^ Thanks for the link.
Interesting post from oreo cookie:
This right here is why people assume that Ashkenazim have Italian DNA. Because Sicilians and Ashkenazim on PCA plots, are both roughly halfway between North Italians and modern day Levantines, people say "well, Ashkenazim are Levantine on the male side, North Italian on the female side, and thus plot like Sicilians when you mix it all up." But Sicilians have very low IBD sharing with the Levant, which implies that West Asian input into Sicily occurred in the Bronze Age rather than from Phoenicians or anything more recent, and that the Sikels, Sicanians, and Elymians at the time of contact with Phoenicians had already been genetically shifted toward West Asia.
At this point, Ashkenazim would not have existed... they'd still be Israelites. My guess is that ancient Israelites were probably closer to Druze than to Lebanese Arabs or Palestinians, and thus we should look at Druze or Cypriots as a good proxy, which means that you'd need closer to 1/3 South European admixture, not 1/2, to explain European Jews' plotting today. They only land in Sicily because Sicilians have enough West Asian affinity that they drift away from the core European cluster, it's not due to any directly shared ancestry. The same would be true of Cretans, who also are very close to Ashkenazim autosomally.
IBD sharing, above all, reflects how recent the exchange took place. Sicilians DO have high IBD sharing with Maghrebi people, implying that the North African input into the population is more recent. I am unclear if Ashkenazim have the same.
Not that this is scientific, but I have seen a few Druze results on GEDmatch and compared to Lebanese Arabs, they shift toward Iberia, Sardinia, etc. and their overall closest population is Cyprus.