Albert,
I found this on the Khazaria.com site: khazaria.com
They don't come to the same conclusion:
Conclusions
The relative abundances of specific haplotypes within the Ashkenazi population included in Hammer's study appear to have significant differences from the reconstructed “ancestral Jewish population”.
Figure 2a and Figure 2b depict a degree of paternal ancestry in ASH that is foreign to the "Med cluster". Figure 2b also suggests some similarity between Ashkenazi Jews and Turkish/European populations, while Figure 2c identifies a component in Ashkenazi Jews that is similar to Middle Eastern non-Jews.
More research is needed to resolve these differences, with more detailed analyses of specific ethnic groups.
In particular, further sub-division of the Ashkenazi population and the European population (with more precise definition of its Slavic, German and Greek components, as well as defining the extent of Scandinavian influence) is imperative. Separate analysis is also necessary to determine the genetic contribution of the various central Asian Turkic tribes which so strongly influenced European history.
In spite of the tendency of prior studies to summarily dismiss the possibility, a single source for the "foreign" male genetic component in the Ashkenazi Jews in the Hammer study could be the medieval kingdom of Khazaria.
Descendants of central Asian Turkic tribesmen, the people of Khazaria lived for centuries in close contact with Near Eastern Jews, Muslims, Byzantines and Slavs (and to a lesser degree, the Scandinavian Rus). Khazars converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. When their kingdom was conquered by the Rus in the 960s, the Khazar population scattered. Some lines of historic and cultural evidence suggest that some of the Jewish Khazars migrated to Europe, where they would have been assimilated into the already extant communities of Ashkenazi Jews.
Before any reliable conclusion may be made regarding the Khazar contribution to Ashkenazi Jewry, an ancestral Khazar haplotype assemblage must be determined. Only with this as a starting point can the differences between the Ashkenazi and the other Jewish populations made apparent by this analysis of the Hammer study be fully evaluated. Now that these differences have been demonstrated, the question of origin of Ashkenazi Jewry is far from closed.
Joe |
