A popular meme circulating on social media claims that a genetic study published by Johns Hopkins proves 97.5% of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel have no ancient Hebrew DNA, suggesting that they are not “Semites” and have no genetic ties to the region.
This meme has been shared by hundreds of accounts on X, Facebook, and other mainstream social media platforms—many with hundreds of thousands of followers—even though no such study exists.
The meme is a fabrication, loosely based on a 2012 study by Dr. Eran Elhaik. In this study, he suggests that a significant number of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars—a diverse group of Turkic peoples from the Caucasus region who allegedly converted to Judaism.
This theory is known as the Khazarian Hypothesis and has been discredited as junk science by the academic community.
Elhaik’s study was methodologically flawed from the beginning. There is no Khazar DNA to compare with Ashkenazi Jews, as the Khazars have no living descendants. Elhaik’s use of modern Georgian and Armenian populations as proxies for ancient Khazars has been rejected by leading scientists, who have published indisputable evidence in numerous journals, including the prestigious journal Science.
In addition to the lack of genetic links to the Khazars, the theory is further weakened by the absence of linguistic connections. If Ashkenazi Jews were truly descendants of the Khazars, they would have spoken a Turkic language, not Yiddish, which is a Judeo-Germanic language.
The meme takes the erroneous results of Elhaik’s study even further. The paper was published in the Genome Biology and Evolution journal, not at Johns Hopkins, and it only focused on the DNA of European Jews, not Israelis, as confirmed by the author. Additionally, the figure of 97% does not appear anywhere in Elhaik’s research.
Numerous studies on Ashkenazi DNA have been conducted, and while none have proven a link to the Khazars, the overwhelming majority of genetic studies have confirmed that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically linked to the Levant.
Sources
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3595026/
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Khazar
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yiddish-language
- https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/study-misrepresented-in-jewish-ancestry-claim/
- https://www.science.org/content/article/roots-jewishness
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/humanbiology.85.6.0859
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4987117/
- https://www.haaretz.com/2010-06-10/ty-article/landmark-study-proves-90-of-jews-are-genetically-linked-to-the-levant/0000017f-e0bb-df7c-a5ff-e2fba5950000 (archived copy)
- https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1003316
- https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2013/12/new-genetic-study-more-evidence-for-modern-ashkenazi-jews-ancient-hebrew-patrimony.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw0G9COpeMY
Support GnasherJew
If you like what we do please consider donating what you can to help us do more. We rely on donations like yours to keep exposing antisemitism on social media.
DONATE