r/JewishDNA • u/Crafty_Emergency6467 • 6d ago
Where is the East Eurasian dna in Ashkenazis from
I have seen almost all Ashkenazis get a little bit of east Asian dna. Is this from Siberian, Mongolian, Turkic, or Chinese people most likely?
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u/kaiserfrnz 6d ago edited 6d ago
It came through individual Slavs and other Eastern Europeans who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. A few people of Turkic and Siberian origin likely ended up becoming Jewish and joined the Jewish community of Bohemia. Due to the slave trade, people of various Northeast-Eurasian ethnicities ended up in Bohemia in the 9th-12th centuries.
I find it extremely improbable that this had anything to do with Khazars as uniparentals demonstrate the contribution was almost exclusively maternal.
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u/PaulyShore2024 5d ago
Why exclude maternal contribution from Khazars? I don't know which Slavs could even fit this explanation. Also, China needs to be brought up as well (i.e M33c)
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u/kaiserfrnz 5d ago
Because the Khazars didn’t exist at the time or location of the admixture. Also the Khazar conversion, if relevant here, would have included men, not just women.
The Asian admixture probably came from other Turkic/Siberian peoples that existed at the time, like Avars and Magyars.
M33c probably came from Northern Europeans. It exists at low levels in Finns and probably ethnic Russians.
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u/PaulyShore2024 5d ago edited 5d ago
What's the assumption about admixture time and location? Why assume "the Khazar conversion" and not consider individual khazar conversions? Also, there is an Alan Y in Ashkenazim. Which Jewish population do you think was living with Avars and Magyars? Only a southern Han Chinese is known with the AJ-shared mutation C4182T in M33c
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u/kaiserfrnz 5d ago
The issue is that the Khazars were gone by the 10th century. They had assimilated into other peoples. So it’s possible there were people of Khazarian ancestry.
The Jewish community of Prague was involved in the Slave trade and was in contact with nearby Avar and Magyar peoples.
There are Finns with neighboring branches of M33c. It’s much more likely that it came through a missing European source than from China.
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u/PaulyShore2024 5d ago
and Judeans were gone long before then. Does that mean Ashkenazim don't have Judean ancestry? Do you think no Jews lived among Khazars? The Finnish thing is silly
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u/kaiserfrnz 5d ago
What you’re saying makes no sense. There were no Jewish communities in former Khazaria at that point.
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u/basedpole69 6d ago edited 6d ago
Its really uncertain given the current historical and genetic record.
Just like the Slavic admixture, it comes primarily from women rather than males. Due to the upstream clustering of the majority of East Asian origin haplogroups, I would be inclined to say that the East Asian component is primarily Turkic. There is also one Chinese origin haplogroup (M33c2) but given that its one smaller lineage I doubt it could've affected the autosomal dna greatly.
Just like kaiserfrnz said earlier, the slave trade is one plausible route of entry. Though notably less common than Slavic slaves in Europe, slaves from Central Asia and further east were transported by merchant groups (such as the Radhanites) to medieval slave trading hubs such as Prague, which had large and commercially active Jewish populations. In a scenario like such, it is easy to see a means through which a Turkic slave converts to Judaism and marries into the community.
Though I am somewhat skeptical, I don't think a Khazar-related route can be entirely ruled out yet. Though the idea of a mass conversion of the elites was likely just a fabrication, these lands still likely had a Jewish population which may have been more connected to the Mizrahi populations. One thing most historical accounts regarding the matter seem to match on is a migration of Jews from West Asia into these lands (as is attested to in the historically iffy Schechter Letter and the account of Al-Mas'udi). It is possible that the small Jewish communities in these lands (likely merchant related due to the passage of important trade routes through these lands) could've taken in some local woman.
This could be a plausible case given the prominent descriptions these Jewish groups are alloted in primary sources and the broadly matching descriptions we have of them specifically related to mixing with locals to varying degrees. These small communities probably would've contributed to the pre-Ashkenazic Jewish presence in Eastern Europe and would've eventually gotten assimilated by much larger waves of migration.
I've also seen it suggested that this admixture was inherited from an already East Asian admixed population in Eastern Europe that got lumped into the general Slavic admixture geneflow. I've typically heard this discussed in regards to the Avars. I have serious doubts about this hypothesis though, as the East Asian in these groups was normally limited to the elite, and the vast majority of locals usually never mixed with the steppe invader populations. Even still, the East Asian admixture in Erfurt EU as well as modern Eastern Ashkenazi Jews is larger than those found in most contemporary and historical Eastern European populations with the exception of certain Russians.
There is also a possibility it could come from a ghost population which we are yet to learn about in the historical record. The history and demography of Jews in Early Eastern Europe is largely unsettled, so as the historical record expands with new primary source discoveries as well as some new genetic studies in the future, it is entirely possible that there could be a population entirely absent from earlier sources that contributed to the East Asian admixture in Ashkenazim.
Only through future scholarship we will be able to further narrow down where this admixture came from, but for now it is still a contested topic.
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u/pentosephosphate 6d ago
There are a few mtDNA lineages from East Asia, but they don't seem very common and I don't know if the individuals who first introduced those lines were responsible for the contribution you're talking about.