The CODOH Revisionist Forum

…Elhaik himself initially contacted Harry Ostrer, who along with most other scientists in the field, proposes that the Jews are genetically related and relatively homogeneous, to obtain permission to access the data basis used by Ostrer and his colleagues to establish their result. Ostrer was willing to share his data provided that Elhaik submit a proposal showing that the project met several criteria, including that it be "non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people", which Elhaik claimed was evidence of bias.

The genetic origins of Ashkenazi Jews

DNA STUDIES, EUROPE - NORTHERN | BY HARRY OSTRER, SUMMER 2017

Ashkenazi Jews (from the Hebrew word for “German”) are the largest of the Jewish groups and number some 10 to 11 million people today in a worldwide Jewish population of 13 million people (Reviewed in Ostrer, 2001; Ostrer, 2012).
During the first millennium of the Common Era, the Jewish progenitors moved north across the Alps, probably from Italy.
By the ninth century, the early Ashkenazi Jews settled in the cities of the Rhineland — Worms, Mainz, Speyer, and others.

Large-scale Jewish migration into Poland started during the 13th century. (Weinryb, 1973). In time, their communities spread to other countries of Eastern and Central Europe...

…Extermination by Nazis and Soviets during the Second World War led to the loss of six million Jews, mostly Ashkenazim. [ ]

… based on the analysis of the DNA segments shared among Ashkenazi Jews, the number of founders for this population may have been as few as 350 and that the founding event occurred about 1,000 years ago (Palamara, et al., 2012; Carmi, et al., 2015). More recent work from this group of collaborators has shown that ~85% of the European segments of the Ashkenazi Jewish genome came from Southern Europeans with the remainder coming from others (Xue, et al., 2017). All of this work precludes that the Khazars, a Turkic people whose kingdom flourished in Southern Russia between ~750 and 965 CE, were the progenitor population of Ashkenazi Jews, but does not exclude that their descendants were contributors to the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

…Eran Elhaik published a reanalysis of data from the Skorecki study arguing for a major Khazarian origin for Ashkenazi Jews. He based his observation of their relatedness to contemporary Armenians and Georgians, groups from the Caucasus that he suggested could serve as proxies for the Khazars (Elhaik, 2013). His study was criticized for sampling only a small number of Ashkenazi Jews, for assuming that Armenians and Georgians would be proxies for Khazars, and for accepting the Khazarian hypothesis as fact.

Arguing that Northern Caucasus populations might represent a better proxy for Khazars, Doron Behar, Noah Rosenberg, and their collaborators compared a larger sample of Ashkenazi and other Jews to 15 Caucasus populations as well as European and Middle Eastern populations (Behar, et al., 2013). Their study found no particular similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Caucasian populations.

Subsequently, Elhaik published a follow-up study in which he applied his technique of geographic population structure (GPS) (Das, et al., 2016). This method assumes that genetic coordinates can be overlaid with geographic coordinates. In fact, this method has worked quite well when applied to the populations of Europe. By Elhaik’s reckoning, the ancestral Ashkenazi Jewish population mapped to the southern coast of the Black Sea in northeastern Turkey. He even identified four villages in the regions with names similar to Ashkenaz.

Elhaik also partnered with the linguist, Paul Wexler, to argue that the Yiddish language was Slavic, rather than Germanic in origin. This led to a rather elaborate hypothesis that Jewish merchants from this region converted and admixed with the Slavs, and subsequently Khazars, to create contemporary Ashkenazi Jews.

A team of investigators led by Pavel Flegontov and Alexei Kassian pointed out that Elhaik misapplied the GPS technique because it is intended for inferring a geographic region where a modern, unadmixed population is likely to have arisen. It is not suitable for admixed populations nor for tracing ancestry that occurred 1,000 years ago (Flegontov, et al., 2016). Simplistically stated, if the Ashkenazi Jews are presumed to have dual Middle Eastern and Southern European origins, then the GPS method would infer their origins to be at some midpoint, such as the Black Sea coast of Turkey. The Flegontov and Kassian group also demurred on the issue of a Slavic origin for Yiddish.

https://avotaynuonline.com/2020/03/the ... nazi-jews/

Elhaik has said that while his paper "has attracted the attention of anti-Zionists and 'anti-Semitic white supremacists'", his intention was not to disprove a connection to biblical Jews, but rather "to eliminate the racist underpinnings of anti-Semitism in Europe".

Stubble wrote: ↑Sat May 24, 2025 9:48 am I feel like I already mentioned this, the controversy and why it piqued my interest.

/shrug

I also feel like I mentioned Brook and linked to his website via one of his articles.

Now, 'Adam and Eve' and 'the 4 founding mothers' are actually said to be buried in the Levant. One could ostensibly go grab some DNA from their teeth and test it and see if any of the jews are related to any of the people in the hole.

Oh, I almost forgot, after October 7th jews decided that the ashkenazi are European bit was antisemitic.

https://jewinthecity.com/2024/07/no-ash ... -european/

Personally, I find the work of Brook best supported by historiography and genetic markers. I tentatively adopt the khazarian hypothesis until I find better evidence against it.

It would have been nice to have been quote posted or given a nod regarding the exposure of Elhaik earlier in this thread.
I'll let y'all get back to it.
I look forward to seeing this thread progress.

“…Antisemites in the past attacked Jews for not being Europeans. Yet, in today’s political climate, antisemites are attacking Jews, particularly Ashkenazi Jews (i.e. Jews with exile history in Central and Eastern Europe) for the exact opposite reason, and DNA has become their weapon of choice. So the legacy continues.”

Stubble wrote: ↑Sat May 24, 2025 10:58 am Part of what I find definitive regarding 'Europeanness' of ashkenazim is the absolute absence of any neanderthal or cromag contribution to their genome.

That seals it for me.

The ashkenazim are a mud people, their segway into Europe was the Turkish khazarians, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find an Esther like tragedy that resulted in a fall of Rome scenario where the Rus were the barbarian horde after the jews opened what would have been their gates of Toledo. Unfortunately, it looks like the evil Russians aktion 1005'd everything and destroyed all the records, so, we are left simply with endless debate over it.

Food for thought, after the khazarian diaspora, many of them may have settled in northern Italy...just because someone live somewhere now doesn't mean their people are from there. Also, that population is almost exactly as related to ashkenazim as Turkish jews...

Regarding the query related to jews being attacked for not being European, that's legitimately how they feel about it as they ignore the fact that they hold in their mouth a burning ember of contempt for the gentiles that they choose to live among and also their incompatible moral framework taken with them out of Babylon.

Elhaik actually cites this contention (jews need to be European because pogroms) as a driver for his work. I find irony in that.

As mentioned above, there will be individuals and even groups that do not fit neatly into one of two categories. Geographical contact zones may develop many thousands of years after races have separated, leading to racial hybrids. These hybrids, depending on the degree of admixture, usually have intermediate gene frequencies in relation to the two parent races. And if the hybrid subsequently becomes geographically and culturally separated from the parent races, a case may develop for terming it a separate race. These racial hybrids are known as “clines.” Examples would include many “Hispanics” (specifically “Mestizos,” who are Native American with European), Cape Coloreds (European with Sub-Saharan African and other racial admixture), and African-Americans (Sub-Saharan, usually West, African with European).

The Ashkenazi Jews could also be regarded as a cline. With them, 40 percent of their maternal DNA has been shown to be European. This would be consistent with Middle Eastern males making their way to Eastern Europe and marrying Gentile females. It’s notable that this is entirely incongruous with the stereotype that Judaism always passed through the female line. And it would potentially also imply that some Europeans, for whatever reason, converted to Judaism at various points. The Sephardic Jews are a less mixed population. However, analyses of the genetics of North African Sephardic Jews is consistent with mixed heritage. The Sephardim emerge “during Classical Antiquity with proselytism of local populations, followed by genetic isolation with the rise of Christianity and then Islam, and admixture following the emigration of Sephardic Jews during the Inquisition.” Thus, it would seem legitimate to regard the Ashkenazi Jews as a European-Middle Eastern cline and the Sephardi as a Middle Eastern group with European admixture. In the case of Jews in India or Yemen, although they may ultimately trace descent from a Jewish ancestor, admixture has been so substantial that they are little different from the surrounding population. The Ethiopian Jews descend from ancient converts and are very genetically similar to other Ethiopian tribes. Some scholars, however, argue that the population was ultimately founded by itinerant Jews who converted and then interbred with the Ethiopians.

Ed Dutton - Making Sense of Race

fireofice wrote: ↑Fri May 23, 2025 8:44 am I would say half would be largely Levantine, and that's what we find.

I’m looking at abstracts on Ashkenazi genetics from ASHG 2013 and SMBE 2014 – by the same group, with Shai Carmi as the lead author. They did 128 whole genomes, 50x deep.

They concluded Ashkenazi Jews were about 50% Middle Eastern and 50% European. In the 2013 abstract, they were pretty specific: they estimated the European ancestry fraction at 55% , plus or minus 2%. ( In our book, we had a crude estimate of about 40% European ancestry.) They estimated the split between Europeans and Middle Easterners at about 9000 BC: which sounds about the right date for the entry of the Sardinian-like farmers. From other data (mtDNA) , and from the fact that you see almost zero WHG or ANE in Ashkenazi autosomal genes, one can conclude that the European admixture was mostly Italian, with some southern French. Very little German or Slavic – by that time serious endogamy had set in..

They found that the following admixture models fit modern Ashkenazi ancestry:

43% Middle Eastern, 20% Eastern European, 37% Northern Italian

32% Middle Eastern, 17% Eastern European, 51% Greek

19% Middle Eastern, 16% Eastern European, 65% Southern Italian

Models with Spanish, German and North Africans as ancestral populations did not fit, suggesting those populations did not contribute much to the proto-Ashkenazim. The first model is the one that initially drew publicity, and it assigns about 40% of Ashkenazi ancestry to the Middle East, which is generally the value you see quoted most often (I, for one have repeated it). But the third model is also a good fit, and in it, the Middle Eastern fraction more than halves, to 19%. What’s going on?

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.

Here, the precision of uniparental lineages proves useful. While Jewish Y-chromosomal lineages are predominantly Middle Eastern, the provenance of the mtDNA is far more diverse. Much of it is Southern European, with nearly 20% of Ashkenazim carrying haplogroup K1a1b1a, a lineage that seems a sister to various other Southern European branches of K1. But in his book The Maternal Lineages of Ashkenazic Jews genetic genealogist Kevin Brook documents that many of the other mtDNA lineages are German, Slavic and possibly even Khazar.

Archie wrote:I imagine that Jews would have considerable interest in showing as high an ME percentage as possible as showing too low a percentage would be very bad PR for Zionism and Israel.
...
I've never paid much attention to the Khazar theory. But I've always assumed the appeal among anti-Semites was that it was a way to "own" the Zionists

fireofice wrote: ↑Sat May 24, 2025 8:07 pm

Archie wrote:I imagine that Jews would have considerable interest in showing as high an ME percentage as possible as showing too low a percentage would be very bad PR for Zionism and Israel.

It depends on exactly what the goals of the particular Jews are.
If Zionism is their top priority, then they want to show Middle Eastern ancestry.
However, if they have other things in mind like reducing antisemitism in Europe, they will go the other way.

fireofice wrote: ↑Sat May 24, 2025 8:07 pm"antisemites" are really only interested in portraying them… [snip]
However, racial antisemites who care more than just about Zionism, like how destructive they are to Europe and whatnot and also want to connect Jews to the bible because they see Christianity as an alien religion, tend to want to… [snip]

Wahrheitssucher wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 8:15 am Bottom line:
Ashkenazi jews aren’t even ‘semites’. They are Europeans and have been for centuries.

HansHill wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 10:19 am

Wahrheitssucher wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 8:15 am Bottom line:
Ashkenazi jews aren’t even ‘semites’. They are Europeans and have been for centuries.

This is far from the bottom line. At best, you can describe them as a European cline (description above), but to outright call them Europeans is misleading. In the passage I quoted, it mentions Mestizos and Cape Coloureds - nobody would describe Mestizos as Europeans unless in bad faith (not that I am accusing you of that)

And that's the bottom line.

Wahrheitssucher wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 10:27 am

HansHill wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 10:19 am

Wahrheitssucher wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 8:15 am Bottom line:
Ashkenazi jews aren’t even ‘semites’. They are Europeans and have been for centuries.

This is far from the bottom line. At best, you can describe them as a European cline (description above), but to outright call them Europeans is misleading. In the passage I quoted, it mentions Mestizos and Cape Coloureds - nobody would describe Mestizos as Europeans unless in bad faith (not that I am accusing you of that)

And that's the bottom line.

Ok, then let’s describe them as a European cline. I’ll go along with that. That still makes them Europeans. They are Europeans in almost every way, not ‘semites’. And that I maintain IS the bottom line here.