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Jewish I is described as "the most common of the three markers . . . its frequency highest in Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Slavic peoples who intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. It also appears in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan Jews (Sephardim)." This means it is a marker of general European admixture. But where is it most common, and where did the European Jews it identifies originate? Where were they concentrated in earliest times?
Statistical searches in ENFSI provide some tantalizing answers. Jewish I is found at a relatively high frequency throughout Europe but at elevated levels in Poland, Portugal and Belgium. It is lowest in Italy and Finland.
This would suggest that Jewish ancestry and intermarriage was common in countries where the population still carries this admixture marker.
Comments
stw commented on 29-Nov-2010 08:25 PM
According to DNA Ances. Comm. post, the Jewish marker I is basically Slavic, one must note that there was very large Slavic slave presence in Moorish Spain and Turkey, which may explain the presence of this marker in Sephardic Jews:
“researchers estimate that altogether more than 3 million people, predominantly Ukrainians but also Circassians, Russians, Belarusians, Poles and Jews were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate.”
Also since its inception, the Muslim religion permitted and encouraged marriage or slave concubinage of Muslim men with Jewish women in areas under their political dominion.
Its early history is basically one of conversion of Arabic speaking Israelites into a reformed Judaism more loyal to the Jewish Torah origins (or so it claims). Distinguishing middle eastern Jews and Muslims of this period is then rather unscientific since they share the same family origins.
Therefore DNA Jewish marker I is likely to be merely a broad marker for Slavic regions adjacent to Islamic conquests, which included regions populated by Jews.. Its presence in North African populations most likely relates to the Islamic white slave trade. This is important for the Jewish marker II, which is described as a non-unique marker common to many in the Middle East, meaning it refers to the peoples of Mediterranean civilization from Turkey to North Africa. It is therefore mislabeled as a Jewish marker, rather it is a representative of the Mediterranean civilization pre-Islam, and pre- rabbinic Judaism (which flourished later in the Islamic caliphates and Moorish Spain).
All of this is consistent with current research, and linguistic research on Yiddish (Paul Wexler), that shows Ashkenazi populations to be rather recent admixtures of Slavo Turkic peoples., while Sephardim are indistinguishable from the admixture of Slavic slaves, Berbers, and Arabs known as Moors.
Ellin Iselin commented on 06-Jan-2011 08:32 AM
Recommended reading for Jewish I: Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, by Jonathan Elukin
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8406.html