Jewish people, where they are from?

Alright, thanks for the detailed explanation, as you might tell I'm no expert. I just have 2 more questions.

1. Do Sicilians, Maltese, Cypriots and Greeks score any WHG or are they pretty much like Ashkenazim?
I would be shocked if they have 0% WHG. However, the percentage is so low that it is sometimes smaller than degree of uncertainty, mistake, or low resolution of current tests.

2. Is it possible that there was European admixture from Southeastern European populations like Mainland Greeks, Greek islanders etc? Because first, I heard that during the Hellenistic era many Jews became "Hellenised", and second, you said yourself that Ashkenazim plot between Cypriots and Mainland Greeks.
From chart in post 38 we can see that Greek and Italian Jews have similar distance to "general European" same as Ashkenazi, and also somewhat genetically different from each other. We have to keep in mind that we are talking about very isolated groups, and thanks to this high insulation they managed to survive in their genetic and cultural identity with small amount of "foreign blood". We also need to remember about possibly bigger number of Jews who got assimilated in local cultures, and we will never know about them, or their numbers, but we can find Jewish contribution in many modern Europeans. My wife is 1.5% Ashkenazi, and nobody can remember from what ancestor.
 
I would be shocked if they have 0% WHG. However, the percentage is so low that it is sometimes smaller than degree of uncertainty, mistake, or low resolution of current tests.


From chart in post 38 we can see that Greek and Italian Jews have similar distance to "general European" same as Ashkenazi, and also somewhat genetically different from each other. We have to keep in mind that we are talking about very isolated groups, and thanks to this high insulation they managed to survive in their genetic and cultural identity with small amount of "foreign blood". We also need to remember about possibly bigger number of Jews who got assimilated in local cultures, and we will never know about them, or their numbers, but we can find Jewish contribution in many modern Europeans. My wife is 1.5% Ashkenazi, and nobody can remember from what ancestor.



Alright thanks. :)


P.S I don't think AJs got 0 WHG, obviously the numbers are low, but not nil. According to that calculator I have around 5-6%, another bloke said it's around the percentage of Maltese, but that same bloke said that when it comes to Euro-Mediterranean populations like Sicilians, Maltese, Greeks, Cypriots and Ashkenazim that calculator doesn't work well.
 
Edited to state no "significant" genetic flow from Italians or Germans into the Ashkenazi gene pool. Also, to clarify, did MfA produce an alternate EEF/WHG/ANE calculator in addition to the NE calculator, as it seems pretty clear the existing one does not produce results consistent with those of the paper even for Europeans.

MfA's file was optimised specifically for West Asian populations, which often get negative WHG scores.
It basically weeds out WHG (including from EEF to some extent), which is why it tends to fit with the paper's figures (especially as far as Eastern Mediterranean pops, namely Maltese, Jews & Sicilians, are of concern).

It doesn't solve the outlandish scores non-Basque Iberians and other European populations (such as Greeks, Albanians, Tuscans, N. Italians etc) obtain, as you this calculator produces inconsistent results (with large margins of error).
 
It is safe to say that Ashkenazi retained their uniqueness in general sense, but to completely deny even small mixing with Europeans is exaggeration, don't you think? The 23andme graph shows strong pull of many Ashkenazi towards Europe.
within-variation.png

http://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/th...nazi-jewish-ancestry-is-important-for-health/

It is interesting to see that there is quite a distance between all Jewish groups. Can 2,000 year of insulation and separation of these groups explain these drifts, simply based on random mutation? If not then there are only two other possibilities. One being, non homogeneous population of Jews prior to separation and migration. Second, limited mixing with locals, or with someone else on their way to destination.

Ashkenazim, due to their high degree of endogamy, do not fully reflect their ancestral populations' diversity... Though their placement in relation to other jewish communities certainly hints towards a complicated past (one which cannot be solved by using contemporary populations as proxies).

I already saw this graph by the past, it doesn't make much sense tbh... But again, we're comparing apples with oranges since Mizrahi Jews are thrown into the lot.
That's probably why Ashkenazim cline so strongly towards Europe.
In fact, Ashkenazim are extremely similar to Turkish, Bulgarian & Greek Jews (something like ~95% identical) with whom they overlap.
This graph doesn't make much sense mainly because Syrian, Italqi & Sephardic Jews appear closer to Mizrahim than to Ashkenazim... While the opposite is true (Sephardim, NA Jews, Syrian Jews & Ashkenazim basically form one big Western Jewish cluster).

Of course with enough resolution you can separate all of these Jewish groups, even though they have very high IBD sharing with one another.

I'm not denying the existence of European admixture in Ashkenazim, as you said this would be an exaggeration from my part.
What I am saying, though, is that this admixture is very difficult to isolate and quantify, and this is mainly due to the fact that Jews are so similar to Sephardim (hence the only reasonable amount of European admixture had to come from a Mediterranean population, and it's very likely that this population was extremely low on WHG when gene-flow took place).
Heck, even North African admixture in Sephardim is easier to uncover.

Actually, I wouldn't exactly be surprised if Ashkenazi endogamy is responsible for the extreme situation we're confronted with.
 
Alright, thanks for the detailed explanation, as you might tell I'm no expert. I just have 2 more questions.

1. Do Sicilians, Maltese, Cypriots and Greeks score any WHG or are they pretty much like Ashkenazim?

2. Is it possible that there was European admixture from Southeastern European populations like Mainland Greeks, Greek islanders etc? Because first, I heard that during the Hellenistic era many Jews became "Hellenised", and second, you said yourself that Ashkenazim plot between Cypriots and Mainland Greeks.


1. It depends which calculator you're using, and whether you're ready to take the study into account.

In the original calculator, all of these populations have a very small amount of WHG, just above noise level (like Ashkenazim).

In the study (Greeks aside), they simply don't have this component, and this is replicated in the optimised version of the test for WA populations (which is why this optimised version makes sense):

desktop_2013_12_27_22nef0i.png


2. This is basically what I am saying: If there really is European admixture, it must've come from a population with very low to non-existent WHG, which is probably what the Eastern Mediterranean looked like during the emergence of the Diaspora (prior to the Temple's destruction).
It makes sense because, as you said, Jews went through a philhellenic period, and many had Greek names when they came to Europe (just read about the Kalonymos family).
Here again, the sole flaw with this model is the low amount of IBD sharing with Greeks... Another problem which arises from this model is that uncovering the real amount of pre-exilic Judean ancestry becomes a pain in the @ss because we'll be splitting hairs (much of what makes up Mainland Greek ancestry emanated from the Levant at some point, and since the pre-islamic Levant probably was Cypriot-like the difference becomes narrow and can only be obvious if more resolution is brought in.).
 
MfA's file was optimised specifically for West Asian populations, which often get negative WHG scores.
It basically weeds out WHG (including from EEF to some extent), which is why it tends to fit with the paper's figures (especially as far as Eastern Mediterranean pops, namely Maltese, Jews & Sicilians, are of concern).

It doesn't solve the outlandish scores non-Basque Iberians and other European populations (such as Greeks, Albanians, Tuscans, N. Italians etc) obtain, as you this calculator produces inconsistent results (with large margins of error).

Outlandish indeed. I just had to look at the Tuscan and North Italian scores compared to those in the study. It's too bad. Perhaps he should consider putting another calculator out there.

I was thinking of asking you precisely that question, i.e. does the NE calculator also remove the WHG that is part of EEF.
 
1. It depends which calculator you're using, and whether you're ready to take the study into account.

In the original calculator, all of these populations have a very small amount of WHG, just above noise level (like Ashkenazim).

In the study (Greeks aside), they simply don't have this component, and this is replicated in the optimised version of the test for WA populations (which is why this optimised version makes sense):

desktop_2013_12_27_22nef0i.png


2. This is basically what I am saying: If there really is European admixture, it must've come from a population with very low to non-existent WHG, which is probably what the Eastern Mediterranean looked like during the emergence of the Diaspora (prior to the Temple's destruction).
It makes sense because, as you said, Jews went through a philhellenic period, and many had Greek names when they came to Europe (just read about the Kalonymos family).
Here again, the sole flaw with this model is the low amount of IBD sharing with Greeks... Another problem which arises from this model is that uncovering the real amount of pre-exilic Judean ancestry becomes a pain in the @ss because we'll be splitting hairs (much of what makes up Mainland Greek ancestry emanated from the Levant at some point, and since the pre-islamic Levant probably was Cypriot-like the difference becomes narrow and can only be obvious if more resolution is brought in.).

The IBD data has always been the fly in the ointment. My husband routinely gets Ashkenazim and Sephardim as, if not his number one match, within the first three matches, no matter what calculator is used.(along with Greek and southern Italian) Yet, there's no significant RF results with Ashkenazim and no IBD sharing that can't be explained by ancient gene flow from the Levant during the Neolithic or at a stretch the Bronze Age. I don't know if the geneticists will ever be able to disentangle the strands.

You mentioned the Kitos War. Are you thinking that the admixture, if any, took place during the Hellenization of the Near East, or are you thinking that it was an aftermath of the war?
 
I was thinking of asking you precisely that question, i.e. does the NE calculator also remove the WHG that is part of EEF.
I think it will be possible once we have genom of pure Ancient Near Eastern Farmer.
 
Do you think this graph still makes sense?
nature09103-f2.2.jpg
 
The IBD data has always been the fly in the ointment. My husband routinely gets Ashkenazim and Sephardim as, if not his number one match, within the first three matches, no matter what calculator is used.(along with Greek and southern Italian) Yet, there's no significant RF results with Ashkenazim and no IBD sharing that can't be explained by ancient gene flow from the Levant during the Neolithic or at a stretch the Bronze Age. I don't know if the geneticists will ever be able to disentangle the strands.

You mentioned the Kitos War. Are you thinking that the admixture, if any, took place during the Hellenization of the Near East, or are you thinking that it was an aftermath of the war?

Actually, the IBD data is beneficial for Southern Italians and other people who plot in the East Med, as it can tell you whether this is due to Jewish ancestry or not.

The only way to get a decent picture of the demographic effects which led to this situation is to obtain genome-wide samples of Iron Age Greeks, Aegeans, Sicilians, Cretans, Cypriots and Levantines.
^^ With this, we wouldn't be speculating anymore and we would finally be onto something (even if this means splitting hairs, which can be managed in the long term).

I think that if there was Greek admixture, we can expect gene-flow to have taken place since the beginning of the Iron Age (with the Sea Peoples).
The Judeans incorporated the Philistines amongst their midst, so that's the first major episode of Aegean gene-flow if you ask me.
Of course, the spread of Hellenization to the Near East plays a huge part as well, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many Judeans mixed with neighbouring Greeks (back when descent laws were lenient).
The diaspora was already established prior to the Temple's destruction, for me the Kitos war merely highlights the fact that Jews were already anchored in the Eastern Mediterranean world... Which is why I think that much of the admixture came from neighbouring Hellenic populations.
So I think it took place mainly prior to the Kitos War... But I could be wrong.
 
Do you think this graph still makes sense?
nature09103-f2.2.jpg

It still does actually, this is how Jews cluster on PCA plots.

If you compare with the study's own PCA, you'll notice that not much has changed since Behar et al 2010:

europe.png


^^ Notice how close Ashkenazi and Turkish Jews are on this one, and reflect on the fact that Behar's Sephardic cluster is mainly made up of Turkish and Bulgarian Jews (there's a lot of IBD sharing between Ashkenazi and Turkish/Greek/Bulgarian Jews).
 
Jews formed late (four or five thousand years ago) in human history and is just a religion anyway so those pre-existing groups in Israel would be included such as Canaanites and shepherds of all kinds. A lot 'sea people' would be part of the Jewish make up. Also the the Jewish definition of the mother defining a Jew screws up the male DNA. Inter-marriage and conversion sure add to the mix.
 
Jews formed late (four or five thousand years ago) in human history and is just a religion anyway so those pre-existing groups in Israel would be included such as Canaanites and shepherds of all kinds. A lot 'sea people' would be part of the Jewish make up. Also the the Jewish definition of the mother defining a Jew screws up the male DNA. Inter-marriage and conversion sure add to the mix.

That's a gross oversimplification, Jews are an ethno-religious group.
By such standards, Judaism is more than a mere religion, it's a culture.

Also, matrilineal descent actually contributed to the high levels of endogamy we observe, since it basically prevented Jews from mixing with neighbouring populations.
Keep in mind that one's Jewish status is patrilineally inherited (Kohanim cannot marry converts, mamzerim & divorcees, etc).

The Israelites themselves emerged out of a Canaanite background during the Bronze Age Collapse, ~3200 years ago.
 
It is self-imposed. There are many mingling that were never sanctioned by the rabbi and all those lost tribes and so on. Over time it will be just like the general population with so much inter marriages. Look at the American biracial celebrities. Look at how many have either partly Jewish mother or father e.g. Prince, Rashida Jones, etc.

Ha, ha billionaire Mark Zuckerberg married his Chinese girlfriend from Harvard.
 
IMO, the autosomal results for Ashkenazi can be explained by their history - Jews who had been for a long time living in what is now Iraq migrated to the Khazar empire when its leaders converted to Judaism in an attempt to avoid the wars between the Christians and Moslems. Then, when the Khazars were conquered by an Arab army, they migrated into Europe where they multiplied considerably. The result is a people who are mostly EEF (more so than modern Middle Eastern populations) with some ANE. The fact that Sicilians and Maltese have a similar autosomal mix doesn't actually mean they're closely related to Ashkenazi Jews - they ended up with a similar autosomal makeup for different reasons, I think.
 
It is self-imposed. There are many mingling that were never sanctioned by the rabbi and all those lost tribes and so on. Over time it will be just like the general population with so much inter marriages. Look at the American biracial celebrities. Look at how many have either partly Jewish mother or father e.g. Prince, Rashida Jones, etc.

Ha, ha billionaire Mark Zuckerberg married his Chinese girlfriend from Harvard.

It is both imposed and self-imposed.
Remember, Jews weren't allowed to earn land for the major part of their diasporic history. There were serious disadvantages associated with Jewish status, persecution was constant (which makes a big German or Eastern Euro contribution look doubtful, I'm ready to bet that it was the other way around for the most).

The future of Jewry is interesting, on one hand I can picture some sort of "Israeli Jewish" type emerging from all the Sephardi-Ashkenazi-Mizrahi-Yemeni mixing going on.
On the other hand, the current intermarriage rates are bound to have some sort of influence, look at myself for instance.

Haredim also have high birthrates, and they practically never mix, so I doubt much will change with them (hell, they still speak Yiddish).
 
IMO, the autosomal results for Ashkenazi can be explained by their history - Jews who had been for a long time living in what is now Iraq migrated to the Khazar empire when its leaders converted to Judaism in an attempt to avoid the wars between the Christians and Moslems. Then, when the Khazars were conquered by an Arab army, they migrated into Europe where they multiplied considerably. The result is a people who are mostly EEF (more so than modern Middle Eastern populations) with some ANE. The fact that Sicilians and Maltese have a similar autosomal mix doesn't actually mean they're closely related to Ashkenazi Jews - they ended up with a similar autosomal makeup for different reasons, I think.

While I do think the Mesopotamian input in Jews is severely underestimated (especially in Mizrahim, who are pretty much identical to neighbouring Assyrians), this isn't the model which emerges when one looks closely at Ashkenazi population genetics & history.
The Khazars weren't "conquered" by an Arab army, they did lose the Transcaucasian parts of their empire to the arabs but it was the Kievian Rus who conquered them.

The problem with your theory is that it fails to take into account the fact that Ashkenazim are near-identical to Sephardic Jews (Syrian, North African, Turkish, Greek) since the latter have literally very little to do with Khazars.

In fact, I think that the high degree of similarity between Sicilians, Maltese and Western Jews is mainly due to the fact that their ancestral populations might've been pretty similar to start with: A large amount of Levantine ancestry (Judean for the Jews, Phoenician & Punic/Carthaginian for Sicilians & Maltese; both Canaanite) along with big chunks of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry (Sicily was intensively settled by the Greeks, so well that it was labeled "Magna Græcia" [also remember that Sicilians overlap with Cretans and Aegean islanders]; the Levant was linked to the Eastern Mediterranean world since the Middle Bronze Age [actually earlier than that, but I'm discussing gene-flow from the East Med, not the other way around] and has always been a crossroads region).
 
Semitic Duwa;434394]Actually, the IBD data is beneficial for Southern Italians and other people who plot in the East Med, as it can tell you whether this is due to Jewish ancestry or not.

From what I've seen of the results, in the vast majority of cases it shows that there wasn't gene flow from Jews into the Italian gene pool, which is a surprise because I thought there would be some, given the documentary evidence of Jews who converted in the north in the late days of the Empire and of the ones in Sicily and Calabria who converted rather than go into exile when the Spanish introduced the Inquisition in the south. It may just be that the numbers were too small to make much of an impression.

On the other hand, I've seen no IBD evidence for gene flow from Italians into the Ashkenazim either, for all the talk of a Jewish population after the invasions taking gentile wives.

Of course, the spread of Hellenization to the Near East plays a huge part as well, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many Judeans mixed with neighbouring Greeks (back when descent laws were lenient).
The diaspora was already established prior to the Temple's destruction, for me the Kitos war merely highlights the fact that Jews were already anchored in the Eastern Mediterranean world... Which is why I think that much of the admixture came from neighbouring Hellenic populations.
So I think it took place mainly prior to the Kitos War... But I could be wrong.

Didn't the rules about matrilineal descent come about after this whole period? Before that, in addition to male Hellenes converting to Judaism, you would have had gentile women marrying into the community. Certainly, there didn't seem to be any rules prohibiting the marriage of Ruth and Boaz in a far earlier time period.

A large amount of Levantine ancestry (Judean for the Jews, Phoenician & Punic/Carthaginian for Sicilians & Maltese; both Canaanite

Except that a lot of these results hold true for southern Italians as well, (Calabrians, for example, in my husband's case and others, but also people from Bari that I know of first hand) and there was no Phoenician or Punic/Carthaginian settlement there. I think we're talking about older common ancestry, dating back to the Neolithic, and reinforced in southern Italy by the Cretans and later by the Greek settlements of the first millennium BC.

After all, you had some Balkan people still very Oetzi like way into the Iron Age, and I think Sicily, and perhaps much of far southern Italy as well, was not very impacted by the Indo-European migrations. The only reason why some mainland Greeks can be fitted into the three population Lazaridis model is, in my opinion, because they were impacted to some degree by the Slavic migrations which had no impact on Italy north or south. I do think there might have been some small amount of Punic input mixed with Berber in the Muslim settlers, particularly in Sicily, but also in other areas of the south, either through their short lived reigns there or through the relocation of Moorish soldiers on the peninsula to remove the threat they posed in Sicily. There was a famous settlement of them near Foggia and another one near Naples.
 
While I do think the Mesopotamian input in Jews is severely underestimated (especially in Mizrahim, who are pretty much identical to neighbouring Assyrians), this isn't the model which emerges when one looks closely at Ashkenazi population genetics & history.
The Khazars weren't "conquered" by an Arab army, they did lose the Transcaucasian parts of their empire to the arabs but it was the Kievian Rus who conquered them.

The problem with your theory is that it fails to take into account the fact that Ashkenazim are near-identical to Sephardic Jews (Syrian, North African, Turkish, Greek) since the latter have literally very little to do with Khazars.

In fact, I think that the high degree of similarity between Sicilians, Maltese and Western Jews is mainly due to the fact that their ancestral populations might've been pretty similar to start with: A large amount of Levantine ancestry (Judean for the Jews, Phoenician & Punic/Carthaginian for Sicilians & Maltese; both Canaanite) along with big chunks of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry (Sicily was intensively settled by the Greeks, so well that it was labeled "Magna Græcia" [also remember that Sicilians overlap with Cretans and Aegean islanders]; the Levant was linked to the Eastern Mediterranean world since the Middle Bronze Age [actually earlier than that, but I'm discussing gene-flow from the East Med, not the other way around] and has always been a crossroads region).

Actually, the Khazars were conquered by an Arab army and converted is Islam, although the actual Jews living among them apparently didn't convert. The Russians did later destroy the (largely Moslem) Khazar empire, which may have influenced the Jews in that area to migrate westward. And the fact that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are both mainly Jewish is not a problem for my theory. But the Ashkenazi do differ somewhat from the Sephardic Jews, and a 2012 study by Eran Elhaik analyzed data collected for previous studies and concluded that the DNA of Eastern and Central European Jewish populations indicates that their ancestry is "a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries". A 2013 study claimed to have refuted that idea, but that was based on the assumption that modern populations in the Caucasus couldn't be taken as a proxy for the population of the Caucasus a few centuries ago - I'm not sure I find that convincing. I do agree with you that the most likely reason Sicilians and Maltese have a profile similar to that of Jews is because they have a lot of EEF. In fact, that's pretty much what I said before.
 

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