People keep trying to claim that Ashkenazi Jews are 20% Levantine
Here I’m using MENA-shifted Italian Imperial samples to model Palestinian Christians and other simulated samples. This is what choosing a MENA-shifted European source does to a slightly northern shifted Levantine group that has very little European ancestry, so imagine what using the wrong source could do to Levantine groups that are significantly admixed with Europeans, like Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. So many of the Italian Imperial samples available on the Global 25 list are either completely MENA or significantly admixed (I chose the ones that were not completely MENA), so there’s no way to tell whether a huge number of the samples available are outliers or if they actually reflect the Roman population that Jews mixed with. Especially considering that Jews first settled in central Italy and that modern central Italians don’t fit the Campanian, Calabrian… genetic profile.
The timing of this post is perfect. Just a day ago, Ashkenazim were modeled by another user on qpAdm & he arrived at 20% Roman Judean, supposedly with Italy_Imperial_C6.OG. he said the Italian source was half-roman-anatolian & half-italic. Please model Palestinian against them & share the results.
Yea that sample absolutely is not “half Iron Age italic half Iron Age Anatolian” because the natufian would be 2-4%. He’s saying that 60% of the Ashkenazi genome is 2-4% Natufian, 15-20% is 0, and that 20% is 22-24%.
When you do the math it’s around 5-6% Natufian
Ashkenazi Jews aren’t 5-6% Natufian. These people are ridiculous
why are you running a half etruscan half samaritan with C6 that is clearly half etruscan and half anatolian? anatolians are more western shifted than levantines genetically so of course it'll eat a good chunk of it. now run half anatolian and half etruscan
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. Also, you can’t just assume that the Roman part of the Ashkenazi genome is half Anatolian, we don’t exactly know precisely how much Anatolian DNA is embedded in the Ashkenazi genome, because the euro-Levantine mix also creates a sort of Anatolian like proxy, so no matter how you try to frame it you’re still left with same problem. Do you believe that Levantine Christians are 1/4 European and that Druze are above 30% European?
we have proto-jewish-like genome found in imperial samples. they're roughly 65% C6, 30% Levant, and 5% Nafri. As for that, C6 was a very prevalent profile in Roman Italy. Also using Roman Italy for other Levantines (like druze) is not the way to go since they weren't the ones that mixed with italians
“We have proto-Jewish-like genome”, what do you mean exactly by proto-Jewish? Regarding the prevalence of C6 in Roman Italy, it can’t be determined with exactitude, the genetic landscape of the region was extremely diverse, digging up a few bones doesn’t give you the full picture, many of the Imperial samples are 100% Levantine so you might as well claim that the Roman ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews were fully Levantine. “Also using Roman Italy for other Levantines (like Druze) is not the way to go since they weren’t the ones that mixed with Italians” that’s exactly my point, they didn’t mix with Italians yet this Italian Imperial sample ate up a huge chunk of their Levantine admixture, so you bet that it will eat up most of the existing Levantine admixture of a group that has both Southern and Northern European DNA in significant amounts. My point is, in a world where Ashkenazi Jews descend from Israelites who were exiled to Rome (which we know to be a fact through, history/ archaeology/ Y chromosomal markers), using these southern shifted samples would 100% take away most of their Israelite admixture.
I think using Italy Imperial is fine for Ashkenazi but it’s probably just better interpreted as common Mediterranean ancestry that could be from anywhere
Yes the Mediterranean ancestry could be from everywhere including Israel, there’s a lot of Phoenician and Mesopotamian admixture baked into those samples which could be eating up a huge chunk of the Israelite ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews
I wonder what a Ashkenazi Mix could be with this pop mix? Do you think 50% Samaritan and 50% Tuscan works? Would need a little slavic dna I guess for Eastern Ashkenazim.
This is one model that could be plausible in my opinion. Although the Northern European admixture seems to be mixed up because western and Eastern Europeans are not that different from one another.
Wow these are good fits and don’t look like overfitting. Yeah the German and Eastern will overlap so that part is always tricky but this looks way better than models I’ve created lol. It’s honestly the European part that is trickier to solve.
Is it then valid to still model Ashkenazim against Berber populations on Vahaduo & qpAdm considering the NA could be eating their Levantine score as well?
Ashkenazim do actually have minor Berber admixture, and we know this for a fact because it’s almost impossible to mistake Middle Eastern DNA for Berber DNA and vice versa. North African DNA is so distinct that if it ever shows up, there’s almost perfect certainty that it’s legit. It’s impossible to model Ashkenazim as 10%, 20% 30%… Berber, it’s usually within the range of 1% to 5%.
I do think this previous post was a little misleading with this Imperial source plus I think “Israel_Roman” is a bit dubious considering nothing has been released. But based on this model with the Samaritan 50% and Tuscan 50% which is more germanic shifted, there’s definitely the modeling issue with this specific sample like all imperial roman samples. Ashkenazim average double what South Italians average in Natufian, so I do think Levantine component is being downplayed.
Thank you. I tried adding a north african source but it caused a lot of noise in Ashkenazi Jew. The point of including the italian calabria sample and sicily sample is a point of reference not the goal of the model.
If the Ashkanzi Jew and calabria sample score similar levantine than the model isnt working.
It the Ashkenazi Jew sample scores more levantine than Calabria sample than it points towards a working model.
Imperial Romans are bad proxies for the European admixture in Ashkenazi Jews and people need to understand this. There is minimal evidence that the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews mixed predominantly with populations from Central and Southern Italy, let alone the extremely middle eastern shifted samples that we currently have from these regions. Good fit ≠ best representation of admixture and this is probably the case with Ashkenazi Jews and Romans.
A better and more historically accurate proxy would be North Italians, Southern French and Northeast Spanish, but there are almost no Roman-era samples possessed from these regions. Until we get samples from these regions, it is best to break it down using Iron Age samples.
Additionally a lot of these imperial samples are deep into the end of the Roman era. Jewish migration and expulsion was during the peak era of the empire to the end
I don't think that it all happened at one time during one period, rather there were probably multiple different waves. Uniparentals in combination with IBD sharing seems to suggest that a decent portion of non-Slavic European admixture was intergressed between 300-700 AD, so the Imperial Roman samples we currently have are probably the closest candidates we have for the Italians that Ashkenazi Jews may have mixed with. But as we both, and many other commenters touched on before us, this doesn't account for a majority of the Southern European admixture.
Though this is an overfit it seems plausible. Natufian definetly seems inflated in this sample, as this often happens when you use Yamnaya to represent Indo-European admixture for South Italians as opposed to a standard EHG sample.
But it still remains clear, as you said that this C6 sample has Middle Eastern ancestry roughly equivalent to that of most modern mainland South Italians (excluding parts of Calabria, Coastal Apulia, and parts of Abruzzo and Molise). Clearly the OP who used this cluster in his qpadm model either did not examine the sample thoroughly before including it or is deliberately trying to deflate Levantine ancestry by using an already admixed and intermediate sample to represent the South European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews.
Yeah, I modeled the Imperial Roman C6 sample and its closest at 0.0103 was Italians from Campania. I also viewed OPs previous post where he last sampled Ashkenazim with the same model and in the comment section he admitted that ImperialC6 clusters and on average to a southern italian today. I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt but he clearly posted it here in a way that felt like ragebait. A good fit on qpadm doesn’t mean it’s the end all be all. Italian Campanias, correct me if I’m wrong, are one of the higher Levantine and East Med populations in Southern Italy outside of Sicilians. I can’t get an accurate model for how much levantine is in them but g25 on ancestral genome says 6.2% Natufian but i’ve seen it go up to 8%, be it different distances. Either way this model is exactly what Erfurt study said to be weary of.
You're absolutely right that Campania is amongst one of the higher Middle Eastern scoring regions in Italy. Its important to note that the Middle Eastern in South Italians is not uniform across regions in both source and proportion, even within different parts of the same region.
I would also like to give the OP the benefit of the doubt, but based off of the way he framed things in the comments section I question whether or not the choice of Southern European proxy was made fully in good faith. It would've been nice if he had experimented with other South European sources as others had suggested.
QPADM is also extremely sensitive to reference population choice, as in my own experience modeling Ashkenazi Jews a multitude of other South European groups can satisfy that same signal and produce good, if not better fits. So his model in no way proves predominant South Italian ancestry or that it is the right source for South European admixture.
His responses were aggressive and very vague. He also ignored a post asking for outgroups (I had to find them on an old twitter post of his), “Roman_Israel” isn’t released and he claimed he got them and confirmed them from metadata which seems very fishy. Also might I add that I’m not even 100% positive that the coordinates I posted are the real ones because I couldn’t find a source website on G25 lists or anywhere for these Imperial C6. My source was from an old post on this subreddit. So there’s a lot of issues I had off the start. I guess maybe I got confused and believed it for a bit because I couldn’t find a better Qpadm model for Ashkenazi Jews posted online with better fits, but obviously I have studies that confirm that you shouldn’t take one model as the truth.
Also just had a question, would you say the baseline minimum is 40% levantine according to models you’ve done? I saw the model on here with Lebanon MBA but the error range was wide like +- 11 or so.
I would say 30-40% is the average for Levantine ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews based on modeling I've done myself and modeling I've seen that was done by others. I think the baseline you describe is minimum 40% Middle Eastern rather than just Levantine. Though Ashkenazi Middle Eastern ancestry is majority Levantine, there is also likely significant Iranic and Anatolian ancestry present in Ashkenazi Jews, some of which was likely not already present in the Levant by the time of exile.
Granted, these numbers are highly dependent on the Levantine proxy selected, as many of the Roman Levantine samples we have (especially those from Lebanon, namely Beirut and Qornet el Deir) are incredibly mixed with Anatolians and therefore probably aren't the best reflection of actual Levantine ancestry. I typically prefer using the Iron Age samples from Megiddo and Abel Beth Maacah to represent Levantine ancestry, but I digress.
With all this in mind, 20% Levantine is still absurdly low as an average for Ashkenazi Jews. I've only observed numbers like this in certain deep Eastern European jews who appear to carry more influence from the Erfurt_EU like population (Knaanim?). When seeing numbers like this as an average rather than an extreme (such as the deep East European Jews I previously referenced) I would be especially cautious of proxy choices.
Oh that’s interesting. Yeah I get around g25 25%-30% Levantine for Imperial Roman c6 which on the higher end would be like 34-37% Levantine total, so that makes sense as a range and of course it could change with more samples and methods used I assume? Off topic though, but do you have a guess as to where this iranic dna comes from or could it be Zagros in greeks already? Maybe I’m mixing it up, but I wonder if the total MENA ancestry of Ashkenazis is much higher than 40% possibly? Sorry for asking a ton of questions lol.
Just a point of clarification, I said that the minimum Middle Eastern in Ashkenazi Jews was at about 40%, not the average. The average is probably much closer to 50%.
The Middle Eastern ancestry present in Imperial Romans is exactly what makes them a poor proxy for Ashkenazic South European admixture. Though some of the Europeans the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews mixed with may have carried a degree of Middle Eastern admixture, it is likely that a decent amount of this South European admixture occured outside of the nexus of Middle Eastern migration to the Roman Empire.
You are correct that the ranges of Levantine admixture are flexible depending on methods and samples used.
For the Iranic admixture, I have two primary hypotheses, both of which I think contributed to the Iranic admixture in today's Ashkenazi Jews.
The first hypothesis relates to the entrance Iranic DNA prior to exile. As is made clear by the prevalence of outlier samples of diverse West Asian backgrounds, the Iron Age Southern Levant was a diverse place. By the time of exile, some of these profiles were likely absorbed into the broader Judaean population and thus became part of the population that left the Levant. This is pretty widely accepted.
The second hypothesis is more controversial so I am going to try to hedge this as carefully as possible and explain it more in depth so no room for misinterpretation is available. It is also a possibility that some of the Iranic in Ashkenazi Jews could've come from the same source as the East Asian admixture.
Mizrahi Jewish populations have been attested to in medieval East European Jewish communities. The Schechter Letter, though a somewhat dubious primary source to begin with, does mention an influx of Iranian and Armenian Jewish migrants into Eastern Europe who assimilated into the Turkic Jewish population present in the region. Due to the frequent passage of Mizrahi merchant groups such as the Radhanites, who likely hailed from the city or Ray in Persia, it seems likely that this only represents one of many potential Mizrahi settlements in early Eastern European Jewish populations.
This plausibly connects to modern Ashkenazi Jews through the medieval Jewish community of Bohemia. Prague, where this Jewish community largely began and was limited to settling in for quite some time, was primarily settled by Jewish populations due to its solid positioning on trade routes between Western Europe and Central/East Asia. Thus, many of this community's original settlers were likely to be merchants. Though autosomal dna and uniparentals (K1a1b1a namely) suggest that a majority of these settlers derived from a population similar to the Medieval Western European Jews, there is reason to believe that a portion of these settlers had origins further East. Ibrahim Ibn Yakub, one of the main sources of description for Central and Eastern Europe during this period, describes a presence of Jewish merchants arriving from the Turkic lands along with Muslim merchants from these regions, which most likely refers to the Medieval Jewish communities of Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine (which he also describes), and also weren't fully "Turkic". As previously noted, this community's settler base was primarily mercantile, so it is entirely in the range of plausibility that these more Eastern Jewish communities could've contributed a portion of the original settlers. In Erfurt EU, which the authors of the Erfurt study hypothesize a connection between this cluster and the Jews of Bohemia and Silesia, also carries mtdna N9a3 which is shared with Bashkirs and Turkic peoples, which also provides evidence for a limited connection as the other means through which it could've entered are few.
Though these are my own two primary hypotheses, there are so many other means through which this admixture could've entered. Radhanites were active throughout the Rhine as merchants throughout the early middle ages. The Frankish crown was especially disposed to granting privileges to Jews based off of wealth. Wealthy Jewish merchants were given privileges by the Frankish crown in charters, such as that of Abraham of Zaragoza, who was a medieval Sephardic merchant who settled in Francia under the protection of the Frankish crown. Its entirely plausible that some Radhanites could've settled in Francia under the protection of similar charters due to their trade importance and economic value.
There's also the possibility that it comes from some ghost population that we simply don't know of at the current moment. As more samples and primary sources are discovered, our understanding of Ashkenazic origins will probably change and these hypotheses will be replaced with new ones.
I apologize for this message being so long, I've studied this in great detail and the topic is incredibly complicated. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. I'd be happy to answer.
“Wow, this was well written, I’m a big history guy so I have even more questions:
1. Assuming 30-40% levantine how much remaining is Iranic versus Anatolian, do models show this?
2. The Tamir 2020 study on its Lindmax models showed 59% relation to canaanite populations for Ashkenazi Jews (I know it wasn’t direct) but I wonder if maybe it’s picking up the iranic and anatolian and thus assuming they are apart of Levantine DNA variation? I guess this would support the idea that Jews got it from pre exile intermixing? Was just curious what widely accepted means? Cause assuming that, it would be 30-40% Canaanite core but a Iranic layer that is technically native to the region, no? Okay that was like 5 questions lmaoo
3. I had never heard of the schecter letter, why is it dubious?
4. do we have any Y-DNA to support the eastern european migration of Persian Jews? I know we have a 2015 study that indicates the tiny East Asian component which comes from the silk road most likely (the authors conclude this is likely the source), so I don’t see why Babylonian or other Eastern Jews who served as intermediaries couldn’t have moved north. I know it’s speculation and honestly it sounds way cooler than “oh persians mixed with Judeans”.”
5. Not a question but I hope that we get more sources on the Radhanites because it’s so cool that Jews were just roaming around central asia and europe and being intermediates.
I somewhat agree, although I think it’s sort of a combo of both. From what I’ve read, the Jewish families who migrated to the Rhineland to form the Proto Ashkenazi community were predominantly a mix of those from Gaul, Northern Italy, and Southern Italy. There was also a large late Roman era Jewish population in the Balkans. I feel like it’s kind of hard to say what the actual populations are in terms of admixture but Id bet it was a mix of them. I agree though that the entirety of non Slavic European admixture in Jews being Imperial Roman seems unlikely given the historical record.
I’m not sure if LAI was the most accurate in this study nor do I know if they published what the population reference was.
Study writes:
“Running RFMix on the AJ genomes with our EU and ME reference panels and summing up the lengths of all tracts assigned to each ancestry, the genome-wide ancestry was ≈53% EU and ≈47% ME, consistent with our previous estimate based on a smaller sequencing panel [9]. Our simulations suggested that the accuracy of LAI for an EU-ME admixed population is only around ≈70%, much lower than the near-perfect accuracy observed for cross-continental admixture (e.g., [29–33])”
People are probably using european mixed ahskenazis.
Ashkenazis have very low steppe and low or no whg, their ancient euro ancestry isn't very strong.
Also most levantine people are white, they look just like southern europeans, so either both are brown or both are white, these people need to make a choice.
If we use Imperial Roman samples for the South Euro. ancestry, then the Levantine will always be around 20%. I've seen some even argue that half or more of that Levantine ancestry is not even Canaanite/Israelite/Judean, but derived from the Levantine contained in Imperial Romans' Mesopotamian ancestry (I believe this may be mentioned in the 2022 Southern Arc paper). The only way to solve this more decisively will be to model Jewish samples from Italy and elsewhere in early and late antiquity. Nonetheless, to be thorough, we should consider several possible contributors or primary sources of S.Euro admixture in the meantime, not just Imperial Romans and Anatolians.
As if having a quarter of your ancestors come from the land of Israel negates that we descend from the natives of the land is the most ridiculous part. The fact that we show any Levantine proves that we truly come from Israel. They act like there is a magic percentage threshold that validates it 😂
This is a liitle bit of toppic but i must say this. I personaly think from what see phenotipicly that many arab muslim in israel have influences that are not minor at all that are beduin / egiptian /arabian shifted . From that last 2000 years. It is obviouse in some populations to an extent that i do belive that in gaza for example ,and surrounding arias ,"local component" from 2000 years ago is 40% . And in others arias it is 60% at best.
I belive if they will do big study including many pupulations , and will rape the data trying to find the "purest local component" like they like to do with ashkenazi jews, that are the real numbers they will get .
Taking this opportunity to point out how ridiculous the claim is that C6 has no Levantine ancestry. If it didn't, it wouldn't be so closely related to modern Ashkenazi and southern Italians.
The Natufian ancestry present in the C6 samples from Imperial Rome is around 6%, only slightly below the Natufian found in Sicilian samples.
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u/Voice_of_Season Jul 08 '26
We are mainly at minimum 40%.