Are European Jews just converted Romans?

[Bellbeaking]

well they have that minor semetic paternal component, but yest they are mostly italian

[Longbowman]

YDNA, atDNA and IBD sharing suggests they're not, but that they do have a very large amount of Italian DNA.

Plotting is very simplistic. My girlfriend is half-Euro half-Chinese. She plots with the Hazara. She is not Hazara.

[celticdragongod]

The facts are:

1. Modern Jews plot with ancient Romans
2. Ancient Jews migrated from Rome to other parts of Europe after the fall of Rome

Why come up with mind-blowing theories that modern Jews are 30% this, 20% that, 40% x, 10% y, when the obvious makes perfect sense?

Obvious to you maybe. Why would the Romans convert to Judaism? I think a more obvious answer is that the Romans were of partial Middle Eastern ancestry.

[celticdragongod]

YDNA, atDNA and IBD sharing suggests they're not, but that they do have a very large amount of Italian DNA.

I believe most of that Italian DNA is of female origin i.e. Jewish males marrying Italian females.

[celticdragongod]

I don't see how this is relevant to his question. Everyone knows the Romans mass converted to Christianity, but in the centuries prior to that Judaism was a proselytizing religion and around 10% of the Empire was Jewish at it's height.

How do you know that at one point 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish?

[Borealis]

No wonder they still looks so ethnic. If they mixed with northern rather than Southern Europeans then they’d look different.

[celticdragongod]

So now that we know Imperial Romans plotted with modern South Italians and by default modern European Jews, I think it's safe to assume the obvious: Euro Jews are converted Romans. The difference in haplogroup distribution could easily be explained due to all the bottlenecks Jews undergone. Imo this makes much more sense than coming up with several theories that European Jews are a mixture of this and that, that coincidentally enough made them plot with ancient Rome.

I think if there was a mass conversion of Romans to Judaism then Latin would have replaced Hebrew as the religion's official language just as Latin became the official language of Roman Catholicism.

[ModernMaskil]

No. Literally all evidence points to this and other mass conversion theories about Ashkenazi Jews not being true.

[ModernMaskil]

To be clear there was plenty of conversion and Euro Jews do have a large Italian component (as Sephardic Jews do) however this is not the primary origin of the group.

[Jacques de Imbelloni]

They have at least some judean/west asian paternal lines.