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Comment by mazsa | Hacker News Reader

"As reported online today in Nature Communications, more than 80% of Ashkenazi mtDNAs had their origins thousands of years ago in Western Europe, during or before Biblical times—and in some cases even before farming came to that part of the continent some 7500 years ago. The closest matches were with mtDNAs from people who today live in and around Italy. The results imply that the Jews can trace their heritage to women who had lived in Europe at that time. Very few Ashkenazi mtDNAs could be traced to the Middle East.

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...

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>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.

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.

"If A then B." does not assume A.

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.

> We're talking about A because Israel extends certain privileges only to A-jews. Orthodox jews only accept A-jews.

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 is outside my personal experience/expertise, so I'll accept your statement about Orthodox conversion, but I'm thinking of things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Israel:

"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."

I sincerely don't understand what you're saying. Can you clarify?

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?

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