The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish

Abstract

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to a cohort of exclusively Yiddish-speaking and multilingual AJs. GPS localized most AJs along major ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that resemble the word "Ashkenaz." These findings were compatible with the hypothesis of an Irano-Turko-Slavic origin for AJs and a Slavic origin for Yiddish and at odds with the Rhineland hypothesis advocating a Levantine origin for AJs and German origins for Yiddish. We discuss how these findings advance three ongoing debates concerning (1) the historical meaning of the term "Ashkenaz;" (2) the genetic structure of AJs and their geographical origins as inferred from multiple studies employing both modern and ancient DNA and original ancient DNA analyses; and (3) the development of Yiddish. We provide additional validation to the non-Levantine origin of AJs using ancient DNA from the Near East and the Levant. Due to the rising popularity of geo-localization tools to address questions of origin, we briefly discuss the advantages and limitations of popular tools with focus on the GPS approach. Our results reinforce the non-Levantine origins of AJs.

Keywords: Archaeogenetics; Ashkenaz; Ashkenazic Jews; Rhineland hypothesis; Yiddish; ancient DNA; geographic population structure (GPS).

Figure 1

The localization of AJs and their ancient admixture proportions compared to neighboring populations. (A) Geographical predictions of individuals analyzed in three separate studies employing different tools: Elhaik (, Figure 4) (blue), Behar et al. (, Figure 2B) (red), and Das et al. (, Figure 4) (dark green for AJs who have four AJ grandparents and light green for the rest) are shown. Color matching mean and standard deviation (bars) of the longitude and latitude are shown for each cohort. Since we were unsuccessful in obtaining the data points of Behar et al. (, Figure 2B) from the corresponding author, we procured 78% of the data points from their figure. Due to the low quality of their figure we were unable to reliably extract the remaining data points. (B) Supervised ADMIXTURE results. For brevity, subpopulations were collapsed. The x axis represents individuals. Each individual is represented by a vertical stacked column of color-coded admixture proportions that reflect genetic contributions from ancient Hunter-Gatherer, Anatolian, Levantine, and Iranian individuals.