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New genetic study: More evidence for modern Ashkenazi Jews’ ancient Hebrew patrimony

By Bruce Goldman

 

I hail from the so-called Ashkenazi branch of Jews, who account for the great majority of all Jews in the world today. Ashkenazis are distinguished by the historical fact that, over the last couple of thousand years or so, they propagated throughout Europe, generating and maintaining tens of thousands of distinctly Jewish communities in diverse countries spanning the entire continent. My dad was born in Lithuania; my mom’s mom came from an Eastern European region that has belonged to any one of about a half-dozen countries, depending on what particular year you happen to be talking about; and my mom’s dad grew up in Russia, near the Black Sea.

Tradition holds, though, that Ashkenazi Jews ultimately trace their origins straight back to ancient Israel, whence most Jews were expelled en masse in 70 CE by their Roman conquerors and sent skittering to all parts of the globe. (Jews who initially fled to Spain and Portugal are referred to as Sephardic. Those who took up residence in Iran, Iraq and Northern Africa are designated as Mizrahi.)

But in the late 1970s I read what was then a recent book titled The Thirteenth Tribe, written by polymath Arthur Koestler, advancing a theory that today’s Ashkenazis descend not from the Holy Land but, rather, from Khazaria, a medieval Turkic empire in the Causasus region whose royals, caught between the rock of Islam and the hard place of Christendom, chose the politically expedient course of converting to Judaism. That hypothesis has become highly politicized, with some groups holding that Ashkenazis, who constitute half of Israel’s current population, are colonialist interlopers with zero historical claim to the land of Israel.

 

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