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.