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New Genetic Study Shows Rhineland Hypothesis False, 'Thirteenth Tribe' Theory Correct After All

In "Heretical History" and numerous other posts, we have argued that the contributions, genetic and cultural, of the Turkic-Iranic Khazars deserve much more attention than the cosseted theories of European Zionist Jews and the official views of the state of Israel on Jewish history. A new study by Eran Elhaik titled "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypothesis," (Genome Biol. Evol. 5.1:61-74) bears out our thinking with hard evidence that seems likely to settle that rancorously-fought-over question once and for all. 

According to Science Daily (Jan. 16, 2013), "Despite being one of the most genetically analysed groups, the origin of European Jews has remained obscure . . . but the new study . . . sets to rest previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry." Elhaik's findings strongly support the Khazarian Hypothesis, as opposed to the Rhineland Hypothesis, of European Jewish origins. 

Ashkenazi ("Germanic") Jews embraced a Western European origin myth not only because it presented Jews as very white, at the top of the race pyramid, but because of the prestige it brought them of being a spin off of the Roman Empire. 

The Khazarian thesis acknowledges that the most important element is Middle Eastern among "brown" peoples, and that the period of efflorescence of Judaism in Europe began in the late Middle Ages under the influence of migrating Khazars. 

That's an entirely different version of history, one much closer to Arthur Koestler's "Thirteenth Tribe" account, a theory for which he was castigated by fellow Jews and especially Zionists. 

The new study was not possible until recently, when many of the gaps in Caucasian and Jewish genetics were filled for the first time, using autosomal approaches rather than sex-linked haplotype surveys. Elhaik's masterwork examines a comprehensive dataset of 1,287 unrelated individuals in 8 Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations genotyped over a range of half a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or markers. These data were adapted from a study by Doron Behar and colleagues from three years ago.

The central role of Khazaria was also not wanted or wished for among Eurocentric scholars, who tended to denigrate Ostjuden or Eastern Jews. Few historians conceded even the fact that Khazaria was a Jewish state that lasted nearly a millennium, where Hebrew was spoken, preferring to think of it as a sort of travelers tale or land of religious fiction.  

Elhaik used seven measures of ancestry, relatedness, admixture, allele sharing distances, geographical origins and migration patterns to identify the Caucasus-Near Eastern and European ancestral signatures in European Jews' genome along with a smaller, but substantial Middle Eastern genome. "The results were consistent in depicting a Caucasus ancestry for all European Jews," according to Science Daily. 

Heresy in a Nutshell

Elhaik wrote:  "The most parsimonious explanation for our findings is that Eastern European Jews are of Judeo-Khazarian ancestry forged over many centuries in the Caucasus. Jewish presence in the Caucasus and later Khazaria [a Hebrew-speaking Central Asian empire] was recorded as early as the late centuries BCE and reinforced due to the increase in trade along the Silk Road, the decline of Judah (1st-7th centuries), and the rise of Christianity and Islam. Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian Jews gravitating toward Khazaria were also common in the early centuries and their migrations were intensified following the Khazars' conversion to Judaism… The religious conversion of the Khazars encompassed most of the Empire's citizens and subordinate tribes and lasted for the next 400 years until the invasion of the Mongols. At the final collapse of their empire in the 13th century, many of the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and later migrated to Central Europe and admixed with the neighbouring populations."

According to Science Daily, Elhaik's findings explain otherwise conflicting results describing high heterogeneity among Jewish communities and relatedness to Middle Eastern, Southern European, and Caucasus populations not accounted for under the Rhineland Hypothesis. Although the study links European Jews to the Khazars, there are still questions to be answered. How substantial is the Iranian ancestry in modern day Jews (Khazars were themselves mixed)? Since Eastern European Jews arrived from the Caucasus, where did Central and Western European Jews come from, those usually called Sephardic?

Finally, if there was no mass migration out of Palestine at the 7th century, what happened to the ancient Judeans? --Shlomo Sand, the author of The Invention of the Jewish People, has maintained that there never were any expulsions or exoduses out of Palestine, only wholesale conversions to Islam. Thus, the true heirs of Judah are the persistent inhabitants who still occupy Jerusalem and the Holy Land, that is, Palestinians. 

It is ironic, to say the least, that these ancient Judeans are dispossessed by a nationalist colonial power with roots no deeper than nineteenth century Europe which exercises a force majeur based on mistaken notions of genetics and history. 

Photo above:  Arthur Koestler, the arch-heretic and persona non grata in the eyes of Jewish authorities, was unorthodox politically, religiously and sexually. 

The question of ancestry has been of human concern in virtually all cultures and over all times of which we have any knowledge. Whether it be a story about the origin of a particular tribe or nation and its subsequent mixture with other groups, or curiosity about a family history, there is always the implication that we understand ourselves better if we know our ancestors and that we, within ourselves, reflect properties that have come to us by an unbroken line from past generations. As treasurer of the Marlboro Historical Society in Vermont, I am the recipient of requests for printed copies of the Reverend Ephraim Newton’s mid-eighteenth-century history of our town, 70 percent of whose pages consist of “Genealogical and Biographical Notes” and a “Catalog of Literary Men.” Over and over our correspondents write of the “pride” they have in descending from these early settlers.

Surely pride or shame are appropriate sentiments for actions for which we ourselves are in some way responsible. Why, then, do we feel pride (or shame) for the actions of others over whom we can have had no influence? Do we, in this way, achieve a false modesty or relieve ourselves of the burdens of our own behavior? As a descendant of late-nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrants I cannot depend on Reverend Newton’s pages to explain my frequent contributions to The New York Review, but neither have the extensive “begats” in Genesis 10 or Matthew 1 been more enlightening.  Read More...

Gene surfing is a process in population expansion whereby certain variations become prominent and dominant in a short time, appearing to skip the slow, steady, uniform accumulation of variegation and diversification. According to a study of the population structure and genealogies of Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean in Quebec, this type of drastic change accompanied the immigrant wave front that spread over the area in the 17th century. "Deep Human Genealogies Reveal a Selective Advantage to Be on an Expanding Wave Front" in Science magazine describes the resulting demographics.

Abstract
Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than one million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.

So gene surfing in an expanding colonization phase can produce a genetic revolution whose effects will be felt for hundreds or thousands of years downstream in history.

We wonder if the same wave front demographics might explain some of the following population phenomena:

• Large scale triumph of Norman male lineages following the conquest of England in 1066.
• Selective expansion of Middle Eastern genes in Tennessee (including Cherokee families, Jewish male and female lines and Melungeons)
• Relatedness among Jews and "Jewish diseases"
• Diversity-within-uniformity of Polynesians
• Population replacement of Old European (U, N) by Middle Eastern genes (T, J)  in Europe as a result of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution

Many students of history are puzzled why old populations have the allele frequencies and heterozygosity clines they have. Genetic drift is only part of the answer. Gene surfing and selection in deep history are the rest of it.

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match

Phyllis Starnes drew many threads of Melungeon research together when she delivered her presentation on autosomal DNA validation studies at the Fifteenth Melungeon Union, held atWarren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC July 15-16, 2011. Sponsored by the Melungeon Heritage Association of Kingsport, Tenn., the conference was appropriately titled, "Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry."

Starnes, who is administrator of DNA Consultants' Melungeon DNA Studies as well as an assistant investigator responsible for authoring reports, began her presentation by telling her own story. In 2002, she read an article about the occurrence of Familial Mediterranean Fever in Appalachia, where she grew up. "This article was the catalyst for me to address my own health and ancestry," she told participants.

She had met N. Brent Kennedy, author of the touchstone book The Melungeons:  The Resurrection of a Proud People, and soon became acquainted with both Elizabeth Hirschman (Melungeons:  The Last Lost Tribe in America) and Donald Panther-Yates, both speakers at Melungeon Fourth Union in Kingsport. The resources she needed for understanding her peculiar heritage were coming together.

Starnes summarized the Hirschman-Yates study of Melungeon DNA results published last December in Appalachian Journal and went on to reveal the results of a validation study of the Melungeon data in which the DNA profiles of the 40 participants were fed back into the database atDNA, expanded to reflect the world's only autosomal DNA Melungeon sample.

Astoundingly, many Melungeon DNA project participants had Melungeon as their No. 1 match, including Starnes.

In 1990, physical anthropologist and chemist James Guthrie analyzed blood sampled from 177 Southern Appalachian people identifying as Melungeon tested by Pollitzer and Brown in 1969. Guthrie's analysis was consistent to a remarkable degree with the Hirschman-Yates study.

All studies to date have verified and confirmed repeatedly that Melungeon descendants carry an unusual mix of Jewish, Mediterranean, Turkish, Iberian, Native American and African DNA. They also inherit genetic predispositions toward developing Familial Mediterranean Fever and other disorders.

This overarching thesis explaining what makes Melungeons different was advanced over twenty years ago by Brent Kennedy. It has now been re-examined, probed, tested and validated by unimpeachable followup studies, but little has turned up to change Kennedy's original thinking. It would be wrong to say that Melungeon origins today are controversial or mysterious. There is much we do not know about them, but their genetic and medical profiles are clear.

Starnes is enrolling people in Phase II of the Melungeon DNA Study. She has also inaugurated a password-secured blog where participants can freely share their experiences.

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match

This posting will review some of the material we have previously made available about the science behind our three Jewish markers in the autosomal 18 Marker Ethnic Panel. First, it may be worthwhile to recount the chronology of our testing innovations in this area.

2006 - DNA Consultants introduces the DNA Fingerprint Test, one of the first simple autosomal ancestry tests based on population databases

2009 -Donald N. Yates, Ph.D., principal investigator, makes the discoveries in July that lay the foundation for the DNA Fingerprint Plus, rolled out in early September. The enhanced product includes simple autosomal markers for Native American, European, Jewish, Asian and African ancestry, based upon their frequencies of occurrence in these ethnicities.

2010 - Several important studies on Jewish genetics appear; DNA Consultants introduces Jewish DNA Test

2011 - DNA Consultants releases version 2.0 of its autosomal population database atDNA, marking the addition of the population Melungeon (n=40).

In the Fall of 2010, our project administrator tabulated results for more than 450 people who had ordered a Jewish Ancestry Test through our partner Jewish Voice. It was found that 99.97% showed at least one Jewish marker, that is, had some Jewish ancestry.  Some had all three markers while others had a combination of the three in some way.  The informal study indicated 74% of Jewish Ancestry Test takers had Jewish I, 30% had Jewish II and 82% Jewish III.

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.

Jewish II is characterized as the "strongest" marker, correlating very often with Ashkenazi Jewish parentage, especially in its double allele form (two checks under parents' columns on an 18 Marker Ethnic Panel or Jewish DNA Ancestry report). This description is validated by ENFSI results for 22 countries of Europe, where its strongest showings are in Czechoslovakia, Croatia and Slovenia (all Central European Slavic populations).

Its lowest frequency occurs in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, countries with few Ashkenazi Jews today. There are no data for Hungary in ENFSI since it does not belong to the European Union. Czech is the closest population in geography and historical composition. Likewise, there are no data for Slovakia, the southern part of the former Czechoslovakia, as Slovakia chose not to participate in ENFSI.

In Czechoslovakia, nearly 1 in 26 people carry Jewish II in its double allelic form, suggesting both parents were Jewish. The lowest frequency of Jewish II occurs in Scotland, where only 1 in 65 have it.

Note that even though most Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, a Germanic dialect, they were not necessarily German in origin. More likely they belonged to the Slavic peoples. Yiddish is not linguistically descended from Rhinish or Low German but a High German language of convenience adopted by Slavic-speaking Jews during Germany's medieval Drang nach Osten (Push to the East). Germany itself was considered a predominantly Slavic nation by geographers until the nineteenth century, when it was first unified under the Prussian monarchy.

The reason Jewish II is not detected at a higher level in today's German population is because of the ethnic cleansing and genocide committed by the Nazi government in the Second World War. For various reasons, Czechoslovakia and Hungary's Jewish populations, many of them assimilated Jews, survived better than Germany's.

The best book about German Jewry is probably The Pity of It All, A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, by Amos Elon (Macmillan, 2002), although the author's approach to Jewish ethnicity is Zionist and doctrinaire.

Jewish DNA is full of controversies and the journalist Jon Entine shies away from none of them in this bestselling compendium. Interesting for our readers may be to note where he falls out on some of the more vexed issues after taking the trouble to interview genetic news makers such as Karl Skorecki ("Genes of Old Testament Priests") and Father William Sanchez, the cause celebre for New Mexico crypto-Jews.



Is there a Jewish "race"? That is probably not the right word, but yes, writes Entine, there is definitely a Jewish ethnicity that has been been preserved in exile from the beginnings of Judaism in the Middle East over 3,000 years ago. Even Ashkenazi Jews are, genetically speaking, more similar to themselves and Middle Easterners than they are to Czechs, Poles and other Central and East European neighboring populations.

Is the Bible a true and accurate history of the Jews? No, for one thing, events in the Old Testament are corroborated by only a handful of contemporary records, including one Egyptian document and one Assyrian proclamation. The early books were rewritten several times, most famously by the Patriarch scribe Ezra. The Jews returning from Babylonian Exile burnished the existing scriptures and introduced political themes that put the Northern Kingdom in a bad light. The word "Jew" was not actually used of the inhabitants of ancient Israel until around 520 B.C.E., when the "battered capital city, Jerusalem, surrounded by a scattering of towns" (p. 107) was called Yehud, the Aramaic name of a new province in the Persian Empire. 

Do the Samaritans retain the closest genetic resemblance to Abraham's descendants? Here is what Entine writes:

The scientists speculate that not only are today's Samaritans likely descended from the Israelites, they may be the ancestral remnants of a breakaway group of Jewish priests that did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. Instead, these Cohanim may well have stayed, "but married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands, which was a typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities." It may just be that the tiny clan of Samaritans are a rare surviving branch of the ancient Israelites.

Among Entine's sources are Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, an Israeli geneticist who began studying Samaritan DNA when the population had dwindled to only a few families in the 1950s. Other authorities interviewed include: 

Karen Avraham (deafness in Jews), Doron Behar (Jewish founding mothers), Neil Bradman (Lemba Jews), Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Stanford's grand old man of DNA), Jared Diamond, David Goldstein (Jewish diseases), Michael Hammer (Y chromosomes), Mary-Claire King (disease studies), Jonathan Marks (critic), Tudor Parfitt (African and Indian Jews) and Mark Thomas (Cohanim).

What happened to the ten Lost Tribes? Entine adopts a wry and caustic attitude toward this subject, beginning his chapter "Wandering Tribes" with a piece on the Worldwide Church of God, a Pasadena, California sect founded by an ex-advertising agent, Herbert W. Armstrong, in the early 1930s. Armstrong was a proponent of British-Israelism, the belief that England is the heir to ancient Israel, the tribe of Ephraim having settled in Britain and the word "British" being derived from the ancient Hebrew word beriyth, which means covenant. "When Armstrong died in 1986, the WWCG claimed more than 150,000 members and an annual budget of $130 million" (p. 130). 

Are Ashkenazi Jews really Khazars (i.e. non-Semitic)? Their genetic mix contains some Turkic elements from the Khazars, but even the Khazars were not 100% Turkic. Entine does not believe in the mass conversion portrayed in works such as Judah Halevi's medieval account The Kuzari: A Book of Argument in Defense of a Despised Religion. Following the author Kevin Brook ("not a formally trained historian but an impressively self-taught scholar...creator of the Web site khazaria.com," p. 199), Entine says "the number of Khazarian Jews probably numbered no more than 30,000 out of a total population of 100,000, including a few thousand nobles and royalty" (p. 201).

Do you have to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish? Entine investigates this ruling very thoroughly and shows that Judaism was spread primarily by men with Middle Eastern roots who married local women of non-Semitic ancestry who converted to the husband's religion. The Jewish mother criterion came about in rabbinical times under the influence of Roman law. In Biblical times, Jewishness always came from a Jewish father. 

Is there an "intelligence gene" among Ashkenazi Jews? Yes, it emerged in the age of the ghetto when survival selected for males who could earn a livelihood with their wits rather than hands or bodies.

Having touched on these questions, I would like to point out that many of the solutions are rather superficial. Entine's research is not very deep or wide ranging. Nowhere in the chapter on mass conversions does he speak about the Babylonian principality of Narbonne in the South of France during Carolingian times. His treatment of Sephardic Jews is meager. There are other limitations in the scope of the work, but in general, Abraham's Children is to be recommended as a solid, reliable, seemingly effortless account of a subject on which blood, sweat and tears have been spilled on every page in the past. That is no small feat.

Implications for Jewish History and Genealogy

Article:  Gil Atzmon et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era:  Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (June 11, 2010) 850-859.

This blog posting attempts to summarize this important article and translate its technical results into layman’s language for the sake of our customers. From the genetic evidence, we hope to glean some useful information about Jewish history and genealogy, especially for those who find they have “some” Jewish ancestry in their family tree but who are non-Jewish in the way they identify.

The eleven authors represent a stellar team of international researchers specializing in population genetics. The institutions involved are leading centers of genetics and biomedicine, starting with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and including Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Appearance in the American Journal of Human Genetics, a publication of the American Society of Human Genetics, assures prestige and finality of the highest order.

The study uses a new sample of 237 carefully qualified Jewish subjects, which it compares with data from the Human Genome Diversity Project started at Stanford in the 1990s, as well as the Population Reference Sample (PopRes) project, containing hundreds of thousands of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms, used to differentiate genes that show heredity lines and disease linkage in populations).

The scale of the project is colossal, and it must have taken years to complete. Financial support came from private and public sources, including the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and NIH. It supersedes (while it confirms or clarifies) the two types of previous approaches to the problem: 1) genetics studies on blood groups from the 1970s, and 2) recent studies of Y chromosomal and mitochondrial haplotypes. The latter “uniparental” studies could only offer a limited view of the subject. This study uses autosomal DNA to its full advantage. The scientists had supercomputers and the latest tools in biostatistics at their disposal.

Material and Methods

The two cornerstones of any statistical study are reliability and validity. Experts would be challenged to find anything wrong with the reliability of “Abraham’s Children.” State-of-the-science genotyping, phylogeny, bootstrapping and GERMLINE algorithms are employed. But validity issues may be mentioned as likely to call some of the findings into slight question in some areas. Subjects were recruited in New York (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian and Ashkenazi Jews), Seattle (Turkish Sephardic Jews), Greece (Greek Sephardic Jews) and Rome (Italian Jews). The main divisions into Italian, Ashkenazi, Syrian, Middle Eastern (termed Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews here) can be seen in some instances to be question-begging, and there are equivocations in labels that might, conceivably, create “desired results.” Moreover, subjects “were included only if all four grandparents came from the same Jewish community.” Such a rule might have influenced one of the findings, namely, that “Jewish Communities Show High Levels of IBD,” or Informative By Descent shared segments of DNA (p. 855f.).

Notably, the conclusion that Ashkenazi Jews are highly inbred, with most being as close as 3^rd or 4^th cousins to each other, could be an effect of the sample selection from New York Ashkenazi Jews, who often emigrated together and belonged to the same synagogue for several generations. A larger, more randomized selection would have been better. The total number of Ashkenazi Jews used was only 34 persons.

Jews now living in Rome are not the same as Roman Jews. Traditional schemes of Jewry speak of the Romaniot Jews, but these were traditionally at home in the Byzantine Empire. Are Syrian Jews mostly Middle Eastern or are they another amalgam of émigrés and remnants? Where are Central Asian Jews like the large Uzbekistani population my local barber represents? The absence of Caucasian and Central Asian Jews may have affected the study’s rather resounding, over-confidant statement that it “refutes” the contention that Ashkenazi Jews have little Middle Eastern heritage and rather more of a contribution to their genetics from Khazars and Slavs. The study, like many, seems at pains to prove Middle Eastern connections of Ashkenazi Jews, who are the leading force in present-day Israel.

There are no German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or English Jews in the study. “Ashkenazi” seems to represent Jews living in New York with rather uniform ancestry in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Lithuania and Russia. All Jews in the study seem to be of the “go to temple” (at least on the High Holy Days) sort, although no mention is made of religious orientation. Subjects were chosen because of their ostensibly “pure” Jewish roots.

Ashkenazi Jews at Yom Kippur in 19th century Central Europe from a painting by Gottlieb.

Seven Jewish population clusters are defined: 

1. Irani Jews
2. Iraqi Jews
3. Syrian Jews
4. Ashkenazi Jews
5. Italian Jews
6. Greek Jews
7. Turkish Jews

These were sorted out into three major groups of the Jewish Diaspora:

• Eastern European Ashkenazim
• Italian, Greek and Turkish Sephardim
• Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian Middle Easterners

How Different are Jews from Each Other? From Non-Jewish Populations?

Table 1 on page 853 shows Fst values, which indicate the degree of projected inbreeding within a cluster and allow one to make comparisons between clusters. If we look at the table of genetic diversity among Jews, we can pick out some of the following points of interest:

• Ashkenazi Jews are very, very different genetically from Italian (Sephardic) Jews: genetic distance between the two populations is over 3.1, whereas that between Ashkenazi Jews and non-Jewish European populations such as Russian or French hardly ever goes above 1.0.

• Syrian and Iraqi Jews are also very different from each other; Syrian Jews group together with European (Ashkenazi and Sephardic) Jews, a major finding of the study.

• All Jewish populations, including Ashkenazim, resemble genetically the Druze, a Middle Eastern population that is still in its original place in Lebanon and Israel. Syrian and Turkish Jews (Sephardim) most resemble Druzes.

The study identifies two major groups of Jews, characterizing them as Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. Of the Middle Eastern Jews, the Irani and Iraqi were scarcely distinguishable. The Europeans have varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations into which they have been dispersed. European Jews are 20-40% (or on another page, 30-60%) European, the study concludes, while Sephardic Jews have 8-11% North African (Berber) DNA. Italian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi Jews are the most inbred.

All these statistics “highlight the commonality of Jewish origin” and expose the Middle Eastern origins and genetic unity of Jewish people, even in dispersal from their homeland in ancient Israel.

The flipside of inbreeding is outbreeding or exogamy. If European Jews are highly admixed, by the same token, many Europeans must have some degree of Jewish admixture. Gene flow did not go just one way. What are the most outbred Jewish clusters according to the study? It is the Sephardic Jews from Italy, Greece and Turkey, with low rates of shared IBD and greater diversity than the Ashkenazim.

Lost Tribes Still Lost

 The brief Discussion section at the end of the article attempts to put the statistical findings together with an outline of Jewish history and resolve some of the mysteries of Jewish genetic makeup, chiefly the Khazar question. “Each of the Jewish populations formed its own cluster as part of the larger Jewish cluster,” the authors conclude. “Each group demonstrated Middle Eastern ancestry and variable admixture with European populations.”

Next, the authors attack the difficulty of determining when the major split between Eastern and Western Jewish groups occurred (with Syrians falling out with the Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the West, although intermediate in genetic distance with Middle Eastern Jews like the Iraqi and Irani). Based on IBD or calculations of shared genes on the front end or bottlenecks and back end or genetic drift, “a split between Middle Eastern Iraqi and Iranian Jews and European/Syrian Jews…is 100-150 generations [or] 2500 years ago.” They correlate this population divide with the Babylonian and Persian periods of Jewish history. These disturbances began in the 900s-800s BCE when the Kingdom of David fell apart into the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Northern Kingdom (Samaria , Israel, Ephraim) and were finalized in the 6^th century BCE when King Cyrus of Persia granted permission to the exiles to be repatriated from Babylon to Jerusalem.

In the shuffle, the so-called Lost Tribes representing the Northern Kingdom had been dispersed “beyond the river” into Central Asia, leaving the Judeans in the ascendancy in Israel. Although the authors do not explicity state it, the fact that Syrian Jews are several quantums’ length closer in affinity with European Jews than Middle Eastern Jews seems to reflect the historic Return to Zion and inauguration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 516 BCE and explain why European Jews, especially Sephardim, emphasize the House of David and Tribes of Levi in their traditional ancestral accounts. So far, the autosomal clock of change seems to beat with the march of history.

Khazar kingdom in the Middle Ages.

The article is clear about another thing, “the idea of non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestry in the formation of the European/Syrian Jewish groups,” attributing this to the mass conversions and proselytism during Greco-Roman times. It mentions that there were six million Jews in the Roman Empire, when Judaism accounted for 10% of the population. But here is where the authors’ sense of history begins to get fuzzy. They do not speak of medieval conversions or mention, for instance, the Jews of Visigothic and Berber Spain and Septimanian France and gloss over the huge Khazar conversion and expansion event, 600-1000 CE. Again, medieval history does not seem to be geneticists’ strength.

“Abraham’s Children” claims that the genetic composition of European/Syrian Jewish groups “is incompatible with theories that Ashkenazi Jews are for the most part the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars or Slavs” (857). In this brief sentence are a number of fallacies, special pleading, misnomers, false assumptions, sleights of hand, straw arguments and equivocations. This blog  posting can only touch on the controversy, but to begin with, as we have seen, Ashkenazi Jews (n=34, all from New York) are lumped together with Sephardim and Syrian Jews as having Middle Eastern core pedigrees, even though they have the highest amount of local population admixture. Are Khazars the same as Slavs? Not ethnographically. They are sometimes treated as Middle Easterners and sometimes as Europeans or other interlopers in this article, but it doesn’t seem to matter really, because there are no Khazars in the study sample. The authors are thus stalking a phantom, which they duly track down and slay.

Ghost in the Machine

Using haplogroup studies, the authors raise the possibility of 12.5% non-Middle Eastern admixture per generation in Ashkenazi Jews (based on Hammer et al.). They also draw attention to the 7.5% frequency of haplogroup R1a1 among Ashkenazi Jews, a non-Middle Eastern, rather Eastern European male lineage. But R1a1 is not diagnostic of Khazars; try maybe G. R1a1 descendants are typically fair haired and light-eyed; Khazars had a Middle Eastern, Turkic appearance, with dark features.

In a sense, geneticists always seem to find support for what they set out to prove in the first place. It is small wonder that “Abraham’s Fathers” comes at the end of and completes a decades-long push by Big Science to legitimize Jewish claims to Middle Eastern roots. It is a splendid survey, the last in a long series, but it is not the final word on the subject. There are flaws both in the sampling and historical thinking.

The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Ashkenazi Jewish author, advanced the thesis that the modern Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe is not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars. This Turkic people of the Caucasus region converted to Judaism in the 8th century and moved into Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania and Germany during the 12th and 13th century when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. Koestler's work was founded on that of the French scholar Ernest Renan and set off a firestorm of controversy among Zionists. 

List Proven to Work in Part Also for Melungeon, Cherokee Family History

As part of our series on Jewish ancestry, we reproduce below an appendix from the forthcoming book, Star, Crescent and Cross:  Jews and Muslims in Colonial America, by Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates.

Rituals and Practices of the Secret Jews of Portugal

The following is an incomplete list of practices that may be indicative of Jewish origin among Anusim or secret Jews or former Jewish families in the New World today.

Told one is Jewish explicitly by parents, grandparents, or other relatives, a boy when he turns 13, a girl at 12.

Having Jewish family names: Duran, Lopez, etc.

Secret synagogues; secret prayer groups.

 New Mexico Crypto-Jews. Newsweek.

Avoiding church.

Churches without icons.

Lighting candles on Friday night when the first star appears.

Clean house and clothes for Shabbat.

Not allowed to do anything Friday night (not even wash hair).

El Dia Puro (Yom Kippur).

Celebrating a spring holiday.

Fasts: three days of Tanit Esther; every Monday and Thursday, fast of Gedalia.

Venerating Jewish saints, with celebrations:  Santa Esterika, Santo Moises, etc.

Eight candles for Christmas.

Circumcision; consecration on eighth day (avoiding circumcision because that would bind child to the laws of Moses.

Biblical first names, like Esther.

Women taught Tanakh and ruled on questions.

Married under huppah/canopy.

Rending of garments; burial within one day; covering mirrors; spigots in cemeteries.

Seven days, then one year, of mourning.

Tombstones bearing Hebrew names, designations such as “daughter of Israel,” and Jewish symbols (hand pointing to a star, open book of life, torah, star of David).

Possessing talit and tefillin, mezuzot, Tanakh, siddurim other Jewish objects.

Sweeping the floor away from the door (to avoid defiling mezuzah).

Having Cabalistic knowledge and practices.

Ritual slaughter (special knives, tested on hair or nails); covering blood with sand; removing sinew.

Purging, soaking, salting, boiling meat.

Avoiding pork and shellfish and other non-kosher foods (squirrel, rabbit).

Avoiding blood; throwing out eggs with bloodspots.

Avoiding red meat in general.

Waiting between meat and milk.

Eating only food prepared by mother or maternal grandmother.

Adapted from Professor Eduardo Mayone Dias

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Los Angeles, California

Birth Rituals

To place a rooster’s head over the door of the room where the birth will occur.

After the birth the mother must not uncover herself or change clothes for 30 days.

To throw a silver coin into the baby’s first bath water, especially a son’s.

To say a prayer eight days after birth in which the baby’s name is included.

Belief that the fairies (hadas) preside over a naming ceremony at birth

Wedding Rituals

Only home weddings.

To fast on the wedding day (both bride and groom, as well as two male friends of the groom and two female friends of the bride).

To bind the bride and groom’s hands with a white cloth while a prayer is said.

To follow the wedding ceremony with a light meal consisting of a glass of wine, salt, bitter herbs, honey, an apple and unleavened bread.

At the wedding ceremony bride and groom eat and drink out of the same plate and glass.

Marrying your brother’s widow (Levirate law).

Funeral Rituals

To have ritual meals to which a beggar is invited and serve the food the deceased liked best.

To throw away all water in the home of the deceased.

To leave furniture overturned to show how a relative’s death has upset the family.

To appear disheveled and careless about your own appearance during mourning.

To go to the deceased’s room for eight days and say: May God give you a good night.  You were once like us, we will be like you.

Not to shave for 30 days after the death of a relative.

Not to eat meat for one week after a death in the family, then fast on the anniversary.

Naming Rituals

Having two names, a private one in Hebrew (kinnui, e.g. Moses) and public one in the vernacular (Morris). Others:  Jacob/James, Raphael/Ralph, Hannah/Johannah, Adina/Adelaide.

Allusions to mascots of Hebrew tribes like deer (Naphthali) and wolf (Levi).

Belief in being descended from the Biblical King David.

Naming after religious objects:  Paschal, Menorah.

Translating Hebrew names, especially girls’:  Hannah into Grace, Esther into Myrtle, Peninah into Pearl, Roda into Rose, Shoshannah into Lillian, Lily. Simchah into Joy, Tikvah into Hope, Tzirrah into Jewel, Golda into Goldie.

Allusions to Jacob’s blessing of his sons and grandsons, e.g. Fishel for Ephraim because he was to multiply like the fish of the sea.

Use of Hebrew, but non-biblical names (e.g., Meir, Hayyim, Omar, Tamarah/Demarice).

Use of names from Jewish legend and folklore (e.g. Adinah, Edna, Adel, progenitress of the tribe of Levi).

Use of hypocoristic or pet names within the family alluding to Hebrew ones, for instance Zack or Ike for Isaac, Robin (Rueben) instead of Robert.

Adding the theophoric suffix -el to surnames, e.g., Lovell, Riddell, Tunnel.

Naming after a living relative, preferably the eldest born after the grandfather or grandmother, the next born after uncles and aunts and only after the father when these names are exhausted (Sephardic) or naming only after dead relatives (Ashkenazic).

Use of double names like Edward Charles and James Robert.

Changing the name of a child who becomes ill to foil the angel of death.

Giving a child an amuletic name like Vetula (“old woman”) to bring long life.

Favoring names that begin with Lu- to remind the child that the family was once Portuguese (Lusitanian):  Louise, Luanne, etc.

Belief in gematria (numerology of names, determined by Hebrew alphabet)

Avoiding saint’s names (Paul, Peter, Barbara) and using Marianne or Mariah instead of Mary.

Jokes about the virgin birth of Jesus by Mary

Using names like Christopher or Christina to dispel doubts about conversion to Christianity.

Knowing whether your family belongs to the Kohanim (priestly caste), Levite (House of David) or Israelite (all the rest) division of Jews.

Other

Swearing an oath with your hat on.

Not mentioning the name of God. Writing it G*d.

Washing your hands before prayer.

A father blessing a son in public.

Saying grace after the meal.

Bowing and bobbing during religious service.

Jokes about the central tenets of Christianity (Immaculate Conception of Mary, rising from the dead of Jesus, etc.).

Deriding idolatry of saints and ornate decor of churches.

Hatred of the pope.

Preparing Saturday’s meal (often a slow-cooking stew, for instance of eggplant) on Friday afternoon so no work is performed on the Sabbath.

Eating preferably fruits that grow in the land of Israel (dates, olives, oranges, grapes, peaches etc.).

Spreading sand from Israel on a grave or in a sanctuary.

Eating tongue on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize head of the year.

Having Bibles containing only the Old Testament and prayer books consisting only of the Psalms.

Having pictures of rabbis and scholars rather than saints in the sanctuary.

Performing tashlich, letting old clothes float away in running stream to mark a new year.

Forgiving a debt on Yom Kippur.

Facing Jerusalem during rituals.

Uttering brief blessings when you see lightning, mountains and other natural wonders.

Using only percussion instruments like the tambourine and hand clapping in services.

Silent prayer by congregation after prayers made out loud.

Worship services in the home.

Having 11 elders in a place of worship (minyam).

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match