How Did Ashkenazi Jews Become "White?"

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Since pre-Second Destruction Jews would probably have looked like other Semitic peoples, like how Mizrahim look today, and Ashkenazi Jews, at least, for centuries lived and married within small communities without much intermarriage with surrounding Christians, how did the descendants of levantine Jews begin to look ethnically like their Euro-Christian neighbors?
 
Because bastardy is far more common than you seem to think. Considering how close Jews and Christians lived near each other mixed parentage was inevitable.
 
Consider this- Semites (and in fact all North Africans and Middle Easterners) are considered by the US government to be "white" regardless of shade of skin. When it comes to "olive skin" (the racial color assigned to Arabs and Jews) the skin color is not that far off from Italians and Greeks and Spanish; even pre-Arab and Ottoman conquests. Prior to Christianity's rise Judaism brought in quite a lot of non-Jews into the fold, and at that point intermarriage with non-ethnic Jews would have been ok as long as the person had converted. I would say bastardism did not play any role that is significant; Jews and Christians did not live that close together post-Roman Empire, the ghetto program kept them pretty separate. Ashkenazi Jews come from the Rhineland for the most part and spread east through Germany to Russia; along the way those that looked more and more superficially as the surrounding population were more likely to be successful and have more children; evolution in miniature. Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.
 
Consider this- Semites (and in fact all North Africans and Middle Easterners) are considered by the US government to be "white" regardless of shade of skin. When it comes to "olive skin" (the racial color assigned to Arabs and Jews) the skin color is not that far off from Italians and Greeks and Spanish; even pre-Arab and Ottoman conquests. Prior to Christianity's rise Judaism brought in quite a lot of non-Jews into the fold, and at that point intermarriage with non-ethnic Jews would have been ok as long as the person had converted. I would say bastardism did not play any role that is significant; Jews and Christians did not live that close together post-Roman Empire, the ghetto program kept them pretty separate. Ashkenazi Jews come from the Rhineland for the most part and spread east through Germany to Russia; along the way those that looked more and more superficially as the surrounding population were more likely to be successful and have more children; evolution in miniature. Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.

That's something I hadn't thought about before. Do you have a source I can peruse further?
 
I remember that a gene study on 2013 showed the Ashkenazim had about 40 to 80% of Mythocondrial DNA from Central and Eastern European ("Germanic White").

Does the mtDNA affect one's phenotype at all?
 
Consider this- Semites (and in fact all North Africans and Middle Easterners) are considered by the US government to be "white" regardless of shade of skin. When it comes to "olive skin" (the racial color assigned to Arabs and Jews) the skin color is not that far off from Italians and Greeks and Spanish; even pre-Arab and Ottoman conquests. Prior to Christianity's rise Judaism brought in quite a lot of non-Jews into the fold, and at that point intermarriage with non-ethnic Jews would have been ok as long as the person had converted. I would say bastardism did not play any role that is significant; Jews and Christians did not live that close together post-Roman Empire, the ghetto program kept them pretty separate. Ashkenazi Jews come from the Rhineland for the most part and spread east through Germany to Russia; along the way those that looked more and more superficially as the surrounding population were more likely to be successful and have more children; evolution in miniature. Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.

I read an article in New Scientist about this a while ago. The most likely reason for the rise in intellectual skill was likely the result of Jews being forced into professions that favored certain kinds of intelligence (ie becoming merchants and bankers).
 
Remember that perhaps 500-1000 years went by between the incorporation of Palestine/Israel in to the Roman Empire which accelerated the dispersal of the Jews in Western Europe and elsewhere until the more formal separation of the Jews from the gentile population. During this period of time there was inevitably some "mixing" with the "non-semitic" population. After the triumph of Christianity in Western (and Eastern) Europe and the final demise of the Byzantine Empire a consequence of repeated assaults on Jewish communities was a non-zero incidence of children born of rape who became members of the Jewish community (matrilineal definition of Jewish identity) and thus brought with them genetic material form the surrounding population. It is worth noting in the more eastern parts of Europe this included genetic material from Mongol conquerors.

While in many instances dispersal of Jewish communities included families and women, often the dispersal was heavily male dominated. As in other male heavy communities, this resulted in "local" women being taken as wives, and accepting conversion.

If one looks at Jewish communities around the world, at least before the major movements of the last 100-150 years, it becomes obvious they tended to look very much like the local communities. The Jews of the Arab world looked much like their neighbors, the Jews of Western Europe likewise, the Jews of India or the Jews of Ethiopia and so forth. Also note the Jews of China, who while finally absorbed in to the larger community were physically almost indistinguishable from their neighbors. I do have to disagree with the proposition that those who "looked" more local were more successful in the Ashkenazic/Christian world. Until the breaking down of ghetto walls, distinctive clothing and hair/beard styles among other things forced Jews to look different from their Christian neighbors so eye color/hair color/skin tones were less important to separate one from the other.
 
Consider this- Semites (and in fact all North Africans and Middle Easterners) are considered by the US government to be "white" regardless of shade of skin. When it comes to "olive skin" (the racial color assigned to Arabs and Jews) the skin color is not that far off from Italians and Greeks and Spanish; even pre-Arab and Ottoman conquests. Prior to Christianity's rise Judaism brought in quite a lot of non-Jews into the fold, and at that point intermarriage with non-ethnic Jews would have been ok as long as the person had converted. I would say bastardism did not play any role that is significant; Jews and Christians did not live that close together post-Roman Empire, the ghetto program kept them pretty separate. Ashkenazi Jews come from the Rhineland for the most part and spread east through Germany to Russia; along the way those that looked more and more superficially as the surrounding population were more likely to be successful and have more children; evolution in miniature. Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.

Human are human and thus breed more humans (I got that quote from a Lois Mcmaster Bujold novel, I am not sure it is verbatim and which one it was but it fits) the separation was far from enough to stop it. You might as well try holding back the tide as stopping interracial sex. Jews had to interact with Gentiles on a semi-regular basis and that is more than enough. It is the same reason US Blacks are paler in color for the most part than those in Africa.
 
Since pre-Second Destruction Jews would probably have looked like other Semitic peoples, like how Mizrahim look today, and Ashkenazi Jews, at least, for centuries lived and married within small communities without much intermarriage with surrounding Christians, how did the descendants of levantine Jews begin to look ethnically like their Euro-Christian neighbors?


For this reason of course :

I remember that a gene study on 2013 showed the Ashkenazim had about 40 to 80% of Mythocondrial DNA from Central and Eastern European ("Germanic White").

Does the mtDNA affect one's phenotype at all?


And also because Judaïsm is a religion, not a color skin nor a DNA. And that until the second half of the first millenium of our era, Judaïsm was still a proselyte religion. So people who were not ethnically/genetically semite at all converted to Judaïsm. That was noticeably the case of the Khazars who are among the main (although not the only) ancestors of the Askenazim. And on the other hand, there were semite hebrews who chose other religions, be it Christianism, Islam, ... etc.
 
Rape, intermarriage, Christian converts (of which there were attested cases), etc. Although as it were Palestinians are legally white by American standards, so I suppose one could say "when the Jews came into existence" :p
 
Consider this- Semites (and in fact all North Africans and Middle Easterners) are considered by the US government to be "white" regardless of shade of skin. When it comes to "olive skin" (the racial color assigned to Arabs and Jews) the skin color is not that far off from Italians and Greeks and Spanish; even pre-Arab and Ottoman conquests. Prior to Christianity's rise Judaism brought in quite a lot of non-Jews into the fold, and at that point intermarriage with non-ethnic Jews would have been ok as long as the person had converted. I would say bastardism did not play any role that is significant; Jews and Christians did not live that close together post-Roman Empire, the ghetto program kept them pretty separate. Ashkenazi Jews come from the Rhineland for the most part and spread east through Germany to Russia; along the way those that looked more and more superficially as the surrounding population were more likely to be successful and have more children; evolution in miniature. Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.

I read an article in New Scientist about this a while ago. The most likely reason for the rise in intellectual skill was likely the result of Jews being forced into professions that favored certain kinds of intelligence (ie becoming merchants and bankers).

I have to ask, if one is to accept these arguments of environmental circumstances over the course of hundreds of years causing a significant difference between the IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews and European whites, how is that any different than similar claims that the IQ gap between blacks and whites in the United States is because of evolution as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_States_test_scores From what I can tell, there even seems to be a similar difference of about 1 standard deviation.
 
For this reason of course :




And also because Judaïsm is a religion, not a color skin nor a DNA. And that until the second half of the first millenium of our era, Judaïsm was still a proselyte religion. So people who were not ethnically/genetically semite at all converted to Judaïsm. That was noticeably the case of the Khazars who are among the main (although not the only) ancestors of the Askenazim. And on the other hand, there were semite hebrews who chose other religions, be it Christianism, Islam, ... etc.

Being a Jew is an ethnic group, not a religion. Being Jewish is a religion. You're crossing a line into anti-semitism and Nazi era propoganda. The Khazar hypothesis of being ancestors in ANY amount to Ashkenazi Jewry has been disproved. Jews have a distinct DNA difference from Europeans, though not distinct from Palestinians btw. That is why Jews have genetic disorders rarely (if ever) found in any group without Jewish ancestry, such as diseases like Tay-Sachs.
 
Those that doubt evolution works on such small time scales should be reminded that the average IQ of an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew is 110 versus 100 for White Europeans; making Jews the only group that is statistically higher or lower than average (1 standard deviation higher); whereas pre-collapse of the Roman Empire there is no stereotype or remark of any type of Jews being extra intelligent; evolution and more specifically in-breeding is what happened.

Sir, please source this.
This just seems like one of these unfortunate pseudo-facts, making grounds for thinking in terms of race.
Doesn't evolution take waaaay longer time than a thousand years?
 
Sir, please source this.
This just seems like one of these unfortunate pseudo-facts, making grounds for thinking in terms of race.
Doesn't evolution take waaaay longer time than a thousand years?
Depending on the pressures involved, it can happen in a shorter amount of time. See dog breeds, for example. But humans aren't dogs and any IQ increases I'd attribute to higher literacy rates or relative affluence. I do wonder if the claim of 110 IQ is for a wide range of Ashkenazim from multiple countries or just Ashkenazim from America, which I suspect.
 
Depending on the pressures involved, it can happen in a shorter amount of time. See dog breeds, for example. But humans aren't dogs and any IQ increases I'd attribute to higher literacy rates or relative affluence. I do wonder if the claim of 110 IQ is for a wide range of Ashkenazim from multiple countries or just Ashkenazim from America, which I suspect.

Education which works a lot faster. Poles in the US went from a below average IQ tests to above average in less than 100 years. Unless evolution is happening at warp speed among Poles it is because the US has a much better education system than late 19th- early 20th century Poland.
 
Education which works a lot faster. Poles in the US went from a below average IQ tests to above average in less than 100 years. Unless evolution is happening at warp speed among Poles it is because the US has a much better education system than late 19th- early 20th century Poland.

Speaking of Poland, I'd presume that many of the Ashkenazim that lived in the pre-Holocaust Pale of Settlement would have had very low IQs. Whilst a lot of the cities in the region had large Jewish populations, with a resultant presumptive increase in IQ, there were a lot of Jewish farming settlements with little-to-no access to education.
 
mtDNA by itself does not affect phenotype much, but is used as a proxy for maternal DNA contribution; Ashkenazi Jews' Y chromosomal DNA, used for paternal contribution, is much less European. Overall Jews appear to be about 50/50 Middle Eastern and European. It's not just Central and Eastern European, but also Italian: there was a documented wave of conversions in the 1c Roman Empire.
 
Since pre-Second Destruction Jews would probably have looked like other Semitic peoples, like how Mizrahim look today, and Ashkenazi Jews, at least, for centuries lived and married within small communities without much intermarriage with surrounding Christians, how did the descendants of levantine Jews begin to look ethnically like their Euro-Christian neighbors?

Intermarriage (legitimate or not). In the same way the Cochin Jews of South India looked pretty much like South Indians- which actually became a source of tension within the community as after the 16th century or so, a wave of new Jewish migrants arrived, who were actually of Sephardic origin. The new arrivals called themselves "White Jews" as opposed to the older "Black Jew" community and instituted segregated synagogues etc.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
Conversion and intermarriage produced whiter looking Jews in the timespan post-Diaspora, and as the community generally consolidated in the Rhine region, I guess you can call it natural selection of a sort, but those who looked most like their neighbors had the best chance of survival and being left alone. By the time the Ashkenazi moved eastwards, you had mostly a white group of people.

I don't really know how the Khazars fit into this, as I've always heard that they were more an example of a group with Jewish leadership, converted by Jewish merchants, but not really in large scale numbers or at a popular level. I don't think the Khazars fit into this.
 
And also because Judaïsm is a religion, not a color skin nor a DNA. And that until the second half of the first millenium of our era, Judaïsm was still a proselyte religion. So people who were not ethnically/genetically semite at all converted to Judaïsm. That was noticeably the case of the Khazars who are among the main (although not the only) ancestors of the Askenazim. And on the other hand, there were semite hebrews who chose other religions, be it Christianism, Islam, ... etc.

Khazars are, in no way, shape or form, ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews. You've fallen for the "Khazar hypothesis", which has been debunked numerous times. It keeps popping up every now and then, but it remains the same - false. Jews are far closer DNA-wise to people from the Middle East than we are to Europeans.

Conversion and intermarriage produced whiter looking Jews in the timespan post-Diaspora, and as the community generally consolidated in the Rhine region, I guess you can call it natural selection of a sort, but those who looked most like their neighbors had the best chance of survival and being left alone. By the time the Ashkenazi moved eastwards, you had mostly a white group of people.

I don't really know how the Khazars fit into this, as I've always heard that they were more an example of a group with Jewish leadership, converted by Jewish merchants, but not really in large scale numbers or at a popular level. I don't think the Khazars fit into this.

Conversion to Judaism and intermarriage weren't all that big, almost negligible. Mostly because whenever Jews tried to proselytize, they were typically murdered (or the Jewish community faced severe legal restrictions on converting non-Jews to Judaism).

Khazars don't, really. It's said that some of the Khazar elite/nobility converted to Rabbinic Judaism, but we don't really know to what extent and it's highly unlikely it extended to the rest of the people. Some scholars, like Moshe Gil and Shaul Stampfer, said that the Khazar conversion never actually happened (citing that Arab and Jewish texts from the time don't mention the Khazars as Jews).
 
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