One of the great things about the spread of ‘direct to consumer’ genomics is that it’s increasing sample size in countries where for various reasons there isn’t much coverage. It was brought to my attention that My Heritage DNA results have been analyzed by the company, and yielded the surprising result that Hungary has been most impacted by Ashkenazi Jewish admixture in the Diaspora. This is surprising since it is well known that the United States of America is home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world, with more than 90 percent of that being Ashkenazi.
The main issue here is the distinction between genetic and cultural definitions. Ashkenazi Jews are a coherent population genetic classification, emerging out of a series of admixtures during the medieval period as a strong endogamous group. This means that this community has a distinctive genetic profile, just as Finns or Cambodians have distinctive genetic profiles. But Ashkenazi Jews are also a cultural and religious entity. Because of social and cultural constraints imposed by Christian societies, Jews could leave their religious identity, but Christians could not become Jewish.
In the United States, the massive wave of Jewish migration occurred around 1900. This is not so many generations in the past, so not too many people have very distant Jewish ancestry. Additionally, anti-Semitism has been a more marginal factor on the American landscape, so Jewish ancestry has been less hidden (though not always).
The situation in Eastern Europe is very different. A massive wave of demographic expansion occurred among Ashkenazi Jews after 1500. In the 18th-century Jewish fertility was far greater than gentile fertility in Poland. This resulted in an increase in the Jewish proportion over time, but likely also assimilation of some Jews into Christian society. The “Jewish Enlightenment”, spanning the 100 years between 1780 and 1880, was also a period when massive defections occurred from the more integrated elements of the Central European Jewry. Moses Mendelssohn’s last male descendant to practice Judaism died in 1871, after one century of assimilation and conversion.
Overall, this result confirms what history would suggest to us. I believe if My Heritage DNA looks specifically at IBD tracts they will see that an early peak of admixture would center around 1830, during the height of the Jewish Enlightenment, in Central Europe. The admixture will be later further east in Europe, due to the later period of assimilation of Jews in those societies. In contrast, in the USA exogamy rates for Jews remained at 10% as late as 1960. Only in the past few generations have been risen to around 50% or more.
One of the benefits of reading Arabs is that the author is an expert on Yemen, which often gets short-shrift in works focused on the Arab peoples. As noted in the book itself this is not entirely unfair, insofar as until the past thousand years or so the peoples of Yemen did not even speak “Arabic.” Rather, they spoke various South Arabian languages more closely related to Semitic Ethiopian languages. In contrast, Arabic’s origins are probably along the northern fringes of the Arabian peninsula.
Historically, the various dialects (some of which are unintelligible to each other) of modern Arabic derive from the Arabic of the Koran, which seems to be quite similar to Nabataean Arabic. A revisionist model of the origins of the Arab conquests under Islam posits that they emerged at the margins of the Byzantines and Persians, in northern Arabia (where there had been Arabs for over 1,000 years), with the southward locus of the Islamic mythos in the Hejaz a later grafting upon the tradition.
But this post is not about that. Rather, one thing to note is that despite the ethnolinguistic differences between north Arabians (proto-Arabs qua Arabs), and south Arabians (the ancestors of Yemenis and Omanis), Arabs argues that there was extensive contact and migration between the two very habitable poles of the Arabian peninsula (the fringes of the Fertile Crescent in the north, and the highlands of Yemen in the south).
In the early Islamic period, there was a purported distinction between tribes of the north and the south, but these are often less about geography than genealogy. The Ghassanids of northern Arabia, who were a major Roman client people for centuries had their origins in the highlands of Yemen. More antiquely it seems likely that the settlement of southern Arabia was due to the impact of agriculturalists whose origins were in the Fertile Crescent, at the beginning of the Holocene.
We report high coverage whole genome sequencing data from 46 Yemeni individuals as well as genome wide genotyping data from 169 Yemenis from diverse locations. We use this dataset to define the genetic diversity in Yemen and how it relates to people elsewhere in the Near East. Yemen is a vast region with substantial cultural and geographic diversity, but we found little genetic structure correlating with geography among the Yemenis, probably reflecting continuous movement of people between the regions. African ancestry from admixture in the past 800 years is widespread in Yemen and is the main contributor to the countrys limited genetic structure, with some individuals in Hudayda and Hadramout having up to 20% of their genetic ancestry from Africa. In contrast, individuals from Maarib appear to have been genetically isolated from the African gene flow and thus have genomes likely to reflect Yemens ancestry before the admixture. This ancestry was comparable to the ancestry present during the Bronze Age in the distant Northern regions of the Near East. After the Bronze Age, the South and North of the Near East therefore followed different genetic trajectories: in the North the Levantines admixed with a Eurasian population carrying steppe ancestry whose impact never reached as far south as the Yemen, where people instead admixed with Africans leading to the genetic structure observed in the Near East today.
By coincidence, Maarib is also the purported homeland of the Ghassanids mentioned above. In any case, it is not surprising that they found such an admixture cline. They note in the paper that the Yemenis exhibit little geographic structure. This could reflect recent settlement and demographic expansion, or, lots of localized gene-flow. I’m putting my money on the former due to the rugged terrain in much of the highlands.
Again, the integrative and assimilative impact of the Islamic period is evident, as all the genetics suggests that the major (if not exclusive) admixture of African ancestry due to slavery occurred within the last 1,000 years. There were pre-Islamic empires in the region, but they had a marginal effect in comparison (the “Asian” admixture in people in southeast Yemen is probably in large part Indian, as they detect R1a Y chromosomes there).
The second issue is that looking at Yemenis from Maarib the authors got a better handle on later Eurasian gene-flow into the Levant. On the order of 20% of the ancestry in the Levant seems to post-date the Bronze Age (pegged by the 1800 BCE Sidon samples). This pulse has shared drift with Ancient North Eurasians. If I had to bet I think the various migrations of barbaric peoples such as the Mitanni and Guti are the likely culprits, along with possible later Roman era overlay. I suspect that this later gene-flow is why Yemenis are the supposed “source” population of the Eurasian ancestry within Ethiopians in naive admixture analysis.
Ethiopians lack the later Eurasian pulse with enriched Ancient North Eurasian, just like Yemenis. But, looking at other statistics such as identity by descent tracts the Eurasian ancestry looks more like that of the Levant. For me, the most obvious resolution is that the original Levantine pastoralists who spread Cushitic languages into eastern Africa pre-date the Bronze Age. This means that modern Levantine genetic profiles with too much Ancient North Eurasian are seen as not a good fit in the model, though modern Levantines are in some ways the parent population of both these pastoralists and Yemenis.
Finally, I suspect that the presence of South Arabian languages in some parts of Ethiopia indicate later cultural and genetic influence directly from Yemen far later than the expansion of agro-pastoralism. Samples from the highlands of northern Ethiopia are normally a bit enriched for Eurasian ancestry, and I think what we are seeing here are later waves of culturally influential Semitic-speaking peoples even in the greater proportion of non-Sub-Saharan African.
A few years ago I reflected that genomics has not really “revolutionized” evolutionary biology. In contrast, it arguably has revolutionary the science of medical genetics. The reason I said this is that because the big questions in the field were formulated in the 19th and 20th-centuries.
To a great extent, we’re recapitulating theoretical arguments of Huxley and Wallace (the power of selection), or Fisher and Wright (selection within structured populations). What has changed is that genomics allows for the more granular testing of predictions and models. In other words, evolutionary biology is illuminated by the surfeit of data of the 21st-century, rather than presenting to us startling new models.
The theoretical raw materials are present if you read old books and papers. It’s just that then testing those disputes were exceedingly difficult. Another way to state it is that what we suspected, we can now confirm or reject.
This, to me, explains why theoretical arguments are less vociferous and personal today than they were in the past. The data is there, so the race is to calculate.
After a little thought, I’ve decided to cancel the “Membership” option for this weblog. It just wasn’t working in terms of the time/energy it took to keep the tech working on an independent platform, and I didn’t really like gating posts anyway. If you really want to support this weblog, I have a Patreon account, but it’s pretty clear that I don’t write this blog for the money (though I make a non-trivial sum on Amazon referrals).
Honestly, who makes money on writing except for a few incumbents who are extracting rents (and perhaps people who write and ghost-write shlock like self-help and romance)?
I’ve canceled everyone’s recurring subscription. If you get charged again, just email me.
You might notice that I haven’t posted something since the last open thread. This happens really rarely. But the reality is I’ve been busy with stuff like family and doing work which actually makes me money. Happens. May happen more in the future, to be frank. If there is another Razib out there blogging about what I’m blogging about, tell me and I’ll retire from the field for sure!
I do post on Twitter now and then. But mostly I lurk. And, it’s sad to see so many people behave like 14-year olds. But I think it’s just a feature of the platform. End it, don’t mend it.
The Rug Rat Race. Lyman Stone is disputing the data but this preprint argues that the current craze for full-court parenting dates to the mid-90s.
How the 1619 Project Rehabilitates the ‘King Cotton’ Thesis. The New York Times took a minority and very tendentious position in economic history and presented it to the general public as if it was the mainstream consensus. Many liberal commentators are quite aware of this reality, and so when you listen to them comment on the series you see how they are engaging in circumlocutions. It’s sad. Also, the series is written like the United States of America is the only country with a history in the world, and that the world before 1619 did not exist.
Just got Statistical Thinking from Scratch: A Primer for Scientists by Michael Edge in the mail (one of the favorite non-electronic books I’ll buy this year). I think a lot of readers of this weblog would find this a useful book in terms of the range of topics covered, as well as the level of knowledge it expects. Definitely a good addition to your library. Recommended.
My guest appearance on Rationally Speaking is live if you want to listen to me talk.
Ancient Burial Pits Reveal Sophisticated Rituals. This is a really cool find, and it looks like there are good possibilities for ancient DNA (look at the note in the supplements). Also, not surprised that environmental stress leads to new coordinated rituals.
When the spirit moves me, I write 1,000-3,000 word essays quite regularly. These posts have a “long-tale”…but I wonder, are they too long for regular readers?
Just got a review copy of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Self-Portrait In Black and White. Won’t be out until the fall, but it looks really interesting.
The conversation below between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on the defenestration of Roland Fryer is worth listening to.
On the whole, I lean toward their argument that considering the infractions Fryer committed, the reaction was disproportionate. But one thing that they mention offhand, and I have thought was truly part of the problem, is that since Fryer was a media darling in 2005 (see this profile in The New York Times Magazine), he hasn’t really panned out as one of the tribunes of the Great Awokening. Combined with the fact that Glenn mentions Roland did not cultivate favor with the black academic community of Harvard, it strikes me that this incident is more a reflection of who/whom.
Over the past few years, I have been telling my friends in academia that the Republicans are going to turn on the whole institution. Because my friends don’t know any Republicans personally (well, except for me) it has all seemed abstract and kind of vague. Pew now is reporting that over the past few years Republican are getting “woke” to higher education. My own personal impression is that the bleeding edge of academic activists have become much more abrasively Left-wing, even if there is a silent moderate majority.
This is not going to end well for an institution which relies in large part upon public monies (even private universities focused on research rely on public grants to fund laboratories and fellowships). I see the 2020s as being a decade when the USA will actually start to tighten its belt due to excessive fiscal obligations (entitlements and our military empire).
Below some comments emerged reflecting differences in the understanding of religious identity and change. After writing on this blog for 17 years I am tempted to just scream “READ WHAT I’VE WRITTEN!”, but that really doesn’t suffice. So I’ll outline very quickly my general stance, which illuminates my sense of how and why the Roman Empire Christianized 1,600 years ago.
Many modern and intellectual understandings of religion focus on individual preferences and dispositions. In the 1980s Rodney Stark outlined a “supply-side” theory of religion in his book, A Theory of Religion. Stark explicitly utilizes a rational choice framework. In this model, a religious denomination provides a bundle of goods and services. Consumers choose from these various religious “products” in the “marketplace.”
A broader survey of this way of thinking about religion is provided in A Marketplace of Gods. Clearly, there is some insight to be gained from this methodology and framework. Over the past few thousand years of history, we see broad convergent trends in terms of the goods and services provided by the major world/higher/universalistic religions. For example, the common trend of promising a more pleasant afterlife as a reward for meritorious behavior and sincere belief.
Most people have common needs and fears. It is no surprise that similar “brands” will converge upon the same solution. Perhaps what we might today term “product-market fit.”
But, in the 30+ years since A Theory of Religion was published we can test some of its predictions, and to be frank, many haven’t panned out. For example, Stark makes much of the reality that the Communism dampened the availability of religious options in the Eastern Bloc. One of the predictions then is that the fall Communism would have unleashed a wave of conversion to Western religions, just as Eastern Bloc consumers initially flocked to Western consumer goods. In particular, American Protestant sects compete extensively.
Though there has been some proliferation of various Protestant sects, on the whole, the transformation of the religious landscape in Eastern Europe has not fulfilled the predictions of a rational choice theory of religion. In some cases, a mild level of government fiat may be implicated, but this is not the case in places such as the Czech Republic. On the whole, places that were relatively secular before Communism (e.g., Czech Republic) remain secular, while those nations that were more religious before (e.g., Romania) defaulted back to their “traditional” religions. Russia is an interesting case where religious belief and practice is relatively anemic, but Eastern Orthodox Christianity has returned to the center of the culture and state.
Today I recorded a podcast for Rationally Speaking. Julia Galef wanted to talk to me about my recent post, Stuff I Was Wrong About!. It was a long discussion, and I don’t know what will go into the final edit. But we did touch on this point from my post:
…I believe that some sort of complex ethical religious system was going to become dominant in the Roman Empire at some point. If Arbogast had won the Battle of Frigidus I think ultimately Christianity would still have become dominant within the empire (see the resistance to Buddhism in Tibet to envision a possible scenario).
The context here is that there is a tradition with the historiography which sees Theodosius the Great’s conquest of the Western Roman Empire from the usurper Eugenius, who was a puppet of the Frankish general Arbogast, as the final victory of Christianity as the state religion over the customary pagan cults. Though non-Christians, or people with strong non-Christian religious sympathies, were persistent as public figures in the Roman world for decades, the last hope for state paganism seems to have ended with Theodosius’ victory.
There are nuances and details here. Alan Cameron presents a mildly revisionist take in The Last Pagans of Rome, arguing that state paganism was in sharp decline after the withdrawal of public subsidies decades before Theodosius’ victory. But that does not impact my general argument. The emergence of Julian the Apostate as emperor heading a counter-Christian movement in the early 360s, and varying degrees of toleration of non-Christian cults in the decades after, tells us that the rise of Christianity as the Roman state religion was a gradual affair that took decades.
Many people perceive that Constantine’s patronage of the Christian religion in the early 4th-century as analogous to Henry VIII changing the English Church from the Catholic to the Protestant camp.* But this is not so. Though Constantine favored Christians, the ruling class of the Roman state remained predominantly pagan for decades.
There was no break with the pagan past. But a gradual evolution. Even though the Roman Empire had been ruled by Christian emperors for nearly two centuries, Anastasius I was still deified upon his death. Presumably, this was a customary honor which persisted, even though by the early 6th-century everyone understood this was a legacy of pagan emperor-cult.
With the gradual withdrawal of paganism’s hold on the landed aristocracy, the old cults declined as features of public culture due to lack of patronage. And, the eventual extinction of the tradition of philosophy also resulted in the intellectual death of elite paganism. By the early Dark Ages, paganism was associated with rustics and marginal peoples. Even if radical Protestants are correct that Europe’s people remained predominantly pagan their primitive beliefs and practices until the 16th-century, European political systems and elite culture were thoroughly Christian long before that.
Back to the original question: is there a scenario where Christianity did not succeed in capturing the Roman state, and so becoming the Roman religion? If Arbogast had won at the Battle of Frigidus in 394, would paganism have revived in the Western Empire? Perhaps, but, I think Christianity had sunk roots too deeply into the matrix of Roman culture and society to be turned back. The fact that Arbogast’s puppet, Eugenius, was a nominal Christian illustrates the reality that even in the Western Empire, where many elite families had pagan sympathies, the head of state was now expected to be a Christian. Christianity was the normative religion of the state.
We don’t know much about Arbogast. He was a Frank by origin, that is, a German. But the ancient sources indicate that Arbogast was a cultured individual, and assimilated into Romanitas. He was also a pagan, though from what I have read, one of the Greco-Roman variety, and not a devotee of Woden or any German god. There was likely an avenue of assimilation and integration whereby men from barbarian cultures could integrate into the high culture and society of old Rome during Late Antiquity, but we know little about it from Christian sources, who were likely not privy to such circles in any case.
If Arbogast had won at Frigidus and pushed forward a revival of the old pagan religion and Roman traditionalism through state patronage, some sort of short-term revival is likely. But a key issue to observe is that we are not talking about the old religion which Augustus attempted to preserve. The Roman religious culture was literally multicultural and very promiscuous. The 1st-century emperor Vespasian was a devotee of Isis, while the cult of Sol Invictus was popular in the 3rd-century. Roman religious traditions evolved and changed, and Kyle Harper suggests in Fate of Rome that pagan temple building decreased sharply after the Plague of Cyprian in the 260s. One interpretation might be that pagan religious practice itself was evolving in a less monumental and personal direction.
Anyone who takes an interest in early Christianity can observe that it evolves and mutates from its origins as a Jewish sect into something more elaborated in the 2nd-century. Very much a mystery religion of the gentiles. The life and thought of Origen illustrate the nexus between Christians and the broader culture. But the influence did not go in a single direction. Not only did the currents of Roman society affect Christianity, but the currents that led to Christianity shaped Roman society. Prominent Jews were already associated with some of the Julio-Claudians, in particular, Gauis, but the penetration of Near Eastern sects into Roman society was high. Christianity was one of these new religious movements.
Just as Arbogast’s personal evolution as a man of Roman culture is hidden from us, so we perceive the cults of the Great Mother, Mithras, or Isis, darkly through a fog. They seem but shadows of the depth and richness that was early Christianity. And they may indeed have been such. But there is an alternative hypothesis: perhaps a large set of new religious movements were converging toward the same broad configuration, and Christianity was the one which won the race to the top, whether through chance or necessity.
And there was a necessity. In my post The Invention Of World Religions 2,000 Years Ago I argue that “higher religions” evolved to fill a cultural niche that became very open with the rose of the Iron Age Empires. Rome, China, Persia, etc. The argument about whether “big gods” came before or after complex polities is a different one than the question I’m exploring here. Rather than “big gods,” the imperial polities of the last few thousand years seem to need “big systems.”
These systems can take various forms but share broad family features. One of the arguments made for the revival of paganism in the Roman Empire is that in the 9th-century Tang China suppressed the power of Buddhism at the cultural commanding heights. Though emperors could be personally devout Buddhists, the religion never obtained the same stature and monopoly power that Christianity or Islam did in western Eurasia. What this analysis ignores though is that the arrival of Buddhism fundamentally transformed the Chinese religious landscape. The development of complex religious Daoism was clearly due to Buddhist stimulus, while Neo-Confucianism took for granted many metaphysical presuppositions inherited from Buddhism. Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in China began to operate as three legs of a religious stool.
If “paganism” had revived in the Roman Empire, it would have had a heavily Christian flavor by the 5th-century. The use of the word pagan in a non-pejorative sense is somewhat broad. Many Christians consider those outside of the Abrahamic tradition “pagans.” But there is a world of difference between Indian practitioners of Vedanta, and a Korean shaman. The latter is pagan in a way that is analogous to the augurs of ancient Rome. Those who espouse Vedanta have views sharply at variance with Nicene Christianity, but their philosophical sophistication is no less than that of the heirs of Basil of Caesarea.
The Romans of the Republic practiced what we would today call a “tribal religion.” The similarities between orisha and numina are not coincidental. The Romans of the Republic were a tribal people in a quite literal sense and worshipped gods of particular places. Though some of their elites were already cosmopolitan and Greek-educated, Roman religion and philosophy remained primitive. By 300 AD the situation was very different. Pagan Romans worshipped a variety of gods and adhered to many different cults, but Neoplatonic philosophy added an intellectual sheen to the new paganism, introducing monism whereby all gods might be emanations from the Ultimate. Christianity came out of the same milieu and was somewhat influenced by Neoplatonists, though Neoplatonists were some of the earliest intellectual critics of the religion, and the school remained the refuge for diehard pagans into the 6th-century.
Which brings us to perennialism. The perennial philosophy is the idea that the world’s religious traditions share a single, metaphysical truth or origin. Unlike perennialists, I do not believe in a single metaphysical truth or origin. Rather, I believe that particular social and cultural conditions 2,000 years ago made it very likely that a set of higher religions would emerge. In particular, in large and complex multi-ethnic societies you need more than big gods. You needed big religions.
These higher religions always came with abstruse and complex philosophies opaque to the vast majority of adherents. But these elements were appealing to and justified the project of a large empire for religious professionals. A unitary principle, a Ground of Being, justified the necessity of a vice-reagent of God upon the earth, the son of Heaven, or the Cakravartin. Pre-modern states lacked the tools for genuine totalitarianism or the rapidity of unifying information technology. They required ideological bindings across their administrative classes. Philosophy injected into supernatural systems and then universalized provided just that.
These higher religions had localisms (e.g., Rome), but they were not fundamentally local. Priests and monks could travel across the world with some surety of safety due to the respect given to them by rulers. Rather than appealing to raw power or the capricious favor of household gods, universal rulers could argue that their power was a reflection of the universal gods and universal principles. Just as there was a God in heaven there was an emperor on earth. Karma and the Dharma applied to all peoples.
In evolutionary biology on occasion, there is a rhetorical question asked: why doesn’t evolution favor a single fit species? Why is there diversity? One explanation is that there are different adaptive niches, but even here there is no single species that occupies an adaptive niche across the whole world. Abiotic factors dictate certain parameters in terms of body-plan and behavior for numerous species. They are clearly being pushed and shaped by the same selective forces, but history is such that they are distinct and different.
And so it is with cultural evolution. I have observed that pagan and antique cults of Babylon existed in Mesopotamia in the early centuries of the Common Era. But by the 4th-century they faded and under the Sassanians Mesopotamia became dominated in its public culture by a welter of sects, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and Zoroastrian, with combinations thereof. This is important because unlike in the Roman Empire, the Sassanian Persians took a liberal attitude toward religious liberty. There was no coercive imposition of the new religions on the elites. Rather, the elites adopted the new religions to integrate themselves into the Roman and Persian world.
There were selective pressures that militated in favor of this transition. It wasn’t simply an accident of history. It was an inevitable consequence of social complexity.
* I am aware that Henry VIII maintained a basically Catholic Church that had broken from Rome.
There is currently much debate regarding the best way to model how heritability varies across the genome. The authors of GCTA recommend the GCTA-LDMS-I Model, the authors of LD Score Regression recommend the Baseline LD Model, while we have instead recommended the LDAK Model. Here we provide a statistical framework for assessing heritability models using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. Using data from studies of 31 complex human traits (average sample size 136,000), we show that the Baseline LD Model is the most realistic of the existing heritability models, but that it can be significantly improved by incorporating features from the LDAK Model. Our framework also provides a method for estimating the selection-related parameter α from summary statistics, finding strong evidence (P<1e-6) of negative selection for traits including height, systolic blood pressure and college education.
The preprint jumped out at me for what they detected selection in (or against). If you look at the details, they actually show selection against “Preference for Evenings.” I don’t know if this is a spurious finding (they talk a bit about population structure in the preprint), but this is really funny to me.
I am trying to make a second go-around the whole audiobook thing. For whatever reason, I’m not very good at listening to books, as opposed to reading them. I’ve spent a lifetime reading, but am not the best listener. Books require concentrated attention across many sequences of ideas and thoughts, and I’m much better with text than audio when it comes to that.
But I’ve decided to try listening to Plato’s The Republic while I’m exercising. I read portions of The Republic as an undergraduate, but the reality is so many of the concepts therein have been internalized and interpreted throughout Western culture that it’s not too difficult to follow the abstractions. I follow Karl Popper in taking a dim view of Plato’s influence on Western civilization, but one cannot deny that influence.*
My biggest reaction listening so far (I’m 10% of the way in) is that Socrates is incredibly unpleasant. Though the sophist Thrasymachus is presented as something of a fool, his critique of Socrates’ schtick seems spot-on. I don’t recall finding Socrates so unpleasant when reading the text years ago. But listening to someone speaking in Socrates’ voice, his somewhat boorish nature comes through.
A final note, when encountering ancient philosophy at some level of depth at around the age of twenty, I was always struck by how modern their thinking was in many ways. Is that because they were like us? Or we are like them?
* My anti-Plato partisanship is not strongly held. To some extent, Plato is at the root of much that is good and evil.
One of the great things about the spread of ‘direct to consumer’ genomics is that it’s increasing sample size in countries where for various reasons there isn’t much coverage. It was brought to my attention that My Heritage DNA results have been analyzed by the company, and yielded the surprising result that Hungary has been most impacted by Ashkenazi Jewish admixture in the Diaspora. This is surprising since it is well known that the United States of America is home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world, with more than 90 percent of that being Ashkenazi.
In the United States, the massive wave of Jewish migration occurred around 1900. This is not so many generations in the past, so not too many people have very distant Jewish ancestry. Additionally, anti-Semitism has been a more marginal factor on the American landscape, so Jewish ancestry has been less hidden (though not always).
