7 ms·

Did Modern Jews Originate in Italy?

26 points by mazsa 13y ago

mazsa 13y ago
"As reported online today in Nature Communications, more than 80% of Ashkenazi mtDNAs had their origins thousands of years ago in Western Europe, during or before Biblical times—and in some cases even before farming came to that part of the continent some 7500 years ago. The closest matches were with mtDNAs from people who today live in and around Italy. The results imply that the Jews can trace their heritage to women who had lived in Europe at that time. Very few Ashkenazi mtDNAs could be traced to the Middle East. The results [...] conflict [...] with widespread assumptions about Jewish identity. Jews have traditionally considered that the mother determines the ethnic identity of her children. If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data." Original: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/nco...
- iskander 13y ago
  >If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data. This assumes that the conversion of long-ago wives were somehow invalid or illegitimate. It's not clear to me why we would make that assumption.
  - jongraehl 13y ago
    "If A then B." does not assume A. We're not making that assumption. We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews. If there's some explicit cutoff date (N generations back? 1900?) before which there's no brand attached to not having a jewish mother then I guess we should talk about A' instead.
    - maratd 13y ago
      > We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews. No. If you convert today by Orthodox standards, then you will be recognized by Israel and Orthodox jews as a jew. You most certainly can do it, you just have to follow stricter standards and there is no reason to believe that such standards were not followed then.
      - jongraehl 13y ago
        This is outside my personal experience/expertise, so I'll accept your statement about Orthodox conversion, but I'm thinking of things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel: "This resulted in several hundreds of thousands of persons fitting the above criteria immigrating to Israel (mainly from the former Soviet Union) but not being recognized as Jews by the Israeli religious authorities, which on the basis of halakha recognize only the child of a Jewish mother as being Jewish." and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel "Eligible individuals are those who have at least one parent of recognized Jewish descent."
    - iskander 13y ago
      I sincerely don't understand what you're saying. Can you clarify? Also, I feel like maybe I wasn't clear. You are considered Jewish by even the strictest standards if you (1) converted or (2) can trace matrilineal descent from ancient Israel or (3) can trace matrilineal descent from a convert. What I'm saying is that when Jewish men showed up in Southern and Western Europe, they seemingly got hitched to a lot of local women. How do we know the majority of those women didn't convert?
iskander 13y ago
(1) This article is talking about Ashkenazi / European Jews. Other Jewish populations (North African, Mesopotamian, Ethiopian, Indian, etc..) generally have patrilineal descent from the original Levantine population and to varying degrees picked up local women. (2) Earlier iterations of Judaism were significantly more evangelical and actively pursued converts. Given the large population of Jews in Rome, it makes that many Italian natives made their way into the religion/ethnicity/tribe/whatever.
dhughes 13y ago
Travel writer Rick Steves has an interesting article on the history of Roman Jews http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/jewish_legacy.htm http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/jewish_leg...
anovikov 13y ago
Traditional view (promoted by Ashkenazi themselves and almost considered a hard fact) on their origin says that Ashkenazi appeared as a nation somewhere in 3th..5th centuries A.D. in what is now west Germany, around what is now Rhine-Main. Their original language (Yiddish) is so much like German that it seems to confirm this view. Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood. So don't spend too much time looking for their ethnic roots, this isn't very important to themselves in the first place.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  "Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood." Yes and no. Bloodline became more of a focus during and after the Holocaust -- which is somewhat bitterly ironic, given that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the name of blood purity. As a "half-Jew," and particularly as someone whose Jewish half is on the paternal side, I've been deemed "not really Jewish" by almost all but the most Reform branches of Judaism that I've encountered. I wouldn't be accepted into an Orthodox congregation except by conversion, because I am considered a gentile in their eyes. Even after being bar mitzvahed, I was labeled a "Jew by choice," with the slightly derisive implication that such a label carried second-class status among the Jewish populace. The obsession with matrilineal purity is still quite strong. It shouldn't be. Jews make up an extreme minority of the worldwide population, and even of the US population. If anything, the faith needs to expand, not double down on supposed bloodline purity (especially purity of increasingly dubious genetic provability). But bloodline still carries a lot of weight in many Jewish communities, typically in direct proportion to the degree of religious orthodoxy of a given community. (My paternal grandmother, a third-generation Jewish American, refused to attend my parents' wedding on account of my father's marrying a gentile. She, like many old-school Jews, didn't quite understand the mathematical implications of marrying within the faith and the supposed bloodline -- that it is a self-limiting strategy, and potentially self-defeating, given how often the faith has come close to being severely endangered).
  - anovikov 13y ago
    Faith does not 'need to expand'. If anything is true about Jewish mentality is that quality is always of more importance for them than quantity, this is especially true about faith itself (and Jews are explicitly banned from promoting their faith to other nations, unlike other major religions). That's why there are few Jews, but they own the world.
pedalpete 13y ago
This article to me is a bit misleading because from my understanding Ashkenazi has always meant European Jews. That they make up a large percentage of the modern population of Jews may not be that impressive as it was the Europeans who colonized much of the world and even the European Jews would have spread from Europe into the Americas as well as back into the Middle East. When studies of DNA look for the markers of a certain group of people, does that deny the markers of another? Does the finding of Ashekenazi mtDNA mean that other Jewish bloodlines DNA was not found?
patrickg_zill 13y ago
So will Jews be claiming Tuscany as an ancestral homeland then?
memracom 13y ago
Let's not forget that the people we now call Jews (Judeans) were members of a group that called themselves "The ten tribes". Their history begins sometime around the end of the stone age and beginning of the copper age. They appear to have had some special skill or affinity with mining of minerals. For instance the Jewish high priest wears a hoshen or breastplate with samples of 12 different minerals attached to it. At that time in history people lived in tribal groups that migrated a lot in particular those which herded sheep or cattle. This means that out of the 10 tribes, one or more could have originated very far away from modern Israel. Over time, commerce between the 10 tribes would have led them to settle on one language as their lingua franca, and eventually this language would become the language of status even in a tribe that spoke a completely different language. And then the individual languages disappear altogether. Let's not forget that the people of Europe came from somewhere else too. 12,000 years ago, all of Europe except a small part of Spain, was covered under a thick Arctic ice cap. Nothing lived there. So this study could be showing that ancestors of the Phoenicians (who spoke a language very close to Hebrew and were renowned travelers and traders) were the first to repopulate Italy when it reemerged from under the ice.

26 points by mazsa 13y ago

mazsa 13y ago

"As reported online today in Nature Communications, more than 80% of Ashkenazi mtDNAs had their origins thousands of years ago in Western Europe, during or before Biblical times—and in some cases even before farming came to that part of the continent some 7500 years ago. The closest matches were with mtDNAs from people who today live in and around Italy. The results imply that the Jews can trace their heritage to women who had lived in Europe at that time. Very few Ashkenazi mtDNAs could be traced to the Middle East. The results [...] conflict [...] with widespread assumptions about Jewish identity. Jews have traditionally considered that the mother determines the ethnic identity of her children. If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data." Original: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/nco...

iskander 13y ago
>If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data. This assumes that the conversion of long-ago wives were somehow invalid or illegitimate. It's not clear to me why we would make that assumption.
- jongraehl 13y ago
  "If A then B." does not assume A. We're not making that assumption. We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews. If there's some explicit cutoff date (N generations back? 1900?) before which there's no brand attached to not having a jewish mother then I guess we should talk about A' instead.
  - maratd 13y ago
    > We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews. No. If you convert today by Orthodox standards, then you will be recognized by Israel and Orthodox jews as a jew. You most certainly can do it, you just have to follow stricter standards and there is no reason to believe that such standards were not followed then.
    - jongraehl 13y ago
      This is outside my personal experience/expertise, so I'll accept your statement about Orthodox conversion, but I'm thinking of things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel: "This resulted in several hundreds of thousands of persons fitting the above criteria immigrating to Israel (mainly from the former Soviet Union) but not being recognized as Jews by the Israeli religious authorities, which on the basis of halakha recognize only the child of a Jewish mother as being Jewish." and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel "Eligible individuals are those who have at least one parent of recognized Jewish descent."
  - iskander 13y ago
    I sincerely don't understand what you're saying. Can you clarify? Also, I feel like maybe I wasn't clear. You are considered Jewish by even the strictest standards if you (1) converted or (2) can trace matrilineal descent from ancient Israel or (3) can trace matrilineal descent from a convert. What I'm saying is that when Jewish men showed up in Southern and Western Europe, they seemingly got hitched to a lot of local women. How do we know the majority of those women didn't convert?

iskander 13y ago

(1) This article is talking about Ashkenazi / European Jews. Other Jewish populations (North African, Mesopotamian, Ethiopian, Indian, etc..) generally have patrilineal descent from the original Levantine population and to varying degrees picked up local women. (2) Earlier iterations of Judaism were significantly more evangelical and actively pursued converts. Given the large population of Jews in Rome, it makes that many Italian natives made their way into the religion/ethnicity/tribe/whatever.

dhughes 13y ago

Travel writer Rick Steves has an interesting article on the history of Roman Jews http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/jewish_legacy.htm http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/destinations/italy/jewish_leg...

anovikov 13y ago

Traditional view (promoted by Ashkenazi themselves and almost considered a hard fact) on their origin says that Ashkenazi appeared as a nation somewhere in 3th..5th centuries A.D. in what is now west Germany, around what is now Rhine-Main. Their original language (Yiddish) is so much like German that it seems to confirm this view. Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood. So don't spend too much time looking for their ethnic roots, this isn't very important to themselves in the first place.

jonnathanson 13y ago
"Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood." Yes and no. Bloodline became more of a focus during and after the Holocaust -- which is somewhat bitterly ironic, given that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the name of blood purity. As a "half-Jew," and particularly as someone whose Jewish half is on the paternal side, I've been deemed "not really Jewish" by almost all but the most Reform branches of Judaism that I've encountered. I wouldn't be accepted into an Orthodox congregation except by conversion, because I am considered a gentile in their eyes. Even after being bar mitzvahed, I was labeled a "Jew by choice," with the slightly derisive implication that such a label carried second-class status among the Jewish populace. The obsession with matrilineal purity is still quite strong. It shouldn't be. Jews make up an extreme minority of the worldwide population, and even of the US population. If anything, the faith needs to expand, not double down on supposed bloodline purity (especially purity of increasingly dubious genetic provability). But bloodline still carries a lot of weight in many Jewish communities, typically in direct proportion to the degree of religious orthodoxy of a given community. (My paternal grandmother, a third-generation Jewish American, refused to attend my parents' wedding on account of my father's marrying a gentile. She, like many old-school Jews, didn't quite understand the mathematical implications of marrying within the faith and the supposed bloodline -- that it is a self-limiting strategy, and potentially self-defeating, given how often the faith has come close to being severely endangered).
- anovikov 13y ago
  Faith does not 'need to expand'. If anything is true about Jewish mentality is that quality is always of more importance for them than quantity, this is especially true about faith itself (and Jews are explicitly banned from promoting their faith to other nations, unlike other major religions). That's why there are few Jews, but they own the world.

pedalpete 13y ago

This article to me is a bit misleading because from my understanding Ashkenazi has always meant European Jews. That they make up a large percentage of the modern population of Jews may not be that impressive as it was the Europeans who colonized much of the world and even the European Jews would have spread from Europe into the Americas as well as back into the Middle East. When studies of DNA look for the markers of a certain group of people, does that deny the markers of another? Does the finding of Ashekenazi mtDNA mean that other Jewish bloodlines DNA was not found?

patrickg_zill 13y ago

So will Jews be claiming Tuscany as an ancestral homeland then?

memracom 13y ago

Let's not forget that the people we now call Jews (Judeans) were members of a group that called themselves "The ten tribes". Their history begins sometime around the end of the stone age and beginning of the copper age. They appear to have had some special skill or affinity with mining of minerals. For instance the Jewish high priest wears a hoshen or breastplate with samples of 12 different minerals attached to it. At that time in history people lived in tribal groups that migrated a lot in particular those which herded sheep or cattle. This means that out of the 10 tribes, one or more could have originated very far away from modern Israel. Over time, commerce between the 10 tribes would have led them to settle on one language as their lingua franca, and eventually this language would become the language of status even in a tribe that spoke a completely different language. And then the individual languages disappear altogether. Let's not forget that the people of Europe came from somewhere else too. 12,000 years ago, all of Europe except a small part of Spain, was covered under a thick Arctic ice cap. Nothing lived there. So this study could be showing that ancestors of the Phoenicians (who spoke a language very close to Hebrew and were renowned travelers and traders) were the first to repopulate Italy when it reemerged from under the ice.