Human life in Canada's Yukon Territory 24,000 years ago

[wnylib]

4. Well, pale, blond, and blue-eyed is not

a standard description of Jews, though, is it?

As an early Semitic people in the eastern Mediterranean region, they were Middle Eastern in appearance. Even then, there were intermarriages with Indo-European Hittites and with Canaanites/Phoenicians. Wars, conquests by non Semitic groups like the Persians, Greeks, and Romans, dispersal by Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem, early Jewish trading colonies in France, Spain, Italy, and Britain, and the conversion to Judaism by southeastern European and southwestern Asian tribes introduced various genetic mixes into Jewish populations, particularly among Ashkenazi Jews.

Then there were the centuries of living in eastern Europe leading to linguistic and cultural borrowings as well as intermarriages, not to mention the centuries of Sephardic Jews in Spain intermarrying with Visigothic Christians and Caliphate Muslims during the conviviencia when people in Spain converted from one faith to the other for marriages.

And Ethiopian Jews have been a known fact for centuries.

So there is a wide variation in appearance among Jews. But the South African presence of Jews is interesting. I wonder if anyone has traced how they came to be there. My guess would be the colony established there by the Dutch East India Company.

The straight black hair, dark skin, and deep brown eyes of Native Americans didn't stop people from speculating that they originated from the Lost Tribes of Israel.