In recent years the idea has taken hold that the Ashkenazi Jews are really Turkish and not Jews at all. Recent genetic studies place the Ashkenazi as closest in kinship to Roman Jews on one side, who are just a small step away from Lebanese non-Jews, and Syrian non-Jews on the other. The Syrian non-Jews are very close to the Kurdish Jews and the Palestinian non-Jews - i.e. the “Palestinians”
What actually seems to have happened is that when the Khazar kingdom “converted” to Judaism, as described above, they invited Jewish rabbis to come and teach them how to be proper Jews. These rabbis, being “proper Jews”, took Khazar wives, mixing with the Khazar population in this way. Additionally, after the fall of the Khazar kingdom, Yiddish-speaking “Jewish” immigrants from the west (especially Germany, Bohemia, and other areas of Central Europe) - which would include Roman Jewish lines, began to flood into Eastern Europe, and it is believed that these newer immigrants intermarried with the Khazars. Thus, Eastern European Jews have a mix of ancestors who came from Central Europe and from the Khazar kingdom. The two groups (eastern and western Jews) intermarried over the centuries.
In this sense, the Ashkenazi Jews are, indeed, descendants of the Israelites through the male line.
“Analysis of the Y chromosome has already yielded interesting results. Dr. Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said she had found considerable similarity between Jews and Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, as if the Y chromosomes of both groups had been drawn from a common population that began to expand 7,800 years ago.
About two-thirds of Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the territories and a similar proportion of Israeli Jews are the descendents of at least three common prehistoric ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the Neolithic period, about 8,000 years ago. This is the finding of a new study conducted by an international team of scholars headed by Prof. Ariella Oppenheim, a senior geneticist in the Hebrew University’s hematology department and at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. In the study, soon to be published in the scientific journal ‘Human Genetics’, the researchers probed the history of Jewish and Arab men by analyzing the genetic changes in the Y chromosome.[…]
The results of the study, says Prof. Oppenheim, ‘support the historical documentation according to which the Arabs are descendents of an ancient population of the country and that a large proportion of them were Jews who converted to Islam after Islam reached Eretz Israel in the seventh century CE’. […]
They […] discovered that Jews and Arabs have common prehistoric ancestors who lived here until just the last few thousand years..[…] In view of the small geographical area of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the researchers were surprised to discover that some Palestinians on the West Bank have a unique genetic trait that is reflected in a relatively high frequency of certain genetic signs. This fact indicates that they are the descendents of people who have lived here for a few hundred years at least. […] Dr. Filon says that the unique genetic trait is characteristic of a population that has lived in the same place for many generations. (Tamara Traubman. “A new study shows that the genetic makeup of Jews and Arabs is almost identical, and that both groups share common prehistoric ancestors.” Ha’aretz (2000))
Data on the Y chromosome indicates that the males originated in the Middle East, while the mothers’ mitochondrial DNA seems to indicate a local Diaspora origin in the female community founders.
We have analyzed the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from each of nine geographically separated Jewish groups, eight non-Jewish host populations, and an Israeli Arab/Palestinian population, and we have compared the differences found in Jews and non-Jews with those found using Y-chromosome data that were obtained, in most cases, from the same population samples. The results suggest that most Jewish communities were founded by relatively few women, that the founding process was independent in different geographic areas, and that subsequent genetic input from surrounding populations was limited on the female side. In sharp contrast to this, the paternally inherited Y chromosome shows diversity similar to that of neighboring populations and shows no evidence of founder effects. These sex-specific differences demonstrate an important role for culture in shaping patterns of genetic variation and are likely to have significant epidemiological implications for studies involving these populations. We illustrate this by presenting data from a panel of X-chromosome microsatellites, which indicates that, in the case of the Georgian Jews, the female-specific founder event appears to have resulted in elevated levels of linkage disequilibrium.
The emerging genetic picture is based largely on two studies, […] that together show that the men and women who founded the Jewish communities had surprisingly different genetic histories.[…]
A new study now shows that the women in nine Jewish communities from Georgia, the former Soviet republic, to Morocco have vastly different genetic histories from the men. […] The women’s identities, however, are a mystery, because, unlike the case with the men, their genetic signatures are not related to one another or to those of present-day Middle Eastern populations.[…]
The new study, by Dr. David Goldstein, Dr. Mark Thomas and Dr. Neil Bradman of University College in London and other colleagues, appears in The American Journal of Human Genetics this month.... His [Goldstein’s] own speculation, he said, is that most Jewish communities were formed by unions between Jewish men and local women, though he notes that the women’s origins cannot be genetically determined.[…]
Like the other Jewish communities in the study, the Ashkenazic community of Northern and Central Europe, from which most American Jews are descended, shows less diversity than expected in its mitochondrial DNA, perhaps reflecting the maternal definition of Jewishness. But unlike the other Jewish populations, it does not show signs of having had very few female founders. It is possible, Dr. Goldstein said, that the Ashkenazic community is a mosaic of separate populations formed the same way as the others.[…]
‘The authors are correct in saying the historical origins of most Jewish communities are unknown’, Dr. [Shaye] Cohen [of Harvard University] said. ‘Not only the little ones like in India, but even the mainstream Ashkenazic culture from which most American Jews descend.’[…] If the founding mothers of most Jewish communities were local, that could explain why Jews in each country tend to resemble their host community physically while the origins of their Jewish founding fathers may explain the aspects the communities have in common, Dr. Cohen said.[…]
The Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA’s in today’s Jewish communities reflect the ancestry of their male and female founders but say little about the rest of the genome... Noting that the Y chromosome points to a Middle Eastern origin of Jewish communities and the mitochondrial DNA to a possibly local origin, Dr. Goldstein said that the composition of ordinary chromosomes, which carry most of the genes, was impossible to assess.” (Nicholas Wade. “DNA, New Clues to Jewish Roots.” The New York Times (May 14, 2002): F1 (col. 1))
These studies suggests the idea that some of the early ancestors of the ancient Levant and Mesopotamian civilizations originated in the region of Armenia and moved southwards - that they were “Semitic” the same way Sargon was. Further, the Tanach records extensive evidence of intermarriage between Jews and ancient peoples who originated in eastern Anatolia, such as the Hittites and Hurrians (including the Jebusites of Jerusalem). The Edomites who were of mixed Hebrew and Hurrian ancestry were also absorbed into the Jewish people. The Armenians and Kurds are the descendants of people who remained in Eastern Anatolia, Armenia and Kurdistan, subsequently intermarrying with the Turks and neighboring peoples. So, we see the idea of the “Ten Lost Tribes”, or even the “Thirteenth Tribe” to be myths exploded by the science of genetics.
Another important point from Oppenheim’s work is that the Arabs are descendents of an ancient population of the country and that a large proportion of them were Jews who converted to Islam. In other words, the Palestinians are closer in kinship to the original “Jews” that inhabited “Israel” than the current day Jews that are primarily of Ashkenazi stock.
In short, if one is to take seriously (as the Zionists declare we must) that Israel was given to the Jews by God, then the Jews that it was given to are the ancestors of the Palestinians. That, of course, raises all kinds of interesting problems, not the least of which is the genocide of the real, ancient line of Jews being completed by Ashkenazi Jews.
