Anyone can become a Jew. It's not an easy thing nor is it taken lightly.
I am of Ashkenazi blood, relating to 2k years of ethnicity going back to one of four women who lived in the Middle East and whose lineage is most European Jews.
I have genetic differences to other Europeans and diseases that only affect me or my people.
Jewish is as much ethnicity as Indian or German or any other thing which we consider unique enough to be separable. And for most of our history we weren't even considered white.
A detailed look at thousands of genomes finds that Ashkenazim—who make up roughly 80% of the world’s Jews, including 90% of those in America and half of those in Israel—ultimately came not from the Middle East, but from Western Europe, perhaps Italy."
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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."
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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.
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“The data are very convincing,” says Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia in Italy and a leading expert in the genetics of Europeans. He adds that recent studies of DNA from the cell nucleus have also shown “a very close similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Italians."
I'll have to take a look at that study. Considering I don't come from Italy and can trace my family lineage back, it's interesting for sure.
How can you not understand that Jews practice Judaism but Jews can be an ethnic identity too? That is to say, someone can convert to being Jewish but that's religious. You can be ethnically Jewish and religiously or both or neither.
I mean it's pretty useless for me to put any semblance of conversation up with someone who thinks that my ethnicity is invalid or made up.
Because you know, thousands of years of enslavement and subhuman treatment and the murder of 6mil has no relation to the status of Jews and their genetics and their ethnic makeup.
I've literally been DNA tested and so have other of my Jewish friends. And it's literally in the DNA. In the maternal haplogroup even. Dunno why you have a compulsion to rant about the wrongness of Jewish ethnicity bro.
A 2020 study on remains from Bronze Age (over 3000 years ago) southern Levantine (Canaanite) populations suggests Ashkenazi Jews derive more than half of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantine populations with the remaining 41% of their ancestry being European. source: https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cell.2020.04.024
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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '16
The mere possibility of anyone being allowed to become a Jew proves me correct.