Surprise:
Ashkenazi Jews Are Genetically European
The
origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely
been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal
lineage may derive largely from Europe.
Though
the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews
mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle
East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the
population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study
co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of
Huddersfield in England.
Tangled
legacy
Little
is known about the history
of Ashkenazi Jews before they were expelled from the Mediterranean and
settled in what is now Poland around the 12th century. On average, all
Ashkenazi Jews are genetically as closely related to each other as fourth or
fifth cousins, said Dr. Harry Ostrer, a pathology, pediatrics and genetics
professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and the author
of "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" (Oxford
University Press, 2012).
But
depending on whether the lineage gets traced through maternal or paternal DNA
or through the rest of the genome, researchers got very different answers for
whether Ashkenazi originally came from Europe or the Near East.
Past
research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi
Y
chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near
East, Richards said. That supported a story wherein Jews came from Israel and
largely eschewed intermarriage when they settled in Europe. [The
Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]
But
historical documents tell a slightly different tale. Based on accounts such as
those of historian Flavius Josephus, by the time of the destruction of
the Second Temple in A.D. 70, as many as 6 million {Israelites] Jews
were living in the Roman Empire, but outside Israel, mainly in Italy and
Southern Europe. In contrast, only about 500,000 lived in Judea, said Ostrer,
who was not involved in the new study.
"The
major Jewish communities were outside Judea," Ostrer told LiveScience.
Maternal
DNA
Richards
and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is contained in the
cytoplasm of the egg and passed down only from the mother, from more than 3,500
people throughout the Near East, the Caucusus and Europe, including Ashkenazi
Jews.
The
team found that four founders were responsible for 40 percent of Ashkenazi
mitochondrial DNA, and that all of these founders originated in Europe. The
majority of the remaining people could be traced to other
European lineages.
All
told, more than 80 percent of the maternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be
traced to Europe, with only a few lineages originating in the Near East.
Virtually
none came from the North Caucasus, located along the border between Europe and
Asia between the Black and Caspian seas.
The
finding should thoroughly debunk one of the most questionable, but still
tenacious, hypotheses: that most Ashkenazi Jews can trace their roots to the
mysterious Khazar Kingdom that flourished during the ninth century in the
region between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire, Richards and Ostrer
said.
The
genetics suggest many of the founding Ashkenazi women were actually converts
from local European populations.
"The
simplest explanation was that it was mainly women who converted and they
married with men who'd come from the Near East," Richards told
LiveScience.
Another
possibility is that Jews actively converted both men and women among local
populations at this time, although researchers would need more detailed study
of paternal lineages to test that hypothesis, Richards said.
By Tia Ghose
- Assistant Managing Editor October 08, 2013
https://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html
For
educational purposes, Assembly of Yahweh, Cascade