Kazimiera
05-26-2014, 03:38 PM
Redheaded Italians – where do they come from?
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead4.jpg?w=960&h=603
The Jewish myth
For many centuries it was believed that red hair in Mediterranean countries came from Jewish ancestors. Although red hair is also fairly common amongst the Ashkenazi Jewish populations, possibly because of the influx of European DNA over a period of centuries, we have to dismiss this explanation as a whole. In European culture, prior to the 20th century, red hair was often seen as a stereotypically Jewish trait: during the Spanish Inquisition, all those with red hair were identified as Jewish. In Italy, red hair was associated with Italian Jews, and Judas was traditionally depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art. Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair. The stereotype that red hair is Jewish remains in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia. But stereotypes and science have little in common.
Besides, early Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting The Birth of Venus (1486) depicts the mythological goddess Venus as a redhead. Sandro Botticelli would never have done this if red hair was associated with Jewishness. The Pope would have killed him. Don’t forget, due to the opinion of the Catholic Church, it was illegal to marry a redhead in parts of Italy until the 18th century.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead1.jpg?w=960&h=1302
So where does red hair in Italian people come from?
A DNA study has concluded that some Neanderthals also had red hair, although the mutation responsible for this differs from that which causes red hair in modern humans. Thus this doesn’t take us any further.
The Roman historian Tacitus brings us closer to the truth. He commented on the “red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia”, which he connected with some red haired Gaulish (Celtic) tribes.
In fact, red hair has long been associated with Celtic people. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Celts as redheads. It is undeniable too that the highest frequencies are always observed in Celtic areas, especially in those that remained Celtic-speaking to this day (Scotland and Ireland) or until recently. We won’t go into the question if red hair originated with the Celtic people.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead3.jpg?w=960&h=722
The history of the Celts in Italy
Coming from the Central European Danube area, the Italic branch of the Celts crossed the Alps around 600 BC, led by Bellovesus, and settled across most of the Italian peninsula, but especially in Central Italy (Umbrians, Latins, Oscans). They inhabited the territory between Milan and Cremona, identifying the local inhabitants of their own time, the Insubres, with these immigrating Gauls. Tarquinius Priscus was reigning in Rome at the time. According to Italian scholars, it is incorrect to think the question of the Celtic presence in Northern Italy in terms of invasions. It is increasingly evident that the presence of Celts in northern Italy dates prior to the waves of invaders described in classical sources, and that subalpine Italy was involved “in its very own primary process of the ethno-linguistic definition of the Celtic nation” (Pallottino).
It is likely that the original Italics had just as much red hair as the Celts and Germans, but lost them progressively as they intermarried with their dark-haired neighbours, like the Etruscans. The subsequent Gaulish Celtic settlements in northern Italy increased the rufosity in areas that had priorly been non-Indo-European (Ligurian, Etruscan, Rhaetic) and therefore dark-haired.
These Celts in northern Italy were called the Golaseccans and Cisalpine Gauls. The first recorded use of the word Celts to refer to an ethnic group was by Hecataeus of Miletus, the Greek geographer, in 517 BC, when writing about a people living near “Massilia” (Marseille). According to the testimony of Julius Caesar and Strabo, the Latin name Celtus was borrowed from a native Celtic tribal name. The Romans kept redheaded slaves, who due to their novelty value held a higher price.
Sites characteristic of Golasecca culture have been identified in western Lombardy, eastern Piedmont, the Canton Ticino and Val Mesolcina, in a territory stretching north of the Po River to sub-alpine zones, between the course of the Serio to the east and the Sesia to the west. The site of Golasecca, where the Ticino exits from Lake Maggiore, flourished for particularly favorable geographical circumstances as it was particularly suitable for long-distance exchanges, in which Golaseccans acted as intermediaries between Etruscans and the Halstatt culture of Austria, supported on the all-important trade in salt.
Cisalpine Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina), also called Gallia Citerior or Gallia Togata, was a Roman province until 41 BC, when it was merged into Roman Italy. It was that part of Gallia, the land of the Gauls, which lay south and east of the Alps (the “near side”, from the perspective of the Romans), as opposed to Gallia Transalpina (Gaul “across the Alps”). Its inhabitants were primarily Celtic since the expulsion of the Etruscans.
The province was bounded on the north and west by the Alps, in the south as far as Placentia by the river Po, and then by the Apennines and the river Rubicon, and in the east by the Adriatic Sea. In 49 BC all inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul received Roman citizenship, and eventually the province was divided among four of the eleven regiones of Italy: Regio VIII Gallia Cispadana, Regio IX Liguria, Regio X Venetia et Histria and Regio XI Gallia Transpadana. It corresponds roughly to the current Northern Italy.
In the first millennium B.C., Cisalpine Gaul was inhabited chiefly by four peoples: the Veneti and Ligurians in Transpadana, the Etruscans (in Emilia), and the Celts, who had conquered the area from the Etruscans and Raetians. These last may have been an Illyrian or Celtic tribe, or Etruscans, which is more likely in view of their linguistic relationship.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead5.jpg?w=960&h=720
The end of the Celts in Italy
The Roman army was routed in the battle of Alesia, and Rome was sacked in 390 BC by the Senones. The defeat of the combined Samnite, Celtic and Etruscan alliance by the Romans in the Third Samnite War ending in 290 B.C. sounded the beginning of the end of the Celtic domination in mainland Europe. At the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, a large Celtic army was trapped between two Roman forces and crushed. However, it was not until 192 BC that the Roman armies conquered the last remaining independent Celtic kingdoms in Italy. The conquest of Transalpine Gaul began around 125-121 BC, with the occupation of the entire Mediterranean area between the Ligurian Alps and the Pyrenees, formed later in the province of Narbonne Gaul. Like all the Celts, the Gauls were subdivided into numerous tribes, which only rarely managed to unite to face a common enemy, as when, in 52 BC, many tribes led by Vercingetorix rebelled against Caesar ‘s conquest of Gaul. The northern Gaul came under the rule of Rome as a result of campaigning by Caesar between 58 and 50 BC.
Thanks largely to the testimony given by Caesar in his De Bello Gallico, the Gallic civilization is by far the most known among those developed by the Celts in ancient times, even if the observations of the Roman statesman are likely to be extensible – at least in a general way – to all the Celts. Caesar describes the Gallic society as living in family groups and divided into three classes: the producers, consisting of farmers provided with formal rights, but politically subservient to the ruling classes; the warriors, holders of political rights, who were entrusted with the exercise of military functions; and the class of the druids, priests, judges and guardians of culture, traditions and collective identity of a people fragmented into numerous tribes.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead2.jpg?w=960&h=647
The strongest survived
Nowadays red hair is about as common in northern and in central Italy. Mediterranean people have considerably darker pigmentations (higher eumelanin), especially as far as hair is considered, giving the red hair alleles little opportunity to express themselves. The reddish tinge is always concealed by black hair, and rarely visible in dark brown hair. Rufosity being recessive, it can easily stay hidden if the alleles are too dispersed in the gene pool, and that the chances of both parents carrying an allele becomes too low. Furthermore, natural selection also progressively pruned red hair from the Mediterranean populations, because the higher amount of sunlight and strong UV rays in the region was more likely to cause potentially fatal melanoma in fair-skinned redheads.
And, before we forget: red hair is beautiful!
(My first Italian girlfriend, the mother of my second daughter, was a redhead too, and for many years I wondered where it came from, as she was the only redhead in the family.)
Source: http://jacksitaly.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/redheaded-italians-where-do-they-come-from/
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead4.jpg?w=960&h=603
The Jewish myth
For many centuries it was believed that red hair in Mediterranean countries came from Jewish ancestors. Although red hair is also fairly common amongst the Ashkenazi Jewish populations, possibly because of the influx of European DNA over a period of centuries, we have to dismiss this explanation as a whole. In European culture, prior to the 20th century, red hair was often seen as a stereotypically Jewish trait: during the Spanish Inquisition, all those with red hair were identified as Jewish. In Italy, red hair was associated with Italian Jews, and Judas was traditionally depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art. Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair. The stereotype that red hair is Jewish remains in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia. But stereotypes and science have little in common.
Besides, early Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting The Birth of Venus (1486) depicts the mythological goddess Venus as a redhead. Sandro Botticelli would never have done this if red hair was associated with Jewishness. The Pope would have killed him. Don’t forget, due to the opinion of the Catholic Church, it was illegal to marry a redhead in parts of Italy until the 18th century.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead1.jpg?w=960&h=1302
So where does red hair in Italian people come from?
A DNA study has concluded that some Neanderthals also had red hair, although the mutation responsible for this differs from that which causes red hair in modern humans. Thus this doesn’t take us any further.
The Roman historian Tacitus brings us closer to the truth. He commented on the “red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia”, which he connected with some red haired Gaulish (Celtic) tribes.
In fact, red hair has long been associated with Celtic people. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Celts as redheads. It is undeniable too that the highest frequencies are always observed in Celtic areas, especially in those that remained Celtic-speaking to this day (Scotland and Ireland) or until recently. We won’t go into the question if red hair originated with the Celtic people.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead3.jpg?w=960&h=722
The history of the Celts in Italy
Coming from the Central European Danube area, the Italic branch of the Celts crossed the Alps around 600 BC, led by Bellovesus, and settled across most of the Italian peninsula, but especially in Central Italy (Umbrians, Latins, Oscans). They inhabited the territory between Milan and Cremona, identifying the local inhabitants of their own time, the Insubres, with these immigrating Gauls. Tarquinius Priscus was reigning in Rome at the time. According to Italian scholars, it is incorrect to think the question of the Celtic presence in Northern Italy in terms of invasions. It is increasingly evident that the presence of Celts in northern Italy dates prior to the waves of invaders described in classical sources, and that subalpine Italy was involved “in its very own primary process of the ethno-linguistic definition of the Celtic nation” (Pallottino).
It is likely that the original Italics had just as much red hair as the Celts and Germans, but lost them progressively as they intermarried with their dark-haired neighbours, like the Etruscans. The subsequent Gaulish Celtic settlements in northern Italy increased the rufosity in areas that had priorly been non-Indo-European (Ligurian, Etruscan, Rhaetic) and therefore dark-haired.
These Celts in northern Italy were called the Golaseccans and Cisalpine Gauls. The first recorded use of the word Celts to refer to an ethnic group was by Hecataeus of Miletus, the Greek geographer, in 517 BC, when writing about a people living near “Massilia” (Marseille). According to the testimony of Julius Caesar and Strabo, the Latin name Celtus was borrowed from a native Celtic tribal name. The Romans kept redheaded slaves, who due to their novelty value held a higher price.
Sites characteristic of Golasecca culture have been identified in western Lombardy, eastern Piedmont, the Canton Ticino and Val Mesolcina, in a territory stretching north of the Po River to sub-alpine zones, between the course of the Serio to the east and the Sesia to the west. The site of Golasecca, where the Ticino exits from Lake Maggiore, flourished for particularly favorable geographical circumstances as it was particularly suitable for long-distance exchanges, in which Golaseccans acted as intermediaries between Etruscans and the Halstatt culture of Austria, supported on the all-important trade in salt.
Cisalpine Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina), also called Gallia Citerior or Gallia Togata, was a Roman province until 41 BC, when it was merged into Roman Italy. It was that part of Gallia, the land of the Gauls, which lay south and east of the Alps (the “near side”, from the perspective of the Romans), as opposed to Gallia Transalpina (Gaul “across the Alps”). Its inhabitants were primarily Celtic since the expulsion of the Etruscans.
The province was bounded on the north and west by the Alps, in the south as far as Placentia by the river Po, and then by the Apennines and the river Rubicon, and in the east by the Adriatic Sea. In 49 BC all inhabitants of Cisalpine Gaul received Roman citizenship, and eventually the province was divided among four of the eleven regiones of Italy: Regio VIII Gallia Cispadana, Regio IX Liguria, Regio X Venetia et Histria and Regio XI Gallia Transpadana. It corresponds roughly to the current Northern Italy.
In the first millennium B.C., Cisalpine Gaul was inhabited chiefly by four peoples: the Veneti and Ligurians in Transpadana, the Etruscans (in Emilia), and the Celts, who had conquered the area from the Etruscans and Raetians. These last may have been an Illyrian or Celtic tribe, or Etruscans, which is more likely in view of their linguistic relationship.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead5.jpg?w=960&h=720
The end of the Celts in Italy
The Roman army was routed in the battle of Alesia, and Rome was sacked in 390 BC by the Senones. The defeat of the combined Samnite, Celtic and Etruscan alliance by the Romans in the Third Samnite War ending in 290 B.C. sounded the beginning of the end of the Celtic domination in mainland Europe. At the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, a large Celtic army was trapped between two Roman forces and crushed. However, it was not until 192 BC that the Roman armies conquered the last remaining independent Celtic kingdoms in Italy. The conquest of Transalpine Gaul began around 125-121 BC, with the occupation of the entire Mediterranean area between the Ligurian Alps and the Pyrenees, formed later in the province of Narbonne Gaul. Like all the Celts, the Gauls were subdivided into numerous tribes, which only rarely managed to unite to face a common enemy, as when, in 52 BC, many tribes led by Vercingetorix rebelled against Caesar ‘s conquest of Gaul. The northern Gaul came under the rule of Rome as a result of campaigning by Caesar between 58 and 50 BC.
Thanks largely to the testimony given by Caesar in his De Bello Gallico, the Gallic civilization is by far the most known among those developed by the Celts in ancient times, even if the observations of the Roman statesman are likely to be extensible – at least in a general way – to all the Celts. Caesar describes the Gallic society as living in family groups and divided into three classes: the producers, consisting of farmers provided with formal rights, but politically subservient to the ruling classes; the warriors, holders of political rights, who were entrusted with the exercise of military functions; and the class of the druids, priests, judges and guardians of culture, traditions and collective identity of a people fragmented into numerous tribes.
http://jacksitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/redhead2.jpg?w=960&h=647
The strongest survived
Nowadays red hair is about as common in northern and in central Italy. Mediterranean people have considerably darker pigmentations (higher eumelanin), especially as far as hair is considered, giving the red hair alleles little opportunity to express themselves. The reddish tinge is always concealed by black hair, and rarely visible in dark brown hair. Rufosity being recessive, it can easily stay hidden if the alleles are too dispersed in the gene pool, and that the chances of both parents carrying an allele becomes too low. Furthermore, natural selection also progressively pruned red hair from the Mediterranean populations, because the higher amount of sunlight and strong UV rays in the region was more likely to cause potentially fatal melanoma in fair-skinned redheads.
And, before we forget: red hair is beautiful!
(My first Italian girlfriend, the mother of my second daughter, was a redhead too, and for many years I wondered where it came from, as she was the only redhead in the family.)
Source: http://jacksitaly.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/redheaded-italians-where-do-they-come-from/