Italian Jews!

[josh w.]

Any others besides just Scott Ritchie and I?

Not sure of your question? There are close to 300 members of varied backgrounds

[mollyblum]

My mom and Uncle only have three. The 4th set of grandparents are German ( or N. European bc they are showing a small % of Finnish ancestry and Finnish matches). Oh well. It should be interesting to see what the results show.

[Michelstaedter]

Not sure of your question? There are close to 300 members of varied backgrounds

Specifically I was referencing Jews with roots in Italy, not people of Jewish AND/OR Italian catholic background.

[josh w.]

Specifically I was referencing Jews with roots in Italy, not people of Jewish AND/OR Italian catholic background.

Still not sure of your question---Jews with some roots in Italy seem similar to Jews of Jewish AND Italian background. There are such members. Did you mean Jews with no Levantine background.

[Michelstaedter]

I was specifically referencing the Italkim, a distinct ethnic group consisting of Jews living in the southern half of the Italian peninsula since the Roman times. More generally, I was speaking to ALL people of Jewish descent whose Jewish ancestors hail from modern day Italy. As I stated in my original post, these could be members of one of three Jewish ethnic divisions found there: Ashkenazi Jews, particularly in the northeast, Sephardic Jews, in the west, and the aforementioned Italkim, from Rome itself. This is NOT the same thing if people of Italian AND Jewish ancestry, but is rather a very specific kind of Jewish ancestry.

[josh w.]

I was specifically referencing the Italkim, a distinct ethnic group consisting of Jews living in the southern half of the Italian peninsula since the Roman times. More generally, I was speaking to ALL people of Jewish descent whose Jewish ancestors hail from modern day Italy. As I stated in my original post, these could be members of one of three Jewish ethnic divisions found there: Ashkenazi Jews, particularly in the northeast, Sephardic Jews, in the west, and the aforementioned Italkim, from Rome itself. This is NOT the same thing if people of Italian AND Jewish ancestry, but is rather a very specific kind of Jewish ancestry.

OK I will limit my answer to Italkim. Actually, Vinnie is more informed on this issue. Not certain, but I think there might be Jewish members with some Italkim origins. For sure there are Italian Catholic members who strongly suspect Italkim origins. I am unaware of Jews who list their Jewish ancestry as limited to Italkim

Atzmon collected a Roman Italian Jewish sample. The genetic pattern fell between Ashkenazi and Sephardic genetic patterns, i.e. with a major Levantine component. The sample is also at Gedmatch Eurogenes with the Oracle 4 option.

[Michelstaedter]

Roman Italian Jews are the Italkim "par excellence" in Italy, as they are very unlikely to have much recent Ashkkenazi or Sephardic (re)-admixture. Would be absolutely fascinated what sort of results the FTDNA and 23andMe autosomal algorithms give them. The only 23andMe customer who I shared with with definite italkim roots had one italkim grandfather, of Calabrian extraction. His 23andMe painting however came up almost entirely Italian, which is probably a function of huge amounts of assimilation of italkim into the Italian gene pool, which 23andMe then erroneously lumped with the Italian gentiles. For comparison, a woman I shared with whose grandfather was an Italian Jew from the northern city of Modena came up nearly 20 percent Ashkenazi.

[josh w.]

Roman Italian Jews are the Italkim "par excellence" in Italy, as they are very unlikely to have much recent Ashkkenazi or Sephardic (re)-admixture. Would be absolutely fascinated what sort of results the FTDNA and 23andMe autosomal algorithms give them. The only 23andMe customer who I shared with with definite italkim roots had one italkim grandfather, of Calabrian extraction. His 23andMe painting however came up almost entirely Italian, which is probably a function of huge amounts of assimilation of italkim into the Italian gene pool, which 23andMe then erroneously lumped with the Italian gentiles. For comparison, a woman I shared with whose grandfather was an Italian Jew from the northern city of Modena came up nearly 20 percent Ashkenazi.

Not sure about Roman Jews. They may be Italkim with ancient roots, but direct evidence is lacking. My hunch is that some Roman Jews have Sephardic or Ashkenazi lines. Atzmon's sample was from Rome but I have seen mention of Sicilian Italkim

[josh w.]

Not sure about Roman Jews. They may be Italkim with ancient roots, but direct evidence is lacking. My hunch is that some Roman Jews have Sephardic or Ashkenazi lines. Atzmon's sample was from Rome but I have seen mention of Sicilian Italkim

Atzmon identified his sample as Italian Jews rather than Italkim, even though they had records going back centuries.

[vinnie]

Are you guys hard core about the 4 grandparent rule, id like to join but only have 3 from Italy, 2 from Calabria and 1 from Rome, the other is from southern Spain?

The primary purposes of the project are to identify common ancestors between modern Italians and Jews through Family Finder matching, and to compare myOrigins results between the two populations. While there are some members who do not fit the criteria (but have been added for various reasons), their results are excluded from the autosomal analyses because a 3rd population would confound the analyses. For example, if the results of someone with known Italian and German background were compared to someone with known Jewish background, would any matches-in-common be connected through the Italian side, the German side, or possibly both?