The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The "Rhineland Hypothesis" proposes that Eastern European Jews emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the "Khazarian Hypothesis" suggests that Eastern European descended from Judean tribes who joined the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. The Judaized Empire was continuously reinforced with Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman Jews until the 13th century. Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo-Khazars. Thus far, however, their contribution has been estimated only empirically; the absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian Hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian Hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland Hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses - including principal component, biogeographical origin, admixture, identity by descent, allele sharing distance, and uniparental analyses - to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, 7 supplementary figures, 7 supplementary table

Why the EU is failing in its neighbourhood: the case of Armenia

As the Arab Spring has made clear, the EU’s strategic aim of being surrounded by a ring of secure, democratic, and prosperous friends has not yet materialized. While most previous analyses have found fault with inconsistent application of conditionality, this article locates the root of the problem with an the EU’s institutional set-up. Starting from interviews and documentary analysis, it uses Armenia as a case study to demonstrate how competition within and between the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission has led to internal, horizontal, and vertical inconsistencies that have seriously hampered the EU’s capacity to promote reforms. If recent institutional reforms have been designed to address precisely these problems, sociological rational choice and historical institutionalism suggest that it remains to be seen to what extent these recent reforms and initiatives will be able to bring about a change substantial enough to make the EU more successful in its neighbourhood

Expanding security eastward: NATO and US military engagement in Georgia

This repository item contains a single issue of Behind the Breaking News, a briefing published from 1999 to 2009 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy

The Slavic-Orthodox community in Azerbaijan: the identity and social position of a once-dominant minority

Based on recent empirical findings and field observations, this article examines the Slavic-Orthodox community in Azerbaijan. Nowadays numbering about one and a half percent of the population, the main threat to its continuity is not persecution nor pressure to assimilate, but an ageing ethnic-demographic base which is not going to be kept up to level by either natural replacement or new adherents. Orthodox Christianity will nonetheless keep a presence in the country, yet its base of adherents will unavoidably become more heterogeneous

Turkey's global strategy: Turkey and the Caucasus

Turkey has had long-standing links with the region called the ‘South(ern) Caucasus’, comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, including the de-facto independent entities of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The area was, for a long time, the scene of intense competition between the Persian-Sassanid and Ottoman Empires, before its gradual incorporation into the Russian Empire during the fi rst half of the 19th century. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkey has become a major regional player through direct investments, and the trade and transportation links tying the Caspian basin to the outside world over Georgia in circumvention of Russian territory, most important among them the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. But the weight of both history and ethnic kinship has distorted the operation of material interests, even under Ankara’s new, zero-problems foreign policy. The historical legacies of massacre and confl ict during and after World War One continue to weigh down on relations between Turkey and Armenia, and the close political interaction between Ankara and Baku – encapsulated in the slogan ‘One nation, two states’ – remains a major ethno-political factor shaping the regional environment

Implementing EU's Normative Agenda in the South Caucasus: Contradictory effects

It is not a secret that the EU has sought to influence regional developments by imposing liberal democratic norms on the third countries interested in closer relations with the union. Given that this soft power approach may effect change, we analysed the role of EU normative powers in influencing human rights dialogues. We also saw how both the political establishments and societies at large have adapted to these new circumstances. Further to the east, the lever for Europeanization seems to be eroding. To that end, the EU has continuously reaffirmed that its support for and cooperation with target countries must be conditional on the promotion of civil liberties and democratic reforms. While there is concern that the EU’s normative policies may be ineffective if they are not fully implemented on the ground, it is possible that the prospect of EU integration could prove to be an attractive aspiration for large segments of these societies. Fully implementing EU norms, however, may drive these countries into conflict with the conservative mores sustained by the state/religious institutions