Did Modern Jews Originate in Italy?
news.sciencemag.org
news.sciencemag.org
The results [...] conflict [...] with widespread assumptions about Jewish identity. Jews have traditionally considered that the mother determines the ethnic identity of her children. If being Jewish is defined as genetically descending from the Israelites through the maternal line, then many Ashkenazi Jews fail the test, according to this data."
Original: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/nco...
This assumes that the conversion of long-ago wives were somehow invalid or illegitimate. It's not clear to me why we would make that assumption.
We're not making that assumption.
We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews.
If there's some explicit cutoff date (N generations back? 1900?) before which there's no brand attached to not having a jewish mother then I guess we should talk about A' instead.
No. If you convert today by Orthodox standards, then you will be recognized by Israel and Orthodox jews as a jew. You most certainly can do it, you just have to follow stricter standards and there is no reason to believe that such standards were not followed then.
"This resulted in several hundreds of thousands of persons fitting the above criteria immigrating to Israel (mainly from the former Soviet Union) but not being recognized as Jews by the Israeli religious authorities, which on the basis of halakha recognize only the child of a Jewish mother as being Jewish."
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_Israel "Eligible individuals are those who have at least one parent of recognized Jewish descent."
Also, I feel like maybe I wasn't clear. You are considered Jewish by even the strictest standards if you (1) converted or (2) can trace matrilineal descent from ancient Israel or (3) can trace matrilineal descent from a convert.
What I'm saying is that when Jewish men showed up in Southern and Western Europe, they seemingly got hitched to a lot of local women. How do we know the majority of those women didn't convert?
(2) Earlier iterations of Judaism were significantly more evangelical and actively pursued converts. Given the large population of Jews in Rome, it makes that many Italian natives made their way into the religion/ethnicity/tribe/whatever.
Jews are not so much about ethnicity than about religion. Jews are the nation of Torah, not blood. So don't spend too much time looking for their ethnic roots, this isn't very important to themselves in the first place.
Yes and no. Bloodline became more of a focus during and after the Holocaust -- which is somewhat bitterly ironic, given that the Holocaust was perpetrated in the name of blood purity.
As a "half-Jew," and particularly as someone whose Jewish half is on the paternal side, I've been deemed "not really Jewish" by almost all but the most Reform branches of Judaism that I've encountered. I wouldn't be accepted into an Orthodox congregation except by conversion, because I am considered a gentile in their eyes. Even after being bar mitzvahed, I was labeled a "Jew by choice," with the slightly derisive implication that such a label carried second-class status among the Jewish populace. The obsession with matrilineal purity is still quite strong.
It shouldn't be. Jews make up an extreme minority of the worldwide population, and even of the US population. If anything, the faith needs to expand, not double down on supposed bloodline purity (especially purity of increasingly dubious genetic provability). But bloodline still carries a lot of weight in many Jewish communities, typically in direct proportion to the degree of religious orthodoxy of a given community. (My paternal grandmother, a third-generation Jewish American, refused to attend my parents' wedding on account of my father's marrying a gentile. She, like many old-school Jews, didn't quite understand the mathematical implications of marrying within the faith and the supposed bloodline -- that it is a self-limiting strategy, and potentially self-defeating, given how often the faith has come close to being severely endangered).
That's why there are few Jews, but they own the world.
Sorry, let me clarify: I'm not calling for the Jewish faith to proselytize around the world and try to seek converts. Judaism doesn't need to go viral. Rather, I'm saying that Judaism's numbers have historically been threatened, and strict bans on (or at least strong stigmatization of) marriage outside the faith is self limiting.
If I'm a Jewish man and I want to marry a gentile woman, why shouldn't my children be considered Jewish, provided I raise them in a Jewish tradition, culture, and set of values? Why should we intentionally threaten the preservation of the worldwide Jewry by placing such a limitation on organic growth? When I say "growth," I'm not talking about expansion, per se; I'm talking about being able to maintain the numbers at a rate faster than they can decline.
"That's why there are few Jews, but they own the world."
I'm not going to touch this sort of comment, sorry.
Let's not forget that the people of Europe came from somewhere else too. 12,000 years ago, all of Europe except a small part of Spain, was covered under a thick Arctic ice cap. Nothing lived there. So this study could be showing that ancestors of the Phoenicians (who spoke a language very close to Hebrew and were renowned travelers and traders) were the first to repopulate Italy when it reemerged from under the ice.
When studies of DNA look for the markers of a certain group of people, does that deny the markers of another? Does the finding of Ashekenazi mtDNA mean that other Jewish bloodlines DNA was not found?