© 1878 painting by Maurycy GottliebDetail of ‘Ashkenazi Jews praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur.
Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish ethnic group who have their earliest ancestors from the indigenous tribes of Israel...at least on one side of the family tree. A study published in 2013 in
Nature Communications has shown their maternal lineage comes from a different, and possibly unexpected, source.The research shows the
origins of the matrilineal line for the Ashkenazi Jews comes from Europe. This goes against the common belief that Jewish people first arrived in central Europe after the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 and only began settling in Germany in the Medieval period.
Ashkenazi Jews is the term used today to describe these Jewish people - individuals who built religiously-based communities centuries later in Central and Eastern Europe. One of the things they are recognized for is the use of Yiddish - a High German language written in the Hebrew alphabet and influenced by classical Hebrew and Aramaic.
The Yiddish calligraphic segment in the Worms Mahzor.
The 2013 study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England,
said that while Ashkenazi Jews have lived in Europe for many centuries, the results of the study using DNA samples
show that most European Jews descend from local people who converted to Judaism, not individuals who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago.Ashkenazi Jews were declared a clear, homogeneous genetic subgroup following a 2006 study. Ashkenazi Jews come from the same genetic group, no matter if their ancestors were from Poland, Russia, Hungary, Lithuania, or another place with a large historical Jewish population. They are all in the same ethnic group.
How could it be that Ashkenazi Jews are just one genetic group? The answer is a relatively simple one:
they didn't reproduce at a noticeable level with others outside their group (not even with other Jewish people). Researchers have shown Ashkenazi Jews were a reproductively isolated population in Europe for about 1000 years.
Read the rest of the article
here.
Comment: Genetic study: Ashkenazi Jews are substantially of Western European origin