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.

[HansHill]

I have not read this fully, and I will read it when I get the time, however on a surface level speedread this seems to jump out from the "Discussion" section:

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.

Maternal ancestry.

I am not going to be so brazen as to simply halve 80% maternal ancestry and arrive at 40% total ancestry, as that clearly would be an oversimplification, however to assert 80% maternal = 80% total ancestry is the same oversimplification just in reverse.

[Wetzelrad]

I have not read this fully, and I will read it when I get the time, however on a surface level speedread this seems to jump out from the "Discussion" section:

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.

Maternal ancestry.

Right, and this later sentence says the opposite for their paternal ancestry.

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.

Which basically means the female founders were more European and the male founders were more Middle Eastern. A very common finding.

[Wahrheitssucher]

I have not read this fully, and I will read it when I get the time, however on a surface level speedread this seems to jump out from the "Discussion" section:

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.

Maternal ancestry.

I am not going to be so brazen as to simply halve 80% maternal ancestry and arrive at 40% total ancestry, as that clearly would be an oversimplification, however to assert 80% maternal = 80% total ancestry is the same oversimplification just in reverse.

Ah. I see.
I think this shows that I’m out of my depth on the genetic and DNA science.

[fireofice]

I came across this article a while ago:

https://ubersoy.com/p/are-jews-white

Ultimately, whether you define Jews as "white" comes down to semantics. Leftists aren't entirely wrong when they say that race is a "social construct" in that humans invent constructs to describe reality. The implication that therefore human biological variation isn't real is of course nonsense. What these constructs include or exclude is up to us.

It ultimately doesn't matter what Jews are defined as. Whether white or middle eastern, they are still their own group with their own traits. If you want, you can still treat them as their own "race" or "subrace" with certain genetics for several physical as well as behavioral traits. Whether these traits are good or bad is up for you to decide.

[borjastick]

I came across this article a while ago:

https://ubersoy.com/p/are-jews-white

Ultimately, whether you define Jews as "white" comes down to semantics. Leftists aren't entirely wrong when they say that race is a "social construct" in that humans invent constructs to describe reality. The implication that therefore human biological variation isn't real is of course nonsense. What these constructs include or exclude is up to us.

It ultimately doesn't matter what Jews are defined as. Whether white or middle eastern, they are still their own group with their own traits. If you want, you can still treat them as their own "race" or "subrace" with certain genetics for several physical as well as behavioral traits. Whether these traits are good or bad is up for you to decide.

The only reason 'jews' want to be known as non white is to attach themselves to the hebrew peoples of old. The reality is unfortunately for them, very different. They are 'non white' in as much as they are not white western europeans, although many many many 'jews' crossed over and interbred in the last 100 years or less to assimilate and lose their 'jewishness'. The reality is that Ashkenazi 'jews' are not jews by historical connection as per the teachings of the big noses. No, they are eastern european from the region now known as Azerbaijan. They are faking it, hence the over jewishness and over reaction and over oy vey attitude to pushing their 'jewishness' such as those like Netanyahu whose family had a very different name. This is commonplace among fake jews.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Family Originally had the Surname Mileikowsky When They Came to Palestine from Poland in the 1920s

[Wetzelrad]

On this topic, and quite relevant to my above statement, there is a new study funded by the government of Israel set to be published in September.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 4125000713

The hypothesis that the Ashkenazi founder population consisted of Levantine males and European females is found to be implausible.

In short, they claim that when prior studies interpreted mtDNA findings to mean that their female founders were mostly European, they made a mistake that is not equally applied to other populations subject to the same phenomenon. They propose instead a "unified founding population" wherein "both maternal and paternal lineages share a common Near Eastern ancestry".

Of course some skepticism is warranted considering the source, that being Israel, and the timing, that being in the wake of widespread doubts about Jewish origins.

Plus an unrelated study from May.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59936-3

This study attempts to model the ancestries of a wide variety of different people groups including Jews. The response on X was skeptical of their methods and results (see replies here). The model of Ashkenazi Jews mapped them as being 68% Italian and only 17% Levantine. This is complicated by the fact that their model of Italians is also heavily Levantine.

Presumably the outcome of these two studies are that Jews will cite the first one when they want to defend Jews as Middle Easterners, but they will cite the second one when they want to defend Jews as Whites. Different hasbara depending on whether the audience is on the left or the right.

[Wahrheitssucher]

.
Johns Hopkins genetic study shows 97.5% of Judaics living in Israel
have absolutely no ancient Hebrew DNA & are therefore not ‘semites’
and have no ancient blood ties to the land of Palestine at all.
Whereas 80% of Palestinians carry ancient Hebrew DNA
and thus are real ‘semites’.

The above is a heading that has become popular on social media and is shared frequently.
E.g.


There are also many refutations of this, even by websites claiming to be ‘fact-checkers’.
E.g. like this Australian one:
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/study- ... try-claim/

A basic rule of thumb for gauging their credibility and reliability of any attempted refutation of this research is to look at the name of the author: if it looks like a possibly ‘jewish’ name, then the author probably has a ‘dog in the fight’ / an ‘axe to grind’ so is not an unbiased source. But this is a very rough gauge.
A second is to see if the report attempts to disparage Elhaik personally and to ascribe unworthy motivations to his research. E.g. like this one in a ‘jewish’ news outlet:
https://forward.com/israel/175912/jews- ... erce-atta/

There are also academic appraisals that welcome Elhaik’s research findings.
E.g. like this one:
https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/ ... ogin=false

Who is Eran Elhaik?
The original research that is being referenced by people on social media and contradicted on jewish-controlled websites is the 2012 research of Eran Elhaik, an American-Israeli molecular geneticist, associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Hub owned by Anath Genomic Consultans AB, registered in Sweden. Previously from 2014 to 2019 he had worked at the University of Sheffield Department of Animal and Plant Sciences in the UK. And prior to that he was completing undergraduate studies in Israel, where he obtained a PhD in molecular evolution at the University of Houston in 2009, followed by postdoctoral research fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Public Health.



It can be read here:
https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/ ... ogin=false

Because this scientific research finding was so unwelcome to Ashkenazis they commissioned many rebuttal ‘research’ articles.
As an example of HOW this negative and emotional reaction to the unwelcome scientific research was received, one of the few permanent, paid staff members of Wikipedia was / is a rabidly zionist American Ashkenazi jew who took the username Jayjig.
He took it upon himself to police all the wikipedia articles that had any relevance or connection to this DNA research and made sure no wiki page referred to it positively.

Consequently, in response to this negative media-campaign, in September 2024 Eran Elhaik wrote a rebuttal of all the attempted rebuttals of his research by Ashkenazis who didn’t like the research conclusions.

It can be read here:
https://khazardnaproject.wordpress.com/ ... ebrew-dna/

Here are some excerpts:

Question: Is there truth to the claim that your study concluded most Jewish people living in Israel have no genetic connection to Israel? Could you explain which groups you sampled in the study (and whether Israeli Jews were included)?

Answer: The study analyzed the genomes of “European Jews,” most of whom live in Israel and the U.S. The study showed that the unique genomes of European Jews (Ashkenazic Jews) were formed in the Caucasus region, around the Black Sea, rather than in Israel. These findings refuted the Rhineland hypothesis, which claimed that modern-day Jews are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites/Judeans, who at some point were exiled to Europe and then remained unchanged until modern times. The Khazarian hypothesis, which depicts Ashkenazic Jews as European and Iranian migrants who mixed with the Khazars, better explained the data. All the data were obtained from a previous study by Behar et al. (2010) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09103. The authors sampled Jewish and non-Jewish populations around the world. Jewish samples were collected from their respective countries, not Israel. Only the Samaritans were collected from Israel.

Question: Can you explain in lay terms what the study concluded and whether social media posts are misinterpreting the study’s findings?

Answer:
The study concluded that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations, including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and possibly Judeans. The population structure of these Jews formed in the Caucasus and along the banks of the Volga, with roots extending to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan. Modern-day Jews are not direct descendants of the Biblical Israelites and were not exiled from Israel. The findings support the integration of Caucasus populations (Iranians, Slavs, Greeks, and Khazars) into the European Jewish collective, a process that likely occurred between the 6th and 13th centuries. In a follow-up study (Das et al. 2016), written with the brilliant linguist Paul Wexler, we applied the GPS technology that I developed and localized Ashkenazic Jews to “Ancient Ashkenaz,” a historically unknown region in southeast Turkey that harbors four ancient villages whose names derived from the word Ashkenaz. Nowhere in the world there is a single placename similar to Ashkenaz. We found four – all in the same place and exactly where the Ashkenazic Jewish genome formed, hence the name “Ancient Ashkenaz.” The region also parallels the speculated location of the Biblical Kingdom of Ashkenaz mentioned in (Jeremiah 51:27). This raised a lot more questions about the history of Ashkenazic Jews.

You need to understand that until my study was published, all previous research in the field concluded that modern-day Jews descended from the ancient Israelites. One study by Atzmon et al. (2010), was even titled “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” despite lacking Abraham’s genome or any ancient genomes. These studies reached their conclusions through data manipulation and logical fallacies. The most prevalent was confirmation bias: testing only one hypothesis without considering a null hypothesis—naturally leading to support for the initial assumption. These studies were not published due to their accuracy but because of a flawed scientific system, coupled with their appeal to political factions that funded, produced, and used them for their agenda. Atzmon et al.’s study even resorted to miraculous explanations for its findings. It is fair to call these studies pseudo-science.
In 2012, I published the first genetic study in Jewish history that contrasted two hypotheses—without funding. Using the exact same data and methods as the previous study, I demonstrated that the results did not support the link between Jews and Judeans, which also lacked historical and linguistic backing. You can understand why it was revolutionary. My study has been the most-read in GBE over the past 12 years, and my two other papers on the same subject are similarly ranked. The first paper has been read over 250,000 times—more than any other genetic study on Jews in history. Combined with its two follow-up studies, that number is 1M reads – more than all studies on Jewish genetics together! But what happened after that? Did the history book change? Were genetic studies conducted more carefully? Did genetic testing companies report the correct geographical origins of Jews? Not at all. And it did not take much time for readers and citers to notice strange patterns: the radical Jewish and non-Jewish media disparaged the study, 23andme reported one thing after some people complained, reported another, Wikipedia’s “editors” attempted to discredit my work – acting against Wiki’s rules, and the scientific community continued to ignore the importance of considering a null hypothesis. The study’s findings were never refuted based on an empirical evaluation of the data and method. They were just not liked for what they were or what they meant. So, the people spoke up and began propagating the study on social media. While they may have gotten some minor details wrong, compared to the scientific establishment that regularly churns out flawed studies—not just about Jewish history but overall—You are really fact-checking the wrong group here.

There is more there, for anyone interested:
https://khazardnaproject.wordpress.com/ ... ebrew-dna/