Why are there so many redheads among the Jews?
According to a reliable historical source such as the Bible, red hair has been part of Jewish heritage for a long time. The redhead was the son of the Old Testament patriarch Isaac named Esau. He may have been the progenitor of the Jewish people, but he sold his birthright to his younger brother Jacob for a bowl of lentil soup. From him is believed to have descended the Edomite people, including its most famous representative, the famous King Herod.
The redhead was the second ruler of the Kingdom of Israel, David, who made it a very powerful state and led to prosperity. According to the beliefs of Judaism, it was believed that the Messiah, who would revive the Jewish state and restore ancient piety in it, would be a man from the line of David.
So, red hair was once considered quite common among Jews. True, they are not of Middle Eastern origin among the modern representatives of this people. But let’s talk about it from the beginning and in detail.
Red is the rarest of the natural colors of human hair. It appeared due to a mutation in melanin cells. Normally, they have an oblong shape, and absorb all the color of the sun, which is why the hair appears black, and for the same reason, black is the most common hair color in humans. In this case, the melanin takes on a round shape, after which it reflects the red part of the light spectrum. Voila – the carrier of such genes becomes red.
This is the preferred mutation for the inhabitants of the north. In redheads, vitamin D is synthesized in the body by a natural way that southerners get from the hot sun. Among other things, an obligatory sign of this hair color is fair skin, which is less protective from ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, northern carriers of the gene, unlike those who live closer to the equator, are in a more advantageous evolutionary situation.
The red hair gene appeared between 100,000 years ago and 20,000 years ago. A more accepted version is the assumption that this happened in Neanderthals, whose descendants are to varying degrees representatives of all human races. In the future, red hair spread due to the migrations of northern Indo-Europeans – the owners of haplogroup R1b.
This genetic marker originated about 23,000 years ago, and is now most common in western Europe, in some places in Central Asia, and in the Middle East, in the vast Armenian highlands. Among European Ashkenazi Jews, the rate is usually 10 percent or more.
Most of the redheads live on the outskirts of the old Celtic world – in Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Many of them are found among the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Volga region, mainly among the Udmurts. The number of redheads among Ashkenazi groups reaches 6-8%. This is less than that of these ethnic groups, but more than that of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.
Red hair is a recessive trait. Therefore, it will manifest itself only if each of the person’s parents carries it within himself. Moreover, they themselves do not necessarily have to have such a hair color, it is enough that they have such a gene. Among the Ashkenazim it arose and became entrenched as a result of a long tradition of intimate marriages.
Scholars claim that this group of Jews is the descendants of only 350 people. As early as Roman times, a small Jewish community arose on the Rhine River. In the future, it increased in number and then decreased again because of wars, mixed marriages, and persecution. Many of these people turned out to be distant relatives, which did not prevent the creation of a family, but contributed to the accumulation of the red hair gene. Although, of course, this is only one of the genetic features of Ashkenazim