Joke term on my part, for people trying to sort the various nationalities of the world into their Ethically Correct Places (In this case, my Israeli cousins back to Poland)
Replies
as a person of mixed Irish and Danish heritage, I belong in my people's only indigenous homeland: Iceland
jul 10, 2025, 7:04 pm โข 18 0 โข view
Surtsey popped up just for you! ๐
jul 10, 2025, 7:07 pm โข 2 0 โข view
We arenโt really khazars right?
jul 10, 2025, 7:04 pm โข 1 0 โข view
there are a very small number of Turkic Jews who appear to be descended from Khazar-era converts, mostly in Crimes (Ralph Bakshi is one) but essentially no people who do not claim to be Khazars while actually being Khazars.
jul 10, 2025, 7:40 pm โข 9 0 โข view
like basically "there are some Krymchak families with names and family histories which strongly indicate Khazar descent but if you are not one of a few people who can trace their ancestry to those families in Crimea then that's not you."
jul 10, 2025, 7:41 pm โข 6 0 โข view
Crimes
jul 10, 2025, 7:41 pm โข 2 0 โข view
autocorrect. I meant "felonies."
jul 10, 2025, 7:42 pm โข 10 0 โข view
There's a Grimes-Elon joke in here somewhere and I leave that for those more skilled than me
jul 10, 2025, 7:43 pm โข 5 0 โข view
Whereโs Herr Grok when you need him
jul 10, 2025, 7:53 pm โข 2 0 โข view
I donโt feel like a khazar at least
jul 10, 2025, 7:04 pm โข 1 0 โข view
Well I feel like a khazir after a big meal
jul 10, 2025, 7:11 pm โข 10 1 โข view
Not in any significant measure. Our convert ancestry is mostly Italian, it would seem (not very surprising). (Amateurs always overestimate the Slavic component; we weren't really there that long and we were more segregated there.)
jul 10, 2025, 7:06 pm โข 7 0 โข view
It was not that many dudes going to Italy (not unlike the Trojans?) finding some ladies, and eventually headed up north right? And then that population begat Ashkenazis?
jul 10, 2025, 7:10 pm โข 1 0 โข view
Genetics so far isn't very good at pinpointing the exact dates and percentages. We know, from Roman sources that the already existing Jewish community in Rome swelled after the destruction of the Temple, and that Judaism became popular in very Jewish areas.
jul 10, 2025, 7:14 pm โข 8 0 โข view
(and that in Roman era Christianity, the line between Judaism and Christianity was not nearly as firm, intermarriage-wise, as Christian leaders (and I guess Jewish ones) would have liked)
jul 10, 2025, 7:14 pm โข 9 0 โข view
basically Pharisaic Judaism was not necessarily the theological consensus of the early diaspora and making a distinction between "Christians," "god-fearers," "Jews," and the people who would go on to become Mandaeans was not at all simple in most places until the third century AD.
jul 10, 2025, 7:17 pm โข 3 0 โข view
though to be fair this appears to have been clearer in the Mesopotamian diaspora than in, e.g., Antioch or Alexandria.
jul 10, 2025, 7:19 pm โข 3 0 โข view
In any case, the second part seems uncontroversial: medieval French and German Jewish communities are continuous with the Italian ones of antiquity. There are many lines of evidence for this.
jul 10, 2025, 7:16 pm โข 6 0 โข view
I didnโt know that! Thatโs fascinating. So never went all the ear north east, but would have also mostly intermarried. Are there genetic differences (not in a weird race science way) between ashkenazi and the Rome to France people
jul 10, 2025, 7:21 pm โข 2 0 โข view
Not much! This already touches on Carmi's published research. Medieval English Jews, who we know were immigrants from northern France, are genetically very similar to Ashkenazim from medieval Erfurt, Germany, and both correspond, taking statistical effects into account, to contemporary Ashkenazim.
jul 10, 2025, 7:23 pm โข 4 0 โข view
Thanks for humoring me with this interrogation/quiz!
jul 10, 2025, 7:33 pm โข 1 0 โข view
No problem! It's close enough to my field of interest that I enjoy it:)
jul 10, 2025, 7:35 pm โข 5 0 โข view
Going back to the genetics part, I'm not going to tag him into this again (because every time I bring him back to Bluesky by doing so, and it's rude) but Shai Carmi, one of the foremost experts on Jewish genetics in medieval times etc, has told me that the current data supports anything between...
jul 10, 2025, 7:19 pm โข 3 0 โข view
... (from memory, just the gist) 25% and 60% Levantine ancestry for Ashkenazim, with the middle of the range being most likely, and most of the rest being Italian contributions from antiquity, and the rest of the remainder mostly German.
jul 10, 2025, 7:19 pm โข 3 0 โข view
Once I demonstrated that tens of thousands of Israelis - and many more Jews and other people of Jewish descent - could be defined as properly Palestinian by his ad hoc criteria, he shifted the date to 1785, the earliest mentioned in the thread.
jul 10, 2025, 7:05 pm โข 25 1 โข view
If I were forced out of Canada, would I go back to New York where my loyalist ancestors lived before the revolution, or would I get chopped into pieces and scattered across northwestern Europe ๐ค
jul 10, 2025, 7:12 pm โข 4 0 โข view
The guy in that conversation couldn't engage in the Fraction Issues at all
jul 10, 2025, 7:14 pm โข 6 0 โข view