>even in those places where they were hundreds of miles away from
>non-Jewish German-speakers and where learning German thus would
>not be useful.
Not useful in your opinion, not in theirs: to them, it must have
been useful - otherwise they wouldn't have learnt it; they anyway
had spoken enough other "Mamme Loshns" (Turkic, Slavic, Baltic,
Greek, Romance (e.g. the so-called Romaniotes in Greece/the
Byzantine Empire), Iranian, Arab & of course Hebrew). The fact
that such an important community (millions!) opted for German
hat was zu bedeuten! And they didn't opt for a German spoken
in Cologne, Hannover, Bremen, Hamburg, Lüneburg, Schwerin,
Berlin, Szczeczin, Königsberg/Kaliningrad, but for one spoken
esp. in Bavaria+Austria+Bohemia (and Slovakia and Western
Hungary up to Buda), from which Yiddish even today preserves
old features that even the most isolated Bavarian and Austrian
villages have forgotten or tend to forget. Bastarnae were
completely 'unschuldig' in this occurrence. They might have
played a role only as hypothetical forefathers of South-Germans.
>You didn't understand my sentence so I'll rephrase:
>
>Wechsler
[You may spell it Wexler if that's the original/official spelling;
I merely jokingly spelled Wechsler, so that one can see what the
name means.]
>does that because he has to, he does not seem to aware
>of the Germanic-speaking Bastarnae peoples Atmoni and Sidones
Get in touch with him and tell him this assumptions of this in
an emailed message, and see his reaction. :)
>So Proto-Romanian might have started in the area on both sides
>on the lower Danube in the 1st century BCE.
That's what the standard theory says - but only as far as geography
is concerned. Chronology is a bit different (starts a bit later on
north of the Danube: the massive Roman presence was necessary;
south of the Danube, it had been more and more there).
>OK, so you say your claim might be justified by an ethnic
>contribution that isn't listed in the article?
It is not *my* claim, it is the claim by those who've dealt
with those aspects (for about 100 years now; many or most of
them Jewish scholars).
>??? That makes no sense at all.
Am I communicating with a... bot? :-D
>Okay so I should not trust the genetics because genes don't reflect
>true inheritance?
No: you didn't read all relevant text parts and tables/lists.
(On top of that, unfortunately, Wp. & al. available data for
the time being do not show us enough comparable material on
Semitic populations over there, incl. Neopalestinians, Arabs
& the like.)
>I think I'll stick with genetics.
Do it. But try getting out now and then (in essential moments)
of your narrow Torsten-frame in order to be able to see the
Alps. ;)
>A smaller but still significant part of the Ashkenazi male line
>population is more likely to have originated from central and
>eastern European populations.'
Da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer! Due to contemporary politics, this
group must be "small", but OTOH it can't be minimized, so the
wording "but still significant" must be added. But it doesn't
matter to our discussion. The genetic afiliation doesn't play
any role in opting for one language or another, for one culture
or another, for one faith or another. But you should be aware
of the fact that to Judaistic faith and culture adhered not
only those "abrahamite" and canaanite tribes, but also other,
foreign, populations in certain epochs and in certain geographic
areas. (To the "newcomers" also belonged all Christians, but
today Christians aren't deemed Jews because of reasons pertaining
to theology, to dogmas. But most Ashkenasic Jews became Jews
4-5-6 centuries after the Christianization of various peoples
around the Mediterranean Sea.)
>Not really. Since Ashkenazi Jews have predominantly eastern
>Mediterranean genes
I doubt that dominance. And I expect that the prose of the
summarizing presentations ("abstract") duly exaggerates in
a certain direction for obvious synchronous (contemporary)
reasons (i.e. politics). (For similar reasons is there the
insisting on the Romanian ethnogenesis linked to the
northern Dacia - since Romanians' continuity in the
territory north of the Danube is contested esp. by Hungarian
and Ukrainian historiography).
But science ought, should and must have a different approach
(as Brian has underlined).
>they must have traveled to eastern Europe from the eastern >Mediterranean
Keep in mind that all humanity traveled from the eastern
Mediterranean: even Australian aborigines, the Inuits and
Chuktchen and the Indians in Tierra de Fuego (according to
the same genetic science).
>which means that any scenario we propose which includes them
>will have to account for that.
Of course! Yet not at all because of mitochondrial or Y-chromosome
peculiarities, but only because of possible participations of
certain groupings characterized inter alia by belonging to the
religion of Moshe and Akharon, namely of worshippers of "barukh
adonai" according to certain rites (since Christians and Muslims
worship the same deity, but they aren't stricto sensu Jews).
I.e., Jews in the religious and cultural sense, not in the
"völkisch" sense.
>If they had been local converts, such as you claim, against >Wikipedia, we would not have needed to do so.
Even the text you cited admits that at least one part ("a signifi-
cant one") has roots in Eurasia. OTOH, the Jewish community itself
(with all rabbinate) knows/admits that Jewry also has been based
on conversions. There is even written attestation of that major
East-Europan conversion: the correspondence between Hasdai ibn
Shaprut and king Joseph ben Akharon (in the lineage of Benyamin
and Ovadiya).
George