Jewish ethnic divisions

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Jewish ethnic divisions refers to a number of distinct communities within the world's ethnically Jewish population. Although considered one single self-identifying ethnicity, there are distinct ethnic divisions among Jews, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions.[1]

As long ago as Biblical times, cultural and linguistic differences between Jewish communities, even within the area of Ancient Israel and Judea, are observed both within the Bible itself as well as from archeological remains. In more recent human history, an array of Jewish communities were established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another resulting in effective and often long-term isolation from each other. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments; political, cultural, natural and populational. Today, manifestation of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.

Contents

[edit] Historical background

[edit] Ancient Israel and Judah

Main article: History of Ancient Israel and Judah

The full extent of the cultural, linguistic, religious or other differences among the Israelites in antiquity is unknown. Following the defeat of the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, the Jewish people were dispersed throughout the Middle East, especially in Egypt, North Africa, Yemen and Mesopotamia. By the height of the Roman Empire, Jewish communities could be found in nearly every notable settlement throughout the Empire, as well as scattered communities found in settlements beyond the Empire's borders in northern Europe and in Africa. In the east, Jewish communities could be found throughout Persia and in empires even farther east including India and China. Jews could also be found in eastern Europe and southwestern Asia.

In the late Byzantine period the khan of Khazaria in the northern Caucasus and his court converted to Judaism, partly in order to maintain neutrality between Christian Byzantium and the Muslim world. This event forms the framework for Yehuda Halevi's work 'The Kuzari'. How far traces of Judaism among this group survived the collapse of the Khazar empire is a matter of scholarly debate.

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and especially after the Moorish invasion of Iberia, communications between the communities in various parts of the former Empire became sporadic. With increasing persecution in "Ashkenaz"—that is, the areas that are now northern France and Germany—masses of Jews began to move further to the east, where they were welcomed by the king of Poland. At the same time, as a result of the freer communications within the Muslim world, the communities in Iberia were in more frequent communication with those in North Africa and the Middle East. Meanwhile, communities further afield, in central and south Asia and central Africa, remained isolated and continued to develop their own unique traditions. Following the 1492 Expulsion from Spain, the Sephardim were dispersed to the Americas, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and in smaller numbers to other areas of the Middle East.

Although the Jewish population was severely reduced by the Jewish-Roman Wars and the hostile policies of the Christian emperors,[2] Jews had always retained a presence in Palestine. In the 6th century, there were 43 Jewish communities in Palestine. During the Islam and Crusader periods, there were 50 communities which included Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza. During the early Ottoman Period there were 30 communities which included Haifa, Shechem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north, the most dominant one being Safed which reached a population of 30,000 Jews by end of the 16th century.

Over the centuries following the Crusades, Jews from around the world began emigrating in increasing numbers. Upon arrival, these Jews adopted the customs of the Mizrahi and Sephardi communities into which they moved. With Baron von Rothschild's philanthropic land purchases and subsequent efforts to turn Palestine into a verdant Jewish homeland, and the subsequent rise of Zionism, a flood of Ashkenazi immigration brought the Jewish population of the region to several hundred thousand.

[edit] Modern divisions

Geographic illustration of the major Jewish ethnic divisions in Afro-Eurasia c. 1490 AD

Historically, Jews have been identified into two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germanics" ("Ashkenaz" meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew, denoting their Central European base), and the Sephardim, or "Hispanics" ("Sefarad" meaning "Hispania" or "Iberia" in Hebrew, denoting their Spanish and Portuguese base). The Mizrahim, or "Easterners" ("Mizrach" being "East" in Hebrew), that is Middle Eastern and North African Jews, could constitute a third major group.

Smaller Jewish groups include the Georgian Jews and Mountain Jews from the Caucasus; Indian Jews including the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the ancient Italian Jewish community; the Teimanim from the Yemen and Oman; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now extinct communities.

The divisions between all these groups are rough and their boundaries aren't solid. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities which are often as unrelated to each other as they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are also termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent evolutions from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Iraqi Jews, Egyptian Jews, Tunisian Jews, Algerian Jews, Moroccan Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, and various others. The Yemenite Jews ("Teimanim") from Yemen and Oman are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. Additionally, there is a difference between the pre-existing Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities as distinct from the descendants of those Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, and a few years later from the expulsion decreed in Portugal.

Despite this diversity, Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, estimated at between 70% and 80% of Jews worldwide[3][4] (and up to 90% prior to World War II and the Holocaust)[3]. As a result of their emigration from Europe during the wartime periods, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents and in countries previously without native Jewish communities, such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Africa, with Venezuela and Panama being an exception since Sefaradim compose the majority of the Jewish communities in these two countries. In France, Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and their descendants now outnumber pre-existing European Jews. Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group's proportion within the overall world Jewish population.

[edit] Genetic studies of DNA

See also: Y-chromosomal Aaron, Genealogical DNA test, and Matrilineality
Main article: Genetic studies on Jews

Despite the evident diversity displayed by the world's distinct Jewish populations, both culturally and physically, genetic studies have demonstrated most of these to be genetically related to one another, having ultimately originated from a common ancient Israelite population that underwent geographic branching and subsequent independent evolutions.[5]

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences stated that "The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora."[5] Researchers expressed surprise at the remarkable genetic uniformity they found among modern Jews, no matter where the diaspora has become dispersed around the world.[5]

Moreover, DNA tests have demonstrated substantially less inter-marriage in most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions over the last 3,000 years than in other populations.[6] The findings lend support to traditional Jewish accounts accrediting their founding to exiled Israelite populations, and counters theories that many or most of the world's Jewish populations were founded by entirely gentile populations that adopted the Jewish faith, as in the notable case of the historic Khazars.[6][7] Although groups such as the Khazars could have been absorbed into modern Jewish populations — in the Khazars' case, absorbed into the Ashkenazim — it is unlikely that they formed a large percentage of the ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews, and much less that they were the genesis of the Ashkenazim.[8]

Even the archetype of Israelite-origin is also beginning to be reviewed for some Jewish populations amid newer studies. Previously, the Israelite origin identified in the world's Jewish populations was attributed only to the males who had migrated from the Middle East and then forged the current known communities with "the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism".[9] Research in Ashkenazi Jews has suggested that, in addition to the male founders, significant female founder ancestry might also derive from the Middle East, with about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population descended matrilineally from just four women, or "founder lineages", that were "likely from a Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool" originating in the Near East in the first and second centuries CE.[9]

Points in which Jewish groups differ is largely in the source and proportion of genetic contribution from host populations.[10][11] As examples, the Teimanim differ from other Mizrahim, as well as from Ashkenazim, in the proportion of sub-Saharan African gene types which have entered their gene pools.[10] Among Yemenites, the average stands at 35% lineages within the past 3,000 years.[10] Yemenite Jews, as a traditionally Arabic-speaking community of local Yemenite and Israelite ancestries,[11] are included within the findings, though they average a quarter of the frequency of the non-Jewish Yemenite sample.[10] In Ashkenazi Jews, the proportion of male indigenous European genetic admixture amounts to around 0.5% per generation over an estimated 80 generations, and a total admixture estimate around 12.5%.[5] The only exception to this amongst Jewish communities is in the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews); a 1999 genetic study came to the conclusion that "the distinctiveness of the Y-chromosome haplotype distribution of Beta Israel Jews from conventional Jewish populations and their relatively greater similarity in haplotype profile to non-Jewish Ethiopians are consistent with the view that the Beta Israel people descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia who converted to Judaism."[12][13] Another 2001 study did, however, find a possible genetic similarity between 11 Ethiopian Jews and 4 Yemenite Jews from the population samples.[14]

DNA analysis further determined that modern Jews of the priesthood tribe — "Cohanim" — share a common ancestor dating back about 3,000 years.[15] This result is consistent for all Jewish populations around the world.[15] The researchers estimated that the most recent common ancestor of modern Cohanim lived between 1000 BCE (roughly the time of the Biblical Exodus) and 586 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple.[16] They found similar results analyzing DNA from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.[16] The scientists estimated the date of the original priest based on genetic mutations, which indicated that the priest lived roughly 106 generations ago, between 2,650 and 3,180 years ago depending whether one counts a generation as 25 or 30 years.[16]

[edit] Geographic distribution

Maltese Jews in Valletta, early 19th century
Sephardi Jewish family descendants of Spanish expellees in Bosnia, 19th century
An Indian Jewish family in Cochin, India, circa 1900
Young Ashkenazi Jewish followers of the minority Haredi sect of Judaism, Jerusalem, 2005
Ethiopian Jewish women at Jerusalem's Western Wall, 2006
Berber Jews from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, circa 1900
Bukharan Jewish teacher and students in Samarkand, modern-day Uzbekistan, circa 1910
Chinese Jews from the city of Kaifeng, China, circa 1900
Kurdish Jews in Rawanduz, Iraqi Kurdistan, 1905
Juhur Imuni (Mountain Jews) girls of the Caucasus, 1913

Because of the independence of local communities, Jewish ethnicities, even when they circumscribe differences in liturgy, language, cuisine and other cultural accoutrements, are more often a reflection of geographic and historical isolation from other communities. It is for this reason that communities are referred to by referencing the historical region in which the community cohered when discussing their practices, regardless of where those practices are found today.

The smaller groups number in the hundreds to tens of thousands, with the Georgian Jews (also known as Gruzinim or Qartveli Ebraeli) and Beta Israel being most numerous at somewhat over 100,000 each. Many members of these groups have now emigrated from their traditional homelands, largely to Israel. For example, only about 10 percent of the Gruzinim remain in Georgia.

The Jewish communities of the modern world can all be found represented today in Israel, which is as much a melting pot as it is a salad bowl of different Jewish ethnic groups.

A brief description of the extant communities, by the geographic regions with which they are associated, is as follows:

[edit] Europe

[edit] The Caucasus and the Crimea

[edit] North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia

Jews originating from Muslim lands are generally called by the catch-all term Mizrahi Jews, more precise terms for particular groups are:

[edit] Sub-Saharan Africa

Main article: Jews and Judaism in Africa

Communities also existed in São Tomé e Príncipe, descended from Portuguese Jewish youths expelled during the Inquisition.

[edit] South and East Asia

[edit] Americas

Most Jewish communities in the Americas are descendants of Jews who found their way there at different times of modern history. The great majority of recognized Jews on both the North American and South American continents are Ashkenazi, particularly among Jews in the United States. There are also Sephardi, Mizrahim and other diaspora groups represented (as well as mixes of any or all of these) as mentioned above. Some unique communities associated with the Americas include:

[edit] Israel; The Exiles Ingathered

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By the time the State of Israel was proclaimed, the majority of Jews in the state and the region were Ashkenazi. Following the declaration of the state, a flood of Jewish migrants and refugees entered Israel from the Arab world and the Muslim world in general. Most were Sephardim and Mizrahim, Jews from the Maghreb, Yemenite Jews, Bukhorim, Persian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, and smaller communities, principally from Libya, Egypt and Turkey. More recently, other communities have also arrived including Ethiopian Jews and Indian Jews. Because of the relative homogeneity of Ashkenazic Jewry, especially by comparison to the diversity of the many smaller communities, over time in Israel, all Jews from Europe came to be called "Ashkenazi" in Israel, whether or not they had any connection with Germany, while Jews from Africa and Asia have come to be called "Sephardi", whether or not they had any connection with Spain. One reason is that most African and Asian Jewish communities use the Sephardic prayer ritual and abide by the rulings of Sephardic rabbinic authorities, and therefore consider themselves to be "Sephardim" in the broader sense of "Jews of the Spanish rite", though not in the narrower sense of "Spanish Jews". Similarly "Ashkenazim" has the broader sense of "Jews of the German rite".

The founders of modern Israel, mostly Ashkenazi Jews, are often said to have believed themselves superior to these new arrivals. With higher degrees of Western-standard education, they were better positioned to take full advantage of the emerging Western-style liberal democracy and Western mode of living which they themselves had established as the cultural norm in Palestine during the pre-state era.

Cultural and/or "racial" biases against the newcomers were compounded by the fledgling state's lack of financial resources and inadequate housing to handle the massive population influx. Thus, hundreds of thousands of new Sephardic immigrants were sent to live in tent cities in outlying areas. Sephardim (in its wider meaning) were often victims of discrimination, and were sometimes called schwartze (meaning "black" in Yiddish).

Worse than housing discrimination was the differential treatment accorded the children of these immigrants, many of whom were tracked by the largely European education establishment into dead-end "vocational" schools, without any real assessment of their intellectual capacities. Mizrahi Jews protested their unfair treatment, and even established the Israeli Black Panthers movement with the mission of working for social justice.

The effects of this early discrimination still linger a half-century later, as documented by the studies of the Adva Center[20], a think tank on social equality, and by other Israeli academic research (cf., for example, Tel Aviv University Professor Yehuda Shenhav's article in Hebrew documenting the gross underrepresentation of Sephardic Jewry in Israeli high school history textbooks,[21]. Every Israeli prime minister has been Ashkenazi, although Sephardim and Mizrahim have attained the (ceremonial) presidency and other high positions. The student bodies of Israel's universities remain overwhelmingly European in origin, despite the fact that roughly half the country's population is non-European. And the tent cities of the 1950s morphed into so-called "development towns". Scattered over border areas of the Negev Desert and the Galilee, far from the bright lights of Israel's major cities, most of these towns never had the critical mass or ingredients to succeed as places to live, and they continue to suffer from high unemployment, inferior schools, and chronic brain drain.

While the Israeli Black Panthers no longer exist,[21] the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition and many other NGOs carry on the struggle for equal access and opportunity in housing, education, and employment for the country's underprivileged populace - still largely composed of Sephardim and Mizrahim, joined now by newer immigrants from Ethiopia and the Caucasus Mountains.

Intermarriage of all these regathered Jewish ethnic groups was initially uncommon, due in part to distances of each group's settlement in Israel, and cultural and/or "racial" biases. In recent generations, however, the barriers were lowered by state sponsored assimilation of all the Jewish ethnic groups into a common Sabra (native-born Israeli) identity which facilitated extensive "mixed-marriages".

[edit] Statistics

The ethnic division of The Jewish population of Israel (including non Halackic Russians) as of 2008 is as follows.

Ethnic Makeup of Jewish Population of Israel[citation needed]
TOTAL 5,818,000 100%
Mizrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews 2,921,000 50.2%
Morocco 800,000 15.2%
Iraq 404,000 7.7%
Yemen 295,000 4.9%
Iran 236,000 4.0%
Algeria/Tunisia 224,000 3.8%
Other Asia 150,000 2.5%
Turkey 147,000 2.5%
Libya 136,000 2.3%
Egypt 112,000 1.9%
Other Asia 200,000 1.7%
India/Pakistan 76,000 1.3%
Latin America 25,000 0.04%
Other Africa (Not South Africa) 3,000 0.05%
Beta Israel 130,000 2.2%
Ethiopia 130,000 2.2%
Ashkenazi Jews 2,767,000 47.5%
Russia 1,018,000 20.9%
Poland 400,000 8.3%
Romania 351,000 7.6%
Other Europe 168,000 3.7%
North America (Including 4,000 African American Black Hebrews) 165,000 2.8%
Germany/Austria 160,000 2.7%
Latin America 82,000 1.4%
Bulgaria/Greece 97,000 1.9%
Hungary 63,000 1.3%
Czechoslovakia 60,000 1.2%
South Africa 20,000 0.4%

The errors occurring due to these calculations were:

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hammer MF, Redd AJ, Wood ET, et al. (June 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97 (12): 6769–74. doi:10.1073/pnas.100115997. PMID 10801975. 
  2. ^ Lehmann, Clayton Miles (Summer 1998). "337-640: Late Antique Palestine". The On-line Encyclopedia of the Roman Provinces. University of South Dakota. http://www.usd.edu/~clehmann/erp/Palestine/history.htm#337-640. Retrieved June 7, 2009. 
  3. ^ a b http://www.adherents.com/Na/Na_588.html
  4. ^ http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllJewsAreAshkenazi
  5. ^ a b c d Hammer, M. F.; A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer, and B. Bonné-Tamir (May 9 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (12): 6769. doi:10.1073/pnas.100115997. PMID 10801975. 
  6. ^ a b Wade, Nicholas (May 9 2000). "Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E0D71338F93AA35756C0A9669C8B63. Retrieved May 6, 2010. 
  7. ^ Diana Muir Appelbaum and Paul S. Appelbaum (February 11, 2008). "Genetics and the Jewish identity". The Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1202742130771&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull. 
  8. ^ Nebel, Almut; Dvora Filon, Bernd Brinkmann, Partha P. Majumder, Marina Faerman, and Ariella Oppenheim (November 2001). "The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East". The American Journal of Human Genetics 69 (5): 1095–112. doi:10.1086/324070. PMID 11573163. 
  9. ^ a b Wade, Nicholas (January 14 2006). "New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi in Europe". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/science/14gene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2006-05-24. 
  10. ^ a b c d Richards, Martin; Chiara Rengo, Fulvio Cruciani, Fiona Gratrix, James F. Wilson, Rosaria Scozzari, Vincent Macaulay, and Antonio Torroni (April 2003). "Extensive female-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa into near eastern Arab populations" (PDF). American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (4): 1058–64. doi:10.1086/374384. ISSN 0002-9297. PMID 12629598. PMC 1180338. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v72n4/024771/024771.web.pdf. Retrieved 2007-06-06. 
  11. ^ a b Ariella Oppenheim and Michael Hammer. "Jewish Genetics: Abstracts and Summaries". Khazaria InfoCenter. http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html. 
  12. ^ Lucotte G, Smets P (December 1999). "Origins of Falasha Jews studied by haplotypes of the Y chromosome". Hum. Biol. 71 (6): 989–93. PMID 10592688. 
  13. ^ [1]
  14. ^ Rosenberg NA, Woolf E, Pritchard JK, et al. (January 2001). "Distinctive genetic signatures in the Libyan Jews". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 98 (3): 858–63. doi:10.1073/pnas.98.3.858. PMID 11158561. 
  15. ^ a b Skorecki K, Selig S, Blazer S, et al. (January 1997). "Y chromosomes of Jewish priests" ([dead link]). Nature 385 (6611): 32. doi:10.1038/385032a0. PMID 8985243. http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html. 
  16. ^ a b c "Priestly Gene Shared By Widely Dispersed Jews". American Society for Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. July 14 1998. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/07/980714071409.htm. 
  17. ^ ncsj.org
  18. ^ Ribner DS, Schindler R (1996). "The Crisis of Religious Identity Among Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel". Journal of Black Studies 27 (1): 104–17. doi:10.1177/002193479602700107. http://jbs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/104. 
  19. ^ Wilson JF, Goldstein DB (October 2000). "Consistent long-range linkage disequilibrium generated by admixture in a Bantu-Semitic hybrid population". Am. J. Hum. Genet. 67 (4): 926–35. doi:10.1086/303083. PMID 10961910. 
  20. ^ adva.org
  21. ^ a b ha-keshet.org
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