Khazarian Rhapsody

Wikipedia describes a rhapsody as a form of music that is:

"episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations"

As I'll show in the next several blog entries that will be dedicated to this subject, much like the art form, the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry presents dreams, a range of emotions, and fantasies that are highly contrasted with reality as has been clearly established by recent advancement in populations genetics.

But before we dwell into why this theory should be considered a complete and utter nonsense, I think a short recap of what it's all about should be our first order of business.

As a child of East European Ashkenazi Jews, and especially having family roots in Jews from Ukraine and Russia, I was introduced to the notion the Kingdom of Khazaria pretty soon after my inquiries into the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry began.

To people who might not be familiar, the Khazar theory states the following: a group of nomadic Turkic people that ruled a vast kingdom in the East European Steppe region, decided to convert to Judaism around the 8th or 9th centuries AD. There are some arguments as to whether or not this conversion was only limited to the royal court, or also included substantial parts of Khazar commons. In any case, the theory claims that after the destruction of their kingdom around the 10th-11th centuries AD by the Slavic Rus people (forefathers of modern day Ukrainians and Russians), the Jews of Khazaria were dispersed among the Slavs, adopted Slavic as their language, and later on German mixed with Slavic words, and basically became the forefathers of all or most Ashkenazi Jews, who in recent times mostly lived in nearby Eastern Europe. During the 20th century, several works have been propagating this idea, including the most famous one - The Thirteenth Tribe  written by Arthur Koestler in 1976, in which he presented the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people.

The notion of being the descendant of Jewish knights fighting in Eastern Europe against both the pagan barbarians from the North and the Roman legions from the South, was really appealing to me as a teenager.

To anyone who's interested to learn about this mysterious, yet fascinating period of Jewish history, I honestly recommend to pay a visit to Kevin Brook's Khazaria.com. He really is the expert when it comes to Khazar historical affairs.

In any case, during the 20th century this Khazar hypothesis became a compelling alternative to the more traditional "Rhineland hypothesis"  - which states that the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews were Israelite Jews who were expelled by the Romans in the 1st century AD from Judea to Rome, Italy, as slaves. They then migrated to the Rhineland region, Germany in early medieval, picked up a German dialect and infused it with Hebrew and Aramaic, and later on were expelled to Eastern Europe where they adopted many Slavic words into their Germanic dialect, Yiddish. The Rhineland hypothesis gained its support from a plethora of historical evidence, showing that most Ashkenazi Jews arrived to Eastern Europe from Western and Central Europe, that there were vast Jewish communities in France and along the Rhineland during early medieval ages, and that Yiddish derives from early High German.

Both theories had their own supporters. Unfortunately, in a sharp contrast to Koestler's original intent, the Khazar theory has been hijacked in the last few decades has also been used by anti-Zionists to challenge the idea Jews have ancestral ties to ancient Israel, and it has also played a role in anti-Semitic attitudes.

In any case, up until 15 years ago, both theories, based only on interpretation of history, could have pertained to be of equal validity.

Then came along modern populations genetics.

From the early 2000s, dozens of peer reviewed publications uncovered that Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardi Jews are closer to each other than to other historically neighboring non-Jewish populations (in the case of Sephardic Jews - Iberians, in the case of Ashkenazi Jews - Germans and Slavs).

Further more, Ashkenazi Jews have been shown to have substantial Levantine genetic admixture, and the non-Levantine component seemed to be mainly of Southern European (Italian, Greek etc.) origin and not Turkic or North Caucasus.

Those findings have been further confirmed and re-validated by numerous of peer reviewed publications in the following decade and a half, among them which can be cited:

Behar et al. (2006):

The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event

Behar et al. (2008):

Counting the Founders: The Matrilineal Genetic Ancestry of the Jewish Diaspora

Behar et al. (2010):

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

Atzmon et al. (2010):

Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry

Bray et al. (2010):

Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population

Ostrer et al. (2013):

The population genetics of the Jewish people

Costa et al. (2013):

A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages

Xue et al. (2017):

The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history

While many of these and similar scientific studies sometimes contradict and disagreed with each other on several details, they all seem be in agreement that there is no genetic evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are Khazar converts or are particularly related to any Khazar-like people, and all of these papers strongly reaffirm that all Ashkenazi Jews are highly related to Sephardic Jews and other Western Jewish populations (more so than to any other non-Jewish population).

Unfortunately, as we will see in the following entries, all of this evidence wasn't enough to kill this theory, with some even resorting to bad science in order to keep it going. As I began this post, by quoting the definition of a rhapsody, this hypothesis and the attempt to continue promoting it are now causing few academics to run wild, come up with fantasies, contrasting reality - and all just to pursue a dead end.

So stay tune for the next entries in our Jewish Genes Khazar special.

"Western" & "Mizrahi" Jews

How genetics break apart the traditional ethnic divisions of Jewish diasporas

I think the best way to get this blog going, is by introducing the way the different Jewish ethnic groups are being divided according to genetics. It's important to break the mold for new people who are being introduced to this subject, and are usually hanged onto the traditional cultural-linguistic-religious divisions.

Usually, Jewish ethnic groups are traditionally divided as following:

• Ashkenazi Jews (plural Ashkenazim) - are the descendants of Jews who migrated into northern France and Germany around 800–1000, and later into Eastern Europe. Religiously they follow minhag Ashkenaz, and traditionally spoke Yiddish - Jewish German dialect.

• Sephardic Jews (plural Sephardim) - from Hebrew "Spanish" - are Jews whose ancestors lived in Iberia prior to 1492, and were forced to leave after the Alhambra edict in that year. Most of their ancestors settled around the Mediterranean sea - mainly North Africa, Italy and the regions controlled by the Ottoman Empire (Balkans and Asia Minor, Syria and Land of Israel), while much smaller numbers also fled as far as Poland and the Netherlands. Religiously they follow minhag Sepharad, and traditionally spoke Ladino - Jewish Spanish dialect.

• Mizrahi Jews (plural Mizrahim) - from Hebrew "Eastern/Oriental" - are Jews whose ancestors have never left the Middle East, and existed in many places that Sephardic Jews also arrived, prior to 1492. Because in many cases the two communities intermarried extensively, there is a bit of confusion and many Mizrahi Jews are usually called Sephardim and vice versa. Basically, one can say that Mizrahi Jews are all Jews that traditionally adhered to a religious liturgical rite very similar to those of the Sephardic Jews and their ancestors spoke Middle Eastern based  languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Aramaic or Judeo-Persian, as opposed to Sephardic Jewish communities which spoke Ladino.

Along those three major divisions that almost everyone is familiar with, there are other Jewish diasporas which in the traditional religious-cultural-linguistic traditions, have their own unique status:

• Italkim - are distinct non-Sephardic Italian Jewish community trace their origins as far back as the 2nd century BCE. It is thought that some families descend from Jews deported from Judaea in 70 CE. They have traditionally spoken a variety of Judeo-Italian languages (Italkian) and used Italian Hebrew as a pronunciation system.

• Romaniotes - are a distinct non-Sephardic Greek Jewish community that has resided in Greece and neighboring areas for over 2,000 years. They have historically spoken the Judæo-Greek dialect Yevanic.

• Gruzim - Georgian Jews

• Beta Israel or Falashim - Ethiopian Jews.

• Maghrebi Jews - pre-Sephardic Jewish communities of North Africa, traditionally spoke Jewish Berber dialects. In some places like Morocco and Algeria, most of them merged with the Sephardic communities, while in other places like Tunisia and Libya, they remained separate.

However, genetically speaking, this makes no sense. As you'll come to see in the next couple of blog entries, the different Jewish ethnic groups do not follow this religious or linguistic or even cultural divisions. Genes don't care about this.

In the most fascinating study "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry" by Atzmon et al. (2010), the terms "European/Syrian Jews" and "Middle Eastern Jews" are used to differentiate between two Jewish ethnic groups that they've recognized:

"Two major differences among the populations in this study ... Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian, and Syrian Jews and the genetic proximity of these populations to each other compared to their proximity to Iranian and Iraqi Jews. This time of a split between Middle Eastern Iraqi and Iranian Jews and European/Syrian Jews, calculated by simulation and comparison of length distributions of IBD segments, is 100–150 generations, compatible with a historical divide that is reported to have occurred more than 2500 years ago.2,5 The Middle Eastern populations were formed by Jews in the Babylonian and Persian empires who are thought to have remained geographically continuous in those locales. In contrast, the other Jewish populations were formed more recently from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from individuals who were converted to Judaism during Hellenic-Hasmonean times, when proselytism was a common Jewish practice."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032072/

Basically, it was found that Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian and Syrian Jews all cluster together - and are designated as "European/Syrian" Jews, compare to Iraqi and Iranian Jews which also cluster with each other, but form a separate cluster than the European/Syrian cluster.

They rightly attribute the time of the split to roughly 2500 years ago, or the Babylonian diaspora, and say that European/Syrian Jews descend from Jews that mixed with Mediterranean Europeans (Greco-Romans) during the Second Temple period and migrated/were expelled Westward, while Middle East Jews descend from those Babylonian Jews that arrived to Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) after the destruction of the 1st Temple. This actually makes sense when the different genetic clustering and paternal and maternal lineages of those two separate communities are examined.

However, instead of those names designated to these two separate ethnic groups by Atzmon et al., it had become increasingly popular, when discussing genetics, to name these Jewish ethnic groups in the following way: Western Jews for the European/Syrian Jews and Mizrahi Jews for the Middle East Jews.

I, for once, find this terminology to be much better. I prefer the term Western Jews over the term European/Syrian Jews, for the fact that it also includes North African (Sephardic and pre-Sephardic) Jews and geographically speaking, they all cluster with populations West of the Levant, with Southeast/East Mediterranean European populations (Aegean Greeks, Maltese, Sicilians and Cypriots). All these communities can rightly be considered part of the "Western diaspora".

For those "Middle East" Jewish communities, I also prefer the Jewish/Hebrew designation of "Mizrahi" Jews, first of all because it sounds better, and second of all because it also somewhat overlaps with the traditional designation of these communities (ie they are considered Mizrahi Jews already). Also, Syria, last time I checked, is also  part of the Middle East, and so is Egypt and in many ways, linguistically and culturally speaking, North Africa could be considered the Middle East as well. So it doesn't make sense to only refer to Iraqi and Iranian Jews as Middle Eastern. Also, Georgian and Uzbek Jews also closely cluster with Iraqi and Iranian Jews, and those communities do not live in the Middle East. The geographic meaning of the word "Mizrahi" - "Eastern" in Hebrew, is also suitable here since they all originate from communities that existed East of the Levant. In essence, they form the "Eastern diaspora".

I've added a PCA created from academic samples gathered by Davidski from Eurogenes project (if you don't know who that is - I suggest you head to his most excellent Eurogenes blog. He's also behind many of the ADMIXTURE calculators offered on the open genomic data site GEDmatch), visually showing the coordinates and genetic distances of each of these Jewish ethnic groups relative to each other and to other West Asian, Near Eastern and South European populations:

As can be clearly seen, despite the two groups - Western Jews and Mizrahi Jews - clustering in two different locations on this PCA and with different non-Jewish populations - all Jewish ethnic groups which were identified as Western Jews pretty much overlap - with non-Sephardic North African Jews extremely close to them; and all groups identified as Mizrahi Jews also overlap with each other.

So from now own, in this blog, we will refer to Western Jews when discussing:
Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, non-Sephardic Greek Jews (Romaniote Jews), non-Sephardic Italian Jews (Italkim), non-Sephardic North African Jews (Maghrebi or Berber Jews) and non-Sephardic Syrian Jews (also known as Musta'arabi Syrian Jews).

And Mizrahi Jews when discussing:
Iraqi Jews, Persian Jews, Mountain Jews ("Kavkazim"), Kurdish Jews, Geogrian Jews and Uzbek Jews ("Bukharim").

Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews etc. all form their own genetically distinct populations, and cannot be included in those groups.

Why this blog

The origins of the Jewish people is something which has been a personal interest of mine, as an Ashkenazi Jew myself, for almost 20 years now.

It also seems to be of immense interest to the rest of the world - more than 30 (!) different population genetics studies have published in the past 20 years trying to uncover the genetic history of our people.

In this blog, I'll try to sum up as clearly as possible, in layman's terms, the complete picture that has been drawn so far by these recent genetic studies regarding the origins of the Jewish people.

I will also use this blog as an opportunity to lay out my own theory about the origins of several of the more demographically dominant Jewish ethnic groups (such as Ashkenazi, Sephardi etc.). Thanks to the advancements in population genetics and DNA ancestry tests which can be done at home in  relatively affordable prices, we are at an exciting age where tons of cultural and linguistic mysteries and basically dark corners of the of the history of populations can be uncovered with the help of genomic tools.
However, despite the boom in published studies and the amount of knowledge gathered in this exciting field, very few people roll up their sleeves and try do their own study with the abundance of readily available open genetic data.
Sometimes this means that even an amateur such as myself can pick up on connections that no one in either the scientific community or semi-professional popular genetics blogs has noticed before.

And last but not least, the intent of this blog is also to help disprove once and for all the notorious "Khazar hypothesis" which should have been buried for good as a result of genetic studies, but is still being propagated endlessly by pseudo-scientists, scientists with political agendas, and anti-Semites.

In essence, this blog is a pop-science Jewish genetics blog, focusing on the origins and the history of the Jewish people. It's main purpose is to be accessible and readable to the non-scientific general audience.