What is the currently accepted explanation for the Sicilian/Ashkenazi genetic similarity?

[Sikeliot]

Which is it?

a) Ashkenazis are primarily descended from southern Italian or Sicilian converts? This would suggest that Israelites, when expelled from Israel, first landed in Italy and then intermarried so much and converted so many people before moving north, and the descendants of these converted Italians became the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews,

or

b) there is no direct admixture between the two groups, but Sicilians and Ashkenazis are of similar genetic components by chance (Greco-Roman, Levantine, NW European) and happen to come out similarly?


To me it would be highly coincidental and up to chance, to assume that two ethnicities that did not intermix with one another could develop nearly identical rates of admixture. Ashkenazi Jews on many DNA tests and admixture runs get their first match as Sicilian, and I've yet to see one that does not. But I notice that on different Gedmatch calculators, if both Ashkenazi and Cretan are reference samples, people from eastern Sicily and Calabria get "Cretan" as their first non-Sicilian match, and western Sicilians get "Ashkenazi".

[Anglojew]

I think that Sicilians and Jews share links due to:

1. Ancient Phoenician/Israelite settlements in Sicily

2. Refugees from the "Jewish Wars" settling in Italy during the Roman Era

3. Refugees from Spain (I've read at once stage 11-14% of Sicily was Sephardi).

4. Similarity in components i.e. Levantine + European (to put it simply).

5. Some Italian genetic input into the Ashkenazi ethnogenesis which seems to have originally taken place in Italy before most of the population migrated to the Rhineland (as well as Crimea in my opinion) leaving the Italkim Jews as proto-(West) Ashkenazis (my theory is there were also "East" Ashkenazis who's ethnogenesis was in Crimea speaking Gothic).

[Anglojew]

I know two friends (one's of southern Italian heritage and one Ashkenazi) and people always think they're sisters.

[Sikeliot]

Other thoughts?

[Black Wolf]

I think that Sicilians and Jews share links due to:

1. Ancient Phoenician/Israelite settlements in Sicily

2. Refugees from the "Jewish Wars" settling in Italy during the Roman Era

3. Refugees from Spain (I've read at once stage 11-14% of Sicily was Sephardi).

4. Similarity in components i.e. Levantine + European (to put it simply).

5. Some Italian genetic input into the Ashkenazi ethnogenesis which seems to have originally taken place in Italy before most of the population migrated to the Rhineland (as well as Crimea in my opinion) leaving the Italkim Jews as proto-(West) Ashkenazis (my theory is there were also "East" Ashkenazis who's ethnogenesis was in Crimea speaking Gothic).

All of these are probably responsible for the similarity of Southern Italian and Ashkenazi genes but numbers 3 and 4 are probably the main reasons.

[dawson]

I know you have a fetish for Sicilians/Southern Italians BUT I never read these converts necessarily came from South Italy. It's the contrary..

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/sc...inds.html?_r=0

"Another recent study, also based on whole genomes, found that a mixture of European ancestries ranged from 30 percent to 60 percent among Ashkenazi and Sephardi populations, with Northern Italians showing the greatest proximity to Jews of any Europeans. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

"Although the Jewish people in general were present across a wide geographical area as described, genetic research done by Gil Atzmon of the Longevity Genes Project at Albert Einstein College of Medicine suggests "that Ashkenazim branched off from other Jews around the time of the destruction of the First Temple, 2,500 years ago ... flourished during the Roman Empire but then went through a 'severe bottleneck' as they dispersed, reducing a population of several million to just 400 families who left Northern Italy around the year 1000 for Central and eventually Eastern Europe."

http://jfjfp.com/?p=50147

One explanation is that they come from the same Jewish source population in Europe. The Atzmon-Ostrer team found that the genomic signature of Ashkenazim and Sephardim was very similar to that of Italian Jews, suggesting that an ancient population in northern Italy of Jews intermarried with Italians could have been the common origin. The Ashkenazim first appear in Northern Europe around A.D. 800, but historians suspect that they arrived there from Italy.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...wish-genetics/

"First, the fact that Jews are most closely related to Northern Italians does not imply that this was due to conversion in the ancient world. He points out that “the relatively greater similarity of Jews to southern rather than central/eastern Europeans may also to some extent reflect the greater Neolithic ancestry in the southern European groups that is shared by various Jewish groups as one component of their ancestry.”

[Roy]

2nd option seems more likely to me. There had to be converts too who were absorbed but this could not be the most of their ancestry either way.

[Longbowman]

I misclicked, but Dawson is right - North Italians with some Levantine is probably the most accurate.

[Not a Cop]

I misclicked, but Dawson is right - North Italians with some Levantine is probably the most accurate.

Have there been found any traces of German-Polish genetic influence in Ashkenazis?

[Longbowman]

Have there been found any traces of German-Polish genetic influence in Ashkenazis?

Some Eastern European influence, namely the relatively high incidence of R1a1a in AJs (but not in SJs) particularly amongst Leviites.