Since there are new people on here (welcome, new people!), I want briefly to explain that I’m an ethnic Jew but not a religious one.
Jewish is an ethnicity that shows up on genetic tests. You can get a genetic test that will tell you whether you have Jewish ancestry. What religion you practice is immaterial to this biological reality.
Ukrainian and Russian doesn’t show up on genetic tests as separate ethnicities. However, you can still deduce if somebody is Russian from a test. A Russian has a high likelihood of showing Finnish ancestry on a genetic test. N has Finnish ancestry and I don’t, for example. Also, Russians are more likely to have Mongol ancestry, especially in comparison with Ukrainians from the Western part of Ukraine. I’m from the Eastern part, so I have Mongol ancestry. But you don’t need a test to know that. It’s very clear when you look at me. I have Jewish eyes and Mongol cheekbones, which is the source of the beautifulness.
I’m very interested in genes. We should all talk more about genes because it’s fascinating.
Clarissa's Blog 
Does it show the same thing if you’re from the Levant in general, or just for specifically Jewish descendants? Put another way, is there a way, in genetics, to know apart a Jordanian, Gazan, Iraq, Jewish, or Egyptian? I ask because I always assumed that what’s discovered in genetics is your semitic-ness, which is peculiar to everyone in that region. But if there’s something uniquely Jewish in the genes, what would it be tied to? Especially, because the Jewish state has been in a flux over the centuries, with mixes through north Africa, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, etc. And wasn’t Abraham, the patriarch, was born in Iraq? In short, is what you find in the genes what makes you “Jewish” or what makes you “Hebrew” or just a Semite?
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It shows you are an Ashkenazi Jew. Other Jews, I assume, come out as “Semitic.” Ashkenazi Jews need to do genetic testing before getting pregnant because there can be rare genetic complications. This is a result of centuries of selective mating among European Jews.
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This is interesting, I have several Ashkenazi Jewish friends so I’ve known about genetic testing. Thing is, many Americans are terrified of genetics because they don’t want to know what they’ll find, there’s been cases of white supremacists finding out they’re actually part African American or Jewish. A odd case was when Ben Affleck went on a genealogy show and learned some of his ancestors were slaveholders, he nearly had a meltdown.
There was another time when Jessica Alba was on such a show and nearly freaked out when she learned that she had mostly European ancestry, she’s half Mexican American, part Danish and part French. She used to go on all the time how proud she was to be Mexican and how proud she was that her child came out brown, and she’s mostly white.
This is weird to me, both sides of my family are from Cuba and all my great-grandparents were Spaniards, so racially we’re white. But if I did take a test and it said I have some African ancestry, I honestly wouldn’t give a shit. It just means that I have a small amount of African ancestry, not that I’m a completely different person. Since I don’t date nor want kids, it would be irrelevant since I’m not passing on genes
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Speaking of genetics. I have been engrossed by the topic lately, and, unfortunately, my family history is lost beyond my great-grandparents, thanks (not!) to the cursed Soviets.
So I had my DNA tested for an ethnicity estimate. This is my genetic outcome as a Ukrainian. Three out of four grandparents were born in Ukraine; all three in southern and western Ukraine. My paternal grandmother was born in south Siberia, with family surnames Litvinenko and Nalivaiko.
https://ibb.co/xGxGxRn
I was unhappy with how broad the regions were, so I ran some Montecarlo sampling on my raw DNA versus known world modern regions:
https://ibb.co/yn0mdtW
and against modern individuals:
https://ibb.co/X3Q1ZB7
It seems Ukrainian DNA to the Southwest is distinct to Russian DNA due to admixture with Moldovans and south Slavs, as well as Germans (Galician heritage). Also, those with Cossack heritage can expect Caucasian admixture (I meant the Caucasus region in the world, seeing as yanks consider people with a paler skintone to be ‘caucasian’ for reasons that are completely nonsensical to me).
I thought the American Indian coming up when sampling specifically against modern individuals must be a glitch, then I realised that native Siberian show up equivalent to native American Indians on DNA tests, which makes sense considering my paternal grandmother’s birthplace.
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That’s beyond fascinating. I’m realizing that much of what I wrote is crap because my genetic tests are from a decade ago, and it looks like the science has evolved, so your results are much more clear.
I’m in awe of your results. So narrow! I’m itching to do this, too, because my previous results are nothing like this specific. I have a great-grandma I suspect was of Romanian stock, and I want to know more about that.
Most importantly, though, how come I’ve got a Ukrainian on the blog and I didn’t know?? Please make requests for what you want me to write about. Anything for a compatriot.
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The situation surrounding knowledge of the Ukrainian genome has dramatically changed in 2020-2021 thanks to these guys at the University of Uzhgorod:
News » New study of the genome of Ukrainians, carried out by scientists of Uzhhorod National University, supplemented the knowledge about the diversity of the world’s population (uzhnu.edu.ua)
Genome diversity in Ukraine – PMC (nih.gov)
As much as 3.7% of Ukrainian alleles are unique in reference to the world and were not discovered prior to this study. Geneticists are still studying those collected samples to understand their clinical significance.
Quoting from the study directly:
“People of Ukraine carry many previously known and several novel genetic variants with clinical and functional importance that in many cases show allele frequencies different from neighboring populations in the rest of Europe, including Poland to the west, Romania to the south, the Baltics to the north, and Russia to the northeast.”
So yes, I believe we can safely say it’s a Russian narrative that we are not distinct from Russians genetically. And you should totally get genetically tested. 🙂
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This is fascinating stuff, I’m very grateful you brought it here. My own testing is from back in 2015 when I was trying to get pregnant. And it kind of feels like it was just yesterday.
I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I’ll now bug everybody I know to death with it.
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There is one topic I actually have for you on the tip of my tongue: a discussion on the causes of and the learnings from the Volyn Tragedy. As this is the chapter of WW2 that is still not closed for Poland and Ukraine; only this year did Zelensky finally grant Poland the permission to exhume their dead.
For many Western Ukrainians, including my family, the events of the Volyn Tragedy, particularly the horrors of Bloody Sunday, caused people to renounce their Ukrainian heritage and embrace Soviet-ism, for lack of a better word. So this is something I would like to understand from your perspective as a Ukrainianist.
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I don’t know much about it, unfortunately. I’m from a very different part of the country and we never heard of it. All I knew is that we never liked Poles because it was to escape them that we ended up with Russians in the first place. We barely even heard of UPA.
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