Put side by side an arab looking sephardic Jew of north-african descent and a blond, blue-eyed Askenazi Jew of polish descent, and the answer to your question is obvious. They have necessarily interbreded. Even in tightly-knight, religious, communities, you’re going to have some women who’re going to cheat on their husband (though IME some Jews love to believe that such a thing could never happen and that interbreeding can only have been the result of rapes), there probably will be some intermarriages, too, in particular for the oldest (and the most recent) times. Over the course of 2000 years, it’s obvious that Jewish people won’t be of “pure descent”. (And what about the black Falachas?)
I know there has supposedly been some genetic study about the “Cohens” (if I’m not mistaken) proving theiy shared the same ancestors, and the fact that some genetic disease are more prevalent amongst Jews than in the rest of the population living in the same palce they do proves Jews are genetically related, but my WAG, would be that they’re a very long shot from being 100% “pure breed”. Once again : 2000 years !!! (and even before the desctruction of Jerusalem, there were already Jews living in other countries).
Ok…Once again, I should read the whole thread before posting. All my points had already been made. Sorry.
Obligitory Spaceballs quote:
“Funny, she doesn’t look Druish”
Zev Steinhardt
Some thoughts -
There seems to be evidence that Egypt was invaded by a Northern people - shepherds from the Caucasus mountain region. Some of these people could easily have settled in other Middle Eastern countries, including Canaan.
Moses married a Midianite woman. We don’t know what the Midianites looked like.
Didn’t a large number of Egyptians join the Israelites in the Exodus?
There are stipulations in Jewish law about foreigners living in Israel. I don’t have the reference at hand, but I remember that foreigners were allowed to live within the borders of Israel as long as they observed Jewish law; after a certain number of generations they would be considered Israelites/Jews. It’s not unlikely that many of these foreigners were of European races. (Am I reading these laws correctly?)
One of King David’s ancestors (great-great-great grandmother?) was Rahab, a Canaanite from Jericho. Again, we don’t know her racial appearance. David’s grandmother, Ruth, was a Moabite who devoted herself to her mother-in-law, and became an Israelite through marriage to Boaz.
So we already have quite a bit of interbreeding going on between the direct descendants of Abraham and other races, thousands of years ago. Indeed, Abraham himself was Mesopotamian.
Samuel describes David as being “ruddy”, which I’ve always heard to mean he was a redhead. How many Middle Eastern people do we see today with red hair? This would again suggest that there was already some European influence 3000 years ago.
All in all, I suspect Israelite Jews were more racially varied than we might expect.
Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, one of Sadaam’s flunkies, for one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/not_in_website/syndication/monitoring/media_reports/2333927.stm
Red hair isn’t unknown in the Middle East.
Thousands of Arabs live in Israel, of course, but they are not “foreigners.” And they don’t have to observe Jewish laws. Israel, as congested as it is population-wise, does not accept any immigrants who are not considered Jewish (born of a Jewish mother).
barbitu8, I was referring to ancient Jewish law, or “The Law of Moses”, not current Israeli law.
Captain Amazing, al Douri looks awfully European to me, so I would guess that his family at some point came from someplace else.
The five books of Moses (the “Pentateuch”) contains a code of civil and religious laws, beginning with the 12th chapter of Exodus. So please give a cite from the Pentateuch supporting your statement. BTW, the Pentateuch is far more than a code of law: it is the Torah (the Divine Teaching given to Israel and the message of Israel to mankind. It describes the origins of the Jews, traces its kinship to other portions of the human family - all being of one blood and offspring of one common stock. All that is told in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The remaining 39 chapters give the story of the Fathers of the Jews: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his children. This biblical account has been authenticated by modern DNA studies.
He’s talking about a Ger Toshav.
Don’t make the assumption that red hair began in Europe. It’s quite likely that the ancestors of modern Europeans were a relatively small outmigration of people from the “Middle East” who spread northeast after the Ice Ages.
In such a small group, a trait such as red hair, may have become common through the “founder effect”, in which a relatively limited gene pool greatly expands, on traits which are relatively rare, if not nearly bred out in the original source population (red hair in this case) become far more common among the outlying group.
Having red hair and very pale skin is probably not very beneficial in Iraq, but in low sunlight/cloudy clims, it promotes vitamin D absoprtion.
I believe this is one of the reasons why red hair is very evident along the “fringes” of neolithic settlement, in areas where people have strong Pictish roots in Scotland for instance.
In general, I notice that “elite” Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians tend to be lighter skinned than the general population. Some of the
Iraqi politicians that we see (Ahmed Chalabi, and the suspiciously Walter Mondale-like Pachachi) look more like Eastern Europeans than the stereotypical Iraqi. Saddam, I believe, was from a very poor background and not elite.
I don’t know if this is due to ethnic or racial selection for “white” features (something akin to Latin American countries where Spanish features are preferred over mestizos looks among the elites), or if it is simply due to lifestyle (less weathering in the sun or exposure). Some peoples have a rather light “natural” coloring but can tan dark brown over time.
Maybe, but you still haven’t said why red hair shows there was European genetic influence? Couldn’t there have been communities native to the Mid-East with red hair, who, presumably would include King David and al Douri’s ancestors?
That AL Douri guy looks for all the world like an Irishman. Not only is his hair red, his skin looks like it’d peel off if he were out in the desert for a day.
Earlier short thread on Arabs and skin color, with another BBC link to a slightly more close-up picture of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri:
- Tamerlane
It seems to me that mummies show that some ancient egyptians were red-haired.
The whole discussion regarding who has or has not red hair is mildly interesting. What I find more interesting is that it has been triggered by an error of perception. Ruddy does not mean red-haired (or did not up until the very recent few years), it means red cheeked (or rosy cheeked) indicating a healthy outdoor lifestyle rather than the pallor of living indoors. It would be interesting to discover the Hebrew word that was translated into the KJV as “ruddy” to see whether there was any association of hair color in that word.
Only on the SDMB can one take an offhand joke and make a serious point.
My amazing honker aside, I don’t look obviously Jewish. I’ve got red hair, grey eyes, freckles, and have been mistaken for Irish on more than one occasion. My bone structure is quite heavy, however, and my world-history professor was able to narrow my phenotype down to the Ukraine, where part of my father’s family is actually from.
As far as my direct lineage has been traced, I am descended entirely from Jews on both sides of my family. Somewhere down the line, though, my father’s family picked up enough of the local genetic material that we can’t be distinguished from any other Ukrainian, Jewish or not. And lest anyone doubt that I am my father’s daugter, any photo of the two of us standing side-by-side will put that doubt to rest.
Robin
Well, my background is 100% Jewish as far back as anyone knows, and we really must be a bunch of mutts, genetically speaking. Within a couple of generations we have just about every build and complexion and hair/eye color combination you can think of, from redheads to blue-eyed brunettes to green-eyed blondes to formerly black salt-and-pepper, from less than 5’ tall to over 6’. Most of the family is Ashkenazic and of East European origin (with Ukraine, Poland, and to a lesser extent the Baltics predominating). Some of us “look Jewish,” and some of us don’t conform to the stereotype at all. Myself, I’ve been mistaken for everything from Moroccan (by Moroccan, who spoke Berber to me, much to my befuddlement) to Armenian (by Armenians) to various flavors of Latina (by various flavors of Latino/a). One of my aunts has two daughters: one is a tall, skinny brown-eyed brunette, and the other is a short, curvy blue-eyed blonde. My dad is tall and used to have jet-black hair until it went gray, and one grandmother has blonde hair, blue eyes, and the palest skin one normally sees on a healthy human being. Yes, we are definitely a bunch of mutts.
But my own goofy family notwithstanding, there is evidence of genetic links among some Jewish populations. Here’s one I don’t think anyone has linked yet, on the Cohanim:
http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html
Here’s the most-cited source I’ve seen on the Jewish/Khazar connection (although some people think the author is a crackpot; I don’t have enough background to judge):
http://www.khazaria.com/khazar-diaspora.html
Knock yourselves out. But if you historically-inclined folks are up to it, I’d love to hear whether you think Kevin Brook is a crackpot, and if so, why.
From the concluding section of Eva Luna’s second link:
I certainly have no issue with this statement.
That the Khazars converted, pretty much en masse to Judaism is well established. (There is quibbling over whether all the Khazars or only the nobility made the conversion, but the conversion certainly occurred.) That, following several successful invasion by Asians from the East and the Rus from the North, Khazaria was overwhelmed and many of its inhabitants moved Westward into the Danube valley is also pretty well established (although the numbers who moved and the degree to which they maintined their Jewish identity are still being investigated).
The story of the Khazars only wanders into the “crackpot” realms when (a few) people speculate (or, worse, assert) that the Khazars simply moved as a body into Ukraine, Poland, and Russia and “became” the Ashkenazim. (The late Cyberian54 made that a particularly nasty crusade while on the AOL SDMB, using text borrowed from melvig dot org to make his point.)
The recent DNA studies have pretty well established that the primary male ancestors of the Ashkenazim were Central European Jews, moving Eastward with the Germanic peoples. This in no way precludes the presence of some Khazars among the Ashkenazi ancestors. The various studies that have attempted to demonstrate that Yiddish is a Germanic vocabulary hung on a Slavic grammar would suggest that there could be something to the notion of a Slavic interaction with the Germanic Jews. (I am not enough of a linguist to assess the claims made regarding the origins of Yiddish.)
Let me clarify this statement:
I have no issue with Mr. Brook’s presentation, and the temporate summary I quoted exemplifies why. I think it’s a pretty good article on the Khazars.
I’ve generally seen it described the other way around; Yiddish is a Germanic grammar with admixtures of Slavic and other vocabulary. I’m no Germanic linguist, but I do speak a Slavic language, and what Yiddish I can make out supports that theory. My grandmother is a native Yiddish speaker, and she says it’s pretty much mutually comprehensible with German (although Yiddish has a huge amount of dialect variation).