Sephardic Jewish influence on Mediterranean populations

Angela

Angela

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See:Miguel Martín Álvarez-Álvarez,1,* Neil Risch,2,3 Christopher R. Gignoux,4Scott Huntsman,5EladZiv,2,5 Laura Fejerman,2,5 Maria Esther Esteban,1Magdalena Gayà-Vidal,6Beatriz Sobrino,7Francesca Brisighelli,8Nourdin Harich,9 Fulvio Cruciani,10 Hassen Chaabani,11 ÁngelCarracedo,7,12,13 Pedro Moral,1Esteban González Burchard,2,5,14 Marc Via,15,16,# GeorgiosAthanasiadis17,*

"The Sephardim are a major Jewish ethnic division whose origins can be traced back to the IberianPeninsula. We used genome-wide SNP data to investigate the degree of Sephardic admixture inseven populations from the Iberian Peninsula and surrounding regions in the aftermath of theirreligious persecution starting in the late 14th century. To this end, we used Eastern Mediterranean(from South Italy, Greece and Israel) and North African (Tunisian and Moroccan) populations asproxies for the major ancestral components found in the target populations and carried out unlinkedandlinked-marker analyses on the available genetic data. We report evidence of Sephardic ancestryin some of our Iberian samples, as well as in North Italy and Tunisia. We find the Sephardicadmixture to be more recent relative to the Berber admixture following an out-of-Iberia geographicdispersal, suggesting Sephardic gene flow from Spain outwards. We also report some of thechallenges in assigning Sephardic ancestry to potentially admixed individuals due to the lack of aclear genetic signature."


https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/05/18/325779.full.pdf


I stopped reading at page ten because I was completely unconvinced. Are there shared alleles between Iberian groups, some North African groups, the southern French, Italians, and Cretans on the one hand and the Sephardic Jews on the other hand? Of course there are.

Does that mean that the shared genes are because of Sephardic Jewish intrusion into these other areas following their diaspora?

I don't see how you could possibly say that, or at least how you could know the percentages.

The similarities could go back to similar ancestral inputs into all these groups going back thousands of years. Plus, if some papers are correct and Ashkenazim are the result of Middle Eastern Jewish men marrying Italian women, a similar process could have gone on in Spain, and therefore the gene flow could be to some degree from Iberians into Jews.

They should have known this. If they didn't know it ahead of time, the hint should have come from the closer sharing they're seeing with the people of Crete. Now there was a huge influx of Sephardim specifically into Crete? Enough for those kinds of percentages?

Or, why didn't caution set in when they saw percentages in Berbers for "Sephardi" admixture which they acknowledge are way too high? No, they're thinking Phoenicians/Carthaginians might have had an input. You'd think this was written by anthrotards. What about the simple explanation which is that the Jews picked up Maghrebi ancestry from their stay in North Africa before they went to Iberia? That's probably where they get their SSA after all.

I also find it amusing that they acknowledge the strictures against intermarriage, but don't seem to apply it to the situation in Europe. I don't know why it didn't dawn on anyone that the whole reason that they left Iberia was because they didn't WANT to convert. So, they leave behind their homes, their landscapes, their businesses and money, go to a foreign land, all so as not to convert, and then to marry "gentiles" and admix, they convert???

I'd also love to know why they didn't include the Dutch, with their big Sephardi community.

Anyway, maybe they did address some of these things later in the paper. I just lost patience and stopped reading. Some of these groups are going to have to up their game.

Also, very surprised Razib Khan signed on to this, albeit only from the abstract. He should know better.
 
Sephardi and Ashkenazi were small human groups, made up of few people and only more recently had a population growth. So it is simply not possible that all the Iberians, all the Italians, all the southern French, who for a long time before were much larger human groups, may have Sephardic and Ashkenazi ancestry.

That some Iberian, Italian, French might have it, it is possible, but this is true for all the ethnic groups that have hosted Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities. So I really do not understand the relevance of studies like this.


Since when something lower than 2% can be defined as notably present?


Sephardic component was notably present in Tunisia (27.23%), but also in the Iberian Peninsula with the exception of the Basque Country (Galicia: 4.25%; Portugal: 2.39%; Andalusia: 2.36%; Catalonia: 1.32%), South France (1.56%), North Italy (1.70%) and South Italy (7.50%).
 
I think it should be the other way around-Mediterranean influences on Sephardic populations. They are from the same stock as ashkenazi so whatever admixture from a non id'd South Euro population ashkenazi received is what they received as well. Just my guess
 
binx said:
Sephardi and Ashkenazi were small human groups, made up of few people and only more recently had a population growth. So it is simply not possible that all the Iberians, all the Italians, all the southern French, who for a long time before were much larger human groups, may have Sephardic and Ashkenazi ancestry.

That some Iberian, Italian, French might have it, it is possible, but this is true for all the ethnic groups that have hosted Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities. So I really do not understand the relevance of studies like this.


Since when something lower than 2% can be defined as notably present?


Sephardic component was notably present in Tunisia (27.23%), but also in the Iberian Peninsula with the exception of the Basque Country (Galicia: 4.25%; Portugal: 2.39%; Andalusia: 2.36%; Catalonia: 1.32%), South France (1.56%), North Italy (1.70%) and South Italy (7.50%).
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Did they really "find' 27.23% in Tunisia, 7.50% in South Italy, whereas even Portugal and Spain have a lot less than this (and yes, despite the expulsion they should have more, because many Jews converted - conversos/New Christians - and they'd been living with the Iberians for a thousand years before the expulsion)? Those numbers alone should have cried to them "Caution, danger! Go back and think this through again!" LOL.
 
I understand that tracing Jewish admmixture isn't a simple task. Religious intolerance by Muslims and Christians have reduced Jewish numbers by a great magnitude.
There was this paper a while back (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2668061/), but the results seem way too high. Even the authors state "An additional factor that could lead to overestimation of Sephardic Jewish ancestry proportions is the effect of other influences on the Iberian Peninsula from eastern Mediterranean populations that might have imported lineages such as G, K∗, and J. These influences fall into two different time periods: the Neolithic era, beginning in 10 KYA, the demographic effects of which are a matter for heated debate;1 and the last three millennia, the time period of Greek and Phoenician colonization".
 
Angela said:
Or, why didn't caution set in when they saw percentages in Berbers for "Sephardi" admixture which they acknowledge are way too high? No, they're thinking Phoenicians/Carthaginians might have had an input. You'd think this was written by anthrotards. What about the simple explanation which is that the Jews picked up Maghrebi ancestry from their stay in North Africa before they went to Iberia? That's probably where they get their SSA after all.

I also find it amusing that they acknowledge the strictures against intermarriage, but don't seem to apply it to the situation in Europe. I don't know why it didn't dawn on anyone that the whole reason that they left Iberia was because they didn't WANT to convert. So, they leave behind their homes, their landscapes, their businesses and money, go to a foreign land, all so as not to convert, and then to marry "gentiles" and admix, they convert???

I'd also love to know why they didn't include the Dutch, with their big Sephardi community.

Anyway, maybe they did address some of these things later in the paper. I just lost patience and stopped reading. Some of these groups are going to have to up their game.

Also, very surprised Razib Khan signed on to this, albeit only from the abstract. He should know better.
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Despite the recent proliferation of studies on population genetics, only few studies have credible conclusions that will last over time.

Many current studies are done by PHD candidates and novice researchers who do not yet have stable employment contracts with the departments, and therefore some of them also collaborate with the industry. And they have few funds and autonomy.

As it has already happened in the human and social sciences, not all genetics papers can be put on the same level.
 
Pax Augusta said:
Despite the recent proliferation of studies on population genetics, only few studies have credible conclusions that will last over time.

Many current studies are done by PHD candidates and novice researchers who do not yet have stable employment contracts with the departments, and therefore some of them also collaborate with the industry. And they have few funds and autonomy.

As it has already happened in the human and social sciences, not all genetics papers can be put on the same level.
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Even people who should know better make these kinds of mistakes. Look at FTDNA finding 15% and more "Sephardi" in Palestinians and Jordanians. Not possible.
 
Angela said:
Even people who should know better make these kinds of mistakes. Look at FTDNA finding 15% and more "Sephardi" in Palestinians and Jordanians. Not possible.
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Exactly, even them, so let alone PHD candidates and novice researchers. Unfortunately we are moving to a phase where these "mistakes" will multiply, I fear.
 
Pax Augusta said:
Exactly, even them, so let alone PHD candidates and novice researchers. Unfortunately we are moving to a phase where these "mistakes" will multiply, I fear.
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That's why I don't have much hope for the upcoming paper on ancient Italian dna. The only people I would trust are the three big labs and they're not interested, it seems.
 
I just read the paper now. Rather late to the game on this one, and I have to state outright that the math in these studies is always way over my head. I'm strictly a B-team Eupedian who relies on the serious hobbyists to do the heavy-lifting. That said, I find it odd that the authors used "a sample of Israelis with all four of their grandparents of Turkish Sephardic descent as a proxy for a Sephardic-descended population." Is it any surprise, then, that the Sephardics in this study cluster most closely with South Italian and Cretan populations? By 1660, Sephardics had already merged with Romaniote & Italian Jewish populations in the Ottoman East. So of course the Sephardics in this study cluster with South Italians and Cretans!

If you wanted a proxy for Spanish Jews circa 1500, the best bet would be modern-day Sephardics in Amsterdam (assuming you could find any with clear ancestry untouched by Ashkenazi blood). These would surely cluster with Iberian populations.

Regardless, I find the entire question of Sephardic & Italian Jews to be fascinating, and I expect there was plenty of gene flow in both directions with Andalusians, Majorcans, South Italians, both at the origin and at the dissolution of these communities (i.e., the Conversos and Neofiiti dissolve back into the wider population).

This sentence from the paper is for me particularly intriguing: "This putatively Sephardic component {{a set of 156,733 SNPs}}was notably present in Tunisia (27.23%), but also in the Iberian Peninsula with the exception of the Basque Country (Galicia: 4.25%; Portugal: 2.39%; Andalusia: 2.36%; Catalonia: 1.32%), South France (1.56%), North Italy (1.70%) and South Italy (7.50%)." Why would this component be so low in Andalusia if it's a Sephardic marker?? Nor does it seem to square with the later finding in the paper that "the highest Sephardic admixture appeared in Andalusia (12.3%; 95%CI: 11.1-13.5%), followed by Galicia and Portugal (11.3%, 95%CI: 10.6-12.1%). And strangely, the authors don't seem to have used South Italy or Crete in this second analysis.

 
Ygorcs said:
Did they really "find' 27.23% in Tunisia, 7.50% in South Italy, whereas even Portugal and Spain have a lot less than this (and yes, despite the expulsion they should have more, because many Jews converted - conversos/New Christians - and they'd been living with the Iberians for a thousand years before the expulsion)? Those numbers alone should have cried to them "Caution, danger! Go back and think this through again!" LOL.
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This suggests to me a Carthaginian source, but even on this theory it is incongruous that the "putative" component would be so much higher in South Italy than Andalusia
 
Malaparte said:
I just read the paper now. Rather late to the game on this one, and I have to state outright that the math in these studies is always way over my head. I'm strictly a B-team Eupedian who relies on the serious hobbyists to do the heavy-lifting. That said, I find it odd that the authors used "a sample of Israelis with all four of their grandparents of Turkish Sephardic descent as a proxy for a Sephardic-descended population." Is it any surprise, then, that the Sephardics in this study cluster most closely with South Italian and Cretan populations? By 1660, Sephardics had already merged with Romaniote & Italian Jewish populations in the Ottoman East. So of course the Sephardics in this study cluster with South Italians and Cretans!

If you wanted a proxy for Spanish Jews circa 1500, the best bet would be modern-day Sephardics in Amsterdam (assuming you could find any with clear ancestry untouched by Ashkenazi blood). These would surely cluster with Iberian populations.

Regardless, I find the entire question of Sephardic & Italian Jews to be fascinating, and I expect there was plenty of gene flow in both directions with Andalusians, Majorcans, South Italians, both at the origin and at the dissolution of these communities (i.e., the Conversos and Neofiiti dissolve back into the wider population).

This sentence from the paper is for me particularly intriguing: "This putatively Sephardic component {{a set of 156,733 SNPs}}was notably present in Tunisia (27.23%), but also in the Iberian Peninsula with the exception of the Basque Country (Galicia: 4.25%; Portugal: 2.39%; Andalusia: 2.36%; Catalonia: 1.32%), South France (1.56%), North Italy (1.70%) and South Italy (7.50%)." Why would this component be so low in Andalusia if it's a Sephardic marker?? Nor does it seem to square with the later finding in the paper that "the highest Sephardic admixture appeared in Andalusia (12.3%; 95%CI: 11.1-13.5%), followed by Galicia and Portugal (11.3%, 95%CI: 10.6-12.1%). And strangely, the authors don't seem to have used South Italy or Crete in this second analysis.
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You remember that the Spanish expelled a large population of Sephardic Jews from Spain, particularly South Spain. That you can still detect Sephardic Jew input in Spain is a testament to some of the Jews converting to Catholicism under pressure.
Turkish Jews are probably pretty representative of Sephardic Jews since a lot of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in the Ottoman Empire particularly Greece and Turkey. The Jews that settled in Greece, particularly in Thessaloniki were almost wiped out by the Germans.
 
I can't believe that four years later there are still people who think similar amounts of ancient ancestral components equal descent.

There is, to my knowledge, no evidence of significant gene flow from Sephardic or Italian Jews into the larger Italian population. Might it have occurred in a particular family, or a particular village? Yes, it might, but inter-marriage with the surrounding people would have massively diluted it, with only perhaps some uniparental signatures remaining. Region wide or country wide significant autosomal flow from Jews to Italians? There is absolutely no evidence to support it. Supposition is not evidence.

I have the documentary evidence from my own area which supports the pattern throughout Europe. When restrictions against Jews became harsh, they left for areas which were more tolerant. They didn't convert in mass numbers, or if they did, they "became Jews again" as soon as they left, or, as in the case of the Belmonte Jews, they formed a sub-group suspected of being Jews, but who were tolerated because they followed the local religious norms publicly. As a result, there was very limited inter-marriage.

One can see another example in the Mallorca Jews.
"[FONT=&quot]Conversos in Majorca were given the name of [/FONT]chuetas[FONT=&quot], a name which persisted into the mid-20[/FONT]th[FONT=&quot] century. They continued to live in separate quarters and all social and public advancement were denied to them. They formed a closed society in which the overwhelming majority secretly observed Jewish rites, for which they were often brought to trial.[/FONT][FONT=&quot]It was not until the end of the 18th century that the government attempted to alleviate their condition and, in 1782, the Conversos were permitted to settle in any part of the town or the island; at the same time, it became an offense to molest them by word ordeed. After the French conquest of the island, the Inquisition was abolished in 1808 and the Conversos were granted further concessions. However, when Ferdinand IV returned to power (1814), the Inquisition was reintroduced and its final abolition barely improved the lot of the Conversos.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]In 1856, riots broke out against them once more when several prominent members of the community sought to join the exclusive Circulo Balear club. There was a renewed debate on the place of the chuetas within the island’s society toward the close of the 19th century with the publication of the work of the priest José Taronji in 1877, condemning their social ostracism and explicitly blaming the clergy for this. Also influential was the work of Vicente Blasco Ibañez, Los muertos mandan (1916). Jews began to take an interest in their condition. During the Republican regime in Spain (1931), a work by Garao, La Fe Triunfante, was republished. Written a century before it sought to stress the Jewishness of the chuetas as grounds for their total rejection.[/FONT]

People in the past, buttressed by prejudice, had long memories for "suspect" ancestry. You couldn't shake it off very easily.

When someone can provide data from an academic paper where the math and the assumptions aren't crap I would of course revisit it.
 
bigsnake49 said:
You remember that the Spanish expelled a large population of Sephardic Jews from Spain, particularly South Spain. That you can still detect Sephardic Jew input in Spain is a testament to some of the Jews converting to Catholicism under pressure.
Turkish Jews are probably pretty representative of Sephardic Jews since a lot of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in the Ottoman Empire particularly Greece and Turkey. The Jews that settled in Greece, particularly in Thessaloniki were almost wiped out by the Germans.
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yes in my parllell branch under e-y62418
https://www.yfull.com/tree/E-FT144090/
saltiel family from greece :sadcry:


p.s
i wish there was more genetic research on sefhardi jews
autosomal / uniparental markers
and not only aschenazi jews which take all the focus :unsure:
 
Angela said:
I can't believe that four years later there are still people who think similar amounts of ancient ancestral components equal descent.
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But this begs the question of the ancestral component found in 7.5% of South Italians and 27% of Tunisians, and in lower percentages of other Western Mediterranean. Let's grant that it doesn't point to descent from Sephardics. What does it point to then?

Angela said:
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence of significant gene flow from Sephardic or Italian Jews into the larger Italian population. Might it have occurred in a particular family, or a particular village? Yes, it might, but inter-marriage with the surrounding people would have massively diluted it, with only perhaps some uniparental signatures remaining. Region wide or country wide significant autosomal flow from Jews to Italians? There is absolutely no evidence to support it. Supposition is not evidence.
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I mentioned the historian Vincenzo Villella, who penned Giudecche di Calabria, on the "Razib Khan: Origin of Ashkenazi" thread. I have not read the book (and do not read Italian), but Villella has reportedly claimed that upward of 40% of Calabrians were Jewish circa 1500. This strikes me as rather too high, but I'm not expert. I have it in my head that Jews constituted maybe 5 to 10% of the pre-Expulsion population of Spain?

I also gave the example of Parghelia, which was basically a Neofiti settlement. Parghelia is close to where my ancestors lived, but as a coastal town its inhabitants may not have had much marital exchange with the farming villages of the Poro plateau. And yet over four-hundred years, gene flow surely happened in both directions, up to the farms, down to the coast


After 1541 the old Calabrian Giudecche depopulated, but not all the Jews left the region, as some communities spread to the interior: those of Nicastro found refuge in the newly settled Albanian villages of Zangarona, Vena di Maida, Amato and Gizzeria; some families of Amantea found hospitality in Martirano and in the Salso di Conflenti valley.
The Jews who remained in Calabria, confused between the local Albanian and Grecanic population, continued to exercise their ancient trades, but no longer usury: they became gunsmiths, doctors, apothecaries, stonecutters, grinders of millstones and oil mills, traders , tanners, varrilari , dyers, basket weavers, combed, Seggiari , tinkers , craftsmen of wood and wrought iron, saddlers; tried for some time to maintain their religious identity and to hand down the cult in secret, since, since 1553, the papal bull of Julius III imposed the destruction of the Talmùd and prohibited its reading and possession due to " impiety of the work ".Many converted and were called marrani ( pigs) or conversi, rather than anusim , ie " forced ".
Recently the Calabrian historian Vincenzo Villella has prepared a long list of surnames of Jewish derivation: from Aiello to Mascaro, to Ventura, to Di Lieto, to Ferraiolo, to Scalise, without counting the classic ones of Abraham, Adamo, Anania, Davide , Elijah, Jacob, Simon, Zacharias.

Much of the question turns, in my mind, on what percentages of the pre-Expulsion populations of Southern Italy and Spain were Jewish? The higher the percentage, the more likely it is that there was signficant admixture from Conversos and Neofiti.

And maybe most of the Jews did manage to leave after several generations. It boggles the mind that during the same era 55,000 Albanians moved in the opposite direction
 
kingjohn said:
yes in my parllell branch under e-y62418
https://www.yfull.com/tree/E-FT144090/
saltiel family from greece :sadcry:


p.s
i wish there was more genetic research on sefhardi jews
autosomal / uniparental markers
and not only aschenazi jews which take all the focus :unsure:
Click to expand...

I went to school with some Saltiels in Thessaloniki Also Benroubi, Assael, Soustiel. There is a Saltiel family private group on Facebook.
 
bigsnake49 said:
I went to school with some Saltiels in Thessaloniki Also Benroubi, Assael, Soustiel. There is a Saltiel family private group on Facebook.
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yes
afcorse there are others families with the surname saltiel from greece
who belonged to other haplogroups like j1 and others etc.....
 
Pax Augusta said:
Unreliable article based on the very unreliable American Rabbi Barbara Aiello's claims.

What Barbara Aiello does is called proselytism, and I knew it was forbidden in the Jewish religion.
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Yes, she strikes me as rather "opportunistic" in her manner and approach. However, the historian Villella seems a more substantial figure. This is his biography page == http://www.lameziastorica.it/bio.html


And I think there was quite a bit of Jewish proselytism during Hellenistic and Roman times, extending unevenly down to Medieval times
 
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