A good number of the ancestors of today's Ashkenazi Jews were of European descent, a new study found.
A researcher at the University of Huddersfield used archaeogenetics to settle a long-standing controversy over whether Ashkenazi Jews' ancestors migrated from Palestine or if they were European coverts, a Huddersfield news release reported.
The new study looked at Ashkenazi DNA and found the female line was descended from Sothern and Western Europe.
In Hebrew, the word "Ashkenazi" actually means "Germans. "The term refers to those who originally spoke Yiddish or Judeo-German.
The research is part of a larger project that is analyzing maternal mitochondrial DNA samples in hopes of mapping out prehistoric European settlement.
Ashkenazi Jewish lineages happened to have an abundance of mitochondrial genomes available the the public.
The four earliest-traced Ashkenazi females lived in Europe between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Only eight percent of the mitochondrial DNA was found to be of Near East descent, Bloomberg reported.
"This suggests that, even though Jewish men may indeed have migrated into Europe from Palestine around 2000 years ago, they seem to have married European women," Professor Martin Richards, head of the Archaeogenetics Research Group based at the University of Huddersfield, said in the news release
This is believed to have happened around Mediterranean, especially in Italy. The trend may have spread into western and central Europe.
"This suggests that, in the early years of the Diaspora, Judaism took in many converts from amongst the European population, but they were mainly recruited from amongst women. Thus, on the female line of descent, the Ashkenazim primarily trace their ancestry neither to Palestine nor to Khazaria in the North Caucasus -- as has also been suggested -- but to southern and western Europe," the press release stated.
"The origins of the Ashkenazim is one of the big questions that people have pursued again and again and never really come to a conclusive view," said Prof Richards,
