Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern & European hybrids

According to search engine traffic one of the most popular posts on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central & Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically distinct with relatively primitive blood group assays. Rather, they were the descendants of converts. More recent genetic work has given mixed results. The reasonable inference then is that Jews themselves are a population with a complex history, and that complexity is manifest in their genetics. A new paper explores these issue in more detail, Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations: