Jewish people, where they are from?

here is an interesting article about jews...a bit old, but I don't think their was much change in migration of jews in last 10 yeras

http://www.jgsgp.org/Documents/Dr Schurr-DNA- 12-04-2011.pdf

There have been a lot of advances in DNA knowledge in the last ten years, so I wouldn't rely too much on old data. And even when one looks at the latest info, I think a lot depends on what assumptions one makes. Some people may look at the similarities between Sicilian and Jewish DNA and say "Either Sicilians are Jews or Jews originated in Sicily." However, I look at the same data and say "Jews and Sicilians must both be mostly of ancient Middle Eastern ancestry." Same data, different interpretation.
 
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.).


Okay got it, thanks for the answer, I heard of a recent study which said that pre Islamic Eastern Mediterranean pops were more Cypriot like than Bedouin like. Wait who AJs do share a large amount of IBD with? BTW what's IBD? xD
 
There have been a lot of advances in DNA knowledge in the last ten years, so I wouldn't rely too much on old data. And even when one looks at the latest info, I think a lot depends on what assumptions one makes. Some people may look at the similarities between Sicilian and Jewish DNA and say "Either Sicilians are Jews or Jews originated in Sicily." However, I look at the same data and say "Jews and Sicilians must both be mostly of ancient Middle Eastern ancestry." Same data, different interpretation.

Maybe you right..............we can throw out the ancient finds and analysis as well , like otzi etc!!!
 
how do you guys explain that Ashkenazim are "smarter" than Sicilians or Greeks, even-though genetically are very similar? (based on number of famous scientists, current average IQ, chess champions etc)
 
how do you guys explain that Ashkenazim are "smarter" than Sicilians or Greeks, even-though genetically are very similar? (based on number of famous scientists, current average IQ, chess champions etc)


The same way they are bad at some other things. Natural selection...
 
I think the Khazar hypothesis has been pretty much shredded by Behar: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=humbiol_preprints

Also, importantly, it contradicts all the PCA plotting of numerous studies, which shows that after whatever amount of mixing has taken place, most Jews have been dragged in a northwestern direction not much further than Cyprus, and that includes a big chunk of the Ashkenazim. (The slight pull toward the Adriatic and the Balkans for some Ashkenazim can be explained through Greek gene flow into Jewish populations, I think. The IBD analyses may not be showing it because the Greeks themselves have experienced some new gene flows? Perhaps some minor input from Khazarians and eastern Europeans is also a factor. Or, it could even be some central or western European gene flow. Fwiw, I’ve seen a number of calculator results where half Ashkenazim/half British Isles people plot either near northern Italy or in Romania.)


And, as Semitic Duwa pointed out, the Sephardic Jews, who would have no possible connection to Khazaria, overlap with the Ashkenazim.


That isn’t to say that there wasn’t some impact from the Khazarian Jews, in my opinion, as I suggested above. I’ve wondered whether that persistent 2% Siberian that the Ashkenazim get in the calculators could be traced to them. However, it now strikes me that perhaps that’s present in northern Near Easterners as well.


As for the overall genetic similarities between Sicilians, Cypriots, the Maltese and the Ashkenazim, I think the IBD data pretty much establishes that most of the similarities result from ancient common ancestors rather than modern admixture, as proposed by Aberdeen.


The other important factor in all of this is the actual history of these communities. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the genesis of the Ashkenazi community was in France and the Rhineland. Those Jewish communities were decimated by the horrors and the barbarity inflicted upon them by the Crusaders, creating the famous bottleneck which has marked their subsequent genetic history. They then fled east, where they experienced the massive expansion, and practiced the endogamy that created the modern Ashkenazi community.


In fact, looking at the history of the Near East and at the genetics as well, I think that one could argue that the people of the Near East, through the invasions from Central Asia, the movement north of Bedouin tribes, and the importation of African slaves, have changed more than have the Jews in the last 2,000 years.


Oh, one other thought…in all those comparisons with Oetzi, the Ashkenazim also show up as a very closely related population, which supports the idea, in my opinion, that they have preserved the EEF signature better than have modern populations of the Near East.
 
how do you guys explain that Ashkenazim are "smarter" than Sicilians or Greeks, even-though genetically are very similar? (based on number of famous scientists, current average IQ, chess champions etc)
Constant bottlenecking due to persecution as minority, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, genocides (like WW2). The well off people (usually smarter than average) tend to survive and their children, while poor and average Jews were caught and killed. When you have money you can buy your freedom, or you can send your kids abroad to safety. Jews were going through these "bottlenecking good few times throughout their history, and not only in Europe.

Perhaps they started off from pretty good IQ base too. There were quite few brainy populations in this region in antiquity, together with Phoenicians and Greeks. IIRC Phoenicians and Jews belonged to Canaanite ethnicity, if I may say so. Do to high degree of insulation Jews retained this very high base, as other's base got diluted. As far as records go, Jewish diaspora was successful wherever they went around the known world. They adapted to different economic conditions, were more skillful traders than locals, always tended to do financially better than average citizen. When you come from far away and beat locals in their own game it really means something about their IQ.
 
Oh, one other thought…in all those comparisons with Oetzi, the Ashkenazim also show up as a very closely related population, which supports the idea, in my opinion, that they have preserved the EEF signature better than have modern populations of the Near East.
As well it might be the case
 
I think the Khazar hypothesis has been pretty much shredded by Behar: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=humbiol_preprints
..............

The argument that Behar is refuting isn't the one I'm making. I realize that some people are allergic to the idea of any connection between the Ashkenazi and the Khazars, mostly because some racists have used that connection to advance a false argument that the Ashkenazis aren't real Jews, which is not at all what I'm saying. There is documentary evidence of Jewish people in that part of the world after the Khazar ruling class converted to Judaism in a vain attempt to stay out of the christian/muslim wars. That's not evidence that the Ashkenazi are anything other than mostly Jews from the Middle East, although Behar seems to assume that's the argument being made by anyone who mentions the idea that the Ashkenazi came out of southern Russia.

Behar said:

"Competing theories include a hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews descend largely from the Khazar Khaganate, a conglomerate of mostly Turkic tribes, who ruled in what is now southern Russia with the capital Atil in the Volga delta on the northwestern banks of the Caspian Sea approximately 1,400 to 1,000 years ago (Figure 1). According to this hypothesis, a portion of the Khazar population, among whom at least some had converted to Judaism, migrated north and west into Europe from their ancestral lands to become the ancestors of some or all of the Ashkenazi Jewish population."

But I think there's better historical evidence for the idea that only the ruling elite among the Khazars ever converted to Judaism but that Jews from what is now Iraq may have migrated to the Khazar Khanate and later migrated westward, which would explain the bottleneck effect that's apparent. That's why the Ashkenazi Jews are mostly ancient Middle Eastern but with a bit of Siberian ancestry. I'm not necessarily convinced that a Turkish khanate in southern Russia was necessarily mostly Turkish in ancestry, and I suspect there was only a small amount of gene flow from the Khazars to the Jews who settled among them.

Where's the evidence for Jewish communities in France and Germany during and after the Migration Period?
 
Perhaps they started off from pretty good IQ base too. There were quite few brainy populations in this region in antiquity, together with Phoenicians and Greeks.
True, Greeks had their peak in the sciences right after their exchanges of ideas (and people) with Phoenicia and Egypt. And Sicilians are the smartest people of Italy when it comes to "unconventional" organizations.
 
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.



Definition endogamy:Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group,....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogamy

Ever read the account of Sarah and Pharoah[Egypt] -Amelech[Philistine]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah

What about Joseph and Asenath?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asenath


 
how do you guys explain that Ashkenazim are "smarter" than Sicilians or Greeks, even-though genetically are very similar? (based on number of famous scientists, current average IQ, chess champions etc)

In my opinion being smart has nothing to do with haplotypes. This reminds me of the thread where J's and I's are genetically posed to build better ships! The psyche, behavior and attitude of any homo sapien depends on its environment and priorities for survival besides the type of experiences it encounters with.



I think that Lebrok explained it well. The only thing I don't agree is the IQ bit. In regards to IQ, we know that EQ (emotional intelligence) plays a more important part in being successful on many layers of social strata.



I believe that Jews (as in religion, since dna is a far more complex subject then that) in more recent situations have lived mainly among Muslim and Christian communities, who according to their custom and religion had different views in regards to business practices. Both Christian and Muslim religions for a long time believed that profit was a sin (this is still a concept in Sharia law) and it was only good ethics to make ends meet and nothing more. Profit was regarded for a long time as a dirty word. The Jews had a different understanding on the issue and often used to be the bankers and money borrowers in the societies they lived in. This same system that lead to more wealth and prosperity could have been a main factor that steered the envy of the People they resided amongst and been one that led to persecution.
 
Assessment of the Behar study

Ahhh.... I'm not entirely sure this is true, Ashkenazis don't plot in the Eastern Mediterranean between Cypriots and Mainland Greeks, I always plot in Southern Italy or in the Tyrrhenian Sea (west of mainland Italy). BTW, saying Ashkenazi Jews aren't European isn't entirely accurate either, Behar's recent study (2013) concluded that after Sephardi and North African Jews, Ashkenazis share closest genetic similarities with Mediterranean Europeans from Italy (Sicily, Abruzzo, Tuscany), Greece and Cyprus, Ashkenazis (and Sephardis) according to that study have something called K5, and if that K5 is removed then Ashkenazis shift from Italians and Greeks to the Druze and Samaritans, according to Behar's study that K5 presence in Ashkenazis and Sephardis suggests admixture with Non Jewish Europeans. Behar also concluded that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry from Middle Eastern and European populations, so saying "Jews are Turkic steppe nomads" may be quite inaccurate, but saying "Jews are Europeans" isn't entirely inaccurate, genetically speaking and linguistically speaking, considering the fact that the Ashkenazi language is Yiddish, an Indo European High German language with it's main origin being in the Rhineland (being derived from old high German with minor Aramaic and Hebrew contributions). Here's the link of Behar's study, you may want to reexamine it.

Link: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=humbiol_preprints

While including a lot of useful data and analysis, the Behar study isn't free of methodological flaws, either:

  1. Khazar homeland: Behar locates the Khazar homeland exclusively north of the Caucasus. Most sources, including Wikipedia, however, agree that the Khazars at least in the 10th and early 11th century also controlled Georgia and Armenia. Once you introduce those populations, and Georgian Jews, as Khazars into the analysis, Khazarian origin of Ashkhenazi Jews becomes much more difficult to refute.
  2. "Post-Khazarians (1)": Behar postulates that no ethnic successors of Khazarians are known. This is also wrong - the Khalysians, who settled in Eastern Hungary, Eastern Slovakia, Galicia and Western Ukraine are reported by medieval historians as Khazars of either Mosaic or Muslim faith: http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...d-two-Galicias?p=433224&viewfull=1#post433224. Apparently, Behar didn't specifically sample Khalysian areas. Eastern Slovakia isn't covered at all, Hungary, Ukraine and Poland are only covered in general, and the data may rather refer to the respective capitals than the area in question, namely Galicia / the NE Carpathians.
  3. "Post-Khazarians (2)": To approximate "Khazarians", Behar sampled a number of ethno-linguistic isolates along the periphery of the former Khazar empire, including various north-Caucasian groups, as well as Chuvash, and Tartars. Using ethno-linguistic isolates is obviously problematic, as the linguistic isolation may correspond to restricted gene flow. Furthermore, the Khazar elite that adopted Judaism, and the region's Jewish community anyway, may be assumed to have been primarily urban, so genetic admixture, if existing, should rather become apparent in and around historic urban centres than within periphery ethno-linguistic isolates.
    To these isolates, "Ukrainians" and "Russians" were added. For the comparatively small "Ukrainian" sample, no regional breakdown is available. In the case of Russians, samples were taken from Kursk, Smolensk and Voronesh , locations either to the periphery (Kursk, Voronesh) or outside (Smolensk) historical Khazar territory. The Khazar homeland hasn't been sampled at all - neither the Khazar capital of Iti, todays Astrakhan, nor other relevant South Russian cities such as Volgograd, Krasnodar, or Rostov-on-Don. Whatever Behar compared Ashkenazi Jews with, I seriously doubt that you can call it representative of Khazars.
  4. Ashkenazi Jews: Behar's sample of Ashkenazi Jews is split up into two groups - a western one (France, Germany, Netherlands), and a Central / Eastern European one (Austria, Belorussia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia). The central-Eastern group is obviously missing Ukrainian, including Galician Jews, which would be the Ashkenazi amongst whom most Khazarian ancestry could theoretically be expected to show up. In addition, some more "zooming in" for the Central / Easter European selection, e.g. by removing Baltic Jews here, could have made sense. Judged by the admixture diagram in the study annex, Central / Eastern European Ashkenazi appear to display quite a diversity, including a few individuals whose admixture is more similar to Georgian or Iranian than to Western European Jews.
  5. Europe: Similar to the Khazarian region, the parts of Europe that might have contributed to the Ashkenazi admixture are hardly covered. Comparison is only made with "Southern Europe" (France, Italy, Spain), and "Eastern Europe" (Belorus, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Ukraine). First of all, one region that is known as source of substantial Jewish migration into north-central Europe during the 16th/ 17th century, namely Northern/ Central Portugal, is missing here [Several famous North German Jewish families, including the Warburgs and Heines, are known to have immigrated from Portugal]. More importantly, the alternative "homeland" of Ashkenazi, stretching from the Upper Rhine (Strasbourg, Worms) via the Rhineland (Cologne) into Flanders (Antwerp), the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Northern Germany (Hamburg, Altona) isn't present at all. Considering the linguistic origin of Yiddish, at least the Rhineland and Flanders should have served as points of comparison.
For my taste, these flaws are a bit too widespread to have occurred accidentally. They rather suggest a hidden political agenda, namely proving a Jewish ethno-genetic unity. Ironically, indications for strong genetic coherence of the Jewish community, with substantial genetic roots in the Levante, are strong enough, have already been demonstrated by other studies before, and didn't require confirmation from Behar's work.
The equally interesting question of which other elements the Jewish diaspora has picked up during the last two millenniums, and from where, however, remains unanswered for the a/m flaws. I don't think that Cyprus, Sicily and Abruzzo (the three European regions with the closest genetical distance to Ashkenazi according to Behar's study) have been the last, most likely not even the most important stations of Jewish migrations [Though Sicily and Abruzzo deserve a closer look, especially considering Emperor Frederick II's policy of religious tolerance, which should have been reverted when both Sicilys fell to the Spanish crown]. More regionally focused studies, especially on the Caucasian / South Russian / Ukrainian / Galician relation, and on the upper and lower Rhine, will be required. Behar had the opportunity for such a regionalised analysis, but - opposite to his claims - failed to deliver it.
 
The argument that Behar is refuting isn't the one I'm making. I realize that some people are allergic to the idea of any connection between the Ashkenazi and the Khazars, mostly because some racists have used that connection to advance a false argument that the Ashkenazis aren't real Jews, which is not at all what I'm saying. There is documentary evidence of Jewish people in that part of the world after the Khazar ruling class converted to Judaism in a vain attempt to stay out of the christian/muslim wars. That's not evidence that the Ashkenazi are anything other than mostly Jews from the Middle East, although Behar seems to assume that's the argument being made by anyone who mentions the idea that the Ashkenazi came out of southern Russia.

Where's the evidence for Jewish communities in France and Germany during and after the Migration Period?

Aberdeen, my allergies are killing me right now, but they're not to the Khazar theory. :) I just don't think it's supported by either the preponderance of the genetic evidence or the historical evidence.

I've also said that I think there's certainly the possibility that there was some input from the Khazars, although as you point out, only the upper classes seem to have converted. I do agree that there were Jews in that area, and that they may have fed into the emerging "Ashkenazi" ethnicity, but there's very little concrete data about their numbers and movements that I've ever been able to find.

I think there's quite a bit of documentation for the French and Rhineland Jewish communities.

This article provides a timeline for the establishment of these communities:
http://www.geni.com/projects/Jews-of-the-French-German-Nexus-Alsace-and-Lorraine/8610

This is another article on the establishment of the Rhineland communities:
http://judaisme.sdv.fr/histoire/historiq/anglais/history.htm

The Rhineland massacres during the First Crusade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

The Crusades and the Jewish community:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/crusades.html

Massacres related to the plague:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/1348-jewsblackdeath.asp

Movement of some European Jews to Poland, where Yiddish, a dialect of German, is said by some to have first coalesced:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html

Elkaim attempted to refute this evidence, in my opinion unconvincingly.
 
In my opinion being smart has nothing to do with haplotypes. This reminds me of the thread where J's and I's are genetically posed to build better ships! The psyche, behavior and attitude of any homo sapien depends on its environment and priorities for survival besides the type of experiences it encounters with.



I think that Lebrok explained it well. The only thing I don't agree is the IQ bit. In regards to IQ, we know that EQ (emotional intelligence) plays a more important part in being successful on many layers of social strata.
I agree, I should have used more general term Intelligence, regardless if Jew score high on IQ test.




I believe that Jews (as in religion, since dna is a far more complex subject then that) in more recent situations have lived mainly among Muslim and Christian communities, who according to their custom and religion had different views in regards to business practices. Both Christian and Muslim religions for a long time believed that profit was a sin (this is still a concept in Sharia law) and it was only good ethics to make ends meet and nothing more. Profit was regarded for a long time as a dirty word. The Jews had a different understanding on the issue and often used to be the bankers and money borrowers in the societies they lived in. This same system that lead to more wealth and prosperity could have been a main factor that steered the envy of the People they resided amongst and been one that led to persecution.
I think the rule comes from Old Testament, however Jews understood this rule, as " One can't charge an Interest to his family, close kin. Making money of gentiles and not related Jews was OK.
Here is a history of money by Niall Ferguson.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/28689-Favorite-Historical-Movies?p=434448&viewfull=1#post434448
 
how do you guys explain that Ashkenazim are "smarter" than Sicilians or Greeks, even-though genetically are very similar? (based on number of famous scientists, current average IQ, chess champions etc)

You're generalising, pilgrim... From personal experience, there are two types of AJs:

1. The extremely intelligent ones
2. The extremely dumb ones (usually the most inbred and religious, you'd be appalled if you knew how stupid some of them are)

The whole deal about AJ "intelligence" is a product of Jewish education (we absolutely loathe public education, for us education is a private matter) and history (most of the idiots and naive folks were weeded out by constant persecution).
 
The argument that Behar is refuting isn't the one I'm making. I realize that some people are allergic to the idea of any connection between the Ashkenazi and the Khazars, mostly because some racists have used that connection to advance a false argument that the Ashkenazis aren't real Jews, which is not at all what I'm saying. There is documentary evidence of Jewish people in that part of the world after the Khazar ruling class converted to Judaism in a vain attempt to stay out of the christian/muslim wars. That's not evidence that the Ashkenazi are anything other than mostly Jews from the Middle East, although Behar seems to assume that's the argument being made by anyone who mentions the idea that the Ashkenazi came out of southern Russia.

Behar said:

"Competing theories include a hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews descend largely from the Khazar Khaganate, a conglomerate of mostly Turkic tribes, who ruled in what is now southern Russia with the capital Atil in the Volga delta on the northwestern banks of the Caspian Sea approximately 1,400 to 1,000 years ago (Figure 1). According to this hypothesis, a portion of the Khazar population, among whom at least some had converted to Judaism, migrated north and west into Europe from their ancestral lands to become the ancestors of some or all of the Ashkenazi Jewish population."

But I think there's better historical evidence for the idea that only the ruling elite among the Khazars ever converted to Judaism but that Jews from what is now Iraq may have migrated to the Khazar Khanate and later migrated westward, which would explain the bottleneck effect that's apparent. That's why the Ashkenazi Jews are mostly ancient Middle Eastern but with a bit of Siberian ancestry. I'm not necessarily convinced that a Turkish khanate in southern Russia was necessarily mostly Turkish in ancestry, and I suspect there was only a small amount of gene flow from the Khazars to the Jews who settled among them.

Where's the evidence for Jewish communities in France and Germany during and after the Migration Period?


I'm not "allergic" to such a connection... In fact, I'm pretty sure that most AJs would be delighted to find out that they have Turkic roots, most of the people who're pushing this theory are AJs themselves (Koestler, Sand, etc).

The main problem with the Khazar model is that in any case, Mizrahim appear more "Khazar" than Western Jews, if we follow Elhaik's methodology which basically uses Armenians & Georgians as proxies for Khazar ancestry (don't laugh, he really did it).

Also, when subscribing to such a theory you'll find yourself at loss when trying to explain the incredible similarity between Ashkenazim and, say, Syrian Jews (I have Syrian and Lebanese Jewish relatives on RF myself, and I'm just half-Jewish).

The more we try to uncover traces of Khazar ancestry, the scarcer the evidence for it... Just read Rootsi et al. 2013's paper about R1a-M582, a marker which was long taken as actual proof of Khazar ancestry in Ashkenazim!
 
Okay got it, thanks for the answer, I heard of a recent study which said that pre Islamic Eastern Mediterranean pops were more Cypriot like than Bedouin like. Wait who AJs do share a large amount of IBD with? BTW what's IBD? xD

I think the recent study you're referring to is Fernandez et al. 2014, which obtained MtDNA data from PPNB samples... It basically shows that Ashkenazim and Cypriots retain markers which have disappeared in the Near East.
Or perhaps is it Haber et al 2013?
This was significant for me because I've been saying for years now that Cyprus might've retained most of the pre-islamic Levant's genetic make-up.
Kind of what Sardinia is to Europe in a sense.

I mean, look at the picture emerging from genome-wide studies of Neolithic European samples... Population change is a reality, we've stumbled on a few surprises and I very much doubt continuity will ever regain the popularity it once enjoyed in academic circles (and that's coming from someone who speaks to archeologists on a daily basis).

No reason to believe that the Near East is any different, especially considering the data we have (take African admixture for instance, Moorjani et al. 2011 is very informative here)... I'm expecting even more surprises when we get our hands on Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean samples (as Angela said, the Iron Age Thracian shows that there were Ötzi-like people living in this area even during the Iron Age, that's a red flag if you ask me).

What's IBD?
You know they say that the shortest questions are the hardest to answer? :)
IBD = Identical By Descent [segment] (read about it, if you tested with 23&Me that's what enables you to find RF matches).
 
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.

Well I do have a Greek relative and a few Italian matches in my RF... But that's rather trivial compared to other matches I get (Iranian Jews, Bukharan Jews, etc).

So I basically agree with what you're saying here.

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.

Matrilineal descent was established during the Tanna'im's time, so it's a relatively recent law (my personal opinion is that it was favoured because of the fact that Near Eastern women rarely tend to intermarry, hence reducing chances of assimilation). But some Jewish groups still retained the original patrilineal system (Karaites, Juhurim, Yemenite Jews until recent times, etc).
I'm pretty sure Judeans mixed intensively with Hellenes, the problem though as you might guess is that uniparental lineages are very similar so it's hard to figure it out most of the time.
I think the coastal Levant was mostly J2a during the Bronze Age so this complicates things further... The only paternal markers I'd associate with Greek ancestry are E-V13 and J2b (which aren't all that common either).
That's why I think it was mostly men marrying foreign women, even Ezra the scribe complained about it at some point and it only makes sense given the fact that Jewishness was transmitted patrilineally back then.
Marriage prohibitions were mainly designed to keep the Jewish people alive, it really took grotesque proportions... My paternal great-grandparents were 1st cousins for instance (and I'll spare you the whole ordeal about arranged marriages, this was pretty much the rule for thousands of years).

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.

Indeed, it actually makes more sense if this Levantine component was more ancient because I'd expect mild IBD sharing if they really were descended from Phoenicians (who were basically the Judeans' civilized counterpart, pretty much the same people in a sense).
 
Aberdeen, my allergies are killing me right now, but they're not to the Khazar theory. :) I just don't think it's supported by either the preponderance of the genetic evidence or the historical evidence.

I've also said that I think there's certainly the possibility that there was some input from the Khazars, although as you point out, only the upper classes seem to have converted. I do agree that there were Jews in that area, and that they may have fed into the emerging "Ashkenazi" ethnicity, but there's very little concrete data about their numbers and movements that I've ever been able to find.

I think there's quite a bit of documentation for the French and Rhineland Jewish communities.

This article provides a timeline for the establishment of these communities:
http://www.geni.com/projects/Jews-of-the-French-German-Nexus-Alsace-and-Lorraine/8610

This is another article on the establishment of the Rhineland communities:
http://judaisme.sdv.fr/histoire/historiq/anglais/history.htm

The Rhineland massacres during the First Crusade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

The Crusades and the Jewish community:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/crusades.html

Massacres related to the plague:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/1348-jewsblackdeath.asp

Movement of some European Jews to Poland, where Yiddish, a dialect of German, is said by some to have first coalesced:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html

Elkaim attempted to refute this evidence, in my opinion unconvincingly.

Most of that information is about persecution of Jews during the Medieval period. There's some indication of small Jewish settlements in France and the Rhineland, but Jews don't seem to have been nearly as common in those areas as in Poland and Russia, at least not until the late Medieval period. And the fact that at least some of the Polish Jews spoke a dialect based partly on German certainly doesn't limit their origin point to somewhere within the boundaries of present day Germany. There were a lot of German speaking people in Eastern Europe until after WWII. I still think that most European Jews are descended from Jews who migrated from the Middle East north into Russia, then gradually moved west.
 

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