Judaism

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The new analysis shows that Jewish ancestry reflects a mosaic of genetic sources. While earlier studies focused on the Middle Eastern component of Jewish DNA, new research has revealed that both Europeans and Central Asians also made significant genetic contributions to Jewish ancestry. Moreover, while the DNA studies have confirmed the close genetic interrelatedness of many Jewish communities, they have also confirmed what many suspected all along: Jews do not constitute a single group distinct from all others. Rather, modern Jews exhibit a diversity of genetic profiles, some reflective of their Semitic/Mediterranean ancestry, but others suggesting an origin in European and Central Asian groups. The blending of European, Semitic, Central Asian and Mediterranean heritage over the centuries has led to today's Jewish populations.

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The Jews resettled in many distant lands, even as far as China. This work, however, focuses specifically on the Ashkenazi Jewish experience. Jews were subdivided into groups depending on where they resettled. Ashkenazi Jews are the Jews of France, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Sephardic Jews are the Jews of Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Mizrachi/Oriental Jews are the Jews of the Middle East. Certain Jewish communities do not fit into these distinctive groupings - in particular, the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia and the Chinese Jews.

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The Cohanim study was widely misinterpreted by the public as indicating that all Jews were in haplogroup J and had the CMH. Furthermore, many non-Jews in haplogroup J mistakenly believed that they must have some Jewish ancestry hidden in their past to explain their DNA results. As it turned out, most non-Jews were in subgroup J2 rather than J1 (Semino et al. 2004). Interestingly, Jews were later found to have as much J2 ancestry as J1.

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However, it would soon become very clear that Jewish DNA was much more complicated than was presented by the media in their reporting of the Cohanim data. And Jewish Khazarian ancestry would come to the public's attention yet again when another DNA study was conducted, this time on the Jewish priestly group known as the Levites.

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Dienekes (2004) also wrote that he found the continued silence of researchers about the presence of haplogroup Q among Ashkenazim "puzzling.

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Haplogroup Q is found in high frequencies in only a few regions of the world. Native American's possess very high percentages of Q, particularly a sub-group known as “Q3” (Zegura et al. 2004). But haplogroup Q did not originate among the Native Americans, nor did this population obtain their Q ancestry from Jewish or Scandinavian ancestors. As previously noted by Faux, its origins probably lie somewhere in northern Eurasia, in Siberia or the Altai, where Q continues to be a common Y chromosome haplogroup. It is from this group after migration to the New World that Native American Haplogroup Q3 originated.

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The investigation of the genetic relationship among three Jewish communities revealed that Kurdish and Sephardic Jews were indistinguishable from one another, whereas both differed slightly, yet significantly, from Ashkenazi Jews. The differences among Ashkenazim may be a result of low-level gene flow from European populations and /or genetic drift during isolation…Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors. (Nebel et al. 2001)

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Such prohibitions did not prevent such sexual contact among Christians and Jews; nor did it prevent Christians from converting to Judaism, individually and in groups, though it was probably much more common for Jews to convert or simply leave the Jewish community, given the significant oppression they faced in Europe. The word "proselyte" originally designated a Greek person who had converted to Judaism, indicating that conversion among Greek populations must have been common enough at one time to have led to the creation of this descriptive word.

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Frankly, the fact that Jews have substantial European ancestry is obvious to most onlookers - many Jews look like Europeans. The question for DNA researchers was: How much of that European appearance actually translates into European genetic ancestry?