Scholars Blast New Study Tracing Ashkenazi Jews to Khazars of Ancient Turkey

Prominent scholars of Jewish demography dismissed the findings of a newly published genetic study suggesting that today’s Ashkenazi Jews originate from converts to Judaism in what today is Turkey.

Titled “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz,” the study by the University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and three other researchers appeared in March in Oxford University Press’ prestigious scientific journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

It is based on an analysis of the genomes of 367 people, mostly from the United States, who reported having Ashkenazi lineage. Using a tool called geographic population structure, the researchers compared their genomes to those of non-Jews from German lands, south Russia and the Middle East. A match was found between the Jewish group’s genetic information and that of populations in northeastern Turkey.