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Which would mean that the idea that one needs to be born from a Jewish mother to be a Jew was not always the case. I wonder why it would change.
judaism, religion or race?
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Which would mean that the idea that one needs to be born from a Jewish mother to be a Jew was not always the case. I wonder why it would change.
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Around the time of Jesus, Judaism used to be a rabidly proselytizing religion; you could be converted and essentially no attention was apparently paid to your genetic origin. It is an amazing historical fact that Judaism around 400 BC was a miniscule and obscure priestly cult in a tiny hill country region in the Levant, where Jerusalem had only a couple thousand people total. Then, 400 years later, this obscure cult had been spread everywhere across most of civilization, and there were now millions of Jews from Central Asia to Europe.
From the Gospels, you may remember Jesus ripping on the Pharisees about how they would go to such ludicrous lengths to try to convert people to Judaism.
In so many ways, pre-Rabbinic Judaism was remarkably similar to Christianity and to what later became Islam. It was only after the fall of the second temple and the rise of state Christianity that Judaism really became this insular, inward looking community, based on Rabbis, and Jewish proselytizing became looked down upon. From its beginnings as a Jewish sect, before the Second Temple's destruction and prior to the innovations of Rabbinical Judaism, early Christianity ironically retained many of the more archaic features of Judaism, such as proselytizing, even though both later Christians and Jews would aggressively seek to downplay that fact.
From the Gospels, you may remember Jesus ripping on the Pharisees about how they would go to such ludicrous lengths to try to convert people to Judaism.
In so many ways, pre-Rabbinic Judaism was remarkably similar to Christianity and to what later became Islam. It was only after the fall of the second temple and the rise of state Christianity that Judaism really became this insular, inward looking community, based on Rabbis, and Jewish proselytizing became looked down upon. From its beginnings as a Jewish sect, before the Second Temple's destruction and prior to the innovations of Rabbinical Judaism, early Christianity ironically retained many of the more archaic features of Judaism, such as proselytizing, even though both later Christians and Jews would aggressively seek to downplay that fact.
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Religion.
Many different ethnicities of Joos: Ashkenazi, Sephardic,Ethiopic, etc.
Many different ethnicities of Joos: Ashkenazi, Sephardic,Ethiopic, etc.
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Your evidence is backed by some data, but alternative sources claim opposing views:
http://www.ftdna.com/pdf/43026_Doron.pdf is the source for the below:
A 2006 study by Behar et al.,[55] based on high-resolution analysis of Haplogroup K(mtDNA), suggested that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women, or "founder lineages", that were "likely from a Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool" originating in the Middle East in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. Moreover, a maternal line "sister" was found among the Jews of Portugal, North Africa, France, and Italy. They wrote:
Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only four women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium...[13][55]
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v15/n4/full/5201764a.html is for the below:
A 2007 study by J. Feder et al.[56] confirms the hypothesis of the founding of non-local origin among the maternal lines. Their study did not address the geographical origin of Ashkenazim and therefore does not explicitly confirm the origin "Levantine" of these founders. This study revealed a significant divergence in total haplogroup distribution between the Ashkenazi Jewish populations and their European host populations, namely Russians, Poles and Germans. They concluded that, regarding mtDNAs, the differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities. The study also found that "the differences between the Jewish communities can be overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons." It supported previous interpretations that, in the direct maternal line, there was "little or no gene flow from the local non-Jewish communities in Poland and Russia to the Jewish communities in these countries."[57]
See also, from http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004401 :
A 2014 study by Fernandez et al have found that Ashkenazi Jews display a frequency of haplogroup K which suggests an ancient Near Eastern origin, stating that this observation clearly contradicts the results of the study led by Richards which suggested a predominantly European origin for the Ashkenazi communities.[62]
The text/sources above were drawn from the wikipedia article on this subject, with direct links to the source material.
What are we to draw from these contradictory conclusions?
A few potential things:
1. Ashkenazi interbred with European (potentially Italian) women about 2000 years ago, and have since kept to themselves.
2. The European identity of these haplogroups is misconstrued, as the same haplogroups are found also in the ME.
3. The Jews have widely interbred with European peoples in the period between 100-2000 AD.
I think the third is ruled out by history, and 1 and 2 are reasonable hypotheses.
Conversely, the paternal ancestry is definitive: These Jews are Jews. They are semitic, Middle Eastern in origin, and often carry the same y-chromosome across important priestly distinctions.
So, are Jews a "race"? No, though they are likely to be considered a sub-race of the family/sub-race of the Caucasoid race that are the Semitic peoples.
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Where are you getting this information from? "Rabidly prostyltizing"? What period saw the Jews rabidly take in converts?
The historical records of the Jews shows that their only type of "conversion" was by conquest (of the Philistines/Caananites) and by marriage (as with the Ethiopian Jews that descend from the Queen of Sheba). Judaism was a markedly small religion of a small kingdom in ancient Palestine even at the time of the Roman conquest, and the only peoples who weren't Jews who practiced Judaism, were the Samaritans, which from the New Testament, we know were not counted as "full Jews". The Samaritans almost certaily were a related, semitic people, as well. The genetic difference was very likely low.
Biblical and archaeological records give no indications that the Jews at any point practiced a faith which actively saw converts by any other means by conquest of the region they called home. The Jews did not convert the Babylonians, they did not convert many of the people immediately in their vicinity (the Caananites of all stripes), and the Samaritans were widely scorned for not being pure of blood.
Hell, the Old Testament casts all sorts of invective against foreign wives because they will lead the Jews astray, and found that a huge failing of the ruling class in Judea (especially Solomon). Why not just convert the wives? Why not convert the people?
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But think of it this way:
Skeletal wise, you can only identify four basic races in this world:
The Caucasoid.
The Negroid.
The Mongoloid (including the entire native population of the Americas).
And the Australoid.
Does this mean that we can't draw a huge distinction between the Chinese and Mayans? The Irish and the Indians? The Pygmies and Zulu?
Of course not.
Skeletal wise, you can only identify four basic races in this world:
The Caucasoid.
The Negroid.
The Mongoloid (including the entire native population of the Americas).
And the Australoid.
Does this mean that we can't draw a huge distinction between the Chinese and Mayans? The Irish and the Indians? The Pygmies and Zulu?
Of course not.
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I think the "religious" element is over stressed. As Jews will themselves say: It doesn't matter if you follow kosherite law, it doesn't matter if you don't believe in God, it doesn't matter if you convert, are a Communist, or any other such thing - it just matters that you are a Jew by blood and heritage.
That is not a religious iddenty t at all. There's virtually no ideological component to the notion of Jewish identity in the minds of many Jews.
sohocanaan22
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Yes. Three copies. One autographed by Henry Ford, another by Charles Lindberg.
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There has been genetic testing of Ethiopian and Bene Menashe (North East Indian) Jews to determine if they share genetic similarity peculiar to other Jews.
Both these groups have not shown to have genetic origins in the Levant.
Both these groups have not shown to have genetic origins in the Levant.
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They show some small signs of having genetic connections to the Middle East compared to normal folks.
But yes, the Ethiopian Jews seem to have been converts in antiquity. I guess I should amend my previous post to say this:
Unlike the Ashkenazi, the Ethiopians are almost certainly converts, whether from the Queen of Sheba, as they claim, or through another process of conversion.
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Maybe, but that's a relatively recent development and there's a lot of historical momentum. Their ethnic history, traditions, homeland, cuisine and even clothing is more closely entwined with Judaism than it is with the heritage or "race" of any of the subgroups.
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The MiddleEastern connection is probably from ancient Semitic speaking colonists and not specifically Jews. Amharic is a Semitic language unique to Ethiopia .
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Unlike most other people, the Jews did have a strong religious component to their identity in a religious that disfavoured breeding with others.
Of course, you're righ tto say that things like Jewish dress and cuisine (traditional) are both related to the religious element. That's obviously the case, as it was not common until the mid-19th century, for a Jew to not be a follower of Judaism. Hell, not even until the early 20th in many communities (most!). But the strong ethnic ties that identify a Jew as a Jew have been stressed throughout. The Cohen are -literally descendants- of Aaron. Mamzers keep that identity indefinitely down their lineage.
Palestine as their homeland is as much an ethnic thing (it's where Jews settled) as it is a religious thing (where God told them to settle).
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It seems more likely it is a Jewish connection because of their practice of Judaism.
The Ethiopian Jews probably didn't just go: Jeez, we're going to adapt a foreign religion to our people for no reason. Probably a small migration accompanied a broader community's acceptance.
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Religion and "race".
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A surprisingly well informed and calm discussion on the issue in the WR, congrats to all involved.
To me, this thread proves one thing that I've understood from the first course I had in Genetics. Genetic studies on these kind of issues are by large as much scientifically accurate as statistics are, probably even less. It's like unraveling a sweater and determining the place of birth of the sheep that produced the threads.
This reminds of a RadioLab episode where a Black guy found out that he has less than 1% African ancestry in his DNA, and about 70% Caucasian.
To me, this thread proves one thing that I've understood from the first course I had in Genetics. Genetic studies on these kind of issues are by large as much scientifically accurate as statistics are, probably even less. It's like unraveling a sweater and determining the place of birth of the sheep that produced the threads.
This reminds of a RadioLab episode where a Black guy found out that he has less than 1% African ancestry in his DNA, and about 70% Caucasian.
