With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Scholars Blast New Study Tracing Ashkenazi Jews to Khazars of Ancient Turkey

Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey.

Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the study by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and three other researchers appeared in March in Oxford University Press’ prestigious scientific journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

It is based on an analysis of the genomes of 367 people, mostly from the United States, who reported having Ashkenazi lineage. Using a tool called geographic population structure, the researchers compared their genomes to those of non-Jews from German lands, south Russia and the Middle East. A match was found between the Jewish group’s genetic information and that of populations in northeastern Turkey.



Read entire article at Forward