Who/what are Jews?

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Some say they are demons, others demigods.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist environment, I viewed Jews as 'God's chosen people.' To disagree with modern Israel was an affront to Almighty God. But, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13:11.

The purpose of this article is not to laud Jews nor disparage them. Rather, it is an effort to sift through the lore, history, and genetic science of their origins to gain a clearer understanding of of who or what they are.

After reading multiple articles and viewing countless YouTube videos, one things is certain: There is no Jew gene. Rather, there is a genetic profile shared by many Jews that suggests probability. Swab your buccal mucosa and send it off to 23andMe. The results may say you have Jewish ancestry. Take it with a grain of salt.

Biblical narrative

In Jesus time, the Jews considered themselves direct pure-blooded descendants of Abraham. They scorned the Samaritans as half-breeds and, for that reason, rejected Jesus as one who was thought to have been illegitimate.

The Old Testament portrays Abraham as the founding patriarch of the Jewish race. His wife, Sarai, gave birth to Isaac whose wife, Rebekah birthed Jacob who, in turn, was the father of the twelve patriarchs through four women. The youngest son, Joseph, was sold to Egyptians by his brothers. Once in Egypt, Joseph rose from slave to prime minister. Famine moved Jacob and his remaining eleven to move to Egypt where Joseph welcomed them and their families, about forty in all. 400 years later, the descendants of the twelve patriarchs found themselves enslaved. Moses led them back to the land of Canaan. (According to Bible scholars, the number fleeing Egypt was about 2-million. How forty people could blossom into 2-million is cause for skepticism, particularly at a time when [a] humanity was growing at a snail's pace, [b] the Hebrews, as they became known (habiru?), were forbidden to bear children, [c] the world population was about 60-million, meaning one in thirty humans were following Moses across the Red Sea, and [d] Egypt's population was between 2-million and 5-million.)

Upon arrived at Canaan, only Moses, Caleb, and Joshua survived. Caleb and Joshua led the descendants of the 2-million fugitives into the Promises Land where they went about exterminating the indigenous peoples and dividing the land between the twelve tribes of Israel (Israel and Jacob are the one-and-the same person.)

About 700 years later — the Exodus from Egypt is dated about 1400 BCE — the northern ten tribes, collectively called Israel, were conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, thus becoming the lost ten tribes of Israel.

That left the tribes of Judah and Benjamin who were the Jews of Jesus times and, I was taught as a child, the Jews of today.

In 70 AD, the Romans laid waste to Jerusalem. The surviving Jews fled. Some, the Ashkenazi, found their way to Germany's Rhineland and parts of northern France. They are named for Ashkenaz, the grandson of Noah's son, Japheth, the ancestral patriarch of Europeans, according to some. The Bible doesn't say that, nor does any reliable historical record. It's just a hypothesis.

Sephardic Jews (also known as Mizrahim), are found mainly in Spain. Mizrahim Jews (from the Hebrew mizrach, meaning “east”), or “Easterners,” has been used to refer to non-European Jewish communities whose historical centers lay further to the east.

Our focus is on Ashkenazi Jews. Their story overlaps others in the Jewish diaspora, and to zero in on each group would be redundant. And, yes, there are other groups beside the three mentioned above.

So, is George Soros a direct descendant of Abraham? Here's what I learned.

Modern genetic tools have redrawn the map of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. They show a population whose fathers mostly carried markers from the Middle East while their mothers largely traced to Europe. This dual heritage helps explain how a community that began in the ancient Levant became one of Europe’s most distinctive groups.

In other words, they are metaphorical Samaritans.

Ashkenazi Jews today make up the large majority of the world’s Jewish population. Most families with this background can point to ancestors in the Rhineland or the later centers of Poland, Lithuania and Russia. Their religious texts, calendar and collective memory reach back to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Genetics does not erase that story, it mearly bring the lineage into question. It adds precise layers about migration, marriage and survival that neither pure continuity nor simple assimilation can fully capture.

What the Y chromosome reveals

Studies of the Y chromosome, which fathers pass to sons, paint a relatively clear picture. The majority of Ashkenazi men belong to haplogroups that are common across the Levant. These include branches of J1, J2 and certain forms of E. The same markers appear frequently among other populations with deep roots in the eastern Mediterranean. The pattern supports a strong paternal connection to the ancient Near East that survived the Roman-era dispersals and the long centuries of diaspora life that followed.

The signal is not absolute. Some European Y-chromosome lineages entered the population over time. Yet the overall weight of the evidence still points eastward for the male line.

This, in my opinion, doesn't confirm they are the descendants of Jews fleeing after the 70 AD, but who else fled that area in large numbers at that time?

Maternal lineages tell a different tale

Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from mothers, tells a contrasting story. A 2013 study published in Nature Communications examined the full mitochondrial genomes of Ashkenazi individuals and compared them with broader European and Near Eastern samples. Researchers found that roughly 40 percent of Ashkenazi maternal lines descend from just four founding women. Those four lineages, and most of the remaining ones, show deep prehistoric European ancestry rather than roots in the Levant or the Caucasus.

Earlier work in 2006 had already identified the prominence of those four maternal founders. The 2013 analysis refined the geographic picture, placing their origins in Europe thousands of years before the formation of Ashkenazi communities. The most likely setting for their entry into Jewish populations was the Mediterranean world of the early centuries of the Common Era, when Jewish communities were already established in places such as Rome and southern Italy. Local women who converted and married into those communities left a lasting genetic imprint.

Overall estimates from the same research suggest that more than 80 percent of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA ultimately derives from European sources.

The mixed signal in the rest of the genome

When scientists examine the broader autosomal genome—the DNA inherited from both parents—the result sits between the two extremes. Ashkenazi individuals typically show a substantial Middle Eastern component alongside a large southern European one. The European share often resembles ancestry found in Italian and Greek populations more than in northern or eastern European ones. This pattern suggests that the main period of genetic mixing occurred relatively early, before the communities moved north into the Rhineland and later eastward into Slavic lands.

It appears, then, that Soros and his kin may have direct lineage to Jesus-era Jews, but they have an admixture of Greek and Italian. To that end, I would say that they are Jewish, but not full-blooded Jews.

The data do not support a late, large-scale influx from the Khazar kingdom or other Central Asian sources. Markers associated with those regions remain rare. That's another story. Personally, I suspect the Khazar were annihilated by Genghis Khan.

A bottleneck that shaped the modern population

History and genetics converge on another decisive episode. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Ashkenazi communities experienced a severe population bottleneck. A relatively small number of ancestors gave rise to a much larger later population. The result was reduced genetic diversity and elevated frequencies of certain recessive conditions, including Tay-Sachs disease and Gaucher disease. The same founder effect helps explain why Ashkenazi Jews form one of the most intensively studied groups in medical genetics today.

Despite the later expansion across Eastern Europe, the core genetic profile remained remarkably stable. Medieval DNA recovered from Jewish cemeteries in Germany has reinforced this continuity, showing that the essential mix of Middle Eastern and southern European ancestry was already in place centuries ago.

History and genetics in conversation

The earliest Jewish presence in Europe outside the eastern Mediterranean appears in Italy during the late Roman Republic and early Empire. From there, communities spread. By the early Middle Ages, Jews were established along the Rhine, where the name Ashkenaz, a medieval Hebrew term for the German lands, took hold. Yiddish later emerged as a fusion of medieval German with Hebrew and Slavic elements. After repeated expulsions and violence in Western Europe, large numbers moved eastward. Poland and Lithuania became major centers of Jewish life.

Genetics does not replace the documentary record of scholarship, liturgy, commerce and resilience. It simply records the biological pathways that accompanied those historical movements. Men carrying Levantine lineages established households. Women of European ancestry joined those households through conversion and marriage. Later isolation preserved the resulting blend while a bottleneck amplified certain genetic features.

The story that emerges is neither one of unbroken isolation nor of wholesale replacement. It is the story of a diaspora community that retained a clear ancestral link to the Near East while absorbing and integrating European maternal lines early in its European history. As more ancient DNA becomes available and analytical methods improve, the timeline and geography of those events will grow still clearer. For now, the evidence already shows a population shaped by both continuity and adaptation across continents and centuries.

So, who or what is the Jewish race? It is likely an admixture "true" Jews who fled Palestine after 70 AD and Europeans. Again, there are others — Hispanics, for example — who claim lineage to Jewish groups and think of themselves as Jews. Personally, I'm convinced there are no true Jews, as known prior to 70 AD, there are only groups that are Jewish. And, of course, there are converts to Judaism that have no genetic ties.

Sometimes I get things wrong. If you notice a significant error, please bring it to my attention in the comment section.

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Sources/related links:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24104924
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/ashkenazi-origins-may-be-with-european-women-study-finds.html

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