re: #371 keloyd

I’m on the outside looking in on this, but aren’t most Israelis, living in Israel descended from Ashkenazis?

No. The big boom in Russian immigration in the 90s tipped the balance toward the Ashkenazim, but the Israeli majority from the early days of the state until then was primarily descended from Sephardim and Mizrahim, many of them descendents of the 900,000 refugees expelled from Arab states after the founding of Israel. The Ashkenazim probably still make up less than half of Israeli Jews, even with the Russians (and some Mizrahim came in with the Soviet immigration, so that confuses things even more.)

As for how much European DNA Ashkenazim carry—I mean Ashkenazim who, unlike me, don’t have Irish Catholic Dads…it’s not as much as people tend to believe, IIRC. We’re pretty genetically distinct from Eastern Europeans.