Today, the three main Jewish communities are Ashkenazi from Europe, Sephardic originally from Spain, and Mizrahi from Arab lands. In Israel, Sephardic and Mizrahi identities have merged into one through mixed Sephardic-Mizrahi marriages and Israelis from these backgrounds often identity themselves as Sephardic (on this see Zohar 2005 in references below). On the whole, the Ashkenazi Jewish community has been at the fore-front of geneaological DNA testing to search for ancient connections to the Israelites, Canaanites, and other people groups of the Levant. But then "were there even Israelites to begin with as a distinct people group?," many archaeologists will ask.
During the Middle Bronze period (ca. 2000 – 1550 BCE) the Southern Levant became host to the Canaanite city states, a flourishing civilization that disseminated its cultural artifacts throughout the Fertile Crescent, reaching south to Egypt and the Hyksos rulers of Tel el-Dab’a/Avaris, all throughout Canaan, north into Syria, and into Mesopotamia.
Archaeologists and Anthropologists agree that the material cultural known today as “Canaanite” was the by-product of an influx of immigrants into the Southern Levant, which had been sparsely inhabited in the previous Intermediate Bronze Age, and likely arrived from the coastal plain of Lebanon and Syria, and the region of Tel Mishrifeh, the site of the great Royal Palace of Qatna, located in Syria’s Orontes Valley (Arensburg & Belfer-Cohen 1997: 341; Mazar 1992: 188-189).
Analysis of excavated human remains in Israel from the Chalcolithic period through to the Iron Age yielded a distinct pattern indicating that the arrival of “foreign populations [during the Middle Bronze Age] carrying a morphology more common in the northern parts of the Levant, i.e. Lebanon, Syria,” and Armenia (Arensburg 1997: 342; Guy 1938). These new arrivals were distinctly West Asian, or otherwise the biblical "Canaanites."
In contrast, during the Early Bronze and Iron Ages, excavated human remains in Israel exhibit features commonly associated with Mediterranean populations, i.e. dolichocephalic “long and narrow skulls of the Mediterranean type common both in Israel and Egypt” (Arensburg 1997: 342). The dolichocephalic Mediterranean skull morphology corresponds to the period of the Israelites.
While there are only a few human skull specimens from the Middle Bronze Age in Israel, those found at Hazor and Megiddo in MB (Middle Bronze) period tombs conform exactly to the theory of new population immigration into ancient Israel during this period followed by a new population influx during the Iron Age (Arensburg 1997: 341 – 343). While pottery alone can never directly translate into a specific people group, here we have a rare 1:1 correlation between human remains of a Northern immigrant population associated with the beginnings of Canaanite culture in the Middle Bronze, followed by a Mediterranean population during the Israelite Kingdom period in the Iron Age.
How does this relate to DNA and Global Population matching of Ashkenazi Jews to the regions of the world?
If you are Ashkenazi Jewish or have friends that have done DNA testing that are Ashkenazi, you may have heard that many Ashkenazim are clustering with Mediterranean Populations (including Southern European, North African, Levantine, and Anatolian) at this stage in autosomal DNA testing (including results from both 23andme and DNA Tribes). Geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a pioneer in population genetics and professor emeritus of Stanford University, wrote of the difficulties in correlating genetic information and skull morphology, or more accurately, that genetic information will always be far more accurate than population studies based on skull morphology (Cavalli-Sforza 1994).
Nevertheless, if the skull morphology of the Israelites during the Iron Age was distinctly that of Mediterranean populations and autosomal DNA region mapping of the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi communities today cluster with Mediterranean populations, does it not reasonably strengthen the tradition that modern Jewish communities are among those who are descended from the people groups that occupied Israel during the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 586 BCE), the same period when the Israelite culture was born and flourished?
Questions for future research: Can we distinguish between Israelites and Canaanites? What about Sephardic Jewish individuals (originally from Spain) and Mizrahi Jewish individuals from Arab countries? What will their DNA look like? Many questions still to be answered as geneaological DNA testing moves into adolescence as a Science.
[Originally submitted as part of an essay for Prof. Ami Mazar in the upper level seminar: Issues in Middle Bronze Age. Genetic data was added later and published to the 23andMe.com community board. Copyright 2010 Peter Hagyo-Kovacs. All rights and media reserved.]
DNA testing companies:
Global autosomal DNA testing and comparitive database: http://www.dnatribes.com (#1)
YDNA, mtDNA, autosomal DNA: http://www.familytreedna.com (#2)
YDNA, mtDNA, autosomal DNA: http://www.23andme.com (#3 but not highly recommended at this time as the database is too small to be meaningful.)
References:
Arensburg, B. and Belfer-Cohen, A. 1997. “Human Skeletal Remains from Hazor Area L.” pp. 341 – 343 in The James A. De Rothschild Expedition at Hazor – HAZOR V: An Account of the Fifth Season of Excavation, 1968. Amnon Ben-Tor, Ruhama Bonfil (editors). Jerusalem.
Cavallli-Sforza, L. Luca, Menozzi, P. Piazza, A. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, New Jersey.
Guy, P. 1938. Megiddo Tombs: Oriental Institute Publications Vol. 33. Chicago.
Mazar, A. 1992. The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (ca. 10000-586 B.C.E.). New York.
Zohar, Z. 2005. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times. New York.
