Ashkenazim: the Genetic Origin

Who we – Ashkenazi – truly are? And who are the “Jews”?

First of all let us make the terminological mess clear. If someone says “Jew” she supposes one of the following identities:

1. Israelites – a semi-mythological ethnos from the Bible, which dwelled across Middle-East before dissipation of 2th century A.D. 2. Judaists (including those who were converted into Judaism – and their descendants) 3. Present ethnical groups – Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizraim.

It is clear that those who fall into 2nd and 3rd groups are not the same; even Navajo Indian can become a Jew, while ethnic Ashkenazi may be secular for several generations. It is much more complicated with kinship. Present “Jewry” is officially divided into 3 main parts: Ashkenazi (Rhein communities’ descendants migrated to the east as the Crusade and exile from the Northern Europe had begun), Sephardim (descendants of those who had been exiled from Spain and Portugal in the end of 15th century) and Mizrahim (all others). Both among Ashkenazi and Sephardim there are ancestral castes of priests - Cohanim and Levites.

How can we determine these groups’ kinship and their link to Israelites? With the DNA test’s help, which allows to link relationship both patrilineal (observing the Y-chromosome mutation) and matrilineal (with Mitochondria DNA’s help). There is a Middle Eastern haplogroup J haplotype, which is strongly defined among ancestral priests – Cohanim, which is called Cohanim Modal Haplotype (CMH). Having determined the amount of CMH in a population we can clearly determine the relation level to Israelites.

The problem is that only specialists research such issues, while the others usually link to the following statement (a very popular but erroneous opinion):

“There is nothing special about Ashkenazi Jews can be found during analysis’ – R1 group marker is found in 50-60% of population, about 10% of I and E3b, some of N and J – which is a usual Middle European set. Sephardim Jews on the contrary have J marker among 50% of population. Maximum of J markers by the way have nomads (bedouins) of the Arabic peninsula and Egypt (about 87% of J marker beholders)”.

Confident mood and scientisms’ overload make the illusion of rightfulness; however, as to Behar we will see that the above said is total crap for both Ashkenazi (who have no more than 10% of R1 and 40% of J) and Sephardim (who also have no more than 40% of J). Klesov’s unacademic article “Joseph and his brothers or the molecular genealogy games for the adults” is more credible. However there were no footsteps indicated in the book so we compared main professional Jewish genetics articles’ results and made sure that Klesov’s figures are the same as of the world’s consensus. The article which Klesov uses but does not mention is Behar, Hammer et al., Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries (Haifa, London, Arizona, 2003). Below are the results of this and other articles in short: [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ].

Y-Chromosome analysis for “Paternity test”

1. Cohanim both Ashkenazic and Sephardic are Middle Eastern Israelites’ direct successors as to the paternity line. 87% (Kolesov for some reason indicates 91% which is not that important) Ashkenazi Cohanim and 76 Sephardic Cohanim possess haplogroup J. which means they are more homogeneous than Germans, Norwegians or Belarusians also included in the testing. Practically Cohanim are the unique Israelite nation, maintaining the blood purity at least according to paternity line.

2. Ashkenazim Levites have basically nothing to do with Middle eastern J group – only 10% possessed the corresponding markers. Instead 60% behold R1a1 marker, which is much more than Belarusians have (51%), but less then Serbians do (63%). Ashkenasic Levites are successors of Eastern Europeans converted to Judaism, with minimal following J admixtures and have nothing to do with Israelites. Most probably that they are the successors of Khazars. Thus there are only 3.4% Levites among all Ashkenazi.

3. 90% of Ashkenazi do not belong neither to Cohanim nor to Levites. They are situated somewhere in the middle between such extreme positions as to J and CMH markers frequency. Klesov does not provide total haplotype statistics among Ashkenazi. However we may find this information in Behar:

J (Middle east) – 37% E (Africa and the Mediterranean) – 22% - i.e. Southern Italians have 25% P (Siberia, Central Asia) – 15% BR (Nothern Europe) – 14% K (Asia and Southern Europe) – 8% R1a1 (Eastern Europe) – 4%

Totally there are 90% of modern Ashkenazi appear to be a metisized formation between Israelites’ successors (about 40%) and different European ethnos’ (about 60%) according to Y-chromosome. For the reference Germans and Norwegians also have all these haplogroups excluding K. However, there are only 3% of J among them. Sometimes tests results may vary (in the most extreme case R1a1 was found among 10%) but the whole picture stays the same.

4. Also we should emphasize that modern Israelite genes (both Ashkenazic and the rest) happened to be closer to the Kurdish, Turkish and Armenian then to Arabic and Arabic-Palestinian according to "The Y-chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East" (pdf)” tests. At the same time arabs do not have an Israelite haplotype. This is to the issue of “pansemitism” and Ashkenazi’s’ and Arabs’ rights to the Israel territory.

Analysis acc. Mt-DNA

It is an even more complicated issue with women line – mitochondrial DNA. It has been a big sensation in the media when it was found out according to Behar that 40% of Askenazi originated from 4 women. However there is nothing sensational in this fact for the scientists figured the hypothetical common ancestors – so-called Y-chromosomic Adam and Mitohondrical Eve. Therefore there are 40% of Ashkenazi who bear mt-DNA which is different from the surrounding nations and can be minimally found among non-Ashkenazi Jews. Despite the fact that scientists announced these 40% middle eastern Jews, they still had to agree that they don’t have any hard proofs: "our findings are not sufficient to answer questions about the extent and location of the maternal deme from which Ashkenazi Jewry as population arose." The fact is that the small amount of these genes could be transferred to non-ashkenazic Jews from the Ashkenazi after the Rhine communities of 9-10 Century originated. There can be no certainty that 4 Ashkenazic ancestress had middle European blood, i.e. had been brought from there, especially taking into account the fact that the European Ashkenazic type is much different from Sephardic and Mizrah. Even in case that these women were Israelites and gave middle eastern genes to 40% of Ashkenazic population, the rest 60% of analysed Ashkenazi did not show any middle-eastern results. Therefore acc to mtDNA the correlation is either the same as to Y-chromosome (40% to the middle east and 60% - Europe) or the European percentage is even higher.

Now let us try to imagine our ancestors’ history

After Bar Kokhba rebellion (132-135 A. D.) a small group of Israelites (J) men – middle eastern ancestors of Ashkenazi – appeared in Spain either bringing their wives with them or breeding with local population (E). Taking specialties of Israelites’ life of that time into account, the most probable is militarized consortium of settlers searching for the wives on the new territory. Their successors spread in the region assimilating and partially becoming a metisized conviction, losing their belligerency. Some of them moved to Roman Köln and Trier, but mass migration to German lands begins after the Franks’ invasion and fall of Rome and Northern Italy (beginning of 9th century). The expansion continued to England and France. For all this time an active exogamy took place: a brand new sub-ethnos – “Ashkenazi” (i.e. “Germans”) was formed, which has little with Israelites who remained in Palestine or moved to Asia and Africa.

In the 11th century Ashkenazi suddenly got a professional national attribute – loansharking, which was banned for the most of Christians. This event was simultaneous with crusade and city-states rise: on the one hand European monarchies urgently needed considerable sums of money; on the other hand business did not suit them, which means the need for intermediaries and front men, who could be easily left behind in case of a failure and didn’t need any benefits in case of a fortune. Thus half-European Ashkenazi, non-Ashkenazic Israelites’ ancestors and harbor men (this is where E and K + parallels come from alone with Sephardim mtDNA) had been chosen in order to hurriedly create a new type of a weapon – sly and wily “Jews” according to the Christian propaganda written by anti-system Israelites in the beginning of a millennium. Talmud was used as a bonding material. The result is a cultural golem, an artificial formation, which covered courts’ financial operations and presented to the local population, crusaders and debtors according to the formula “King is good – Jews are band” after its mission was done (England 1920, France 1394, Germany 1400s). Bitter and deceived by the “masters” a metis-golem in the amount of 25,000 leaves to the East carrying Talmud along with the thoughts of being unique and cursed, instilled to it by Europeans for business purposes. It pupates and ghettoizes with exogamy fall to <0,5% for generation. Looks like that all finished.

However Talmud and usury “presented” from the Europeans gave Ashkenazi a unique criteria for the eugenic selection – the intellectual one. After 20-30 generations of Yeshiva, away from the battles and agricultural labor an average IQ grows up to 107-117 among Ashkenazi (European = 100) and remains the highest in the world. During 500 years the “masters” have already forgotten about Ashkenazi and when they finally bethink about them, they faced an intellectually superior white European sub ethnos, enlightened, suburbanly insolent, with political and mafia ambitions and moreover free from the heavy state machinery! Something had to be done urgently. And the next scheme “Treblinka – Tel-Aviv” is well known.

Thus we came up to following:

1. Ashkenazi is a metisized european subethnos with 40% Israelite mixture with average IQ = 110 and unique intellectual culture. It is a promising player who usually does not fully realize its subjectivity and gets manipulated.

2. Sephardim – Maghrebian-Middle Easterm subethnos with 40% Israelite mixture with average IQ lower for 10-15 points then of Ashkenazi. Considering itself an Ashkenazi discrimination victim, used for Israel Ashkenazi weakening.

3. Jews – an artificial formation, which unites different ethnos’ and cultures according to Israelite genes. Used by Europeans for the certain economic needs, tied with the Christians’ ban for usury in middle ages and need for covering the outstanding financial operations later. Presently it is actively formed in Israel under control of the “masters”. However, when saying “Jews” most people mean Ashkenazi, who form the majority of 80%.

4. Thus it makes sense to give the brand “Jews” along with the bulky religious and historical outfit to rastafari, lemba and all identical Christians and actively promote a perspective European brand “Ashkenazi”. Let Christians and Muslims fight for the biblical history. We can find subjectivity only with such identity.

Exogamy is ok. As our genetical set shows, our ancestors bred with native Europeans for centuries. However the Ashkenazic ethnicity proved to be resistant. Danger comes not from the mixed marriages, but on the contrary in the excessive endogamy and gene pool impoverishment, which leads to sicknesses and degeneration. Also it comes from “panjewishness” (Ashkenazi IQ and culture destruction in the “Jewry” melting pot) and “pansemitism” – intermixture with mythical “brotherly Semitic nations” in Palestina propaganda.

All our history is Nataly Portman’s (Hershlag) face.

By Valgerer

Ashkenazim: the Genetic Origin

David Frankfurter

Another Jew who fought back (and survived):

Having become convinced of the danger posed by the Nazis, Frankfurter kept an eye on Gustloff, head of the Foreign Section of the Nazi party in Switzerland, (NSDAP) who ordered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be published in Switzerland. This culminated in the assassination which occurred in Davos on February 4, 1936. Frankfurter found Gustloff's address in a simple phonebook and on that day went to the Gustloff's home; Gustloff's wife, Hedwig Gustloff, received him and showed him into the study, asking him to wait since her husband was on the telephone but would be with him presently. When Gustloff, who was in the adjoining room, entered his office where Frankfurter was sitting oppositve a picture of Hitler, Frankfurter shot him five times in the head, neck and chest; he left the premises (according to Heinz Schön, while hearing Hedwig Gustloff's cries), went into the next house and asked to use the telephone. He rang the police and confessed to the murder. Immediately he went to the police station and coldly told the police what had happened. Frankfurter was put on trial for the assassination in Chur on December 9 of that year.

We should know our heroes.

- by Miron Fyodorov

David Frankfurter

Herschel Grynszpan: Martyr

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby, published by Random House, Inc. It has been adapted for Jewcy by author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz.

He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him.

He was a Jew. And he had a gun.

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. By 1938, he had lived through three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice nor otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there. Finally, he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization.

He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, non-Christian, unemployed, a troubled youth.

In Paris, the agitated Herschel argued with his aunt and uncle, with whom he stayed. He had received a note from the German-Polish frontier describing the conditions his family suffered. He had fantasies of joining the French Foreign Legion, but had probably been refused a visa to Palestine because of bad health, and it was unlikely he would succeed as a soldier of France. He threatened suicide, then slammed the door of his uncle’s house and was not seen for a night and a day.

On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan went to the German embassy on the Rue de Lille and asked to see the ambassador. An undersecretary, Ernst Vom Rath, was sent to the anteroom to find out what the visitor wanted. Grynszpan pulled a gun and shot at Vom Rath repeatedly, killing him.

“Being a Jew is not a crime,” Grynszpan told the press after his arrest. “I am not a dog. I have "Being a Jew is Not a Crime": Photo of Herschel Grynszpan after his arresta right to live, and the Jewish people have the right to live on this earth. Wherever I have gone, I have been hunted like a beast.”

By a terrible coincidence, the shooting came on the twentieth anniversary of imperial Germany’s capitulation to the allies—which the Nazis and other German antisemites blamed on the Jews, who had allegedly stabbed the nation in the back. On the night of November 9, the Nazis used Grynszpan’s reckless protest as a pretext for retaliation. The date would forever be known as Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass. The New York Times described “a wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany” since the seventeenth century.

The specter of Grynszpan briefly haunted the world; like a blazing silhouette, he had in an instant illuminated the deepest contradictions and challenges facing his people and all of oppressed humanity. The Jews had dedicated themselves to the common welfare of themselves and their Gentile neighbors for many centuries. Was it good for them to struggle for universal justice, even if they remained crushed by their fate as outsiders? Or should they declare that they, like the multitude of Gentile nations, had a particular interest to guard and nurture? Could Jews defend themselves? Could they take up the sword when threatened?

Only in America would this question never need to be directly posed. Only in America would Jews experience, miraculously, a permanent liberty and security. “Only in America” became a Jewish meme, employed to describe the almost dreamlike quality of life here.

Yet if American Jews were never threatened with such an outburst of medieval horrors, neither were they able to feel perfectly at ease. Though it is largely forgotten today, the Great Depression produced homegrown fascist movements that targeted Jews as the cause of American social and economic ills.

There were no American Jewish or Zionist lobbies with such power as exist today. American Jews were gaining political influence but still weak in social weight, with a leadership grossly hesitant to appear too assertive, as the Grynszpan case showed.

The New York Times, Jewish-owned but sunken in a cowardly attitude of constraint about asserting any Jewish interest, treated Grynszpan with barely concealed contempt. The Times referred to his having studied Hebrew but with “no intention of becoming a rabbi,” and later headlined the young man’s description of the shooting as “carried out in a trance.”

The leading American Jewish communal organizations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), produced no press releases or other emergency statements defending Grynszpan.

The American Communist party, anxious to draw attention away from its significant Jewish membership, treated the events in Germany ambiguously. The Communist paper referred to Grynszpan as “grief-crazed” and referred to Goebbels as a member of “the extreme antisemitic wing of Nazism”—as if such distinctions meant anything.

As the years went by, the Stalinists who described Grynszpan as insane were echoed by others. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt joined in the denigration of Grynszpan figure than Hannah Arendt described Grynszpan as “a psychopath, unable to finish school, who for years had knocked about Paris and Brussels, being expelled from both places.”

Today, Jews remain ambivalent about Grynszpan; he is seen by most as a warped and tormented figure whose only significance is that he helped bring about the tragedy of European Jewry—as if the Holocaust would not have occurred if Grynszpan had not murdered Vom Rath.

The treatment of Grynszpan by history, including by Jewish chroniclers, raises the issue of the morality to which Jewish self-defense must be held. Jews employed violence to protect their communities in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. They would do so again after the foundation of the state of Israel, but more regularly and with greater effectiveness.

Yet such behavior has almost always been greeted with disquiet by Jews and non-Jews alike. Under what circumstances is it permissible for Jews to commit acts of assassination, terror, and military conquest in the name of self-defense? This would become the great question of the twentieth century for the Jews, and a major challenge for the world—and so it persists.

And what of the desperate youth himself? His ultimate fate is unknown today. Grynszpan never saw trial. He was held in the French prison of Fresnes until June 1940 when he was sent south by the Parisian authorities, to a jail in Bourges. On the way he experienced a brief period of freedom when the train he was riding was attacked by German aircraft. In Bourges, he was kidnapped by the Nazis and transferred to Germany, where he disappeared in the night and fog of the Holocaust. He vanished without a trace, although rumors later proliferated describing his survival somewhere in France.

Still, the lessons of Grynszpan grow in relevance with every passing day. The situation today cannot be compared with that of the 1930s, of course. Even the undeniably great threat posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not bring us back to the 1930s. Israel and the Western powers are determined to confront and curb the hallucinated Iranian, and Israel will maintain its security.

My concern, however, has been for the future of American Jews in a society where the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish prejudice currently advances, and the Jewish establishment has been weak in its response. Once again, Jewish leaders appear too frightened to assert themselves.

Why was the campaign to identify the atrocities of September 11, 2001, with an Israeli conspiracy ignored by American Jewish leaders as beneath notice? The agitators responsible for that libel should be named and shamed.

Why was Michael Lerner met with indifference when he announced his belief that the U.S. government might be complicit in 9/11—declaring himself “agnostic” on the question? Lerner describes such arguments about Israeli involvement as “baloney”—hardly an appropriate response to such an attack. Would it be appropriate to merely dismiss the blood libel as “baloney?”

Why was the pamphlet against the Jewish lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth-century German academic outburst of “anti-Semitismus,” met with so feeble a public response? Jewish and other students should have gathered at the offices of Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at the Harvard Kennedy School, and disrupted their work nonviolently, with signs and shouts. Further, the historic Jewish-associated publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has contracted to put their pseudo-academic propaganda in a nice binding and dust jacket. Why does Tom Friedman or any other Jewish writer not break relations with the house? Why has no boycott been organized against FS&G? The freedom of speech and the right to publish do not include the right to be insulated from criticism.

The Jewish historian and essayist Tony Judt complained that free speech had disappeared from America, because a Polish diplomatic facility in New York—which is, after all, the property of the Polish authorities—refused to sponsor his speech. Judt alleged the Poles had been pressured by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, but why did Judt not address his reproach to the Polish government? Perhaps because he knows the Poles have no interest in acquiring a reputation for coddling Israel-baiters.

We’re told that critics of Israel and the American Jewish community have their views suppressed. And yet Noam Chomsky, a ferocious critic of Israel and the American Jewish leadership, is the most adulated figure in American academic life. If this is “suppression,” the word has no meaning. A community hesitant to speak out in its own defense cannot even discourage insults, much less silence them.

The German intellectual Theodor W. Adorno declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Perhaps he was right; the great Jewish poet Paul Celan, who challenged that view, finally committed suicide, as did other survivor-authors. But some Jewish poets who died in the Holocaust left messages of fire, like the deed and words of Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, for those who would come after. The Hungarian Jew Radnoti Miklos, executed on a forced labor march, wrote during his ordeal:

“I knew there was an angel, sword in hand, behind me—there in my time of trouble to guard and defend me… Where the angel with his sword was standing once/There may be nobody.”

- by Head Wide Open

Herschel Grynszpan: Martyr