The Origin of European Jews

Inkarri Thursday 24 Jan 2013

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The “Rhineland hypothesis” depicts Eastern European Jews as a “population isolate” that emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the “Khazarian hypothesis” suggests that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Mesopotamian and Greco–Roman Jews continuously reinforced the Judaized empire until the 13th century. Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo–Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo–Khazars. Thus far, however, the Khazars’ contribution has been estimated only empirically, as the absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe a major difference among Caucasus populations explained by the early presence of Judeans in the Southern and Central Caucasus. Our results have important implications for the demographic forces that shaped the genetic diversity in the Caucasus and for medical studies.

...We compared two genetic models for European Jewish ancestry depicting a mixed Khazarian–European–Middle Eastern and sole Middle Eastern origins. Contemporary populations were used as surrogates to the ancient Khazars and Judeans, and their relatedness to European Jews was compared over a comprehensive set of genetic analyses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis depicting a large Near Eastern–Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions. We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco–Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans and that their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.

Read the rest here: http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/61.full

Angocachi Thursday 24 Jan 2013

If Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, that means they are Gog & Magog.
Genetic testing confirms that they are.

Now Ezekiel 38,

1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal , and prophesy against him,
3 and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog , the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal :
4 and I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armor, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
5 Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
6 Gomer , and all his bands; the house of Togar'mah of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.

Palestinians are the descendants of the pre-diaspora Jews who converted to Christianity and Islam, as confirmed by Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand in his bestseller "The Invention of the Jewish People"

http://www.haaretz.com/an-invention-called-the-jewish-people-1.240298

Zionism is the prophesied many nations, Gog, Gomer, Libya, Ethiopia, etc besieging the people of the tribe of Israel, the Palestinians.

Then what about the Biblical prophecy that the tribe of Israel would return from exile, isn't that the establishment of the State of Israel?
No. The prophecy that the tribe of Israel would return to the land of Israel was written during the Babylonian exile, and the tribe of Israel returned to the land of Israel from Babylon in 538 BC. It was already fulfilled.

Niccolo and Donkey Thursday 24 Jan 2013

Inkarri

Let's move this to Ethnology.

Niccolo and Donkey Wednesday 24 Jul 2013

Powerful Male Mohel Inkarri Byssus SteamshipTime Longface President Camacho

'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert

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Science Feud : Johns Hopkins geneticist Eran Elhaik says his research debunks the long-held theory that Jews are a single race.

But that’s how Johns Hopkins University post-doctoral researcher Eran Elhaik describes a group of widely respected geneticists, including Harry Ostrer, professor of p athology and genetics at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and author of the 2012 book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People.”

For years now, the findings of Ostrer and several other scientists have stood virtually unchallenged on the genetics of Jews and the story they tell of the common Middle East origins shared by many Jewish populations worldwide. Jews — and Ashkenazim in particular — are indeed one people, Ostrer’s research finds.

It’s a theory that more or less affirms the understanding that many Jews themselves hold of who they are in the world: a people who, though scattered, share an ethnic-racial bond rooted in their common ancestral descent from the indigenous Jews of ancient Judea or Palestine, as the Romans called it after they conquered the Jewish homeland.

But now, Elhaik, an Israeli molecular geneticist, has published research that he says debunks this claim. And that has set off a predictable clash.

“He’s just wrong,” said Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, a leading researcher in Jewish genetics, referring to Elhaik.

The sometimes strong emotions generated by this scientific dispute stem from a politically loaded question that scientists and others have pondered for decades: Where in the world did Ashkenazi Jews come from?

click the link above to read the rest

Angocachi Thursday 25 Jul 2013

niccolo and donkey said: ↑

Powerful Male Mohel Inkarri Byssus SteamshipTime Longface President Camacho

'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert

Science Feud : Johns Hopkins geneticist Eran Elhaik says his research debunks the long-held theory that Jews are a single race.

click the link above to read the rest

If you've ever seen an Arab looking Ashkenazi like Jeff Goldblum, Henry Kissinger, or any other swarthy, kinky haired, hook nosed European Jew... you know they must have come in part from the Middle-East. That said, it's not as if the entire Jewish population of Khazaria converted from Judaism when they left the Caucasus.
Jews in Europe were a small population and could rarely marry a Christian woman. Perhaps the White phenotype of Ashkenazis, red or blond hair, pale skin, blue or green eyes... came far more from amalgamating with Khazar Jews than it did from shiksas.

Niccolo and Donkey Sunday 29 Jun 2014

Why Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Descended From Khazars — and What It Means

Mass Conversion Claim Cast Doubt on Mideast Origins

(Haaretz) — The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian.

The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that book, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages, Sand argued that the “Jewish people” is an invention, forged out of myths and fictitious “history” to justify Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel.

Now, another Israeli historian has challenged one of the foundations of Sand’s argument: his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the people of the Khazar kingdom, who in the eighth century converted en masse on the instruction of their king. In an article published this month in the journal “Jewish Social Studies,” Prof. Shaul Stampfer concluded that there is no evidence to support this assertion.

“Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened,” Stampfer said.

Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”

As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past … It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.”

That’s because the proof is based primarily on the absence of evidence rather than its presence – like the fact that an event as unprecedented as an entire kingdom’s conversion to Judaism merited no mention in contemporaneous sources.

“The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer said. “The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt – none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.”

The research ended up taking him four years. “I thought I’d finish in two months, but I discovered that there was a huge amount of work. I had to check sources that aren’t in my field, and I consulted and got help from many people.”

Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught.

“It’s a really interesting historical question, but it has political implications,” he said. “As a historian, I’m naturally worried by the misuse of history. I think history should be removed from political discussions, but anyone who nevertheless wants to use history must at least present the correct facts. In this case, the facts are that the Khazars didn’t convert, the Jews aren’t descendants of the Khazars and the contemporary political problems between Israelis and Palestinians must be dealt with on the basis of current reality, not on the basis of a fictitious past.”

Sand had tied the Khazar issue directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling Haaretz in 2008 that many Jews fear that wide acceptance of his thesis would undermine their “historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea [ancient Israel] would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us … There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.”

Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms.

“Those who believed this story – and they are many – usually didn’t do so for malicious reasons,” he says. “I tell my students that the only thing I want them to remember from my classes is the need to investigate and ask – to investigate whether the arguments they hear are credible, reasonable and well-founded.”

Byssus Welund Jongkind Angocachi Longface

Abe de Ville Monday 30 Jun 2014

This is complete BS, several different Islamic chroniclers visited the Khazar Khaganate during the time of its existence and all of them said that the elites were Jewish. They never said that all of the Khazars converted, though, as after the fashion of Turkic kingdoms these lands didn't impose one religion on all of the people that lived there, so you had in that area all Abrahamic faiths as well as pagans. I note he doesn't even mention this rather gaping hole in his historiography.

It's also not true that surrounding kingdoms don't mention this. Both Russian and Byzantine sources acknowledge that there were Jews in the Khazar lands. This study is disinformation.

Bronze Age Pervert Monday 30 Jun 2014

Abe de Ville said: ↑

This is complete BS, several different Islamic chroniclers visited the Khazar Khaganate during the time of its existence and all of them said that the elites were Jewish. They never said that all of the Khazars converted, though, as after the fashion of Turkic kingdoms these lands didn't impose one religion on all of the people that lived there, so you had in that area all Abrahamic faiths as well as pagans. I note he doesn't even mention this rather gaping hole in his historiography.

It's also not true that surrounding kingdoms don't mention this. Both Russian and Byzantine sources acknowledge that there were Jews in the Khazar lands. This study is disinformation.

And Khazar kings all of a sudden start getting Old Testament names too...

Angocachi Monday 30 Jun 2014

Genetic tests prove that Ashkenazis are descended from Neareasterners and have a likeness to other Levantines, You can see that in their appearance, olive skinned Ashkenazis with dark curly hair, flappy lips and hook noses are clearly Semites. So I have no doubt that they are, like other Jewish ethnic groups, descendants of the ancient and biblical sand wog tribe of Judah... only those who ended up in Europe and took white women for wives. However, Jewish convert Khazars were a reality, and it's likely they contribute some part, large or small, to Ashkenazi ancestry.

Welund Monday 7 Jul 2014

Is it just or do the Jews look more like Arabians/Mesopotamians in some traits than "Levantines"? They had that whole sojourn, didn't they? Even Iraqi Jews look like NYC types, whereas Samaritans look more Levantine.

Other than that, the Khazar= Yentil thing is just sort of ridiculous because Khazars are cool, and Jews are not. It's possible they got some red hair from some Khazar converts though. Or it was just an archaic Levantine trait.

One thing that really seems to disprove it is that there are literally no Mongoloid genes in the Jews, whereas there would have been a couple among the Khazars.

The Origin of European Jews

10 posts