Does anyone know why Israeli Jews don't resemble American Jews?

I am guessing simply that there is more a Middle Eastern genetic influence in Israel (because, duh, it's in the Middle East), but I don't actually know the real answer to this. The Jewish diaspora is widespread and complicated. You are right in that there is a large Jewish population in Eastern Europe, but I'm not sure if both originate from there or not. My mom has Russian/Ukrainian Jewish ancestry on her side of the family through her maternal grandfather, and the physical characteristics don't read the same as those you see in many Israeli Jews.

I was raised Catholic and had no real knowledge of there being any Jewish heritage in my family tree until I was an adult, but I definitely inherited my mother's darker features and absurd amount of body hair. My brother and I have both been told we "look Jewish".

R1, do you and your brother have big cocks?

R1 Your mother was absurdly hairy?!

If your mom's Jewish, doesn't that make you Jewish?

R1 here—I don't know what my brother's cock size is as I haven't seen him naked since we were pretty young, but I am about average size (6 inches). And yes, my mother is a very hairy woman. I witnessed her leg-shaving struggle throughout my entire childhood. I don't consider myself Jewish for all intents and purposes. I was raised a Catholic, as was my mother (her dad was a staunch first-generation Irish Catholic American).

I had my DNA analyzed through Ancestry.com and as it currently stands, I am classified as around 40% Russian, but Jewish does not show on there. My uncle, however, shows as around 60% Russian and around 15% "Jewish peoples of Europe". I assume that has to come from my great-grandfather, who was killed by German soldiers in Ukraine during the war. My great-grandmother (a Lutheran mainly of German ancestry) fled Russia/Ukraine after that with my grandmother and her siblings in tow, and they eventually made their way to the US.

The DNA thing frankly confuses me. Despite having been told that I look Jewish, it has apparently been bred out of me, at least according to that DNA analysis. I've had some ethnicities (French, for example) appear on Ancestry in substantial percentages (above 10%), only to vanish after subsequent "updates" in their database. It's odd. I've considered using a different company (like 23andMe) to compare the results between the two.

The Jewish diaspora involved a 3-way split - and that happened in Roman times. Some Jews went to Italy and then a bit later in the middle ages went north into Germany and north central Europe. There, they acquired a Germanic dialect (which we now call Yiddish). They were ousted from various countries over the centuries, usually whenever a ruler needed scapegoats for his mismanagement, and many ended up in Eastern Europe. They went to the Poland/Lithuanian commonwealth, and when Poland was partitioned, under Russian rule they were corralled into a large expanse of land, some of which is now Belorus, some eastern Poland, and some northern Ukraine. It was called "the Pale of Settlement". There were Jewish populations in Germany and France and the Netherlands, but they were relatively small compared the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. All of those Jews are called Ashkenazi. Most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were from this branch. Genetically they are linked on their maternal lines to northern Italians, on their paternal lines to people of the eastern Mediterranean. Many look northern European, with blonde or red hair, blue eyes, sometimes very pale skin.

The Jews who went to Spain and other parts of southern Europe were called Sephardic. They prospered and grew numerous in Moorish Spain, but were expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in the time of the Inquisition. Many went to north Africa or to Greece. There was probably some genetic mixing with Spanish and Moorish, but this would not have affected physical appearance much, since all Mediterranean people have many features in common. There was constant seafaring, armies, conquests, all around the Mediterranean basin and the gene pool favored dark curly hair, dark eyes, olive complexions.

There were also Jews scattered throughout the Middle East. Until the last half of the 20th century, they received better treatment under Islamic ruled lands than they did in Christian-ruled lands. They had to pay extra taxes and were excluded from some professions and positions, but they were generally left alone. There were significant numbers in Persia (Iran), Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt as well as in north Africa - Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco. . They are sometimes called Mizrahi Jews. They also look like other Middle Eastern and Arabic people.

The Ashkenazi Jews were the most numerous branch in the world prior to the Holocaust. But they make up less than half of the population of Israel, partly because so many were killed in Europe before they could emigrate to Israel, partly because the other branches tend to have higher fertility rates. In the US the majority of Jews are of Ashkenazi descent so they do indeed look different than Israeli Jews. Plus there is a high rate of interreligious marriage in the US, so a fairly large proportion of people in the US who have some Jewish ancestry are not 100%.

If they dressed alike and wore similar haircuts, I think most people would be hard put to identify with certainty which people were Palestinian and which were Jewish in Israel.

Jews, technically, don't have a specific "look" because of how scattered they were over the centuries. Some look more European (i.e. Ashkenazi Jews), some look more Middle Eastern (i.e Israeli Jews) and yes, some even look Black (i.e Ethiopian and Sudanese Jews). They're everywhere.

r6 here. I should have hastened to add that plenty of Ashkenazi Jews look exactly like their Sephardic and Mizrahi "cousins". Those eastern Mediterranean genes are often dominant.

Thanks for the vid link OP.

But it begs the question: Where are the long, soapy showers?

Where ever they come from, Israeli Jewish men are usually VERY good looking.

Same goes for the Israeli women.

And yes, they vary in looks, as they went everywhere during diaspora.

Every Jewish woman I've ever met has looked like a version of Bette Midler.

It's weird how the physical traits come out in families. My maternal grandmother was a Sephardic Jew from Portugal. Her mother was a Jew from France, father Portuguese Sephardic whose family originated in Jordan. All the girls in the family looked very french like their mother, and the boys looked just like their father. Most of the family ended up in the US in 1898 & settled in Brockton, Mass.. My grandmother met my grandfather, who was Dutch on both sides of his family, when he was in college in Boston. They married and moved south to my grandfather's home of Savannah, Ga.. My grandmother gave birth to 5 children who all looked nothing like the native Portuguese Sephardic side of the family. The children all married and had loads of kids and out of all that gaggle of children there is only one who ended up with Portuguese look, little ol' me. Kids in school used to accuse me of being adopted because I looked so much different than the rest of my family.

Shout out to the Bukharan Jews who are a branch of Mizrahi Jews who decided to move to the ‘Stans after Cyrus. (Afghanistan used to be nicer.)

Israeli men are so hot. (As the video at OP testifies.)

I spent a week in Tel Aviv and had an erection the entire time.

Igal is hot AF, @ OP’s link.

R14, yes, they’re GORGEOUS.

I’m still trying to figure out why George Santos doesn’t look like any other Jews on the planet.

Totally "innocent" question OP 😉

OP is just hungry for knowledge and hate speech.

r6 are you Jewish?

R6, thank you for that. I knew about the Jewish communities in Iraq, Iran, and various other areas of the former Ottoman Empire, but I did not know they were referred to as "Mizrahi." I learned only about Ashkenazi and Sephardic divisions within ethnic Judaism.

I teach a course in which we discuss the current conflicts and acts of terrorism. It surprises me that university students (and the population at large) know very little about Judaism as an ethnicity and Judaism as a religion. They have really no idea about religion at all. The students who went to public schools tell me that religion is avoided at all costs. That's a shame, because we all should have a basic knowledge of the outlines of the belief systems of the world's major religions...both Western and Eastern. That can be taught without the appearance of proselytizing.

With your permission, R6, I will use your explanation (with a few tweaks) in class.

Again, thank you

[quote]They have really no idea about religion at all.

There is hope for mankind after all!

Oooh r14, surrounded by all that beautiful CUT cock. 😛🔥

All Catholics don't look alike either.

Religion is not an ethnicity.

Igal was speaking French in the video. It's possible he is isn't fluent in Hebrew yet.

Without understanding religion, you can’t understand history. It also drives issues in a major country like India today. Pretending it’s still not important is living in denial.

Israeli Jews have been in Israel since the beginning of time…they are Sabras, the natives. Most natives of the Middle East are dark haired and skinned…that one of the reasons Jesus wasn’t a blue eyed blond as he is always depicted as.. If you don’t see any print in pictures, you can’t tell the Jews from the Arabs

[quote]Religion is not an ethnicity.

Jewish is also an ethnicity, r24. Judaism is the religion that is also practiced by ethnic Jews but can be practiced by anyone of any ethnicity.

Israeli jews= Hello!

Everywhere else Jews= Mort Goldman

If Jesus actually lived (and many say he was just a myth) this is supposedly akin to what he would have looked like.

The advancement of genetic concepts of race made the Holocaust possible. Germans had a long history of hating Jews, but it wasn’t until they saw Judaism as a race that they shifted from persecuting and converting Jews to eliminating them entirely. The Nazis didn’t care if Jews were religious or not, they just wanted them dead.

Cut? ^^^

Hard pass

R24, Judaism, like Hinduism, is a religion people are born into; you can convert, but converts aren't sought. Christianity and Islam are, to put it mildly, globalist, proselytizing religions.

OP, that's just one video, you need to look up more photos of the IDF. Following this conflict from the start, I've seen plenty of goofy-looking Jews who looked like the caricature Jew guy you come across in every Hollywood writers' room.

In short, just like every other country, they have the hotties and the notties.

You can convert to the Jewish faith. You can not convert to the Jewish ethnicity.

It's a shitty quirk of the language (not just English) that the two aren't named separately. So much confusion arises from that.

Russian Jew.

Irish Catholic.

Irish/Russian is ethnicity. Jewish and Catholic is religious identity.

Ethnic Jews are Jews who do not practice their faith and is not related to the country or region of origin.

If Jesus actually existed he would have been Jewish by faith and ethnically Palestinian.

Yeah, it's not that simple, babe. You missed out the most important one – "observant Jew" for ethnic Jews following the Jewish religion, but they don't like being called that to their face at all because they see it as the default.

The fact that we don't have two separate words *is* the original sin, and it does a lot of damage to non-observant Jews and also to converts to Judaism.

R5, 23andMe was recently hacked by someone specifically interested in its Jewish members.

[quote]You can convert to the Jewish faith. You can not convert to the Jewish ethnicity.

That's false! Jews For Palestine is full of people who have self identified as ethnically Jewish.

It’s the processed foods and class inequality.

R6 I'm Jewish and loved your explanation. Thank you for the betterment of the DL.

After I explained the Biden pictures to my mother and why they were significant, she proceed to describe them as Jewish. She was using the term as a descriptor for their special attribute.

The Sephardic Jews are usually good looking not sure if they make up a big percentage of Israeli Jews.

A very high percentage of Israeli Jews do not practice the faith at all. Many are atheist, and many are simply non religious Jews who see all the goo-gah and hullabaloo in the religion as a joke. They are, as the 80 year old father of an old friend of mine once said, "pork eatin' Jews". But then, when Pope John Paul was inaugurated he was watching all the goings on in St. Peter's Basilica and as a huge group of Cardinals were walking up the aisle he said, "have you ever seen so many damn crossbacks in your life?".

[quote] the most important one – "observant Jew" for ethnic Jews following the Jewish religion, but they don't like being called that to their face at all because they see it as the default.

What about making up a ridiculous prefix for them instead? “Obs-Jew”? “Sab-Jew”?

Nobody gets to take advantage of a possible default identity when others might take offense!

Yeah I've noticed how handsome Israeli Jewish men have been on the TV for the last couple of weeks? How come you bitches never told me they had such fine men there

OP, you mean you didn’t know all Jews look alike? Are you really this stupid? Really?

Israeli Jews in NYC are usually unaware that they are attractive. And they are. IDK

Israeli Jews are quite Russian. Those hulking, sexy military officers are in the minority.

American Jews have better personalities.

[quote] and yes, some even look Black (i.e Ethiopian and Sudanese Jews). They're everywhere.

There was an Israeli government policy for sterilising Ethiopian Jewish women.

This is a nice little snippet for you, OP.

A lot of Israeli Jews are from other parts of the Middle East, their families arrived as refugees mostly in the late 40's and early 50's from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, etc etc

They were expelled from Islamic countries all over the Middle East until there were basically none left by 1980. Over 900,000 in total, over 600,000 of whom ended up in Israel.

Thats why they look a bit different to American Jews overall

Great link, r53. Some have asked if I'm Jewish. I'm not. But I had Jewish roommates and friends all through college, all through my years in NYC, and all the way up to the present. Two of my BFFs are Jewish. I've taught many Jewish kids and had relationships with their parents. I'm a history nerd, so I quiz them deeply about their families and their backgrounds, let them teach me Yiddish expressions, go to their children's bar and bat mitzvahs, (with a collection of commemorative kippas to prove it) , go to their seders, and generally enjoy hanging out with them. In order not to inadvertently insult them, I've made it a point to educate myself about their history. As with all minorities, they know much more about us than we know about them. In the past, Jews were generally raised to revere intelligence, wit, the ability to tell a good story, and to respect literacy and artistic excellence. What's not to like about any of that? (That isn't to say I haven't had some mighty fierce arguments with some of them!)

Everybody thinks I’m Jewish. My mom just called me tonight to wish me a good Shabbos. I said, “Ma, I’m not Jewish.”

[quote] Every Jewish woman I've ever met has looked like a version of Bette Midler.

Ahem.

My Jewish roots are from Northern Russia and genetically we have a lot of Scandinavian attributes (blonde, blue eyes, etc).. The large family migration began in the early 20th century moving west. My branch of the family ended up in the UK, but eventually found our way to the US. Although the great grandparents resembled each other, my brother and I do not resemble any of our American cousins. We are still fair while they are dark. (the remained and married American Jews, while my parents and grand parents married Dutch and English).

Just a coincidence that "Nazi" is in "Ashkenazi?"

I’m Polish and Sicilian and 50% of people on the east coast I know assumed I was Jewish. Flyover states more like 90%. My parents were catholic.