Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.
This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.
Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.
At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshipers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.
In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz concludes in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.
In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.
As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the Khazar Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.
Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.
Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).
In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names
out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor Richard William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.
The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, or estate management, which were all heavily involved in the slave trade in the early Medieval period or through the medical profession, whose revenue stream came almost entirely from slave traders or slave owners during this time frame. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.
Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.
Amitav Ghosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land
, and Ghosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.
This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.
As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar
traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.
As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.
The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.
As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish
populations (with the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish
without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider
and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish
may have taken place in German territories.
By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression of the century following the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.
This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.
The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.
This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.
Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.
At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshipers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.
In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz concludes in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.
In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.
As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the Khazar Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.
Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.
Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).
In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names
out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor Richard William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, or estate management, which were all heavily involved in the slave trade in the early Medieval period or through the medical profession, whose revenue stream came almost entirely from slave traders or slave owners during this time frame. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.
Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.
Amitav Ghosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land
, and Ghosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar
traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.
The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.
As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish
populations (with the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in German territories.By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression of the century following the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.
This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.
The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.
Map of Southwest Asia
Sphere: Related Content
13 comments:
Ethnic Ashkenazim have no connection to Palestine beyond the mythological. In the late 19th century eminent Semiticists like Gustav Dalman and Wilhelm Gesenius elucidated difficult Talmudic texts by analyzing vocabulary and idioms that passed into Palestinian Arabic from Palestinian Aramaic as the Palestinian Judean, Galilean, and Idumean populations were Islamicized.
Before the Zionists ethnically cleansed the native Palestinian population, classicists and anthropologists used modern Palestinian practices to explain difficult references to Greco-Roman Palestine in classical texts.
The native Palestinian population preserved the ancient Palestinian festivals like those of Nabi Hud (Yehuda), Nabi Ruben (Reuvan), and Nabi Yamin (Binyamin), that are mentioned in classical texts but were never codified by Talmudic sages. Naturally, modern ethnic Ashkenazim descended from non-Palestinian populations that adopted a very different form of Judaism much later have no knowledge of such celebrations.
In point of fact, ethnic Ashkenazim have far more in common with Poles and other Slavs than they with other Jewish populations. The Israeli movie Late Marriage shows how tremendously different ethnic Ashkenazim are with their history of early marriage, early divorce and remarriage even from Georgian Jews, who also came from Russian-rule territories and who like Georgian non-Jews tended to have later marriages and disdain divorce.
The Polish ethnic Ashkenazi Yeshiva-system was strongly influenced by the Polish seminary and had little similarity to the educational system among other Jews. The pilpul of Polish yeshiva is for the most part an immitation of the Polish seminary practice of training via quodlibet analysis. Even co-resident Polish Tatar Jews had a completely dissimilar educational system, and among Polish Tatar Jews even idiomatic usage of religious Hebrew differed. Melammed or melammed gadol were titles that indicated high levels of scholarship. Ashkenazim called the humble heder teacher a melammed.
Personally, I believe that ethnic Ashkenazim should be proud of the role proto-ethnic Ashkenazim and ethnic Ashkenazim played in the construction of the Medieval world and then in the creation of the economy and distribution system of Commonwealth Poland.
Instead ethnic Ashkenazim are so ashamed of the achievements of their ancestors that they for all intents and purposes have stolen the history and country of the native Palestinian population, who are descended from the Greco-Roman Judean, Galilian, Idumean, Nabatian, Samarian, and Greek-speaking Palestinian population.
Nice work, Joachim. Like the "Pre-State Historiography", this may become a classic in its field.
Joachim, population genetic evidence makes quite clear that today's main Jewish communities (Ashkenazi, Mizrakhi, Sefardi) share a strong Levantine/southwest Asian ancestral component. In the case of patrilineal ancestry, in particular, this shared component readily clusters them together, and insodoing differentiates them from neighboring non-Jewish populations.
The matrilineal composition of these populations is more patchy, but also shows strong southwest Asian components in all the populations in question. Overall, each such population also shows significant genetic affinity to non-Jewish neighboring populations too, which is unsurprising, given the duration of diaspora settlement in various regions.
In sum, empirical evidence from the genome quite clearly contradicts your claims re. the ancestry of Ashkenazi jews, and is, in fact, consistent with much of Jewish folk history (regarding the diaspora's Palestinian origin). It is sad that such claims will nonetheless likely persist in many circles, bolstering arguments against zionism that actually need no such bolstering. To wit, while Ashkenazi jews may have clear and substantial ancestry in Palestine, so, unquestionably, do Palestinians; the establishment of an ethnically discriminatory state there, to the ongoing and suffering-causing exclusion of those (Palestinians) who call it home, is inexcusable.
Unlike Chaski, I either understand genetic anthropological data or know my geography.
The Levant is not part of Soutwest Asia, and genetic anthropological studies claiming a Southwest asian component in ethnic Ashkenazi ancestry are certainly consistent with the hypothesis that the founder populations of the Ashkenazi ethnic group included Turkic and Slavic populations of the Balkans and Southern Russia, which is partially in Southwest Asia (see map included in the blog entry's update section) even if I am dubious of the statistical analysis that underlies such conclusions.
There was in fact a good deal of migration of Southwest Asian Turkish population into the Balkans during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
To sum up in brief: ethnic Ashkenazim in stolen and occupied Palestine are murderous genocidal invaders, interlopers and thieves driven by a false, psychotic and extremist interpretation of Jewish and Christian scripture.
All decent human beings should hate and despise Zionism, the State of Israel, and Zionists.
Perhaps I was unclear. First, I use the term "southwest Asia" to denote what is, in English, often called "the middle east" -- a term that I deem needlessly Eurocentric, and geographically unclear. The Levant is, indeed, part of southwest Asia.
Second, the ancestral component in question that is distinctively shared by Ashkenazis and other major Jewish populations is just that -- shared. Meaning that, if you argue that said component's presence among Ashkenazis suggests ancestry in, say, southern Russia (which it does not, incidentally, as the variants in question are -not- found in southern Russian populations any more than in, say, east central Africans), then you would likewise be positing that Mizrakhi and Sefardi Jews, as well as Samaritans, Saudis, and other populations in, well, southwest Asia, show the same ostensibly southern Russian (the charge makes me giggle, actually, given how groundless it is in the data) ancestral component.
In any case, the data are what they are, despite what you may preconceive or wish. Please let me know if you'd like specific references, and/or help understanding the jargon in the literature. In general, I hope that you'll show a scientific mindset, in adapting your beliefs about reality to maximally accord empirical data. That sometimes entails adjustment to new insights.
I concede that according to current UN terminology Southwest Asia includes the Levant although the meanings of terms like Near East, Asia Minor, and Southwest Asia have varied in the past. Levant seems to be more constant in meaning over a long time period. Nobody's definition equates Southwest Asia to the Middle East as far as I could determine from googling.
Anyway, I believe that as of two years ago, I had read everything published published relating to the genetic anthropology of Jews.
The articles referring to Southwestern Asia and discussing genetic traits shared by Ethnic Ashkenazim with other Jewish and non-Jewish ethnic groups were usually discussing non-Jewish populations surrounding the Black Sea especially Kurds.
I believe that a few also looked at Armenians, Azeri Turks, and some of the populations of Georgia.
When we note that in the languages of many if not most of the groups bordering the Black Sea, the Black Sea is named some variant of the Khazar Sea, the studies described in these papers were really describing a Slavo-Turkic origin for modern ethnic Ashkenazim and not a Palestinian origin. The conclusions were phrased to mislead the reader and were typical of the intellectual dishonesty of Zionist Jewish researchers, whose works relate to Zionist ideology. [Note that the Slavic ancestry of ethnic Ashkenazim does not seem to include most of genetically distinct Russian or Polish subpopulations, but there are other Slavic groups that appear a good deal more similar to some of the fairly distinct ethnic Ashkenazi subgroups.]
In any case, a lot of studies used self-identification of subjects to classify ethnicity even though the procedure is dubious to the point of unacceptability.
As for understanding the mathematics of genetic anthropology, I have an M.Phil. in physics (among other degrees). My focus was mathematical physics. I have been a working medical physicist, statistician and demographer.
Every summer when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I reviewed scientific papers for medical researchers in the Boston area and helped the scientists present their results in a way that made sense statistically.
In other words, I am quite good at mathematics and statistics. I am not at Fields Medal level, but one of my friends is a winner. We have looked at all the same genetic anthropological studies and agree that they are crap.
As an expert in Jewish studies, I note that all onomastic, historical, linguistic, and archeological data rule out a Palestinian origin for ethnic Ashkenazim. If the genetic anthropological studies were not crap, we would need an explanation why genetic anthropology would come to such a radically different conclusion.
Because genetic anthropology is a rather new field whose underlying principles and assumptions are dubious to say the least, we would have to dismiss genetic anthropological conclusions until some way to harmonize them with the non-genetic anthropological data.
Thus, I stand by my previous summation.
Ethnic Ashkenazim in stolen and occupied Palestine are murderous genocidal invaders, interlopers and thieves driven by a false, psychotic and extremist interpretation of Jewish and Christian scripture.
All decent human beings should hate and despise Zionism, the State of Israel, and Zionists.
Zionism is probably the biggest fraud in the history of the human race. Instead of wasting time in discussion of pseudo-scientific nonsense, we should be discussing a claw-back of at least $6 trillion from Zionists, Jewish racists and the organized Jewish community.
Ok, good to have the red herring re. southwest Asia out of the way. I'll try my best to address your hodge-podge of other objections systematically.
First, if we're going to conflate rhetorical non-substance (i.e., authority of the messenger) with substance (empirical validity of the message), I'll note by way of background that my own bachelor's degrees are in linguistics and biology (Stanford), and my PhD is in evolutionary genetics (University of Chicago). My doctoral work focused on the long term evolution of sex chromosomes in mammals (including humans), but I've also done a great deal of human population genetics, including personally collecting many human DNA samples in the Caspian basin (Azerbaijan, Iran, and Kazakstan), as well as in Armenia, Georgia, and elsewhere. My sampling has targeted many populations; of these, the only Jewish populations have been Tats, Bukharans, and Indian (Maharashtra) Jews.
As to the soundness of analytical methods in population genetics, my view is likely biased by the differential recency and depth of my exposure to two relevant fields, but, for what it's worth, I find population genetics (a field whose luminaries include many mathematics and physics PhDs) far more mathematically rigorous and well tested (theoretically and empirically) than any subfield of linguistics (my honors work in that field focused on phonetics, phonology, and historical linguistics, all of which enjoy reputations of greater systematic rigor than subfields such as pragmatics; in my studies, I also gleaned enough syntax etc. to muddle through some relevant academic work such as Wexler's work on relexification). Given that linguistics is widely held to be among the most mathematically sophisticated 'social sciences', I suspect that most objections you might level against statistical methods in population genetics (and I eagerly await specifics, more than vague, unsubstantiated dismissal of a field as 'crap') would also undermine your confidence in conventional analytical methods of other major fields of inquiry into human history.
Now, a little substance. To start simply, let's look at the frequency of a particular Y chromosome haplotype (i.e., a 'spelling variant' of the whole chromosome) in various populations. This variant chromosome is a particular variant of a set of mutually most-closely-related variants known collectively as J1, which, in turn, are part of a larger set of likewise closely related variants called J (you'll quickly grasp the naming conventions for human Y types here...). The 'center of mass' of the J group of haplotypes, in terms of their geographic density, is the southwestern Arabian peninsula; for a potentially error-prone (as always) summary, have a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J_(Y-DNA)
Now, the particular J1 variant in question is carried by roughly 20% of Ashkenazi men and also by roughly 20% of Sefardi men. In both populations, the variant is particularly common among men claiming the patrilineally inherited 'kohen' (priest) status, and considerably less common (<5%) among men claiming the patrilineally inherited 'levi' (priest's assistant) status, and intermediate in frequency (~10-15%) among non-kohen, non-levi men in these populations. Meanwhile, the same variant is carried by roughly 2% of muslim Kurdish men (to take one population to which you argue Ashkenazis to be more closely related than to other Jews), in roughly 2% of Armenian men (to take another), in roughly 1% of Azeri men (another), roughly 1% of Russian men (another), and in a negligibly small fraction of Greek men (to take a Balkan population, per your charge). Intriguingly, this variant is, however, carried by nearly 10% of Lemba men (whose population's folk history claims ancient patrilineal ancestry in Yemeni Jewish immigrants to southeast Africa, in conjunction with trade in the western Indian Ocean basin).
Now, the foregoing represents just one ancestral component -- albeit a major one, likely representing the plurality of founding patrilines in the Ashkenazi and Sefardi populations. The Ashkenazi population does indeed also carry Y chromosome variants (including types that belong to the so-called R and Q groups) whose geographic density distributions suggest that they may indeed reflect ancestry in Caspian basin populations (such as the Khazars!). The R variant in question, in particular, is particularly common among Ashkenazi men who claim levi status, suggesting, intriguingly, that some immigrants to the pool of Ashkenazi 'founding fathers' may have been granted high (levi) status as part of their adoption into the community (the Q variant in question is far less common, and may also appear in non-Ashkenazi populations, suggesting a potentially complex history there).
Ok, above I've given just one small example illustrative of the close genetic affinity among major Jewish populations (including Ashkenazim) that suggests -distinctively shared- ancestry in southwest Asia. There are similar lessons to be gleaned from another important and informative set of data: the composition mitochondrial haplotypes, which are passed -matrilineally-. We can go into that if you wish.
Generally, as we discuss percentages here, it bears emphasis that the forebears whose patrilineal descendants include 20% of the Ashkenazi and Sefardi male populations also transmitted the -rest- of their genomes (not just Y chromosomes) into the population. Thus it would be incorrect to interpret these results to mean that 'Well, maybe 10% of Ashkenazis (half being male) have these ancestors, but the other 90% represent converts' etc. The Y chromosome just represents one particularly big and easy to track 'chunk' of ancestry (because, unlike other parts of the genome, most of it does not swap segments with a partner chromosome during cell division -- a process that can 'scramble' signals of particular ancestry for other parts of the genome); but it is extremely likely that other parts of the genomes of particular founder individuals (men and women) have trickled down throughout the Ashkenazi population. Every person's genome is, in short, a mosaic of segments with distinct evolutionary histories; but in a highly endogamous population, such as the Ashkenazi population, many of those segments will share the same ancestors, even despite being on different chromosomes, etc.
I hope this helps clarify the evidence undergirding the inference of close genetic affinity between Ashkenazis and other major Jewish (and non-Jewish) populations. As to your charge that self-designation of ethnicity is a major problem in surveys of human genetic variation, I have yet to see any evidence of such complication in my work; in particular, the consistency of findings on particular populations, despite non-overlap of sets of sampled individuals, supports that conclusion. In laying out these arguments, I trust, of course, that the intellects of those who have held other views exceed their stubbornness/pride/prejudice, and that their minds can, as such, integrate new knowledge without kneejerk dismissal, straw-grasping, or acrimony.
Also -- and this bears repeating as an aside in topic, but certainly not importance -- the fact that some population has ancestry in a particular region of earth's surface in no sense justifies that population's ongoing oppression of others. It is a sad coincidence that our discussion here coincides with a horrific siege in Gaza, in which hundreds of thousands of people already displaced from their family homeland are suffering en masse -- many of them dying -- at the hands of an ethnically discriminatory state (Israel). Historical debate aside, my thoughts -- and, I am guessing, yours -- are with them.
Sorry, for taking so long to get back to this discussion. I have discussed statistical genetic anthropology (SGA) with Vladimir Voevodsky, who won the Fields Medal in 2002. His last comment to me about the subject was a description of SGA as a research area that was somewhere between a mess and a pile of crap. He was thinking about making SGA mathematically rigorous. I was hoping he could tell me the current state of his work, but he hasn't gotten back to me.
Anyway, there is a tremendous difference between statistical evolutionary genetics and statistical genetic anthropology.
In statistical evolutionary genetics, the analysis is trying to derive an expected time period that would be required to transform one chromosome into another into via point mutations and possibly other evolutionary events.
In statistical genetic anthropology, the researcher is trying to determine affinity between populations on the basis of frequencies of allotypes or haplotypes or more properly between hypothetical populations on the basis of allotypic or haplotypic frequencies within samples from hypothetical populations.
With a few exceptions the allotypes or haplotypes arose at period long before the ethnic definition of the hypothetical population is meaningful.
Because no allotype and no haplotype is identified as being completely absent from the hypothetical population, not only is construction of a sample with target allotype frequencies always possible, but the allotype/haplotype frequencies of a given sample population may as a matter of chance indicate affinity within the analysis framework when there is none.
In general the results of a genetic anthropological study require careful significance and confidence analysis with regard to the specific study and with regard to the hypothesis that a given study is addressing.
I have a real problem with definition of the subjects within sample populations used by many of the researchers. Self-identification as used in Hammer and Oppenheim papers is simply not sufficiently reliable.
The terminology is questionable. With qualifications, one can define an Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group, but Sefardi is a term which refers only to liturgy and has only become a meaningful ethnological term since the founding of the State of Israel as a way of indicating that a person is neither of Ashkenazi nor of German Jewish background.
With regard to statistical genetic anthropology of Jews, even the term Jew must be used with care. Different scholars identify different time periods when the term becomes meaningful.
I reject any usage before the 10th century. Harvard Scholar Shaye Cohen rejects using the term before the fourth century.
Some classical texts identify the Judean population of Antioch as almost entirely of convert origin even though we do not know exactly what conversion means before the 10th century and even though Antioch was not even particularly far from Palestine.
There is still a lot of debate about the origins of the Greek-speaking Judean populations of the Greco-Roman Empire even though most of the Judeans within the Roman Empire were Greek-speaking.
One reasonable hypothesis proposes that Alexandrian Judeans were descended from Greeks, who settled in Palestine during the early Hellenistic period, who adopted the dominant religion of the region, and who then emigrated to Egypt.
During the Greco-Roman period most of the Judean populations lived outside of the Roman Empire, and Biblical text (e.g., the Book of Esther) suggests massive conversion to Judean religion in Mesopotamia.
The historical, textual, and archeological data clearly makes statistical genetic anthropological claims about modern Jewish populations and an ancient "Israelite" population more than questionable.
Can statistical genetic anthropology be applied to shorter time periods like the last millennium?
Possibly -- but statistical genetic anthropological analysis assumes a model of origin, founder, and current populations that probably does not apply in the case of Jews.
My research into the origins of the Medieval world identified early Medieval Jewry as a population united by a trade network and religious law. There is no reason to believe that there was a single large original population from which Medieval Jewish communities descended.
Instead the historical record is quite clear on mobility of Jews within the Medieval period in that there were already sizable communities of Jews with origins in Germany and E. Europe already living in Spain and Egypt by the 1200s and probably at least 100 years earlier.
Jewish trade networks continue to play a considerable economic role throughout European as well as throughout the Islamic world until well into the 17th and 18th centuries and would have tended to cancel out founder effects and various assumptions of SGA through the replenishment (or addition) of genetic material to Jewish communities that either lost certain allotypes/haplotypes or never had them in the first place.
It is possible that one origin population was larger than other origin populations for Medieval Jewry, but when I ground through the very dubious data that Zionist pseudo-scientists were producing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would have placed the predominant origin population in historic Khazaria. (See Let the Exiles Return Home!.)
I would take statistical genetic anthropology far more seriously if researchers looked at an issue, which was of far less ideological interest to them as Zionists and showed that their analytic techniques could tell us something about the genetic component of ethnic Ashkenazim that originated with the 15th-16th century Hussite conversions to Judaism in Bohemia.
My original understanding of the term Southwest Asia appears to have been congruent with American usage since the Carter administration.
Here is a passage from Martin Kramer, with whom I have agreed on practically nothing until now. (See The Failure of Jewish Studies in America.)
So when did “Southwest Asia” finally get its big break, and begin to turn up in high places as a near-synonym for the Middle East? “From the moment of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,” wrote U.S. diplomat and strategist John C. Campbell, “Washington began to talk of ‘Southwest Asia’ instead of the Middle East as the area of crisis and of American concern.” Cold War strategists wished to emphasize that the region was crucial not because it was east of us, but because it was immediately southwest of the Soviet Union, which had a plan to push through to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The sooner Americans started thinking about the region as “Southwest Asia,” the sooner they would grasp the nature of the threat.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski effected the shift in labeling. Two days after the Soviet invasion, he warned President Jimmy Carter that “the collapse of the balance of power in Southwest Asia… could produce Soviet presence right down on the edge of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs.” Carter, reeling from the combined effects of the invasion and the Iran hostage crisis, opened a dramatic television address to the nation some days later with these words: “I come to you this evening to discuss important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia.” Carter proceeded to warn Americans of “a threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia.” A month later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee jumped on board, and held a series of landmark hearings later published as “U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia.”
“A new name has been devised to cover these counties on which attention has been concentrated during the past 12 months,” wrote the military historian Sir Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs a year later. “Southwest Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and the oil-bearing states bordering what now must tactfully be termed simply ‘the Gulf,’ all constituting a politically seismic zone of incalculable explosive potential.” Campbell later gave a similar definition: “‘Southwest Asia’ includes everything from the eastern fringes of the Arab world to the western limits of the Indian subcontinent.” (Campbell also added that “roughly, it is Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘arc of crisis.’” Brzezinski had coined that phrase a year before the Soviet invasion, and it figured prominently in a January 1979 story in TIME magazine, whose cover showed a Soviet bear looming over the Persian Gulf. TIME explained that Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” consisted of “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.”)
This “Southwest Asia,” then, wasn’t a geographic reference at all, but a strategic one with a Cold War application.
The term Southwest Asia is also strategic in Zionist genetic anthropology, which is probably better termed Zionazi racial science.
Because of some of my work at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I was reading a lot of official papers about the region.
I absorbed the usage, which apparently remains fairly standard in US government and academic circles.
Joachim, I too have been busy, but will now respond to your recent comments.
Generally, I'll note that your rhetorical approach and, apparently, beliefs remain remarkably impervious to reasoned assessment of evidence. Below I'll try to systematically point out some specific breakdowns in your inferential chain of reasoning. I hope, once again, that you'll eventually let your mind assess data objectively. As to your Fields Medal winner's objections to methods in statistical population genetics (a field subject to vigorous internal debate and active ongoing validation, both by simulation and from real-world data), I think we're all ears. The most specific critique I think you raise is:
"Because no allotype and no haplotype is identified as being completely absent from the hypothetical population, not only is construction of a sample with target allotype frequencies always possible, but the allotype/haplotype frequencies of a given sample population may as a matter of chance indicate affinity within the analysis framework when there is none."
I assume that you likewise refrain from drawing any conclusions, no matter how well validated statistically or by ancillary evidence, from data accrued from literary/archeological sources, given that conflicting data can never be assumed to be 'completely absent' from the original literary/archeological record (despite not appearing in however dense a sampling of that record). Simply put, your objection seems to amount to 'Anything's possible, so we shouldn't bother drawing inferences from available evidence.' Funny how that would only appear to apply, however, to a field where new data resoundingly contradicts your entrenched beliefs.
Now, as to terminology, you write:
"The terminology is questionable. With qualifications, one can define an Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group, but Sefardi is a term which refers only to liturgy and has only become a meaningful ethnological term since the founding of the State of Israel as a way of indicating that a person is neither of Ashkenazi nor of German Jewish background.
With regard to statistical genetic anthropology of Jews, even the term Jew must be used with care. Different scholars identify different time periods when the term becomes meaningful."
Your harrumphing distinction between the terms Ashkenazi and Sefardi is both spurious ('Ashkenazi' and 'Sfarad' both simply referred to particular regions of Europe, as far as we know) and moot, as studies of Jewish genetic variation are, typically, careful to distinguish Sefardi from Iraqi from Yemeni from Ashkenazi etc. In short, you build another straw man argument here, in the mode of your borderline paranoid concern about the simple, geographically objective term 'southwest Asia'. As to 'Jew', of course the term -- like any ethnonym, especially one complicated by associated religious trappings -- but your whole site is built on the use of terms like Ashkenazi, which, along with Burmese/Hausa/Palestinian/Inuit are subject to the same sorts of inherent ambiguities! The questions raised in historical literature on the history of Jews in Judea, Greece, and elsewhere, are perfectly valid and intriguing -- yet, when offered data that actually suggest clear answers to some of those questions, you reject it out of hand when it doesn't conform to your entrenched view. In short, you're not actually raising any clearly reasoned, or even 'Ashkenazi' or 'Jew'-specific objection here, but merely muddying the situation in ostensible ambiguity in order to avoid having to confront the possibility of revising your views based on -data-.
As to the ostensible obsession of population geneticists with Judaic populations, while interest in Jews and some other human populations affiliated with Palestine is indeed outsized relative to their numbers, I think you may actually be projecting your own narrow obsession onto human evolutionary geneticists. If you bother to look into the literature, you'll find careful and well publicized work assessing the potential validity of folk histories of all sorts of specific human populations other than Jews; while these still show a strong Eurocentric bias (e.g., work on Roma, Irish, Iberians, Icelanders, etc.), there are a lot of interesting studies out there if you cared to look.
Back to the data in question here, though I commend your accurate use of the terms 'allotypes' and 'haplotypes', I think you remain especially confused about the nature of Y chromosome variation data, and how inferences of historical relationships among populations -- in particular, the difference between distinctively shared ancestry and overall genetic affinity -- are drawn from them. Let's start with your highly selective, yet technically heedless, conflation of early studies (the ones that could only tally 'allotypes') of Y chromosome sequence variation with more recent ones (which benefit from detailed sequence data). Though even the earliest studies (the very earliest, by the way, concluded that there was -zero- variation on the human Y chromosome -- a source of much amusement, now) were helpful and necessary for the advancement of the field of human evolutionary genetics, they attained relatively poor sequence resolution and lacked the interpretive benefit of a large amount of already accumulated data -- they, of course, were beginning that analytically important accumulation process. From these early, low-resolution studies, in particular, you apparently hope to cherrypick what you think are arguments that rebut the claim of distinctively shared ancestry among Ashkenazis and other Jewish populations -- yet you conveniently ignore data from the same early studies that actually contradict your attempted inferences.
Taking those technical considerations first, it bears note that 'allotype' surveys in question relied fully on what are called 'restriction fragment length polymorphisms' (RFLPs), rather than DNA sequencing per se (the latter was extraordinarily expensive for roughly a decade after the publication of the very first population sequence data, from a small sample of fruitflies, in 1983). RFLPs are variable patterns in how a particular piece of DNA gets chopped up by highly selective chopping proteins (called restriction enzymes, these are made by some microbes) that recognize particular short DNA sequences. Because the recognized short sequences are a) distributed sparsely in the genome, and b) must actually -vary- in order to generate a useful 'polymorphism' at all, RFLPs are a very blunt, low resolution instrument for looking at variation. Ultimately, they tell you how many pieces of a given size a given piece of DNA gets chopped into by a particular restriction enzyme (or set thereof). Because few mutations happen to strike restriction enzyme target sites, RFLP surveys are overwhelmingly likely to -miss- most of the variation in sequence within a studied genome region; that is, most mutations do not affect the 'chop-up' pattern at all, so go unrecorded in the data. Moreover, because individual 'chopped blocks' from non-overlapping segments of the genome may happen be of too similar size to tell apart (without sequencing them -- again, a technology that only became commonly available later), and because the enzymes may also yield complex patterns of chopping when combined together, RFLPs are especially prone to both false inferences of haplotype identity and to failure to detect haplotype similarity. All of this means, basically, that assessing population affinity by a single RFLP (as was, necessarily, common very early in the Y chromosome variation field), or even a set of several of them, is roughly akin to, say, assessing dog breed affinity solely by counting the proportion of short-tailed dogs in each breed -- i.e., you're learning something, but you're also likely to get incredibly low resolution of such affinities, as you're missing the overwhelming majority of variation in compiling your survey data (and you're also unwittingly conflating the results of distinct changes -- i.e., distinct tail-shortening mutations and/or clipping events -- as if they represented common ancestry).
Ok, now let's address a second key distinction you fail to make: that between overall population affinity, on one hand, and shared ancestry, on the other. The former (overall genetic affinity) is actually a remarkably slippery problem in population genetic data analysis, roughly akin to the question 'How similar to each other, quantitatively, are two jars of mixed m&m's, relative to a set of other such jars?' There are various approaches to answering this question, of course (think about how you might do it). In population genetics, the question is often addressed via some variant or another of principal-components analysis (which I'm sure you encountered in mathematics training), where many-dimensional variation in a set is projected onto a smaller dimensional space, with the aim of 'capturing' major axes of variation that distinguish one set of points from another. Such analysis is what you're looking at in, say, the early paper on Y chromosome variation that you cite as showing particular patrilineal affinity between Ashkenazis and Turks. Of course, what you don't mention is that the very same plot of the data (and remember, it's a flattened version of the 'real', more complex data set) actually shows Sefardis as even closer to Turks than Ashkenazis are! But the more important point, in this case, is that the data you're looking at are trying to summarize complex haplotype compositions on two-dimensional cartesian space -- they are, again, trying to estimate overall pairwise genetic (patrilineal, there) among a large set of population samples. What you're missing, in this case, is the main point of the many data sources I've referred to: that, whatever, the overall affinity is between Ashkenazis and whomever, it's by now crystal clear that Ashkenazis distinctively -share- major ancestral components with other Jewish populations, reflecting common ancestry in southwest Asia (and, again, I use that term -specifically- to be both cautious in data interpretation and objective in geographic designation -- not for any of the utterly silly, conspiratorial reasons you seem to want to attach to an objective geographic term!). You can think of this difference as akin to jars A, B, K, and W all sharing a consistent component of, say, 20% rare, tellingly distinctive ultraviolet m&m's, regardless of whether jar K is most similar overall (by some summary estimate of 'jar composition affinity') to jar M, which lacks the ultraviolet m&m's.
Ok, speaking of the lacking of ultraviolet m&m's, you seem to hold out hope that the J-type Y haplotypes shared strikingly by Jewish populations (including Ashkenazis) are somehow also shared by Turks, or whatever other non-Jewish, non-Levantine populations which you so stubbornly invoking in trying to discount obvious Ashkenazi-Sefardi-Mizrakhi patrilineal affinity. Alas, I'm sorry to tell you that it simply isn't so: the J-haplotypes in question are -not- found at high frequency in Turks et al. -- though they are indeed found at high frequency in Samaritans (though I trust you have an explanation for this that bends over backwards to avoid accepting close patrilineal relationship between Samaritans and Jews, including Ashkenazis -- an explanation that, I assume, will include some sort of fervently conspiratorial allegation of 'zionazi' data-tampering etc.). Moreover, let's ask you a simple question, Joachim: how do you suppose the haplotypes in question ended up being so consistently enriched among kohen lineages in both the Ashkenazi and Sefardi populations, if not by common ancestry in keeping with the patrilineal transmission of priestly status? Do you suppose that medieval Jewish communities had an early form of DNA testing by which 'proselytes' candidates were vetted for admission to the Ashkenazi (or Sefardi) priestly caste? Or is this again some case of mass data fraud perpetuated by the elders of Zion, er, Khazaria? Regards.
In fact modern genetic studies strongly suggest that Ashkenazi Jews have an Anatolian-Black Sea area ancestry. I would not say their main ancestry is Khazar nevertheless but rather Anatolian anyhow. It's clearly not from the Levant for the most part in any case.
Zionist geneticists like D. Behar have tried to hide this fact by claiming that the peoples of the Levant do not represent those living there 2000 years ago and that instead minorities like the Druzes (who are somewhat similar in their genetic makeup to Jews but who do have a tradition of foreign origin and seem like Greek Gnostics "converted" to Islam) do.
But the fact seems to be that Ashkenazi Jews appear to be mostly of Anatolian or other Black Sea are origin, with a maninful apportion (c. 20%) of Central European blood.
Also it seems that, against modern "tradition" of maternal heritage of Jewishness, Y-DNA (paternal) lineages look much more properly West Asian than mtDNA (maternal) lineages do, suggesting that, in practice, Jewish men married Gentile women all the time. This does not only applies to Ashkanazim but to all Jews in general, except those that are more clearly from a local convert background like Berber and Ethiopian Jews. Again the conclusions of such studies (Behar has provided very good data but his conclusions are very misleading and ideological) try to find most unlikely "founder effects" to justify such data within a Zionist perspective.
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