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The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews in early medieval Europe


Last year’s The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history is very close to the last word on the genetics of the ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jews. Here’s the author summary:

The Ashkenazi Jewish population has resided in Europe for much of its 1000-year existence. However, its ethnic and geographic origins are controversial, due to the scarcity of reliable historical records. Previous genetic studies have found links to Middle-Eastern and European ancestries, but the admixture history has not been studied in detail yet, partly due to technical difficulties in disentangling signals from multiple admixture events. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of the sources of European gene flow and the time of admixture events by using multiple new and existing methods and extensive simulations. Our results suggest a model of at least two events of European admixture. One event slightly pre-dated a late medieval founder event and was likely from a Southern European source. Another event post-dated the founder event and likely occurred in Eastern Europe. These results, as well as the methods introduced, will be highly valuable for geneticists and other researchers interested in Ashkenazi Jewish origins.

Roughly the Ashkenazi Jews are a half and half mix of a Middle Eastern population and various European groups. The majority of the European ancestry is “Southern European,” probably something like Italian. But, a minority of the European ancestry is like “Eastern European.” Additionally, the former admixture pre-dated the bottleneck, and probably dates to ~1000 A.D., while the latter event post-dates the bottleneck.

For years I had thought that Isaac Bashevis Singer’s excellent novel The Slave was interesting but implausible. The reason being that Ashkenazi Jews and their gentile neighbors did not mix by this time, as the European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews dates to the Roman period.

These results reject that model…the tract-length evidence is persuasive to me that admixture with Slavs did occur.  Some Italian groups are more north shifted, but the most parsimonious explanation while the Eastern European like ancestry came in later is that it tracks Jewish migration into Germany and Poland-Lithuania later.

The dating of admixture is something I’m less sure of. At 625 to 1,250 years before the present, it puts the emergence of the Ashkenazi community firmly in the Christian era. I don’t want to get into too many details, but from what I have read the Church and local authorities frowned on Jews owning Christians slaves, and tried to suppress instances where Christian slave women became concubines to Jewish men or even Judaized.

I had long assumed that these records reflect elite paranoia. If the dates of admixture are right they may reflect a real concern and a phenomenon (the Y and mtDNA evidence strongly point to the likelihood that the pattern was generally partnerships between Jewish men and gentile women).

And to be frank they tell us less about Jews than they do about the nature of “Christian Europe” in the early medieval period. There is one school of Reform Protestant which takes a dim view of how deeply Christian medieval Europe ever was. I think these results support the thesis that Christianity was an elite religion whose grasp upon the masses was more tenuous and illusory than we might imagine. There is also the reality that the feudal Christian state never had totalitarian authority over the population.

In theory Jewish assimilation of Christians to their identity, Judaizing, could be a capital crime. But if these results are correct it was quite common in the formation of the early Ashkenazi community before it moved north and then east. This decentralization and relative weakness of the early medieval Church and state, the superficially of mass Christianity, might also explain how vast regions of France defected from orthodox Christianity for decades in the 12th century during the ascendancy of the Cathars.

On a final note, I decided to do a little probing on the Middle Eastern forebears of the Askhenazi. The paper says that Levantine populations are the most likely source, which is entirely expected. But I wanted more detail, so I used the Human Origins Array dataset. You can see on the PCA above that the Ashkenazi Jews are shifted toward the European (Basque) population away from Middle Easterners, but if you project the line outward it lands on Christian and Muslim Lebanese. Haber et al. last year showed that there was continuity between the modern Lebanese and Caananites, and the Jews were likely originally a form of Canaanite. Curiously, Palestinian samples in the data are strongly shifted away for the Lebanese, toward groups like Saudis.

I understand it’s a hot potato politically, but if I didn’t have a dog in this fight I’d say that the contention that Palestine and Jordan (look at the Jordanian sample positions) underwent some population turnover is likely true (though I’d be curious about the data on Palestinian Christians).

57 thoughts on “The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews in early medieval Europe

  1. I had long assumed that these records reflect elite paranoia. If the dates of admixture are right they may reflect a real concern and a phenomenon

    So, a pre-modern #MeToo movement? Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

    There is also the reality that the feudal Christian state never had totalitarian authority over the population.

    This is something that often goes unacknowledged in the Protestant Anglophone world. The pervasive worldview in the latter is that the Protestant Reformation ended superstition and tyrannical rule of priests of Rome and planted the seeds of religious freedom.

    In reality, the historical evidence weighs against this idea and tends to demonstrate that the post-Reformation/Westphalian state-control of churches, particularly in Protestant countries, brought about an era of religious intolerance and even “totalitarian authority” on the population.

    For example, the post-Reconquista Iberia is held up as an example of Catholic totalitarianism… despite the fact that the Inquisition there was strongly state-driven and -motivated and even forbade appeals to the Papacy for relief, because the latter was known to come to the defense of those who were (usually falsely) accused.

  2. I’ve never seen intentional sampling of Palestinian Christians, but Holy Land DNA is an amateur project I know of that focuses on Palestinian Christian DNA. The cases I’ve seen there appear shifted toward Lebanese/Cypriots in calculator results, iirc — but I bet the woman behind the project would be happy to share raw data for deeper analysis. I know everyone’s afraid to study Palestinian DNA, but what with all the Natufian-to-Bronze Age Levantine info coming out, they can’t hide for long.

  3. Also: the dating of admixture (at least the Southern European component) to the early medieval period presents serious problems for the commonsense narrative (I can’t comment on methodology, so I’ll assume the 625-1250 window is sound). Assuming that the Judaean ancestors of Ashkenazim arrived in Rome during the classical era, that leaves several hundred years of non-mixing, just when you’d expect the communal boundaries to be most porous?

    But then again, how strong has the historians’ basis been for assuming Jewish continuity in Europe since classical times?

    This makes me wonder about Edrei and Mendels’ “split diaspora” hypothesis, which claims that the classical Greek-speaking Jewish communities of Europe, which supposedly lacked Hebrew and the codified Oral Law, were a cultural (and demographic, Michael Toch claims) dead end, supplanted by later migrations by Rabbinic Jews from the Islamic realm (including Spain). There are many counterintuitive things about it (from a genetics perspective, the yawning gulf between Mesopotamian and Mediterranean Jews), and much of it springs out of absence of evidence, rather than hard proof of absence. But if the initial admixture date of 625-1250 is robust enough to be adopted as a prior, this might be a way to make sense of it.

  4. It’s weird that the admixture is not from earlier time when many Romans were judaizing and eventually many did convert. Did they all disappear ? Or maybe they lived separated from other Jews and mixed with them only later and this is the admixture we see here ? Seems highly implosible.

  5. 1. Given the window for the eastern European admixture, isn’t it possible that some of the gentile women who came into the Jewish community were not yet Christianized at all? Pomerania, for example, didn’t Christianize until the 1100s. There was a ready source of Pagan European women for slaves during the period anyway.

    2. My understanding is there are large communities of Palestinians in the West Bank who are known to have Samaritan ethnic background, and are even somewhat visually distinctive from “regular” Palestinians. It would be interesting to see how they plotted on a PCA.

  6. The pattern of long-distance travel followed by substantial admixture in the recent few millennia is by no means unique to the Ashkenazim. As to potentially sex-biased nature of the more recent admixing, the phenomenon is well studied in Latin America, where Native (and, to a smaller extent, African) mtDNA lineages vastly predominate, and where there is also a much smaller but statistically significant increase in non-European ancestry in X-chromosomes (indicating widespread taking of non-European wives during the early stages of colonization of Latin America, but not later in the population history). Similar, and likewise somewhat disproportionate (when compared with autosomes) enrichment in local vs. ancestral mtDNA in the Ashkenazi Jews is well documented (60% “broadly local” mtDNA in Western Europe, increasing to 75% in the former USSR). So it’s impossible to argue that some local wife-taking didn’t occurr early on, as the ancestors of the Ashkenazim moved further and further East. But there are occasional “local” Y-DNA markers as well, most peculiarly N1c.
    Some autosomal markers have been specifically timed to the Chmielnicki Wars and subsequent Ruination. For example, a haplotype phylogeny of a broadly Eastern European BRCA1 mutation, 5382insC, indicates that entered the Ashkenazi bloodstream in the 1600s from Poland or Ukraine.
    But slavery? Totally implausible. In these lands during the Chmielnicki and the Ruin times, it was impossible to survive as a Jew without strong protection from the warlords. And slavery was only being practiced by the Muslims. However, there are contemporary Census-like lists of Jews in the Cossack lands in the later 1600s, and there are more than a few, all lacking residency permissions, all employed in the service of the warlords, typically in logistics and tavern-keeping. All were valuable professionals protected by the local bosses, as you can see. Most were single males, of course. The traditional Jewish law allowed taking converted wives, but the Christian law generally forbade such conversions (starting from the 1700s, it was punishable by death). I imagine that during the lawless frontier times, such conversions occasionally did happen. ( Conversion of non-Christian brides have never been banned, and in the early 1800s the Czar even approved an official plan to import Buddhist slave-girls from Mongolia for conversion to Judaism to be married to Jewish exiles to Siberia … but the schema, albeit fully legal, didn’t catch on)

  7. Dx: Ashkenazi Y-DNA is very well-documented (jewishdna.net); I’m not aware of a single N. The paternal central/Eastern European contribution seems to be near nil. On the other hand, my mtDNA haplogroup, J1c7a, was recently found in Iron Age remains from Poland.

  8. In the PCA graphic of modern Near Eastern and European populations that the Reich lab always uses as a backdrop for their arrays of ancient genomes, Ashkenazi Jews form a sort of bridge, clustering with Sicilians, Cypriots, and Maltese. Are these the unspecified “Southern Europeans?” Facile notions of early Medieval assimilation in Italy and/or the Balkans fail to address the strange fact that Ashkenazi mtDNA clades (such as K1a1b1a) have no closely related “sister” or basal ancestral clades in southern Europe. The relevant literature often is based on an outdated assumption that K is an Upper Paleolithic-age European haplogroup; in fact, K1 first turns up in Europe among Neolithic farmers, who were derived from Anatolia. Jewish women appear to descend mainly from a “ghost” (possibly early Greek-admixed, e.g., Philistines) Levantine population, not Medieval Europeans.

  9. not aware of a single N
    You are right, it must be really rare. I am aware of one family, and I see one more N, a singleton, in Behar’s 2004 study. As a rule, Ashkenazi Y-chromosomes are all deep ancestral, of course. That’s why I vividly remembered an exception I once saw.

    Two more minor points: in the cited last year’s paper, the South Europeans include many contemporary Greek samples, without accounting for the substantial Slavic admixture in Greece which generally postdates the spread of the Jewish diaspora. This effect may make separation between “South” and “East” European ancestries a bit trickier.

    Also with respect to the magnitude of the Chmielnicki bottleneck, and the allele frequency of the BRCA1 mutation linked to it. In the greater Ukraine areas, the Jewish population has been annihilated then, but further West, nearly untouched. In most population models, this kind of a regional scale of a genocide wouldn’t register as a bottleneck at all? Yet the mutation in question has ~0.12% MAF. It’s only one locus but it clearly looks like a founder effect. What gives?

  10. 1. Given the window for the eastern European admixture, isn’t it possible that some of the gentile women who came into the Jewish community were not yet Christianized at all? Pomerania, for example, didn’t Christianize until the 1100s. There was a ready source of Pagan European women for slaves during the period anyway.

    there were some jews and muslims who arrived in lithuania before official xtianization. so yes. that might be the way you square that circle, though the bottleneck was happening then and this pulse seems post bottleneck.

    But slavery? Totally implausible.

    the slavery i’m talking about would be southwest europe. not eastern europe.

  11. would be southwest europe
    Ah, I see. The first wave of European admixture (I skipped straight to the fiction book summary LOL).

    As to the 2nd wave, there is a curious onomastic tidbit. While traditional Ashkenazi male given names are a mix of Hebrew, German, and Romance etymologies, the female given names have an additional, and historically widespread, layer of etymologically Slavic names. The traditional given names are after a deceased ancestor, and thus show remarkable (albeit by no means perfect) persistence over time. The thing about these etymologically Slavic feminine given names is that they come from Old Czech, and are already attested in the old Prague records. It could be interpreted as a hint that Prague, hypothesized to be the earliest post-bottleneck population center, is also where the elements of the sex-biased admixture took place. Alas, no ancient DNA…

  12. I think these results support the thesis that Christianity was an elite religion whose grasp upon the masses was more tenuous and illusory than we might imagine. There is also the reality that the feudal Christian state never had totalitarian authority over the population.

    While it is true that feudal European Christendom never had totalitarian authority (in fact, there wasn’t really a concept of “the state” until the 1500s or so) I think one has to distinguish between the half-Christian / half-pagan early medieval period and a more fully Christianized late medieval period. The spread of Christianity (particularly orthodox Catholicism) in Western, Eastern, and Northern Europe was fairly late, starting with the conversion of Clovis and the Franks in 508 and not completed until the conversion of Lithuania in the late 1300s. Poland and Russia weren’t converted until the 10th century. And of course it took generations for the often political or dynastic conversions of European kings to trickle down to their populations. But trickle down it did. Reading Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars you learn how England went from being barely Christian to thoroughly Catholic between about 1200 and 1500 with the spread of lay devotion, increased catechesis in sermons, church art and architecture that taught the stories of the Bible and the saints, etc., and how traumatic the shifts were when the Tudors moved England into the Protestant camp.

  13. It’s possible that Palestinians and Jordanians are the results of admixture between medieval Arabians and pre-Islamic south Levantines, but it may not be Islamic Arabs that caused it, but pre-Islamic ones.

    As of now, we don’t know the origins of the Nabataeans, they could have migrated from Arabia, also the Ghassanids, a Yemeni tribe that established a kingdom in Jordan and Palestine, vassals of the Roman Empire.

    If only we had ancient samples from the region.

  14. due to the scarcity of reliable historical records.

    This seems odd to me. We are talking about the people of “The Book,” one of the earliest and most enthusiastic literate peoples. Could the Jewish elites have suppressed the history of this period?

  15. iffen: Record-keeping was awful among all peoples starting 630 CE or so. It was bad in Iran; it was bad in Merovingian Neustria-Austrasia “France”; it was bad in Byzantium. Most of our records for the Semitic-speaking nations at the time, of which Islam is one, survive in Syriac amongst Christians. It would be noteworthy if the contemporary Jews didn’t follow this trend of negligent historiography, like it’s noteworthy amongst the Syrians.

  16. @zimriel

    I think that I understand that it is chance and hit or miss with regards to what has survived. I would look to %. What do we have from American Indians from 500-1500? It just seems odd that there is a historical gap. Is the gap because nothing was created or because nothing survived? And if it was because nothing survived could it be because it was suppressed at the time?

  17. Any thoughts on the nature of the bottleneck?

    Earlier research by some of the same folks (doi:10.1038/ncomms5835) peg it at going from 24k people to just 300. Also, this would have occurred 700 years ago — which puts it right in to the time of Black Death.

    I’m a statistician not a geneticist, so wondering how good these estimates are…

    https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5835

  18. @iffen: The Jewish literary corpus of the Middle Ages consists of religious poetry, legal codes, and philosophical works. Writing “history” per se was not part of the post-Biblical picture until the modern era.

  19. I summarized indications of intimate relationships between Jewish men and Catholic women (who often worked for the men in their homes, inns, and taverns) in Poland even as recently as the 18th century in my 14th July 2017 message at http://forums.familytreedna.com/showthread.php?p=441820 I am sure many of these were real situations. H11a2a2 was probably was one of those women. J1c7a may have been from an earlier century? And perhaps the three Ashkenazic H7 lines as well? (I’m in one of those, and all but two of my HVR1 and HVR2 codes are shared by a Slovak, but there are no Slavic matches to my line at the Full Coding Region level.)

    Ben-canaan, indeed, there aren’t many paternal lines tracing to Eastern European men, but there is this: “A small proportion of Eastern European Jewish men belong to a European branch of the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a called R1a-M458 that is most commonly found among West Slavs, with high prevalence among Poles. Although this demonstrates a genetic contribution from one or more Slavic men into the Ashkenazic population, the majority of Slavic DNA in Ashkenazim must have come from women, since R1a-M458 and/or its subclade R1a-L260 and/or R1a-Z282 (also common among eastern Europeans) would have otherwise been more common among Ashkenazim.” – from “The Jews of Khazaria, Third Edition”, https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1538103427/geneexpressio-20/ (Razib, do you want a review copy? I had asked my publisher to offer you one.) On the other hand, I recently read an analysis by a genetic genealogist who saw closer ties between the Ashkenazic subclade and East Slavic Belarusians as opposed to Poles.

  20. @Joe Q.

    The Jewish literary corpus of the Middle Ages consists of religious poetry, legal codes, and philosophical works.

    Sure, that’s what we have. I am currently reading a book recommended by Razib, The Sacred Chain by Norman F. Cantor. He is very much a partisan, but the book is excellent. He points out that the historical narrative of the Jews by Jews drops off a cliff after the 1st century A.D. I’m not making any accusations of Jewish perfidity, I’m just questioning the bases for the view. We might not have a good historical record because those people didn’t want the records to exist.

  21. Look, if I was a smart MF with multiple concubines, I don’t believe that I would like a “good” history recorded, then or now.

  22. I think slavery is the wrong word. In peasant societies, there will always be young women whose parents and kinsmen have died or been dispossessed or otherwise impoverished. Lacking anyone to stump up a dowry for them, marriage was not an option, even becoming a “bride of Christ”. Becoming household servants was among the least unpleasant things that could happen to them. As such, their parents or guardians would happily transfer their services to a new master for a few thallers.

    At the same time, opening new commercial outposts has always been a game for young single men. A few young Jewish men might come to a new area in Poland (which then included a large chunk of what is now places like Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine), settle, an open a business, and set up households. They would of course acquire servant girls to cook and clean. Boys will be boys, and girls will get pregnant and give birth.

    Nobody, but nobody, cared about the servant girls. The men would regularize the relationships, and legitimate their heirs. Conversion to Judaism doesn’t require surgery if you are a woman. And it doesn’t even require consent, if you are a baby.

    As Dx points out above, the same pattern was seen in Latin America.

    As for the Palestinians, it too is unsurprising. The exhaustion and collapse of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires led to an eruption of often nomadic Arab populations, before the Muslim conquests. It goes a long way towards explaining why places like Iraq are so tribalized, when a long spell of civilization should have extinguished tribalism.

  23. @iffen:

    the historical narrative of the Jews by Jews drops off a cliff after the 1st century A.D.

    There isn’t much of a historical narrative of the Jews by Jews before that time either.

  24. There isn’t much of a historical narrative of the Jews by Jews before that time either.

    I learned as the Pentateuch.

  25. Joe Q: There are several biblical references to works of history that are now lost in the mists of time. Eg. The Book of the Kings of Israel referenced in Chronicles.

    There are also known works such as the books of Maccabees and the rather sophisticated historical writing of Josephus. Significantly, none of them were preserved by Rabbinical Jews. They are known to us through Christian sources.

    Iffen: History as a literary form is not universal. There is very little available in South Asia.

  26. Iffen: History as a literary form is not universal.

    Understood.

    Just my little opinion based on a small knowledge base that the lacuna in the surviving writings seems odd. No need for me to keep repeating it so I will stop.

  27. Jews were well-established in Rome before the reign of Nero from 37 to 68 AD, which actually predates the destruction of the Temple. They were in Ptolemaic Alexandria in the 3rd Century BC. So, why is there no admixture for 600 to 1,000 years?

  28. @bob sykes: Why is there no admixture for 600 to 1000 years?

    2 hypotheses (i.e., rank speculation):

    1) For almost all of that time, each city had an established community of Jews in which to find marriage partners. At the beginning of each community, there was both a well established community in Judea-Palestine, and good communication and transportation between each of these communities, so marriage partners could be found among Jews in J-P.

    2) The earlier communities were not Jews as we currently recognize them, members of the Talmudic/Rabbinic tradition which only began to develop after the destruction of the 2nd Temple. These earlier communities eventually disappeared, ultimately replaced by members of this newer tradition. RK had a few words tangentially related to this, here (search on the word Pharisees).

    Also tangentially related to this, a couple of years ago I came across a book (reviewed here) by an Israeli economist I once knew, about the central role of literacy in Jewish history after the destruction of the 2nd Temple. The rabbis made literacy — and educating sons to be literate — a major religious duty. As they came to dominate the religion, the pressure to comply increased, but this was a very expensive route to salvation for peasants (which is what most Jews of the time were). One consequence, they argue, is that the reason Jews from the classical era left few Jewish descendants was neither massacres nor forced conversions but because Christianity and (later) Islam provided much less costly routes, so most Jews chose to convert. I am not entirely convinced, but it has an appealing plausibility.

  29. @Walter Sobchak, when Jews were negotiating re-entry to England in the 1650s, one of the conditions was that Jews were prohibited from hiring Christians as domestic servants. There was no slavery in England at that time, but the concern seems like it would be sexual as Jews were free to otherwise hire Christians.

    Different time and place, but suggestive of religious views on slavery before the rise of the African slave trade.

  30. @Kevin Brook

    …there aren’t many paternal lines tracing to Eastern European men, but there is this: “A small proportion of Eastern European Jewish men belong to a European branch of the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a called R1a-M458 that is most commonly found among West Slavs, with high prevalence among Poles. Although this demonstrates a genetic contribution from one or more Slavic men into the Ashkenazic population, the majority of Slavic DNA in Ashkenazim must have come from women, since R1a-M458 and/or its subclade R1a-L260 and/or R1a-Z282 (also common among eastern Europeans) would have otherwise been more common among Ashkenazim.” – from “The Jews of Khazaria, Third Edition”

    Evidently not indicative Eastern European ancestry within the relevant historical time-frame:

    Abstract: Previous Y-chromosome studies have demonstrated that Ashkenazi Levites, members of a paternally inherited Jewish priestly caste, display a distinctive founder event within R1a, the most prevalent Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europe. Here we report the analysis of 16 whole R1 sequences and show that a set of 19 unique nucleotide substitutions defines the Ashkenazi R1a lineage. While our survey of one of these, M582, in 2,834 R1a samples reveals its absence in 922 Eastern Europeans, we show it is present in all sampled R1a Ashkenazi Levites, as well as in 33.8% of other R1a Ashkenazi Jewish males and 5.9% of 303 R1a Near Eastern males, where it shows considerably higher diversity. Moreover, the M582 lineage also occurs at low frequencies in non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations. In contrast to the previously suggested Eastern European origin for Ashkenazi Levites, the current data are indicative of a geographic source of the Levite founder lineage in the Near East and its likely presence among pre-Diaspora Hebrews.

    Phylogenetic applications of whole Y-chromosome sequences and the Near Eastern origin of Ashkenazi Levites

  31. The earlier communities were not Jews as we currently recognize them, members of the Talmudic/Rabbinic tradition which only began to develop after the destruction of the 2nd Temple. These earlier communities eventually disappeared, ultimately replaced by members of this newer tradition. RK had a few words tangentially related to this, here (search on the word Pharisees).
    The historical accounts in Josephus Flavius state quite unequivocally that the Jewish world of the 1st century AD was extremely fractious, split by lines of ideology and religion. Talmud’s fable about the reasons for the destruction of the Temple also cites extreme disunity of the people. So it’s totally unsurprising that only one of these rival broadly Jewish groups of the Roman empire might have significantly contributed to the colonization of Rhineland. It’s just as unsurprising if it was the least assimilationist group, because the more open, more miscible groups have a smaller chance to survive through the centuries of upheavals.

    BTW I also went through Kevin’s references about XVIII c. sexual liaisons between Jews and Christian women in their employ. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that these were (i) singularly uncommon, (ii) didn’t happen at all earlier in the preceding centuries, and (iii) didn’t result in Jewish offspring. The YIVO Encyclopedia entry actually explains that employment of Xians by the Jews has been strictly banned by the Church in 1267, and reaffirmed by the Government in the 1500s. The employment regulations weakened only by the XVIII century, but even then, sexual liaisons were severely punishable, often by death. Hundert’s book, also cited by Kevin, actually explains that co-mingling of Jews and Christians of any kind remained extremely rare. And if any babies were born to such infrequent unions, then they would have been non-Jewish according to both the Jewish and the Christian law, anyway. Mothers of out-of-wedlock children were not allowed to convert to Judaism either, not just by the Christian law by also by the Jewish law which made pious behavior a precondition for any conversion.

    Oh, and lastly, the traditional Jewish law afforded women far wider economic and family rights than the Christian law (including property ownership and divorce). It appears that the standing of a Jewish wife was so radically different from the status of a subordinated servant that one can’t suspect any overlap.

  32. kevin, sure have them send a review copy. contactgnxp-at-gmail-dot-com

    Just my little opinion based on a small knowledge base that the lacuna in the surviving writings seems odd. No need for me to keep repeating it so I will stop.

    right, basically if you knowledge base expand’s you get a sense on how uncommon obsessive history writing is even among literate cultures. the chinese and the greeks are atypical.

    indian history is helped a lot by muslims who took a more ethnographic/historical interest in chronology.

  33. “Another interesting case are the Ashkenazi Jews, who display a frequency of haplogroup K similar to the PPNB [Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, from 3 sites in Syria] sample together with low non-significant pairwise Fst values, which taken together suggests an ancient Near Eastern origin. This observation clearly contradicts the results of a recent study, where a detailed phylogeographical analysis of mtDNA lineages has suggested a predominantly European origin for the Ashkenazi communities [48]. According to that work the majority of the Ashkenazi mtDNA lineages can be assigned to three major founders within haplogroup K (31% of their total lineages): K1a1b1a, K1a9 and K2a2. The absence of characteristic mutations within the control region in the PPNB K-haplotypes allow discarding them as members of either sub-clades K1a1b1a or K2a2, both representing a 79% of total Ashkenazi K lineages. However, without a high-resolution typing of the mtDNA coding region it cannot be excluded that the PPNB K lineages belong to the third sub-cluster K1a9 (20% of Askhenazi K lineages). Moreover, in the light of the evidence presented here of a loss of lineages in the Near East since Neolithic times, the absence of Ashkenazi mtDNA founder clades in the Near East should not be taken as a definitive argument for its absence in the past. The genotyping of the complete mtDNA in ancient Near Eastern populations would be required to fully answer this question and it will undoubtedly add resolution to the patterns detected in modern populations in this and other studies.”

    Ancient DNA Analysis of 8000 B.C. Near Eastern Farmers Supports an Early Neolithic Pioneer Maritime Colonization of Mainland Europe through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands
    Eva Fernández , Alejandro Pérez-Pérez, Cristina Gamba, Eva Prats, Pedro Cuesta, Josep Anfruns, Miquel Molist, Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo, Daniel Turbón
    Published: June 5, 2014 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004401

  34. @ Labayu

    I wasn’t talking about the Ashkenazic Levite variety of R1a (R1a-M582) and I am aware that it doesn’t represent input from a Slav. R1a-M458, as I said, does provide evidence of that and is widely divergent from R1a-M582.

  35. @Marcel Proust: “The earlier communities were not Jews as we currently recognize them, members of the Talmudic/Rabbinic tradition which only began to develop after the destruction of the 2nd Temple.”

    The Talmud itself was codified and set down after the destruction of the Second Temple but the Rabbinic tradition had its start well before that time. The Rabbinic texts quote sages who lived back in the Hasmonean era or even earlier, several hundred years before the destruction. Hillel and Shammai (whose disputes form a core layer of the Talmud) were “at their peak” about four generations before the destruction.

  36. “the Jews were likely originally a form of Canaanite”

    So you don’t hold to the idea that there was migration from Mesopotamia?

  37. @Kevin Brook

    I should have looked at the R1a phylogenetic tree before responding. I mistakenly assumed you were referring to one of the subclades of R1a-Z94 that were previous thought to indicate Eastern European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews.

    @Luke Lea

    Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect. Some would say it’s a Canaanite language, but I think dialect is more appropriate. Although the corpus of non-Hebrew Canaanite texts is limited, there isn’t much observable difference between Hebrew, Moabite, and Edomite. Anyone who can read biblical Hebrew and knows the paleo-Hebrew alphabet can read Canaanite inscriptions. The only consistent difference I’ve noticed is that Hebrew dropped the pronunciation of the last letter in some feminine endings, so that ᵓišāṯ (woman) became ᵓišāh for example. Phoenician is basically the same as well, except its masculine plural is în instead of îm. In many cases, when a text is found, there isn’t any way to tell which “language” it is.

  38. @Labayu

    “Phoenician is basically the same as well, except its masculine plural is în instead of îm.”

    Interestingly, post-Biblical Hebrew has the same shift and Jewish liturgy is full of the -in form.

  39. @Joe Q.:

    a) I wrote too loosely. The Pharisees appear to be the sect* that was the most influential antecedent of Talmudic/Rabbinic Judaism. So long as the 2nd Temple (& its cult) survived, it seems unlikely that it would have come to dominate Judaism in the long run, as it has, if only because of the cult’s centrality to the religion and the long-term control that the Sadducees exercised over the cult. While it seems as clear as anything from that period that the Pharisees were the dominant political grouping in the late Hasmonean kingdom, their control or domination of religious practice was not especially secure then or later during the Roman period while the 2nd Temple stood.

    b) In any event, I do not have any information about the importance in the ancient Diaspora of these political divisions in and around Jerusalem. My speculative hypothesis was relying on 2 assumptions:

    i) that in looking toward Jerusalem during the 2nd Temple period, Diaspora Jews focused on the cult which was then most frequently dominated by the Saducees.

    ii) the Talmudic/Rabbinic domination of Judaism was the outcome of a centuries-long process, and in the meantime, in the absence of a central, recognized authority, practice and belief in many Diaspora communities went their own way. Eventually, many of these disappeared, to be replaced by what were essentially newly founded communities established by more recent arrivals from Palestine.

    *perhaps too strong, but I can’t come up with a better word

  40. FWIW,

    In last year’s abstract about Bronze and Iron Age remains from Canaan, wherein Carmi claims Palestinians are ~60% descendant from Canaanites, and Ashkenazim ~55% (and 45% from Neolithic Central Europeans … sure, okay…), he uses BA as the reference group for Ashkenazim, and IA as the reference group for Palestinians. I asked him why, and he said it yielded a marginal improvement in fit—nothing else. I’m not sure how BA and IA populations in the area have been found to have differed from one another, but you could argue that any difference might be explained by Israelite and Philistine/Philistine-like migrations. Weird, then, that an imprint of it would be found among Palestinians but not Jews.

    Maybe Israelite (and also Aramaean) tribal memories of a Mesopotamian connection preserve some vague imprint of the great scrambling of the Uruk period and beyond, when Eastern Farmer DNA (and haplogroup J) radiated out to the Levant, Anatolia, and Arabia, as far as Egypt and Ethiopia. Nothing suggests a more recent connection … and anyway, most north-easterly influence on Hebrew dates to the latter part of the biblical period.

    @marcel proust

    The late advent of Rabbinic Judaism / weak continuity hypothesis of classical north Mediterranean Jewish communities is compelling for all the reasons you suggest. But the deep, bimodal genetic divergence between Mediterranean/European Jews, on one hand, and Mesopotamian Jews, on the other, seems like a problem for it. Also, the thought of Jews from Byzantine and Arab Palestine migrating to Europe is tantalizing from a historical fiction perspective, but I’d imagine it would’ve left more convincing traces.

  41. @ben-canaan

    The Iron Age sample is just one individual from Abel-beth-maacah, which was a border town that changed hands between Israel and Aram-Damascus more than once in this period. It was also likely the capital of a small Aramaic kingdom for awhile.

  42. @Labayu

    Good to know. Was anything ever published or announced, beyond the abstract I saw a few months ago?

  43. I would have guessed that some (if not more) of the non-Southern part of the European component might be closer to Central European (from Germany. Austria, Perhaps even parts of Eastern or S.E France), from the regions where ancestral Ashkenazim lived before migrating to Slavic lands (and after having left Italy). Was Central European tested for? (I wonder which Eastern European population samples were used, and whether they were from areas toward the West of central Europe—i.e the Western Slavic zone)? And I wonder what the results might be of the non-Southern component of the European ancestry fraction of Western Ashkenazim—assuming enough without other admixture could be found—test (many of whose ancestors might never have gone further East than Germany or Austria).

  44. Edit:

    “I would have guessed that some (if not more) of the non-Southern minority part of the European component might be closer to Central European (from Germany. Austria, Perhaps even parts of Eastern or S.E France), rather than Eastern European (or that that non-Southern part of the European component might be a more even mix or central and Eastern European): i.e: from the from the regions where ancestral Ashkenazim lived before migrating to Slavic lands…”

  45. European ancestry fraction of Western Ashkenazim
    It doesn’t look that there exists a significant extant “purely Western” Ashkenazi population group. In last year’s Ancestry’s spectral analysis paper, they were able to identify three extremely genetically similar Ashkenazi populations, but not able to attribute the differences to history and geography (in the Supplement PDF file, it’s on pages 68-70).
    All three groups have a combination of Eastern European pedigree nodes with an extensive network of Western European nodes and a smattering of Sephardic / Mediterranean nodes. The imprint of the more recent / less assimilated Eastern European immigration may be visible in that the groups A and B show some geographic similarities with the NE vs. SE dialects of Yiddish (group A is heavily Litvak, while group B is over-representing Podolian, Galitzaner, and Hungarian sources. One has to assume that the earlier and better assimilated Western Jewish immigrants, assuming they were once genetically distinct, underwent too much intermarriage for this pre-existing structure to remain visible. The pairwise Fst between groups A and B is rounded to 0.000, BTW.
    (My hypothesis is that group B may still be distinct – if barely – owing to the legacy of the drift of the additional XVII c. Chmielnicki bottleneck, which only this group has experienced in its full horror)

  46. Not strictly on topic, but still related to Ashkenazi DNA and mixing between Ashkenazim and sorrounding populations. 23andme tells me with 90% confidence that I had an Ashkenazi ancestor in the late 17th or 18th century. That seems extremely unlikely to me, as my ancestors back then would’ve been living in small, homogeneous villages in various regions of the NW Balkans. So I guess my question is what could be tripping 23andme up here? Or is Ashkenazi DNA just too distinct to get it wrong like that and actual Ashkenazi admixture in that time and place not as wildly unlikely as I think it is?

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