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Yeah I've been doing a lot more close looking at them, genetically, to be honest I'm of the opinion now that there's a lot of influence to see Jew as "non-european" in whole or in part, from many different political angles ( modern white nationalism, zionism, minority-obsessed political correctness ) but frankly I'd say from actually looking at their Ancestry myself, they're too similar to other modern and even ancient europeans to be differentiated. Using samples from Tuscany to represent "pure" Italians, Samaritans for the levant and tunisians for north africa, I'd say WESTERN Ashkenazi are about 55-60% southern European on average and around 35-40% Levant with an additional 5% either North African or a proxy for some ancestry from peninsular Arabs. Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe are about 90% this "basal Ashkenazi" component, plus around 10% Eastern European, making them roughly 60-65% European and about 30-35% Levant. North African may be around 3-5% in these eastern Ashkenazi.
Sicilians I would say are much more Italian than frequently stated, around 75% and the remaining a similar ratio of levant to north african as in Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi as well as Sephardic Jews cluster with other mediterranean islanders and all of them fall in the southernmost european cline. In fact when looking at Ashkenazi in terms of Farmer/Steppe/HG, we find that they get a lot of farmer-like ancestry from the levant and north african that makes them appear something like 80-90% Archaic European!. This make sense when you consider that individuals with a quarter Ashkenazi or less will simply plot inside of europe on every scale and appear, genetically, composed entirely of Farmer/Steppe/HG
That's not to say Ashkenazi are NOT getting ancestry from the Levant, but their Levant ancestry carries archaic components with it that are too similar to Archaic Europeans to be differentiated once mixed in heavily with Europeans of modern stock and no historical Levant ancestry.
Here as an example, I ran myself and a synthetic coordinate composed of 1/4 Ashkenazi and 3/4 Scottish+Irish against Davidskis standard ancient calculator:
Target: 3/4Irish+1/4Ashkenazi_Scaled
Distance: 0.0344% / 0.03443885
46.1 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
43.9 TUR_Barcin_N
9.2 WHG
0.8 MAR_Taforalt
Target: SouthDutch7991_Scaled
Distance: 0.0399% / 0.03993313
44.4 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
40.6 TUR_Barcin_N
15.0 WHG
You can see that Anatolian Farmer-like ancestry from the Levant and North Africa have effectively disappeared. Looking at it from a purely unknown point of view you would not be able to tell this was someone with Ashkenazi ancestry from this alone, it could be anyone from the northern Balkans.
I think we tend to see Ashkenazi as being "other" and so when we see their ancestry from outside europe place heavy emphasis on it, despite the fact that many native europeans have significant non-middle-eastern "middle-east-like" ancestry and that in terms of basic components, an Ashkenazi is a Southern European. Politics and historical beefs have clouded our view on them. Even though, to me, it initially seemed obvious that Jews were just "white", I came to want to see them otherwise after being around political groups on both sides of the debate long enough. It's funny, because now neither Pro-Jews nor Anti-Jews wish to call Jews "white" except for people who dislike Jews for the whole Zionism thing in Israel.
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