Abstract
The history of the Jewish Diaspora dates back to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests in the Levant, followed by complex demographic and migratory trajectories over the ensuing millennia which pose a serious challenge to unraveling population genetic patterns. Here we ask whether phylogenetic analysis, based on highly resolved mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) phylogenies can discern among maternal ancestries of the Diaspora. Accordingly, 1,142 samples from 14 different non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities were analyzed. A list of complete mtDNA sequences was established for all variants present at high frequency in the communities studied, along with high-resolution genotyping of all samples. Unlike the previously reported pattern observed among Ashkenazi Jews, the numerically major portion of the non-Ashkenazi Jews, currently estimated at 5 million people and comprised of the Moroccan, Iraqi, Iranian and Iberian Exile Jewish communities showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect, which did however characterize the smaller and more remote Belmonte, Indian and the two Caucasus communities. The Indian and Ethiopian Jewish sample sets suggested local female introgression, while mtDNAs in all other communities studied belong to a well-characterized West Eurasian pool of maternal lineages. Absence of sub-Saharan African mtDNA lineages among the North African Jewish communities suggests negligible or low level of admixture with females of the host populations among whom the African haplogroup (Hg) L0-L3 sub-clades variants are common. In contrast, the North African and Iberian Exile Jewish communities show influence of putative Iberian admixture as documented by mtDNA Hg HV0 variants. These findings highlight striking differences in the demographic history of the widespread Jewish Diaspora.
Highlights
Contemporary Jews, whose number is estimated at 13 million [1], can be divided to Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi, which are each in turn comprised of numerous different constituent communities
The fourteen non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities fulfilling this criterion were from Azerbaijan, Mountain Jews (58); Georgia (74); Ethiopia, Beta Israel (29); India: a) Mumbai, B’nei Israel (34), b) Cochin (45); Iran (82); Iraq (135); Libya (83); Morocco (149); Tunisia (37); Portugal (Belmonte, 30); Bulgaria (71); Turkey (123); and Yemen (119)
We put forward and below the narrow designation for ‘‘a founder lineage’’ as being present in the sample of the contemporary community at a frequency equal to or greater than 5%, based upon the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomic sequence for that lineage
Summary
Contemporary Jews, whose number is estimated at 13 million [1], can be divided to Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi, which are each in turn comprised of numerous different constituent communities. The geographically much more widespread non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities are culturally more diverse, and are comprised of the Jewish communities that have continuously resided in the Near and Middle East and in North Africa and in different geographic locations to which Jews fled or to which they were deported including the Iberian expulsion in 1492–1495 These communities share similar religious rituals, probably due to their presumed common historical origin from the descendants of the much earlier Babylonian exile. While the genetic ancestry of the Ashkenazi has been investigated recently in some depth in terms of both male and female lineages, by means of the male-specific portion of the Y chromosome and the mtDNA respectively [2,3,4,5], the comparative data currently available on the non-Ashkenazi Jews is scant [6,7] These studies suggested geographically independent founding of the different Jewish communities.
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