Yiddish and English are generally considered by linguistics experts to be Germanic languages, even though Romantic, Semitic and Slavic languages certainly contributed to both. Just because Hebrew and Aramaic contributed to both languages doesn't mean all English speakers and Yiddish speakers are Middle Easterners. Other experts argue that Yiddish is a Slavic language. I've never heard anyone ever say it's a Semitic language, aside from just you.
Germanic languages - Wikipedia
This Mormon choir is singing Handel's Messiah, repeatedly saying "hallelujah". The words messiah and hallelujah have Semitic origins. To you, that's indisputable
proof that the German Lutheran composer Handel and every single one of those Mormons in the choir are Middle Easterners.
Both men in this image are Ashkenazi Jews. Do they look Middle Eastern to you?
View attachment 788647
Here's a video, so you can get a side profile instead of just a straight-on photo. I just don't see a Middle Eastern guy in the video.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all originated in the Middle East and billions of people around the world practice those religions, and practically all languages around the world borrow from Semitic languages, largely because of the spread of these three religions. That doesn't mean that everyone who practices Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is indigenous to the Middle East. Many are, but most aren't.
From a historical perspective, the exile of 70 AD didn't happen, according to Dr. Shlomo Sand, Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, himself an Ashkenazi Jew. According to Dr. Sand, it's just a myth Christians have used to justify their antisemitism.
Dr. Sand has also said, “Once to say Jews were a race was anti-Semitic, now to say they’re not a race is anti-Semitic. It’s crazy how history plays with us.“
From a scientific, genetic perspective, Ashkenazi Jews are a genetic admixture with either non-existent or negligible-at-best Semitic origins, analogous to Elizabeth Warren's Native American status. She provided a DNA test that said she's Native American, but clearly she has as much white privilege as anyone and leveraged whatever negligible-at-best indigenous American ancestry that may exist for personal gain at the expense of people who are overtly Native American and grew up on reseravtions, the same way Ashkenazi Jews are every bit as European as Elizabeth Warren, but have leveraged whatever minute amount of Semitic ancestry that may or may not exist in order to take from people who are overtly Semitic and obviously descend from the ancient tribes of the area.
This study linked below was done by Dr. Eran Elhaik, himself an Israeli-born Jew, Dr. Paul Wexler, an Ashkenazi Jew born in the USA and now an Israeli, Dr. Ranajit Das with a PhD in Biotechnology and Dr. Mehdi Pirooznia with a PhD in Bioinformatics. Outside of the study, Dr. Elhaik has been quoted as saying, "There is no Jewish genome and certainly no Jewish gene." He's also stated that the intention in his work was not to disprove a connection to biblical Jews, but rather "to eliminate the racist underpinnings of antisemitism in Europe."
Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz
Some excerpts from the study, since it's a long read:
- An analysis of 393 Ashkenazic, Iranian, and mountain Jews and over 600 non-Jewish genomes demonstrated that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, and Turks exhibit the highest genetic similarity with AJs.
- Our results suggest that AJs originated from a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which the Jews call “Ashkenazic” (i.e., “Scythian”), though these Jews probably spoke Persian and/or Ossete. This is compatible with linguistic evidence suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic language created by Irano-Turko-Slavic Jewish merchants along the Silk Roads as a cryptic trade language, spoken only by its originators to gain an advantage in trade.
- Already by the 1st century, most of the Jews in the world resided in the Iranian Empire (
Baron 1952). These Jews were descended either from Judaean emigrants or, more likely, from local converts to Judaism and were extremely active in international trade, as evident from the Talmud and non-Jewish historical sources (
Baron 1957;
Gil 1974). Over time, many of them moved north to the Khazar Empire to expand their mercantile operations. Consequently, some of the Turkic Khazar rulers and the numerous Eastern Slavs in the Khazar Empire converted to Judaism to participate in the lucrative Silk Road trade between Germany and China (
Foltz 1998), which was essentially a Jewish monopoly (
Rabinowitz 1945,
1948;
Baron 1957). Yiddish emerged at that time as a secret language for trade based on Slavic and even Iranian patterns of discourse.
- Costa et al. reasoned that Judaized women made major contributions to the formation of Ashkenazic communities. This conclusion is in agreement with a widespread Judaization of slaves (
Sand 2009) and depictions of Greco-Roman women leading communities of proselytes and adherents to Judaism during the first millennium, A.D. (
Kraemer 2010).
- Interestingly,
Brook (2014) reported a Crimean Karaite man with a surname of
Kogen who self-identifies as a Cohen and belongs to a J1 (J-M267) Y haplogroup. His panel of 12 short-tandem repeats (STRs) on that chromosomal, but not a panel of 25 STRs, matched exactly a Belarusian Ashkenazic Cohen whose surname is
Kagan (
Kahan). We surmis that some Cohen surnames are later modifications of
Kagan (
Kahan), the term used by Turks and Khazars to denote a leader.
- In the era of ancient DNA sequencing, the peculiar absence of priestly or even Judaean ancient DNA should render any assertions or insinuations that certain genetic markers are telltales of Judaean lineages or Biblical figures as fictitious.
- Our autosomal analyses highlight the high genetic similarity between AJs and Iranians, Turks, southern Caucasians, Greeks, Italians, and Slavs (
figs. 6 and 4D, and
supplementary fig. S1,
Supplementary Material online).
- Our findings are also consistent with the vast majority of genetic findings that AJs are closer to Near Eastern (e.g., Turks, Iranians, and Kurds) and South European populations (e.g., Greeks and Italians) as opposed to Middle Eastern populations (e.g., Bedouins and Palestinians). Remarkably, with only few exceptions (e.g.,
Need et al. 2009;
Zoossmann-Diskin 2010), these findings have been consistently misinterpreted in favor of a Middle Eastern Judaean ancestry, although the data do not support such contention for either Y chromosomal (
Hammer et al. 2000;
Nebel et al. 2001;
Rootsi et al. 2013) or genome-wide studies (
Seldin et al. 2006;
Kopelman et al. 2009;
Tian et al. 2009;
Atzmon et al. 2010;
Behar et al. 2010;
Campbell et al. 2012;
Ostrer and Skorecki 2012).
- A common fallacy is interpreting the genetic similarity between AJs as evidence of a Middle Eastern origin.
- To the best of our knowledge, no large-scale study has reported that AJs are genetically closer to German or Israelite populations compared with Near Eastern and Southern European populations. Bedouins and Palestinians are the only populations localized to Israel (
fig. 3).
- The most parsimonious explanation for our findings is that Yiddish speaking AJs have originated from Greco-Roman and mixed Irano-Turko-Slavic populations who espoused Judaism in a variety of venues throughout the first millennium A.D. in “Ashkenaz” lands centered between the Black and Caspian Seas (
figs. 4 and 5) (
Baron 1937). These pagans became Godfearers (non-Jewish supporters of Second Temple Judaism) probably around the first century A.D
- The Khazars converted to Judaism to profit from the transit trade across their territories.
- In the 9th century, a Persian postal official in the Baghdad Caliphate, ibn Khordādhbeh, described the Iranian Jewish traders, who by then may have already become a tribal confederation of Slavic, Iranian, and Turkic converts to Judaism, as conversant in the main components of Yiddish: Slavic, German, Iranian, Hebrew, in addition to several other languages.
- Further evidence to the origin of AJs can be found in the many customs and their names concerning the Jewish religion, which were probably introduced by Slavic converts to Judaism.
- A striking fact that is hardly ever appreciated is that Yiddish
košer ‘kosher’ is not a Hebraism, as is widely believed (it appears centuries after the demise of colloquial Semitic Hebrew), but the source of the term is a common Iranian word meaning ‘to slaughter an animal’, for example, Ossete
kušart means ‘animal slaughtered for food.
I'm not going to pretend like Ivanka Trump has Middle Eastern ancestry, but you do you.
