Unearthing Ancient Ashkenaz and the origin of Yiddish

The search for ancient Ashkenaz has been ongoing for over 1000 years. In the 11th century, Bible scholars determined that Ashkenaz stands for Germany based on the similarity between the names “Gomer” (Noah’s grandson and the father of Ashkenaz) and “Germany,” which became the acceptable location. To test this hypothesis, we sought to trace the origin of the Yiddish language, the native language of Ashkenazic Jews. The Yiddish language is over one thousand years old and incorporates German, Slavic, and Hebrew elements. The popular view is that Yiddish has a German origin, whereas the opposing view posits a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weak Turkic substrata. To localize Yiddish, we attempted to find the biogeographical origin of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews using the Geographic Population Structure (GPS), which converts DNA to geographical data. Here, I present our results and a critical overview of research in the field.

Some notes
1. The sound is a bit quiet. Please use speakers or headphones. It will be corrected for the next talk.
2. GPS Origins is available as a commercial tool to study origins. It is an expanded version of the original GPS tool used in this study in that it was designed to infer the origins of your two parental lines and their migration routes. The tool is available here: https://homedna.com/product/gps-origins. If you took a DNA test, you can simply upload your file.
3. If you like this video, please subscribe to be notified of future videos that employ precise genetic tools to answer questions of origins.