Thursday, April 21, 2016

Are Ashkenazi Jews descended from Turks?

Persian Jews converted Turks to Judaism to create the rump of what would become today’s Jewish population, DNA research has revealed. The fascinating insight, which shows that most Ashkenazi Jews descend from Turkey, was made possible by state-of-the-art computer modelling and genetic techniques. The project, led by Israeli-born Dr Eran Elhaik, even pinpointed Iskenaz, Eskenaz and Ashanaz – three Turkish villages an ancient Silk Road route which still exist today – as part of the original Ashkenazi homeland. It is the largest genomic study ever carried out on Ashkenazi Jews, and claims that most of today’s population are the descendants of Greeks, Iranians and others who colonized what is now northern Turkey more than 2,000 years ago. Elhaik says that locals were converted to Judaism by Jews from Persia, whose empire was then home to the world’s largest Jewish communities. He said that the word Ashkenaz likely derives from Ashguza, the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian term for Iron Age Eurasian steppeland people known as Scythians. Concurrent analysis of Yiddish suggests that it was originally a Slavic language which the researchers think was developed by Jewish tradesmen travelling along the Silk Roads linking China and Europe 1,200 years ago. It was only when the Khazar Empire began to decline around 1,000 years ago that the Jewish converts headed west, into central Europe, coming into contact with German-speaking peoples. Elhaik and his team from the University of Sheffield say that their work helps settle an age-old debate about the origins of the 1,000-year old Yiddish language. “The prevalent view claims Yiddish has a German origin, whereas the opposing view suggests a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weak Turkic substrata,” they say. “One of the major difficulties in deciding was the unknown geographical origin of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews,” they say, but their analysis “demonstrates that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, and Turks exhibit the highest genetic similarity with Ashkenazic Jews”.

9 comments:

Dave said...

If this is true, it might mean that Jews are the closest thing we have to the ancient Greeks and Romans, most of whom abandoned their pagan religion and contracepted themselves out of existence. Today's Greeks and Italians are descended from multiple waves of barbarians who immigrated to the Roman Empire and eventually wrecked it.

Imagine an old, fading, dysgenic civilization slowly sinking into idiocracy, and you come along and convert a few of the smart people to a religion that demands eugenic breeding. Then you come back 1000 years later and find your converts lording it over an illiterate population 45 IQ points beneath them. Not surprised, are you?

Average Joe said...

http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/03/03/gbe.evw046.full.pdf

Anonymous said...

Wow, I was sure this thesis was dead. Fascinating. What are the eugenic breeding practices Dave (in an above comment) refers to? Anyone know?

Anonymous said...

Too bad the Germans just didn't slaughter them when they had the chance

Average Joe said...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/05/16/israeli-researcher-challenges-jewish-dna-links-to-israel-calls-those-who-disagree-nazi-sympathizers/#3b6e70f3db23

Santoculto said...

Una faccia Una razzia
A one face a one race

Ashkenazis just look the same than people im Anatolia region included Caucasus, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, Greek, a very east mediterraneans with strong armenid component.

I have little impression that western Sephardim definitely don't look ashkenazi-like.

I think ashkenazis can be Jewish too without the idea that they fakery its ethnic identity. They are just of geographically different branch than western Sephardim.

Dave said...

A eugenic religion calls its smartest men "rabbis", and encourages them to marry and have lots of children.

A dysgenic religion calls its smartest men "priests" and "monks" and forbids them to marry and have children.

It also helped that Jews were forbidden to own land, so they gravitated to brainier occupations like banking, medicine, diamond-cutting, etc. They didn't even consider you a man until you could read the Torah, in Hebrew, at a time when most non-Jews couldn't read anything.

Luke Raines said...

They also gravitated to "brainer occupations" such as con-artists and swindlers.

Anonymous said...

Ofcourse Ashkenazis are not similar to Ancient Greeks Dave, who said Greeks were replaced, who said Italians were replaced. A couple of barbarian invasions just changed the original Italic population. Are you stupid?