This is interesting, but saying that a European depiction of Mary is invalid is a bit ridiculous. Has the author seen many Jewish girls? Alicia Silverstone? Plenty of Jewish women have blonde hair and blue eyes. What I want to know is, where are the redheaded depictions of Mary?
Well, if I understand the diaspora, and the differences between the Jewish groups (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc.) Alicia Silverstone’s family most likely was of desecendants of later European settlement jewa (via intermarriage with non-jews or their conversions), hence her lighter complexion as compared to most jews truly from the middle east, semitic in origin, and were more likely to look like, well, middle eastern or mediteranean, not as central or northern European looking, so to speak. I suspect Mary (Miriam, her Hebrew name) probably was olive-skinned, with dark hair and dark eyes, given up until that point in time, the jews were very heavily concentrated in the middle east, before their dispersion by the Romans after 70 AD. I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but the odds are more likely that way. Just sayin’.