91–100 of 109 posts
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I have a hunch that Jews came from Eastern Europe (I mean Israel before that). No, I don't think they are Khazars. But Ashkenaz was in Scythia, i.e. Eastern Europe.
Their history is very well documented. The Ashkenazi came from Italy into Germany, then moved into Poland (a bit different geographically from modern day Poland) after crusader pogroms in the 11th century.
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I don’t think the ancestry tests compare the DNA with archeological finds. If they did I wouldn’t trust it given the relatively small sample size of archeological finds with intact DNA.
The usual tests certainly don’t. But some scientific studies do: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...
In any case I've heard from the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who had been through the Nazi concentrationary system that they in some respects had an easier navigating it than Western or Greek Jews because they spoke "more or less German".
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Their history is very well documented. The Ashkenazi came from Italy into Germany, then moved into Poland (a bit different geographically from modern day Poland) after crusader pogroms in the 11th century.
Jews were in Czech Republic since at least 9th century. I don’t think they were German Jews.
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Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the…
> Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity Prussia, let alone Prussian “identity” is not something that existed well into the mid to late modern era.
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Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
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Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.
I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from? I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on…
I don't think it's "some" -- I think that's 100% of it.
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Run of the mill, he says, he says, in his second tongue, using correct grammar, idiomatic phrases, and perfect spelling. This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages. Oy veh!
>and perfect spelling >> understandibility for me https://www.google.com/search?q=understandibility
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I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.
Run of the mill, he says, he says, in his second tongue, using correct grammar, idiomatic phrases, and perfect spelling. This n=1 sample shows even run of the mill can be good at languages. Oy veh!
It’s also a good example: it’s easy to understand for me because in German, “oh weh!” is a very common phrase.