Jewish Genetics-A review

[Angela]

This is another Insight podcast.

It's good, although by its nature pretty general. Still, a good review for those not familiar with the subject.

As to genetics, as they point out, we know "Ashkenazi" Jews were in the Rhineland around 1000 AD. However, how did they get from the Near East to the Rhineland? Also, were they or were they not very similar to the Canaanites?

They maintain that if you plot them, they are between Mizrahi Jews/Syrian Christians (minorities before Arab migrations and slavery) and Southern Europeans, Italians maybe, plus a bit of either Northern European or Eastern European. (40-50% Middle Eastern, 10% Eastern European and 40-50% Southern European). That's the current consensus. When we get the ancient dna let's see if that's borne out.

Uniparental markers are also discussed. He's wrong, I think, about the R1a1. I've yet to be convinced it's Khazar.

One quibble: the "Berber" component in Sephardic Jews didn't necessarily come only from their return to North Africa after the expulsion from Spain. They may have also picked some up from their sojourn in North Africa before they arrived in Spain.

https://twitter.com/insight_podcast/status/981667929992450048

 

[CrazyDonkey]

The Rhineland was part of the Kingdom of the Franks, long before it was part of Germany.

There were Jews at Charlelemagne's court (died 814). His physician was a Jew. A Jew, named Isaac, was a member of a diplomatic embassy (likely as a dragoman, an interpreter or guide) that he sent to Harun al-Rashid (the fifth Abbasid Caliph). They had complete freedom in their commercial transactions.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4250-charlemagne

If they were of good repute at Charlelemagne's court, we can't assume they weren't at the courts of Pepin III ("The Short", his father), Charles Martel (his grandfather), or Pepin II ("The Great" or "The Fat", his great grandfather).

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite

 

[Tomenable]

How do we know that South European admixture in Jews is Italian and not Greek?

Inscriptions in Jewish catacombs in ancient Rome were nearly all written in Greek.

Check also this article:

https://www.theopavlidis.com/MidEast/part10.htm

 

[Alyan]

It can't be both?

 

[Angela]

^^We don't.

A lot of the speculation is based on the fact that we know there were many Jewish communities resident in Italy for a long time, whether or not they originated in the East and spoke Greek.


We also have evidence of a movement of some of those groups to the Rhineland at the appropriate time. This is just one example:
"The first records of Jews in Speyer appear in the 1070s. They were members of the renowned Kalonymos familyof Mainz, which had migrated a century before from Italy. Other Jews from Mainz had possibly also settled in Speyer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Speyer

Martin Richards et al claimed in 2013 that the mtDna of Ashkenazim best fits Italians.
"The result was very clear-cut, the authors say: As reported online today in Nature Communications, more than 80% of Ashkenazi mtDNAs had their origins thousands of years ago in Western Europe, during or before Biblical times—and in some cases even before farming came to that part of the continent some 7500 years ago. The closest matches were with mtDNAs from people who today live in and around Italy. The results imply that the Jews can trace their heritage to women who had lived in Europe at that time. Very few Ashkenazi mtDNAs could be traced to the Middle East.The results not only conflict with the Ostrer and Behar results, but also with widespread assumptions about Jewish identity. Jews have traditionally considered that the mother determines the ethnic identity of her children. If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/did-modern-jews-originate-italy

"But some scientists question these conclusions. “While it is clear that Ashkenazi maternal ancestry includes both Levantine [Near Eastern] and European origins—the assignment of several of the major Ashkenazi lineages to pre-historic European origin in the current study is incorrect in our view,” physician-geneticists Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Rambam Healthcare Campus in Israel, whose previous work indicated a Near Eastern origins to many Ashkenazi mitochondrial types, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist. They argue that the mitochondrial DNA data used in the new study did not represent the full spectrum of mitochondrial diversity."
https://www.the-scientist.com/?arti...21/title/Genetic-Roots-of-the-Ashkenazi-Jews/

"A 2014 study by Fernandez et al. found that Ashkenazi Jews display a frequency of haplogroup K which suggests an ancient Near Eastern origin, stating that this observation clearly contradicts the results of the study led by Richards which suggested a predominantly European origin for the Ashkenazi community's maternal lines. However, the authors of the 2014 study also state that definitively answering the question of whether this group was of Jewish origin rather than the result of a Neolithic migration to Europe would require the genotyping of the complete mtDNA in ancient Near Eastern populations.^[30]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews

That's why Khan said maybe Italy.

The problem with all of this is that IBD analysis doesn't confirm it.

The fact remains that the "European" ancestry had to come from somewhere, and the yDna is predominantly Middle Eastern.

I also don't understand the significance of the inscriptions in the Catacombs being in Greek. By that time most Christians were decidedly not Jews, but were drawn from lower class people and ex-slaves, many of whom assumed Greek names. American slave owners didn't give their slaves African names, they gave them American names, or Biblical names, and indeed, in some cases, names from Classical Antiquity.

 

[HistortyBuff2]

Thank you, Angela !! Very helpful !