"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.