to drop evidence in here and I'll debate it out.

[Stubble]

When you say 'largely levantine', can you expound?

I just want to see how disperite our points of view are.

[fireofice]

I agree with this. Jews do in fact have substantial Levantine ancestry.

https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2021/11 ... poiler-no/

https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2021/01 ... -european/

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09103

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews

[ConfusedJew]

I haven't looked into this very closely but it seemed extremely likely to me that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants from the original Israelites that were expelled from Jerusalem.

I always wondered why Ashkenazis Jews have white skin tone while Middle Easterners are darker. But it seems like they are not entirely Levantine (from the Middle East) and some of the men married white European women when they migrated to Europe.

I have seen absolutely no credible evidence that the Jews were Khazarian converts but if you present me with evidence that I haven't seen, I'll take a look. I'm pretty sure it won't be accurate though.

[Stubble]

When I said expound, I didn't mean vomit random words onto the forum.

Can you, here and now, explicitly define your qualifier 'largely levantine'.

Is that going to be more than 5%? More than 30%? 52%? 60%? 80%?

What, pray tell do you consider 'largely levantine'?

We will get into the rest later, currently we need to get off the ground.

[fireofice]

When you say 'largely levantine', can you expound?

I just want to see how disperite our points of view are.

I would say half would be largely Levantine, and that's what we find.

I have seen absolutely no credible evidence that the Jews were Khazarian converts

There is none. They certainly were not Khazars. One of the main promoters of the Khazar theory was a Jew name Arthur Koestler whose main motivation was to reduce antisemitism by undermining the racial basis of it.



If the Jews were Khazars, then they would just be another white European group. The Khazars were a white European population that ruled from 650–969 AD and whites as a whole resided in Turkey/Anatolia until 1000 AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars

Note: Anatolia wasn’t Turkish until after 1,000 AD. Before then, it was occupied by Europeans. Even today, many Turkish people on the West coast have predominantly (but not entirely) European ancestry.

https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2020/08 ... e-novices/

For reference, European Anatolians that would have been the Khazars are genetically the most closely related to modern Sardinians, a white European population.

https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2023/07 ... isnt-real/

[Stubble]

Many might think 'largely' would imply better than half, and depending on whose study you look at, you get different projections of Levantine root stock, I've seen some say 96%-98%.

That certainly would be 'largely'.

We are dealing with projections however, not definitive study, and numbers get played with.

This question, and the surrounding research, as with a lot of other subjects, gets quite messy once you scratch the surface of it.

Part of the problem here is that there is obfuscation. This obfuscation is tied to the word 'origin'. It seems patently obvious that the root stock is from the Levant. Even if you adopt the lower end numbers for Levantine DNA (some as low as 2% to 5%, generally resting around 30% in aggregate across studies) the root stock is Levantine.

You start to run in to problems when you begin to look at admixture.

One study I found particularly interesting, due the style of its refutation, the suppression of data sharing with the author by other authors and the discourse around it on both sides is Elhaik (2013).

Now on to another point, Whites settled Europe around 45,000 years ago, and were not hole up in Turkey/Anatolia.

The Rhineland Hypothesis is at this point sunk, as now 'consensus' points to Northern Italy. Personally, I think Northern Italy is the wrong spot as well, but, I don't want to base everything on conjecture.

I'm going to link a couple of articles regarding Elhaik and an article by Brook.

https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/ ... ogin=false

https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/ ... ogin=false

http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-diaspora.html

I encourage you to dig in to this oddity and do your research.

Up until about a month ago, I was in your camp and simply assumed I had good information and had formed a valid opinion based on the research. After a slight disagreement with some other users, I went to validate my position and found it tenuous if not untenable.

Again, the root stock is certainly Levantine, and Ashkenazim are certainly not 'White'. That doesn't mean they aren't mongrelized, even if they stick to marrying their cousins (which leads to some, problems).

[Wahrheitssucher]

Here's an article by an Ahkenazi jew on his DNA results.
First, he admits that Ashkenazis come from Europe !
(So CJ and others in denial take note: they are not from ‘Israel’ nor the middle east).

And secondly he also demonstated that DNA testing isn’t 100% reliable.

I took 9 different DNA tests and here's what I found
By Rafi Letzter published November 5, 2018

I sent off nine DNA samples to three different DNA companies under a variety of fake names.
The results indicated that I'm super-duper Ashkenazi Jewish.
(Ashkenazim are Jews who trace their ancestry back to Yiddish-speaking populations inhabiting the region between France and Russia.)

Here's what was a bit surprising, though: none of the companies — AncestryDNA, 23andMe and National Geographic (which works with a testing company called Helix) — could agree on just how Ashkenazi I am.

AncestryDNA looked at the first DNA sample …and reported back that I'm
93% European Jewish.
2% traces back to the Iberian Peninsula (that's Spain and Portugal);
1% traces back to the European South;
1% traces back to the Middle East;
and the rest comes from elsewhere.

According to Nat Geo, I'm way less than 100 percent Ashkenazi. The genetic service reported that my first sample's ancestry was 88% from the "Jewish Diaspora" (in this context, a term that more or less refers to Ashkenazim) and 10% from "Italy and Southern Europe.

23andMe …reassessed all the DNA already in its system. Now, when I log into 23andMe using the three different names I gave, the reports for two of those names say that I have 100% Ashkenazi [European] ancestry.

According to Nat Geo, I'm way less than 100 percent Ashkenazi. The genetic service reported that my first sample's ancestry was 88 percent from the "Jewish Diaspora" (in this context, a term that more or less refers to Ashkenazim) and 10 percent from "Italy and Southern Europe."











So, nine DNA tests later, I learned this about myself: I'm a whole lot Ashkenazi Jewish [i.e. European]. Like, mostly. Or entirely. The rest of my ancestors in recent memory probably also lived in Europe — though who really knows where. And maybe somewhere in my family tree there was a Middle Easterner, or a Native American. But probably (almost definitely) not.

But, of course, I already knew all that.

The Science
Scientists who specialize in this sort of research told Live Science that none of this is all that surprising, though they noted that the fact that the companies couldn't even produce consistent results from samples taken from the same person was a bit weird.

https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-a ... ained.html

[Stubble]

While I can appreciate that ashkenazim share a very similar genetic makeup and physically live in Europe (and other places), that does not, in any way, make them 'White', just ask one. They stayed insular to a point of having an artificial population bottleneck of less than 400 souls because they wouldn't intermarry with the native population.

So far as their lack of a root in the Levant, Mr Seeker, could you provide study in support? I'd appreciate it.

I'd also like to see study of ashkenazim testing for Cro-Magnon and Neandertal DNA...if you've got one...

You know what, I've only turned my attention back to this particular over about the last month. I think I'm going to step back and just watch this thread progress.

[fireofice]

Here's an article by an Ahkenazi jew on his DNA results.
First, he admits that Ashkenazis come from Europe !
(So CJ and others in denial take note: they are not from ‘Israel’ nor the middle east).

It's just using "Europe" to mean that Jews have lived in Europe for a while. Like Raul Hilberg's book "The Destruction of European Jews" is just talking about where they've lived for a long time, not where they trace their ultimate ancestry to.

[Wetzelrad]

The genetic evidence for Khazar ancestry just isn't there. I think Elhaik sufficiently demonstrates this himself with his 2013 study linked above. His PCA puts European Jews roughly inbetween Europeans and Middle Easterners which is consistent with mixed ancestry from both. The fact that various Caucasian populations also fall into that inbetween space is merely incidental, and it might actually suggest he was trying to fabricate that result. What he doesn't show is that Jews are genetically closer to proxies for the Khazars than they are to other populations.

Even if you find Elhaik convincing, the many other studies that consistently find Jews to be a mix of European and ME, like this one which explicitly refutes the Khazar Hypothesis, should be sufficient for you to be skeptical of claims to the contrary. Going by DNA, it would make more sense to call them Italians than to call them Khazars.

The paper evidence isn't there either since only the Khazar rulers are said to have converted to Judaism.

If you have an afternoon to burn, read this interesting piece on Jewish ancestry by Ron Unz:
American Pravda: The True Origin of the Jews as Khazars, Israelites, or Canaanites. Or read just these two paragraphs:

As Sand persuasively argued, over the centuries many of those Jews eventually converted to Christianity then later to Islam following the Muslim conquest, and they are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, leavened by an admixture from all the various conquering groups of the last two thousand years, including Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks. Thus, the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans lived continuously in their homeland prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The tremendous historical irony that the current Palestinians—now suffering horrifying massacres in Gaza—are almost certainly the closest lineal descendants of the Biblical Israelites was highlighted by Sand and had been similarly emphasized by Beaty in his 1951 book.

Although this view might seem shocking to the vast majority of both Gentiles and Jews, certainly including most present-day Israelis, Sand and Beaty were hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, while Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country’s second president after the death of Chaim Weizmann, and in 1918 as young Zionist leaders, they had co-authored Eretz Israel in the Past and the Present, the most important Zionist book of that era, very successfully released in both Hebrew and Yiddish. In that work, they summarized the strong historical evidence that the local Palestinians were obviously just long-converted Jews, expressing the hope that they would therefore be absorbed into the growing Zionist movement and become an integral part of their planned State of Israel; Ben-Zvi published a later 1929 booklet making the same points. It was only after the Palestinians became increasingly hostile to Zionist colonization and they began violently clashing with those European settlers that the Judean ancestry of the Palestinians was tossed down the memory-hole and forgotten.

[Wahrheitssucher]

Here's an article by an Ahkenazi jew on his DNA results.
First, he admits that Ashkenazis come from Europe !
(So CJ and others in denial take note: they are not from ‘Israel’ nor the middle east).

It's just using "Europe" to mean that Jews have lived in Europe for a while. Like Raul Hilberg's book "The Destruction of European Jews" is just talking about where they've lived for a long time, not where they trace their ultimate ancestry to.

Yeah, yeah!
As I wrote, you and CJ are in D E N I A L.

[Wetzelrad]

Here's an article by an Ahkenazi jew on his DNA results.
First, he admits that Ashkenazis come from Europe !
(So CJ and others in denial take note: they are not from ‘Israel’ nor the middle east).

This DNA test argument doesn't mean anything, though. 23andme is not telling him his ancestral origins, it's telling him which categories of people his DNA most closely aligns with. Those categories are created and labelled by 23andme. If 23andme categorized Algerians as "100% European Algerian", would that prove to you that Algerians originated in Europe? This is the argument you are making.

A great quantitative way of measuring ancestry is by genetic distance. Pairwise Fst comparisons are especially useful. Here is a table from a Gilad Atzmon study that shows the genetic distance between Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Ashkenazi Jews are most closely related to Palestinians (0.011) and North Italians (0.008).

table.jpg (191.76 KiB) Viewed 82 times

This is exactly what we expect for a population deriving ancestry from both locations. If the Khazar Hypothesis was true, we should expect to see lesser genetic distance to a proxy population from the Caucasus.

[Wahrheitssucher]

.
Surprise: Ashkenazi Jews are genetically European
By Tia Ghose published October 8, 2013

The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe.
Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England.

Little is known about the history of Ashkenazi Jews before they were expelled from the Mediterranean and settled in what is now Poland around the 12th century. On average, all Ashkenazi Jews are genetically as closely related to each other as fourth or fifth cousins, said Dr. Harry Ostrer, a pathology, pediatrics and genetics professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and the author of "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" (Oxford University Press, 2012).

But depending on whether the lineage gets traced through maternal or paternal DNA or through the rest of the genome, researchers got very different answers for whether Ashkenazi originally came from Europe or the Near East [not the Middle East].

Past research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near East, Richards said. That supported a story wherein Jews came from Israel and largely eschewed intermarriage when they settled in Europe. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]
But historical documents tell a slightly different tale…

Maternal DNA
Richards and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is contained in the cytoplasm of the egg and passed down only from the mother, from more than 3,500 people throughout the Near East, the Caucusus and Europe, including Ashkenazi Jews.

The team found that four founders were responsible for 40% of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA, and that ALL of these founders originated in Europe. The majority of the remaining people could be traced to other European lineages.

All told, more than 80 percent of the maternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be traced to Europe, with only a few lineages originating in the Near East.

https://www.livescience.com/40247-ashke ... genes.html

[fireofice]

Yes Wahrheitssucher, Jews do indeed have some European admixture, which is all that article says. No one has denied this and it doesn't detract from the Middle Eastern admixture that also exists.