Posted on 01/14/2006 7:10:07 AM PST by blam
'Four mothers' for Europe's Jews
There are now some 8m people of Ashkenazi origin around the world
Almost half of Europe's Jews are descended from just four women who lived 1,000 years ago, a study says. Scientists studied the mitochondrial DNA - passed from mother to daughter - of 11,000 women of Ashkenazi Jewish origin living in 67 countries.
The Ashkenazis moved from the Mid-East to Italy and then to Eastern Europe, where their population exploded in the 13th Century, the scientists say.
One of the authors said the study shows the importance of Jewish mothers.
"This I could tell you even without the paper," Dr Doron Behar of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology told Reuters news agency.
Genetic signature
The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago but they may not have lived anywhere near each other, according to the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
However, they bequeathed genetic signatures to their descendents, which do not appear in non-Jews and are rare in Jews not of Ashkenazi origin.
The Ashkenazis are thought to have travelled from the Middle East to Italy in the first or second Centuries.
In Central and Eastern Europe, many spoke Yiddish - a form of German, mixed with Hebrew.
Ashkenazi comes from an old Hebrew word for Germany.
By the outbreak of World War II, there were some nine million, some two-thirds of whom were killed by the Nazis.
There are now some eight million people of Ashkenazi origin living around the world, the researchers say.
Some 3.5m, or 40%, of them are descended from the four women, they say.
GGG Ping.
And do you think that any of them ever call me?
Except for a really strange time-line (that left out Spain and North Africa completely), I suppose this is possible although the claim that none of these women have a non-Jewish descendant is not likely at all ~ probably half the people who post/read FreeRepublic know several people descended from these four women and who would certainly be surprised to hear of any Jewish ancestors.
bump
Yeah, mathematically it doesn't add up. All we need is for one of those 40% to intermarry and have a child, and boom, the claim's exploded. And logically speaking many of them already have intermarried and had children, certainly within the last 80 years, and sporadically well before that.
I suspect the problem is in using too small a sample size, and with too great a focus on traditional rabbinical families.
The Jews who lived in Spain are not Ashkenazim--their descendants are the Sephardic Jews (who continued to speak Spanish into the 20th century in many cases).
Ping!
There are also Jews whose ancestors migrated from Baghdad during the Balkan Wars to Vienna and other Eastern European points. They are indistinguishable from Jews previously residing in those areas except for their tendency to have occupational surnames in Ladino, the language of the Spanish Jews. Many such families who moved further East, to Kazan after its clearance of Moslems by the Russians in the 1700s, took extensive family genealogies with them that make all of this quite clear.
Spanish Jews who moved to North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the expulsions of the 15th and 16th century are more correctly identified as Sephardic.
It is incorrect to identify the small population that migrated from the Eastern Mediterranean to Venice in the 1100s (to Geto) as consisting of all of the ancestors of all the Eastern European Jews.
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