Ashkenazi Jews

[The Khagan]

Ashkenazi Jews are mostly a mixture of Near Eastern and European people genetically, with varying dominances in individuals, families and regions.

Genetically and racially they are Europid, but not European, at least not in their vast majority and genetically.

Culturally and by religion, they are no Europeans neither, they are just here for a longer period of time and, like racially and genetically, in some regards closer than lets say some other Near Easterners. Their religion and traditional language is foreign in any case too.

Still they are no real Europeans by any meaningful standard and most of them dont behave like being ones and acting in a common interest, which is probably the worst aspect.

The Khazar story is nonsense, heavy Mongoloid influence is not present in most of the Ashkenazi Jews.

Problem, Ashkenazi traditional language is Yiddish, a Germanic language. They've been in Europe a LONG time, their ethnogenesis as a people was fully realized within Europe. I'd say they're European, but saying they're one or the other is an extreme oversimplification of the complex history and ethnic affiliations of the Ashkenazim...

but for the most part, I'd say yes, they are.

Also, the Khazar theory is just a speculation and somewhat sound, just because they don't have mongoliform influence doesn't mean some Ashkenazim have some genetics with the Khazars. Plus, speculating the phenotype of the Khazars, and indeed all middle age/migration period Turkic and Central Asian nomads is a tough call, seeing as they all heavily mixed with surrounding populations.

To be European is to be Christian for starters. So no, Ashkenazi Jews are not European.

Last time I checked, Christianity and Judaism are from the same place, and are quite similar. In fact, half of your book is THEIR doctrine.

[Agrippa]

To begin with, it doesnt matter how long a group lived here already, its all about the common traits of Europeans. If Neandertals would still exist, they would be no Europeans neither, nor does it interest me whether the Kalmyks are here 5 or 100 generations, they are no Europeans. That doesnt have to mean I hate them or anything like that, they just dont belong to the rest of the European people.

Problem, Ashkenazi traditional language is Yiddish, a Germanic language. They've been in Europe a LONG time, their ethnogenesis as a people was fully realized within Europe.

The Jewish ethnogenesis if bound to their religion, without the religion they wouldnt exist and that didnt happen in Europe, but in the Near East. And even if it happened in Europe, too many aspects are foreign.

Also, the Khazar theory is just a speculation and somewhat sound, just because they don't have mongoliform influence doesn't mean some Ashkenazim have some genetics with the Khazars. Plus, speculating the phenotype of the Khazars, and indeed all middle age/migration period Turkic and Central Asian nomads is a tough call, seeing as they all heavily mixed with surrounding populations.

Point is, some people dont just say some Ashkenazis here and there might have some Khazar influence, but that modern day Ashkenazis are completely descendent of those Judaised Khazar people and thats just wrong.

Genetically Jews are Near Easterners mixed with various European people, mostly those where they reside, be it because of conversion, sexual intercourse, rape, etc.

Last time I checked, Christianity and Judaism are from the same place, and are quite similar. In fact, half of your book is THEIR doctrine.

Which is a problem. The old testament in particular is mainly Jewish history mixed with myths and religious ideas.

Thats why some Christians resided solely or at least mostly on the New Testament. Christianity in Europe is, since Paulus, "Europeanised Judaism", Judaism is Judaism, its not Europeanised, its not European.

An idea can be altered, changed to fit into whats needed in a specific region. Thats how cultural transfer usually worked and it happened with Christianity too.

Some new Christian sects, especially Calvinist ones and those in the English speaking world, even more so the USA, are "New Christians" which ruined a lot of the typically European character and erraded it, made it a weaker religion again - with some positive and many negative consequences.

But thats another story...

[Wulfhere]

Judaism had already been heavily influenced by European culture for centuries even before the time of Jesus, since Judea had been part of the Greek Hellenistic world since the time of Alexander the Great. Judea in Roman times was full of Greek-speakers, and much in Jewish thought had by that time synchretised with Greek thought. Christianity was the ultimate expression of this, since from the beginning it contained Pagan Mystery School elements, such as the Communion feast.

[Osweo]

Judaism had already been heavily influenced by European culture for centuries even before the time of Jesus, since Judea had been part of the Greek Hellenistic world since the time of Alexander the Great. Judea in Roman times was full of Greek-speakers, and much in Jewish thought had by that time synchretised with Greek thought. Christianity was the ultimate expression of this, since from the beginning it contained Pagan Mystery School elements, such as the Communion feast.

The Hellenised Hebrews of the eastern Med are probably not the ancestors of most of the current day Jews. As you've indicated, Christianity was the logical outcome of their Hellenisation, so they ended up part of the Christian communities they lived in, in Egypt, Anatolia and Syria. The greater part have now islamised, I suppose. Perhaps the Sephardim owe something to them, too.

The Ashkenazim are a peculiar lot, and their Talmud is from Babylon - just beyond the reach of the main Hellenising influence. There's a lot of European blood in them, but a lot of Other too. You could say the same for the culture on the whole, too.

The Khazar thing is utter bollocks. I've had to argue it too many times to have the patience to do it again, though.

[Agrippa]

The Hellenised Hebrews of the eastern Med are probably not the ancestors of most of the current day Jews. As you've indicated, Christianity was the logical outcome of their Hellenisation, so they ended up part of the Christian communities they lived in, in Egypt, Anatolia and Syria. The greater part have now islamised, I suppose. Perhaps the Sephardim owe something to them, too.

Exactly, the "traditional" and "religious" Jews fought the Hellenised people of their region and had little respect for them. Of course, the Jewish tradition was influenced, but not to the core nor sufficiently and the core which survived is older and more unique than the later influences.

[Óttar]

The Khazar thing is utter bollocks.

Utter bollocks? Some Khazars especially among the upper classes, converted to Judaism in an effort to maintain neutrality with their Christian and Muslim neighbors (a fact that, I might add, other Jews find absolutely hysterical )

I wouldn't doubt that at least some Khazars married into other Jewish populations, maybe in eastern Europe.

[Ibericus]

Sorry my friend, but Ashkenazi Jews are genetically closer to middle-easterns than to Europeans. They are not genetically european , as you can see in all these different studies :


All other haplotypes had d values below 20% (data not shown). Themvalues based on haplotypes Med and 1L were '13%610%, suggesting a rather small European contribution to the Ashkenazi paternal gene pool.

http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/HammerPNAS_2000.pdf

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While the above studies have examined global population structure, more recent studies have focused on uncovering finer structure within populations of European ancestry themselves. For example [4] studied the ancestry of European Americans using 583 SNP markers. The authors determined that the major feature of European American variation is clinal along a Southeast-Northwest axis, a finding which confirms the above-mentioned work of Cavalli-Sforza [1] based on classical markers.



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"Despite the Ashkenazi Jews' long residence in Europe, their Y signature has remained distinct from that of non-Jewish Europeans.

On the assumption that there have been 80 generations since the founding of the Ashkenazi population, Dr. Hammer and colleagues calculate that the rate of genetic admixture with Europeans has been less than half a percent per generation.

Jewish law tracing back almost 2,000 years states that Jewish affiliation is determined by maternal ancestry, so the Y chromosome study addresses the question of how much non-Jewish men may have contributed to Jewish genetic diversity.

Dr. Hammer was surprised to find how little that contribution was."
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In 2001, Nebel et al compared three Jewish and three non-Jewish groups from the Middle East: Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Kurdish Jews from Israel; Muslim Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area; Bedouin from the Negev; and Kurds. They concluded that Sephardim and Kurdish Jews were genetically indistinguishable, but that both were slightly significantly[clarification needed] different from Ashkenazim (who were most closely related to the Kurds). Nebel et al had earlier (2000) found a large genetic relationship between Jews and Palestinians, but in this study found an even higher relationship of Jews with Iraqi Kurds. They conclude that the common genetic background shared by Jews and other Middle Eastern groups predates the division of Middle Easterners into different ethnic
groups[5].

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Jews intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations (Kopelman et al. 2009)

Fairly interesting that at K=5 a Palestinian cluster emerges, and Jews show mixed affiliations with this cluster and the European one. This is also consistent with the idea that different Jewish populations have a Levantine element in common, and have also undergone admixture with European (or more properly European-like) populations.

A weakness of the study is that it does not look into Gentile populations in the region between Italy and Palestine.

The main issue in Jewish origins is no longer whether they are of Middle Eastern or European (or European-like) origin. It seems pretty clear by now that they are both. The main issue is to determine the origin of their Middle Eastern and European components. This study does offer some new insight by showing the affinity between Jews and Palestinians at K=5 (purple); however the origin of the European (or European-like) component remains elusive.

Abstract

Background: Genetic studies have often produced conflicting results on the
question of whether distant Jewish populations in different geographic locations
share greater genetic similarity to each other or instead, to nearby non-Jewish
populations. We perform a genome-wide population-genetic study of Jewish
populations, analyzing 678 autosomal microsatellite loci in 78 individuals from four
Jewish groups together with similar data on 321 individuals from 12 non-Jewish
Middle Eastern and European populations.

Results: We find that the Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity
to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure.
Further, Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling
place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle
Eastern and European populations.

Conclusion: These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely
share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have
undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European
descent.



http://www.biomedcentral.com/content...2156-10-80.pdf
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A study of haplotypes of the Y chromosome, published in 2000, addressed the paternal origins of Ashkenazi Jews. Hammer et al.[17] found that the Y chromosome of some Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews contained mutations that are also common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population. This suggested that the male ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East. The proportion of male genetic admixture in Ashkenazi Jews amounts to less than 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, with "relatively minor contribution of European Y chromosomes to the Ashkenazim," and a total admixture estimate "very similar to Motulsky's average estimate of 12.5%." This supported the finding that "Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors."

Hammer, M. F.; A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer, and B. Bonné-Tamir (May 9 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97: 6769. doi:10.1073/pnas.100115997. PMID 10801975

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http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/HammerPNAS_2000.pdf

Genetic and Geographic Distances Among Populations. The ‘‘among
populations’’ variance component (FST) for the Ashkenazi,
Roman, North African, Near Eastern, Kurdish, and Yemenite
Jews (the lowestFST value of the five population groups analyzed
in Table 2) indicated that these Jewish populations were not
significantly different from one another. A series of pairwise
differentiation tests in which 13 of 15 Jewish population pairs
were not statistically different confirmed this result (data not
shown). Furthermore, the mean Jewish interpopulation Chord
(42) distance value was lower than that for any other population
group (data not shown). It is of particular interest that the level
of divergence among Jewish populations was low despite their
high degree of geographic dispersion. The mean geographic
distance among these six Jewish populations was '3,000 km.
This value was greater than the mean geographic distances of the
Middle Eastern ('600 km) and European ('1,700 km) groups
and was comparable to that for the North African group ('2,900
km). In fact, these Jewish populations had the lowest ratio of
genetic-to-geographic distance of all groups in this study.
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To address this, we considered a random sample of 611 unrelated self-described Caucasian subjects mostly residing in America who specifically reported whether they had Jewish ancestry, and if so, how many grandparents were 'Jewish'. All individuals were genotyped for approximately 550,000 polymorphic markers and we applied a principal-component-based method to describe the population genetic structure [8] of the sample. Out of the 611 subjects, 507 reported no Jewish ancestry, 55 reported 4 Jewish grandparents, 4 reported 3 Jewish grandparents, 37 reported 2 Jewish grandparents and 8 reported 1 Jewish grandparent. Of these, 23 reported that they were Ashkenazim, one reported four Sephardic grandparents, two reported three Ashkenazi and one Sephardic grandparent, and two reported two Sephardic grandparents. A further 62 provided European or Russian country-of-origin information for at least one grandparent and 14 were able to give no more information than 'European-American'.

Results

Our first test was to assess how accurately individuals with full Jewish ancestry (all four grandparents) could be distinguished from those with no Jewish ancestry using the score on the first principal component axis (PC1). We found that the individuals with full Jewish ancestry formed a clearly distinct cluster from those individuals with no Jewish ancestry (Figure 1). Strikingly, if we look only at the position on the first principal component, in this dataset, every single individual with self-reported full Jewish ancestry has a higher score than any individual with no Jewish ancestry



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[Wulfhere]

Utter bollocks? Some Khazars especially among the upper classes, converted to Judaism in an effort to maintain neutrality with their Christian and Muslim neighbors (a fact that, I might add, other Jews find absolutely hysterical )

I wouldn't doubt that at least some Khazars married into other Jewish populations, maybe in eastern Europe.

It's odd, this Khazar theory, because it has been propagated by Jewish writers themselves (such as Arthur Koestler). But these were in the days before DNA tests, which have indeed proven it to be utter bollocks. By utter bollocks, I don't mean that there is no Khazar blood in the Ashkenazi population - simply that Khazar blood does not predominate, and, in fact, is so limited as to not show up in DNA tests. There is far more European blood in the population.

[Pallantides]

Jews and people with Jewish ancestry at 23andMe marked with red.

[Ibericus]

Jews and people with Jewish ancestry at 23andMe marked with red.

That's the Jews who cluster with europeans, but most of them cluster with middle-easterns :

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content...2156-10-80.pdf

Another one :

AJA = Ashkenzai Jewish American



And another: