Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century
Ikusi/ Ireki
Data
2022-12Egilea
Waldman, Shamam
Backenroth, Daniel
Harney, Eadaoin
Flohr, Stefan
Neff, Nadia C.
Buckley, Gina M.
Fridman, Hila
Akbari, Ali
Rohland, Nadin
Mallick, Swapan
Cooper, Leo
Lomes, Ariel
Lipson, Joshua
Cano Nistal, Jorge
Yu, Jin
Barzilai, Nir
Peter, Inga
Atzmon, Gil
Ostrer, Harry
Lencz, Todd
Maruvka, Yosef E.
Lammerhirt, Maike
Beider, Alexander
Rutgers, Leonard V.
Renson, Virginie
Prufer, Keith M.
Schiffels, Stephan
Ringbauer, Harald
Sczech, Karin
Carmi, Shai
Reich, David
Cell 185(25) : 4703-4716 (2022)
Laburpena
We report genome-wide data from 33 Ashkenazi Jews (AJ), dated to the 14th century, obtained following a salvage excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt, Germany. The Erfurt individuals are genet-ically similar to modern AJ, but they show more variability in Eastern European-related ancestry than mod-ern AJ. A third of the Erfurt individuals carried a mitochondrial lineage common in modern AJ and eight carried pathogenic variants known to affect AJ today. These observations, together with high levels of runs of homozygosity, suggest that the Erfurt community had already experienced the major reduction in size that affected modern AJ. The Erfurt bottleneck was more severe, implying substructure in medieval AJ. Overall, our results suggest that the AJ founder event and the acquisition of the main sources of ancestry pre-dated the 14th century and highlight late medieval genetic heterogeneity no longer present in modern AJ.