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Ein Says:

“a rival school of thought proposed by Duke University professor David Goldstein says that the early Jewish traders who founded the Ashkenazi took local, European women as wives. If so, such an early infusion of Aryan DNA might help explain the measurably higher IQ of Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi Jews.”

I can believe that explanation much more easily than the other one. It seems only logical that early Jewish merchants following the trade routes would not have brought their wives along with them. So they settled down and took what they could find from among the local populace.

Yep, makes sense. That’s apparently what they did in Ethiopia too.

http://www.hamishkandavid.org/id38.html

Hence, the result is that while many Jews do still retain a Semitic look, a great many also do not. And some look just as Aryan as anyone possible could. You would never believe that some of them are Jews. And also, since that very early intermarrying, there have doubtless been many, many other intermarriages since, down over the centuries. That covers a LOT of generations! Human nature being what it is, despite all the prohibitions against intermarriage (just as in India) it still happened. And it’s still happening now.

Ein and anyone else interested in Jewish genetics should check out the discussion of an importantrecent scientific paper by Goldstein et al. of this topic on the Gene Expression blog.

From: http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/how_ashkenazi_jewish_are_you.php

As the authors note, the Ashkenazi are almost certainly a compound population. There are full-Jews who “look gentile” and full-Jews who could pass easily in the Middle East as a native. Most Ashkenazi Jews exhibit a mix of features. The genetic likelihood that the Ashkenazi have varied origins should no surprise. The paper notes that Askhenazi heterozygosity is actually somewhat greater than American whites, implying that the source of their distinctiveness has to do with genetic origin, not genetic history (i.e., population bottlenecks). Another population which I suspect resembles the population history of the Ashkenazi are Uyghurs, who fall between Europeans and Han Chinese in their ancestry. But the hybridization even occurred in the past, so the Uyghurs today can be thought of as a separate population with its own suite of genetic combinations, as opposed to a hybrid of two “pure” groups. Similarly, Ashkenazi Jews no doubt emerged from hybridization evens between Middle Eastern and European females, but over the generations they have been relatively endogamous (most gene flow has been out of the community into gentile Europeans through conversion) and so are a genetically coherent population in their own right.

The last sentence is relevant to your point about intermarriage, Ein. Owing to the fact that Judaism is a racial religion thousands of years old, unique in the world in that regard, over the centuries gene flow has been overwhelmingly outward from Jews to their host populations. They “infect” other races with their genetics via conversions and defections from their group, but they preserve their own racial purity as a result of their religio-cultural practices. The loci of these infections then act as points of subversion – “whites” who, by reason of their genetics, understandably may have great sympathy for the Jews and Jewish causes. I am sure we all have known whites like that.

Tim McGreen Says:

I’d just like to point out that the Judaism practiced today is different from the Judaism practiced two thousand years ago, which in turn was different from the Judaism practiced a thousand years before that. There seems to be a widely-held misconception that Judaism is the world’s oldest religion and has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Not so.

Not sure what you are alluding to here, but the only thing relevant to this discussion is their religion-based endogamy and “ethnocentrism” (i.e., the polite word for racism). That hasn’t changed one bit.