Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz

Abstract

The Yiddish language is over 1,000 years old and incorporates German, Slavic, and Hebrew elements. The prevalent view claims Yiddish has a German origin, whereas the opposing view posits a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weak Turkic substrata. One of the major difficulties in deciding between these hypotheses is the unknown geographical origin of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews (AJs). An analysis of 393 Ashkenazic, Iranian, and mountain Jews and over 600 non-Jewish genomes demonstrated that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, and Turks exhibit the highest genetic similarity with AJs. The Geographic Population Structure analysis localized most AJs along major primeval trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that may be derived from “Ashkenaz.” Iranian and mountain Jews were localized along trade routes on the Turkey’s eastern border. Loss of maternal haplogroups was evident in non-Yiddish speaking AJs. Our results suggest that AJs originated from a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which the Jews call “Ashkenazic” (i.e., “Scythian”), though these Jews probably spoke Persian and/or Ossete. This is compatible with linguistic evidence suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic language created by Irano-Turko-Slavic Jewish merchants along the Silk Roads as a cryptic trade language, spoken only by its originators to gain an advantage in trade. Later, in the 9th century, Yiddish underwent relexification by adopting a new vocabulary that consists of a minority of German and Hebrew and a majority of newly coined Germanoid and Hebroid elements that replaced most of the original Eastern Slavic and Sorbian vocabularies, while keeping the original grammars intact.

Diverse genetic origins of medieval steppe nomad conquerors – a response to Mikheyev et al. (2019)

“…Following its destruction, these people migrated to Eastern and Northern Europe and bolstered the Ashkenazic Jewry communities. Das et al (2016) showed that Ashkenazic Jews trace their origins to "Ancient Ashkenazic," South to the Black Sea. From there, Jews could have penetrated Europe from two directions: through Western Turkey or by crossing Khazaria and entering from Eastern Europe after the demise of the Empire.…”

“…Surprisingly, the Caucasus Jews included in the original dataset were omitted from this study. This choice of a limited and irrelevant dataset to address a key question in the manuscript is peculiar provided the numerous datasets (e.g., Need et al 2009;Bray et al 2010;Das et al 2016;Gladstein and Hammer 2016) which, unlike the so-called "Jewish HapMap Project," do not require signing a contract that limits the academic freedom of the authors. Using a small dataset is bound to produce limited results, which may lead one to conclude that "the genetic homogeneity of the worldwide Jewish population is also problematic.…”

The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish

“…Thus far, all analyses aimed to geo-localize AJs (Behar et al, 2013, Figure 2B; Elhaik, 2013, Figure 4; Das et al, 2016, Figure 4) identified Turkey as the predominant origin of AJs, although they used different approaches and datasets, in support of the Irano-Turko-Slavic hypothesis (Figure 1A, Table 1). The existence of both major Southern European and Near Eastern ancestries in AJ genomes are also strong indictors of the Irano-Turko-Slavic hypothesis provided the Greco-Roman history of the region southern to the Black Sea (Baron, 1937; Kraemer, 2010).…”

Diverse genetic origins of medieval steppe nomad conquerors

“…The existence of conflicting reports has led to debates about their veracity and authenticity; even the very practice of Judaism by the Khazars has been questioned [7]. Yet, recent work on geographical genetics and linguistics of present-day Ashkenazi populations lent support to the hypothesis of the Khazarian origin [8][9][10]. However, the methodology of this work has been subjected to critique, citing the difficulty of reconstructing ancestral Jewish populations without appropriate Khazarian proxies in using present-day data.…”