Angela
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This went beyond tribal preferences or even religious proscriptions.
In Europe marriages between Christians and Jews were prohibited by the state as well as by the Church until the 19th century. It was first banned by Constantius II in 339 AD. and was a capital offense. This arose out of the increasingly acrimonious disputes between Christians and Jews and is in the wider context of attempting to stop Jewish proselytizing and expansion. It's different, in that sense, from the "racial" nature of anti-intermarriage sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th century.
The bans were perpetuated in the Middle Ages. There's also some evidence that in certain places even conversion to Christianity didn't result in the attainment of equal rights and the ability to marry Christians. Here is a beaut from 13th century Germany:" “if a Christian fornicates with a Jewess, or a Jew with a Christian woman, they are both guilty of super harlotry and they should be put upon one another and burned to death." Nice symbolic touch, putting one on top of the other. Sometimes I wonder if the human race is just inherently insane.
http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2080&context=etd
The Napoleonic Code of the early 19th century did permit it in those countries which adopted it. The parties could marry in a civil union. In Germany such a law was only passed in 1865. That ended sixteen centuries of bans.
Prior to that time there was essentially no "civil" marriage. The only way it could happen is if one of the parties converted. In some periods, including that of the late Empire, the state passed laws prohibiting Jews from proselytizing, so, in effect, Christians really couldn't convert to Judaism or "marry into" the Jewish community.
Not that I can imagine many Christian people wanting to take on the discrimination and the restrictions and the periodic outbursts of mob violence. Not to mention that Jews were portrayed as "Christ killers", as people who sacrificed young Christian children during the Passover service, and other such abominations. Every Easter celebration was a time of fear for the isolated Jewish communities, because the Passion Plays produced at those times usually sparked a period of some mob violence. (I don't know if people remember the controversy over Mel Gibson's film , which was really a Passion Play. Jewish leaders opposed it so vehemently out of fear that it would happen again. They were wrong. Things have changed, at least in so far as Christians are concerned.)
So, the only real situation in which it could have occurred before the 19th century would have been in cases where a Jew wanted to "pass" into the Christian community by converting and then marrying. It may indeed have happened, but given that it would mean cutting your ties with all your family and friends I doubt that it happened very often. I think the closest analogy would probably be the minority SSA people in the US who "passed".
Most importantly, for the purposes of this thread, this would have resulted in gene flow from Jews into the Christian community, not the other way around.
As I said, that changed in the 19th century. There was a feeling in the Jewish community itself that perhaps if they assimilated into the larger "Gentile" community (while still maintaining their separate religion, the persecutions would stop. They were sadly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder if that experience, where it didn't matter if you had fought for the country of your birth, or even converted to Christianity, where Christian spouses would abandon the Jewish spouse in periods of persecution, or the often increased anti-Semitism of the early 20th century especially in Germany and eastern Europe is responsible for the attitude of Jews in the U.S. to intermarriage which was prevalent up until the last few decades. Many of my Jewish friends have told me that their grandparents and even parents sat shiva when a son or daughter "married out". (That's the ritual mourning for the dead, where you stay home for the week, covering all the mirrors with black cloths etc.)
Things are somewhat different now. Among non-Orthodox Jews the intermarriage rate in the U.S. is about 70%.
This is a statement from a conference of Conservative (not Orthodox, but not Reform) Rabbis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism
In the past, intermarriage... was viewed as an act of rebellion, a rejection of Judaism. Jews who intermarried were essentially excommunicated. But now, intermarriage is often the result of living in an open society... If our children end up marrying non-Jews, we should not reject them. We should continue to give our love and by that retain a measure of influence in their lives, Jewishly and otherwise. Life consists of constant growth and our adult children may yet reach a stage when Judaism has new meaning for them. However, the marriage between a Jew and non-Jew is not a celebration for the Jewish community.....[45]
Among the Orthodox, who constitute about of the Jewish population, absent traditional conversion intermarriage is strictly forbidden. If you do it you're excommunicated.
This kind of thing is also hardly unique to Christians versus Jews. Look at Northern Ireland and the conflict between Catholics and Protestant. How many people "cross the line" in terms of intermarriage, at least up until very recently. They were killing each other until a few years ago, and how much genetic difference is there between them?
Anyway, in terms of our discussion, assuming that we find, when comparing the genome of Jews from Israel from around, say, the period of the Hasmoneans, to modern Jews of the early twentieth century that there is additional "European" introgression, there are a couple of options: classical era Greeks and Romans, Italy during the late Empire, the Rhineland, eastern Europe.
Despite the evidence for some IBD sharing with eastern Europeans, the low level of it, and the very small, if any, amounts of "eastern European" in Ashkenazim mitigates against eastern Europeans as the source of most of it. It's my understanding that there's no evidence of IBD sharing with Italians. That's certainly what the IBD analysis done by Dienekes showed. I don't know about Greeks.
Of course, I don't know how far back those algorithms go. Ralph and Coop claim to have been able to go back thousands of years, but I don't know of any study like that, that goes back that far, that has been done for Jews versus European ethnicities. My guess would therefore be eastern France and the Rhineland for a good chunk of it. The paper at the link above details how Jews and Christianity moved into that area around the same time. There would therefore not have been the entrenched church sponsored restrictions against intermarriage present at other places and times, nor the social stigma against some local women marrying Jewish traders and artisans. During the Crusade era it has to be said that male introgression into the Jewish gene pool could have occurred through rape.
Anyway, that's how I currently see it.
I would advise against putting too much credence in Wiki articles on some of these topics. The deniers and "white washers" have been very busy. As in most cases, it's much better to stick to academic studies by "neutral" parties.
In Europe marriages between Christians and Jews were prohibited by the state as well as by the Church until the 19th century. It was first banned by Constantius II in 339 AD. and was a capital offense. This arose out of the increasingly acrimonious disputes between Christians and Jews and is in the wider context of attempting to stop Jewish proselytizing and expansion. It's different, in that sense, from the "racial" nature of anti-intermarriage sentiment of the late 19th and early 20th century.
The bans were perpetuated in the Middle Ages. There's also some evidence that in certain places even conversion to Christianity didn't result in the attainment of equal rights and the ability to marry Christians. Here is a beaut from 13th century Germany:" “if a Christian fornicates with a Jewess, or a Jew with a Christian woman, they are both guilty of super harlotry and they should be put upon one another and burned to death." Nice symbolic touch, putting one on top of the other. Sometimes I wonder if the human race is just inherently insane.
http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2080&context=etd
The Napoleonic Code of the early 19th century did permit it in those countries which adopted it. The parties could marry in a civil union. In Germany such a law was only passed in 1865. That ended sixteen centuries of bans.
Prior to that time there was essentially no "civil" marriage. The only way it could happen is if one of the parties converted. In some periods, including that of the late Empire, the state passed laws prohibiting Jews from proselytizing, so, in effect, Christians really couldn't convert to Judaism or "marry into" the Jewish community.
Not that I can imagine many Christian people wanting to take on the discrimination and the restrictions and the periodic outbursts of mob violence. Not to mention that Jews were portrayed as "Christ killers", as people who sacrificed young Christian children during the Passover service, and other such abominations. Every Easter celebration was a time of fear for the isolated Jewish communities, because the Passion Plays produced at those times usually sparked a period of some mob violence. (I don't know if people remember the controversy over Mel Gibson's film , which was really a Passion Play. Jewish leaders opposed it so vehemently out of fear that it would happen again. They were wrong. Things have changed, at least in so far as Christians are concerned.)
So, the only real situation in which it could have occurred before the 19th century would have been in cases where a Jew wanted to "pass" into the Christian community by converting and then marrying. It may indeed have happened, but given that it would mean cutting your ties with all your family and friends I doubt that it happened very often. I think the closest analogy would probably be the minority SSA people in the US who "passed".
Most importantly, for the purposes of this thread, this would have resulted in gene flow from Jews into the Christian community, not the other way around.
As I said, that changed in the 19th century. There was a feeling in the Jewish community itself that perhaps if they assimilated into the larger "Gentile" community (while still maintaining their separate religion, the persecutions would stop. They were sadly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder if that experience, where it didn't matter if you had fought for the country of your birth, or even converted to Christianity, where Christian spouses would abandon the Jewish spouse in periods of persecution, or the often increased anti-Semitism of the early 20th century especially in Germany and eastern Europe is responsible for the attitude of Jews in the U.S. to intermarriage which was prevalent up until the last few decades. Many of my Jewish friends have told me that their grandparents and even parents sat shiva when a son or daughter "married out". (That's the ritual mourning for the dead, where you stay home for the week, covering all the mirrors with black cloths etc.)
Things are somewhat different now. Among non-Orthodox Jews the intermarriage rate in the U.S. is about 70%.
This is a statement from a conference of Conservative (not Orthodox, but not Reform) Rabbis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism
In the past, intermarriage... was viewed as an act of rebellion, a rejection of Judaism. Jews who intermarried were essentially excommunicated. But now, intermarriage is often the result of living in an open society... If our children end up marrying non-Jews, we should not reject them. We should continue to give our love and by that retain a measure of influence in their lives, Jewishly and otherwise. Life consists of constant growth and our adult children may yet reach a stage when Judaism has new meaning for them. However, the marriage between a Jew and non-Jew is not a celebration for the Jewish community.....[45]
Among the Orthodox, who constitute about of the Jewish population, absent traditional conversion intermarriage is strictly forbidden. If you do it you're excommunicated.
This kind of thing is also hardly unique to Christians versus Jews. Look at Northern Ireland and the conflict between Catholics and Protestant. How many people "cross the line" in terms of intermarriage, at least up until very recently. They were killing each other until a few years ago, and how much genetic difference is there between them?
Anyway, in terms of our discussion, assuming that we find, when comparing the genome of Jews from Israel from around, say, the period of the Hasmoneans, to modern Jews of the early twentieth century that there is additional "European" introgression, there are a couple of options: classical era Greeks and Romans, Italy during the late Empire, the Rhineland, eastern Europe.
Despite the evidence for some IBD sharing with eastern Europeans, the low level of it, and the very small, if any, amounts of "eastern European" in Ashkenazim mitigates against eastern Europeans as the source of most of it. It's my understanding that there's no evidence of IBD sharing with Italians. That's certainly what the IBD analysis done by Dienekes showed. I don't know about Greeks.
Of course, I don't know how far back those algorithms go. Ralph and Coop claim to have been able to go back thousands of years, but I don't know of any study like that, that goes back that far, that has been done for Jews versus European ethnicities. My guess would therefore be eastern France and the Rhineland for a good chunk of it. The paper at the link above details how Jews and Christianity moved into that area around the same time. There would therefore not have been the entrenched church sponsored restrictions against intermarriage present at other places and times, nor the social stigma against some local women marrying Jewish traders and artisans. During the Crusade era it has to be said that male introgression into the Jewish gene pool could have occurred through rape.
Anyway, that's how I currently see it.
I would advise against putting too much credence in Wiki articles on some of these topics. The deniers and "white washers" have been very busy. As in most cases, it's much better to stick to academic studies by "neutral" parties.