Kevin,

Thanks. Leo Cooper's read doesn't move the needle much at all. What a pity...

Here is a revised chart based on the connection of I13865 with the Maharam of Rothenburg (everything very tentative).

NB: The EU group includes y uniparentals T1a1a, J1a, and E1b1. I wonder how this would affect interpretation of that cluster's evolution.

--
Adam Cherson

Adam,
Yes. Leo Cooper says his SNP analysis of that sample you asked about (I13866) places it within haplogroup J-Z2215.
--
Kevin Brook

As I understand your analysis, you interpret the Erfurt EU group as having some Khazar ancestry via Knaanic populations. This must be then one of the main hypotheses going forward. I look forward to a paper on this someday (not by me!).

I wonder if you can dig up any insight on sample I13866 (y-called as J1a), appearing in the EU cluster. Is there a way to look at the SNPs in the BAM file for this sample to see if that y classification can be narrowed down a little?

--
Adam Cherson

I am researching the last name "Jena" of my maternal Great Grandfather.  He immigrated from Ritschenwalde, Prussia [ Noe Ryczywo'l Poland].  There doesn't seem 
to be any records there of a Jena family earlier than about 1840s.  The only other Jena families that I could located were from Detmold, in Germany, but some of the last names were Jena and others were Michaelis Jena.  Does anyone have any thoughts on why some people would have just Jena and others Michaelis Jena in the same family?

    For example
                   LC3Z-2JK 

 Lew Meixler

--

Meir ben Borukh Rothenburg is in the Rabbinical Index under group R-A13358. Sample I13865 in the recently pre-printed Erfurt study (https://twitter.com/ShaiCarmi/status/1526850050772590592) is R-Y19847+, which means that the two lines are closely related on the R haplotree.

I cannot say for sure how close, because the ancient sample provide only limited SNPs for classification. However, it could be very close. The only thing that prevents me from saying that I13565 is in fact the Maharam of Rothenburg is the fact that the latter is buried in Worms and I13865 is from Erfurt.

The date of I13865 is estimated to be anywhere from about 1275 CE to 1398 CE. The Maharam is believed to have been born circa 1215 CE and lived until 1293 CE. Rothenburg ob der Tauber is about 115 miles SW of Erfurt.

--
Adam Cherson

Adam,

For the handful of maternal and paternal haplogroups in Ashkenazim that are closely linked to the North Ossetians and Turkic peoples like Bashkirs -- I mentioned 3 out of the 4 haplogroups of this nature in JewishGen message #667951 -- I would posit anew the migrational path I had proposed decades ago whereby a small number of Khazars who remained Jewish were living in what became Kievan Rus' and became a part of East Knaanic Jewry, intermarrying with assorted Romaniote Jews and Mizrahi Jews, and subsequently mixing with other Jewish groups including West Knaanic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews.  The Khazars switched their language from Turkic to Slavic to Yiddish, and their writing system from Turkic runes to Cyrillic to Hebrew square script.

I cannot agree with your proposal that Turkic elements were incorporated into a Jewish community in southern Italy, such as a population of proto-Ashkenazim.  Modern Sicilian Catholics, who sometimes have several segments of Sicilian Jewish DNA, don't show Turkic admixture in the calculators nor do they have Turkic uniparental haplogroups.  There are no living people whose ancestry is 100 percent Sicilian Jewish so we can't test your hypothesis in the best way but I never saw a reason to believe they had relations with peoples from northern and eastern Asia, nor that any Khazar Jews or Avar Jews had moved into southern Italy, although small numbers of Khazar Jews did live at least temporarily in a more eastern area of the Byzantine Empire and in Spain.

As others have said, the Jews in 14th-century Erfurt were a very mixed group and some members had genetic affinities that others didn't, sometimes seemingly randomly, without a completely consistent pattern when it comes to non-Slavic elements like South Asian, North African, and even East Asian, other than for example the "EA_Devils_Gate" element that Michalis Moriopoulous incorporated into his custom Vahaduo model using G25 coordinates to determine the Erfurt Jews' admixtures.

4 of the Erfurt Jews from the Eastern Profile group scored that element whereas none of the Erfurt Jews from the Western Profile group did.  "EA_Devils_Gate" is a Northeast Asian cluster similar to modern Ulchi of far-eastern Russia and other Tungusic-speaking ethnicities and to also forming a minority portion of Koreans and Japanese but not found in most Han Chinese, especially not the Southern Chinese where Ashkenazim got mtDNA haplogroup M33c from.  So I think "EA_Devils_Gate" would be Turkic Khazarian in this case, and would be at the deepest root of the "Siberian" and "Mongolian/Manchurian" affinities for Ashkenazim in some calculators.

In Moriopoulous's experiment, some of the Erfurt Jews with "EA_Devils_Gate" don't score in the other East Asian element, "EA_Hanben", which appears to represent affinity to Hanben people from Taiwan, and visa versa.  The EA_Hanben element is in 10 of the samples, this time including members of both the Eastern Profile and Western Profile groups as well as among what Moriopoulous calls the Mixed Western-Eastern Profile.  In fact, the highest Hanben score (2 percent) is in a Western Profile sample (I13863).

Using Eurogenes K13's admixture estimates, Erfurt Jewish sample I13869 scores 3.08 percent Siberian and 2.06 percent East Asian, adding up to 5.14 percent. Her Siberian score is the highest of all the tested Erfurt Jews.

The only carrier of mtDNA haplogroup N9a3 (which probably originated with a Khazarian convert), sample I14740, scores 2.74 percent Siberian and 0.95 percent East Asian in Eurogenes K13. She has the third-highest Siberian score among these samples.

The authors of the Erfurt study cannot be correct in assuming that East Eurasian DNA came into Ashkenazim from a Slavic people.  There's evidence in these samples as well as uniparental evidence that Slavic DNA in Ashkenazim is related to the Slavic peoples of Czechia, Poland, and perhaps eastern Germany (e.g., the Sorbs in the 14th-century Krakauer Berg DNA samples), rather than to those of Russia or Ukraine.  Ethnic Czechs and Poles have very low East Eurasian DNA proportions so it can't explain what Ashkenazim have.

The Erfurt sample I14899 scores 0 percent Siberian and 0 percent East Asian but 21.37 percent Baltic in Eurogenes K13.  This disparity would show what some of us already knew that the Slavic and East Eurasian elements in Ashkenazim don't come from the same ultimate non-Jewish source population if we went back to the 10th century.  But the Slavic-admixed and Eastern-admixed Jewish populations would have started intermarrying a short time after that.

The Erfurt sample I13862 scores modestly in the East Eurasian elements but has 18.25 percent Baltic, again all per Eurogenes K13.
--
Kevin Brook

On Thu, Jun 23, 2022 at 03:31 AM, <topaz1943@...> wrote:

Valkacreszr

Hi Dianne,

I was able to find this website that mentioned a nearly identical town name:

Valacreszr, Russian Poland

https://british-jewry.org.uk/leedsjewry/getperson.php?personID=I0012654&tree=1

The RUSSIAN Poland makes me even more confident that this could be the town you're looking for. I'm replying publicly just in case this could be of use to anyone else looking for this town.

Best of luck,
 
--
Chloë Kogan
Arizona, USA
Email: KoganAncestry@...

Researching:

• KOGAN (Tarutyne & Kakhovka, Ukraine):
  • Great-grandparents Bentzion (b. 1871; sochet, cantor, soapmaker; murdered Kakhovka 1941) & Frieda nee BERCOVICI (b. Akkerman, Ukraine), and their children Joseph (Montreal, Canada), Riva / Rebekah (Moscow), Israel (Moscow), Blyuma (murdered Kakhovka 1941), Moisey (killed at the front near Kiev 1941), Unknown child.
• FISHER / FISERAS (Anyksciai, Kupiskis, Skapiskis, and Utena, Lithuania):
  • Searching for my paternal grandmother's brother, Jankelis / Jankel / Jacak / Yaakov FISHER / FISERAS (born ~1899 in Utena) & wife Sonia nee PICKER / PIKERAITE (born ~1898 in Anyksciai), and their children.

Diane,

I agree with Angel. Perhaps you could post a screenshot of the text here.
Otherwise, here is a page from the JewishGen gazetteer that has many hits on it for Volkacreszer: https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/gazetteer/gazetteer.php?Town=Volkacreszer&Country=AU|BO|HR|EZ|EN|HU|LG|LH|MD|PL|RO|RS|LO|SI|UP&Miles=MILES&cl=capital&stype=D&accnt=Y&HttpVerb=Post

Once you can secure the name I would like to find a historical map of the area for you. You may be able to use the map to understand the immediate environment around the town/village.

Hap Ponedel
Eugene, OR
hapsky@...
http://easteurotopo.org/

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help decipher the first names of Rosa Teitelbaum's parents in this manifest.  The names appear on three pages, and I have included the entirety of each page to assist in deciphering the handwriting.  Rosa is on line 6 of the first two pages, and line 10 of the list of detained passengers.   If you want an enlarged version of the area of interest, please contact me privately.

--
Harry Moatz
Potomac, MD, USA
hamoatzi@...

ABOWITZ - Lomza
BRODESKY - Berdichev
GOLDMAN / PASNIKOW - Hadiach or Gadyach
GREENBURG - Kiev
KESSLER - Pruzhany
KLAUBER - Sambir or Sambor
SCHWARTZ / SCHWARZ / SZWARZ - Monasterzyska and Stanislawow
TEITELBAUM - Yazloweic or Yazlovets
WARECK and MEYER / MEER - Dembitz or Debica

I've posted a vital record in Russian for which I need a translation. It is on ViewMate at the following address ...
https://www.jewishgen.org/viewmate/viewmateview.asp?key=VM98865
Family Surname: MER and KLANK
Country: Poland
Town: Grabowiec
Date of Image: 1878
Please respond via the form provided on the ViewMate image page.
Thank you very much.

Esther Kleinman

Harold,
Thanks for the citation. I'm well aware of Meir Wunder's Elef Margaliot. But does it contain any reference to Yosef Margaliot b'Alexander Sender that I haven't mentioned above?
Thanks.
Dan Rottenberg
Philadelphia PA
dan@...

Jeremy,

G25 components for the Erfurt data here: https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?26176-The-Ashkenazi-founder-event-pre-dated-the-14th-century-(discussion)/page13  and here are K13s, which I believe can be used on Gedmatch: https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?26176-The-Ashkenazi-founder-event-pre-dated-the-14th-century-(discussion)/page17
(You may need to start a free account to access these pages)

I'm not sure whether anyone has uploaded the data to Gedmatch as a kit yet.

--
Adam Cherson

Kevin,

Thanks for the observations and insights.

The initial period after a new data dump appears (such as the Erfurt data) is usually a highly exploratory time with several hypotheses emerging, re-formulating, and hopefully producing something that most can agree on. In that spirit I make a few tweaks to the initial interpretation from this thread.

I have modified the Sephardic explanation for the Erfurt-ME group because when I reviewed the data I saw that, genetically, the S. Italian Middle Age Jewish population, especially recent arrivals from the Levant, resemble Sephardim closely and could well have been the source of the ME in Erfurt. I now believe part of the Erfurt-ME group could just as well be S. Italian Jews migrating to Erfurt, not necessarily early Sephardic migrants to that area, although I still believe there could have been a few early Sephardic refugees at this time (not enough to constitute the Erfurt-ME group though)..

In some ways this modification would make the model simpler: a heterogeneous group of Italian Jews consisting of two sub-pops, one with some admixed Longobardic-Avar genes (Erfurt2) (BTW: I don't mean to suggest there was Longobardic-to-Jewish conversion, only that there was genetic mixing), and the other perhaps more recently arrived from the Levant (Erfurt1(b)), being more Middle Eastern. In Erfurt they meet a resident population of German Ashkenazim (Erfurt1(a)), and (this is new) they are met there also by a small number of Sephardic refugees (Erfurt3a: I14736 and I13867; the third Erfurt3 sample, I14897, seems to be a horse of different color, perhaps a person of more slavic origins, not sure). In time these 4 sub-pops merge into what we now call Eastern European Jewry (joined there perhaps by other populations migrating into EEs from other places, not included in this model). The fact that Erfurt 1(b) and Erfurt 2 are two different clusters does not imply they came from different places: both could have been S. Italian sub-pops, I figure. And I believe it makes some sense that there were already Jews in Erfurt who could have formed a slightly different cluster.

I am open to other possibilities regarding the origins of the East Asian and Siberian admixture. From where I sit, there is a certain logic to the idea that S. Italy is the pre-Erfurt melting pot and that the East Asian and Siberian admixtures occurred there. From this point of view it seems more likely that the socio-political vector for these genes would have been the Longobard occupation of the area around Benvento, including other populations politically associated and possibly intermixed with the Longobards. such as Avars. I find this historical scenario more compelling than the Khazar hypothesis since Khazaria was more distant from S. Italy than Pannonia and I am not aware of historical fact that would have brought Khazars into S. Italy.

Perhaps the Erfurt-EU group represents a population with a completely different geographical origin which does connect up better with Khazars. Are you able to summarize a historical progression that would have brought the Khazar genes into Erfurt by 1300 CE?

At this point I am seeking to gather as many plausible models for the Erfurt data as possible.

--
Adam Cherson

I recommend to publish an image of the document as the problem may be in the interpretation of the cursive characters
--

Angel Kosfiszer

Richardson, Texas

--
Avi Biton
Israel

--

Moishe Miller
Brooklyn, NY
moishe.miller@...
JGFF #3391

VM98971

In Russian: