

Did Modern Jews Originate in Italy? - mazsa
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2013/10/did-modern-jews-originate-italy

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mazsa
"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/nco...](http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html)

~~~
iskander
>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
"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
> 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
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."

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

------
anovikov
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
_" 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
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.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" Faith does not 'need to expand'."_

Sorry, let me clarify: I'm not calling for the Jewish faith to proselytize
around the world and try to seek converts. Judaism doesn't need to go viral.
Rather, I'm saying that Judaism's numbers have historically been threatened,
and strict bans on (or at least strong stigmatization of) marriage outside the
faith is self limiting.

If I'm a Jewish man and I want to marry a gentile woman, why shouldn't my
children be considered Jewish, provided I raise them in a Jewish tradition,
culture, and set of values? Why should we intentionally threaten the
preservation of the worldwide Jewry by placing such a limitation on organic
growth? When I say "growth," I'm not talking about expansion, per se; I'm
talking about being able to maintain the numbers at a rate faster than they
can decline.

 _" That's why there are few Jews, but they own the world."_

I'm not going to touch this sort of comment, sorry.

------
memracom
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.

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pedalpete
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?

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

