Jewish Genetics

[HansHill]

Hmm



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

[Wahrheitssucher]

Hmm



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

This discussion is getting more and more crazy.
Are you seriously suggesting that the ashkenazim are descended from a great grandson of the mythological person Noah?

The North American city of San Antonio derives its name from a christian saint from Portugal who died in 1231.
Does that prove all the original population and people now living in San Antonio are Portuguese?



Why don’t you want to accept the self-evident reality that for all discernible, practible purposes ashkenazi jews are Europeans?

[HansHill]

Hmm



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

This discussion is getting more and more crazy.
Are you seriously suggesting that the ashkenazim are descended from a great grandson of the mythological person Noah?

Absolutely not - my argument was about the etymology of the word, and I was not suggesting a direct genetic link whatsoever.

The North American city of San Antonio derives its name from a christian saint from Portugal who died in 1231.
Does that prove all the original population and people now living in San Antonio are Portuguese?

Again, absolutely not, and that's a very silly thing to suggest was what I mean. Studying the etymology of the word at best shows us a cultural link, but does nothing to point to the genetics of the current people living there. It was yourself who actually introduced the argument that etymology implies genetic relationship.

Why don’t you want to accept the self-evident reality that for all discernible, practible purposes ashkenazi jews are Europeans?

Because if we call anybody with European admixture "Europeans" then the word loses all meaning. Again back to the Mestizo argument which you don't seem to have responded to yet - if we call the Mestizos "European" due to their 20-40% European admixture, this completely trivialises what we mean when we say "Europeans". Everybody knows they are not Europeans.

[Wahrheitssucher]

Hmm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenaz

This discussion is getting more and more crazy.
Are you seriously suggesting that the ashkenazim are descended from a great grandson of the mythological person Noah?

Absolutely not — my argument was about the etymology of the word, and I was not suggesting a direct genetic link whatsoever.

And the etymology of the name for the Atlantic Ocean is to Atlas, the Titan in Greek mythology. That means nothing in this conversation. The name Ashkenaz was used by ancient jews to refer to GERMANY (as I demonstrated). That European converts to Judaism chose to name their homeland named after a mythological Hebrew personage means nothing in terms of genetic DNA.

The North American city of San Antonio derives its name from a christian saint from Portugal who died in 1231.
Does that prove all the original population and people now living in San Antonio are Portuguese?

Again, absolutely not, and that's a very silly thing to suggest was what I mean.

it applies the same logic of etymology.

Studying the etymology of the word at best shows us a cultural link, but does nothing to point to the genetics of the current people living there.

I agree. We appear to be talking past each other.

It was yourself who actually introduced the argument that etymology implies genetic relationship.

No I didn’t. I tried to bring this discussion down to a practicable level. And I did that because it seems to me that you want to deny that Ashkenazis are to every intent and purpose Europeans.
I had just replied:

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.

…if we call anybody with European admixture "Europeans" then the word loses all meaning. Again back to the Mestizo argument which you don't seem to have responded to yet — if we call the Mestizos "European" due to their 20-40% European admixture, this completely trivialises what we mean when we say "Europeans". Everybody knows they are not Europeans.

My point is that Mestizos and mulatos are discernibly NOT white caucasians of European ethnic origin. Whereas the Ashkenazi jews are. Look at the ones who are currently organising and implementing the mass-murder and ethnic cleansing of the actual descendants of the ancient Israelites in occupied Palestine. It would be hard to distinguish them in a crowd of Europeans.

[Stubble]

Just gonna leave this here.

[HansHill]

I think this is approaching it from completely the wrong angle. You are bending over backwards trying to factor them in as Europeans based on their 40% European admixture, rather than factoring them out based on their 60% Middle Eastern admixture.

Looked at from that perspective, its clearly ridiculous to describe an ethnic group that is 60% Middle Eastern as European.

At best, they are a European cline, that is, an offshoot of two "parent races" splintering off, mixing, and becoming culturally distinct & isolated from each parent race.

....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".....

- Ed Dutton, as quoted earlier

[Wahrheitssucher]

I think this is approaching it from completely the wrong angle. You are bending over backwards trying to factor them in as Europeans based on their 40% European admixture, rather than factoring them out based on their 60% Middle Eastern admixture.

Looked at from that perspective, its clearly ridiculous to describe an ethnic group that is 60% Middle Eastern as European.

At best, they are a European cline, that is, an offshoot of two "parent races" splintering off, mixing, and becoming culturally distinct & isolated from each parent race.

....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".....

- Ed Dutton, as quoted earlier

On the contrary, I am trying to get you to set aside what you’ve read and what you steadfastly believe and use your common sense and your god-given eyes for a moment. But you won’t. No. Because you’ve read something / been taught something.

Don’t you know any Ashkenazim, Hans?

That “40% - 60% divide you believe in and keep referring to isn’t an absolute reality, Hans.

Firstly because the origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial and is highly contested.

And secondly because some fairly recent studies claim 80% European origin:

The extent to which Ashkenazi Jewry trace their ancestry to the Levant or to Europe is a long-standing question, which remains highly controversial. Our results, primarily from the detailed analysis of the four major haplogroup K and N1b founders, but corroborated with the remaining Ashkenazi mtDNAs, suggest that most Ashkenazi maternal lineages trace their ancestry to prehistoric Europe.

Previous researchers proposed a Levantine origin for the three Ashkenazi K founders from several indirect lines of evidence: shared ancestry with non-Ashkenazi Jews, shared recent ancestry with Mediterranean samples, and their absence from amongst non-Jews, and this suggestion has been widely accepted.

However, our much more detailed analyses show that two of the major Ashkenazi haplogroup K lineages, K1a1b1a and K2a2a1 have a deep European ancestry, tracing back at least as far as the early and mid-Holocene respectively. They both belong to ancient European clades (K1a1b1 and K2) that include primarily European mtDNAs, to the virtual exclusion of any from the Near East.

Despite some uncertainty in its ancestral branching relationships, a European ancestry seems likely for the third founder clade, K1a9. The heavy concentration of Near Eastern haplogroup K lineages within particular, distinct subclades of the tree, and indeed the lack of haplogroup K lineages in Samaritans, who might be expected to have shared an ancestral gene pool with ancient Israelites, both strongly imply that we are unlikely to have missed a hitherto undetected Levantine ‘reservoir’ of haplogroup K variation (Supplementary Note 1).

Furthermore, our results suggest that N1b2, for which a Near Eastern ancestry was proposed (with much greater confidence than for K) by Behar et al.2, is more likely to have been assimilated into the ancestors of the Ashkenazi in the north Mediterranean [Europe].

Finally, our cross-comparison of control-region and mitogenome databases shows that the great majority of the remaining ~60% of Ashkenazi lineages, belonging to haplogroups H, J, T, HV0, U4/U5, I, W and M1 also have a predominantly European ancestry.

Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion. The phylogenetic nesting patterns suggest that the most frequent of the Ashkenazi mtDNA lineages were assimilated in Western Europe, ~2 ka or slightly earlier. Some in particular, including N1b2, M1a1b, K1a9 and perhaps even the major K1a1b1, point to a north Mediterranean [European] source. It seems likely that the major founders were the result of the earliest and presumably most profound wave of founder effects, from the Mediterranean northwards into central Europe, and that most of the minor founders were assimilated in west/central Europe within the last 1,500 years. The sharing of rarer lineages with Eastern European populations may indicate further assimilation in some cases, but can often be explained by exchange via intermarriage in the reverse direction.

The Ashkenazim therefore resemble Jewish communities in Eastern Africa and India, and possibly also others across the Near East, Caucasus and Central Asia, which also carry a substantial fraction of maternal lineages from their ‘host’ communities11,25.

Despite widely differing interpretations of autosomal data, these results in fact fit well with genome-wide studies, which imply a significant European component, with particularly close relationships to Italians. As might be expected from the autosomal picture, Y-chromosome studies generally show the opposite trend to mtDNA (with a predominantly Near Eastern source) with the exception of the large fraction of European ancestry seen in Ashkenazi Levites22.

Evidence for haplotype sharing with non-Ashkenazi Jews for each of the three main haplogroup K founders may imply a partial common ancestry in Mediterranean Europe for Ashkenazi and Spanish-exile Sephardic Jews, but may also, at least in part, be due to subsequent gene flow, especially into Bulgaria and Turkey, both of which witnessed substantial immigration from Ashkenazi communities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Gene flow could have been substantial in some cases—ongoing intermarriage is likely when these communities began living in closer proximity after the Spanish exile. A partial common ancestry for all European Jews—both Ashkenazi and Sephardic—is again strongly supported by the autosomal results.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

Published: 08 October 2013
A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages

By Marta D. Costa, Joana B. Pereira, Maria Pala, Verónica Fernandes, Anna Olivieri, Alessandro Achilli, Ugo A. Perego, Sergei Rychkov, Oksana Naumova, Jiři Hatina, Scott R. Woodward, Ken Khong Eng, Vincent Macaulay, Martin Carr, Pedro Soares, Luísa Pereira & Martin B. Richards.

[Stubble]

Mr Seeker, if you find some time, can you make an effort to track down the refrenced paper?

[Never mind, I see it now, thank you for linking the study]

[Note, cited study does not show raw data, only projections based on aggregate sample, I would like to see a more precise paper]

I will concede that maternal contribution would not confer neanderthal or cromagnon contribution.

I need to see their research.

I again point at the relation of ashkenazim to Turkish jews as well as Northern Italians.

The relation to the broader set 'Europeans' just isn't supported from what I've seen.

I find the evidence for the khazarian hypothesis more convincing.