In getting my report from 23andMe yesterday, there was definitely a lot of surprise, a little disappointment, and a whole lot of funny.

I had asked Norma a while back if I could be Ashkenazi (my GYN said they have an increased risk of breast cancer) and she said she didn’t think so since I didn’t have dark eyes and because I’m pale-skinned. it was soon determined, or so I thought, that I was probably Litvak. So when I read that I was 99% Ashkenazi, I was like wow! Norma was surprised as well when I shared the news with her.

Where there was a slight bit of disappointment was that when I first glanced at the ancestry composition, I expected a long list of percentage breakdowns of all the different countries I supposedly originated from, as I’ve seen in sample reports. Yet there was virtually nothing there that was kind of boring, LOL. Okay, I’m 99.3% “broadly” European. I’m broadly 0.2% East Asian & Native American, broadly 0.2% Western Asian & North African, and then there’s 0.3% that’s unassigned. I guess unassigned means that they don’t yet have enough data collected to get any real definitive information and some areas, even though they tell me I have shared DNA with 1365 customers and 75 of them are “close” relatives. That’s why, the more people that submit samples, the percentages of our origins can change over time. So I’ll have to look for updates periodically.

The fact that the mitochondrial Eve, the mother of all humans, lived in Eastern Africa over 150K years ago makes me wonder if that explains the 0.2% African in me even though it says “North” African.

The Jews started out in East Asia which could also explain the tiny speck of Asian in me, and they eventually settled in Central and Eastern Europe, later migrating to America and other places in hopes of gaining acceptance in escaping persecution. So instead of showing me a list of countries, they just showed me a region which is what I expected it to be. It told me 100% of my relatives are Ashkenazi and 77% of them were less likely to live near a farm when they were young.

Just like not all blacks are quite the same since some can be American, Haitian, Jamaican, African, etc., we come in a variety as well with Mizrahi, Sephardic, Ethiopian, Hasidic, and the most common which is Ashkenazi. Thanks to Shitler, though, I am a very unique breed with only 10 to 12 million of us left on Earth and about 5 million in the US. I always did say no one had it as bad as the Jews (and gays) for a reason.

Jews were the least diverse in that they were very strict about marrying other Jews but that was mostly because they were forbidden to do so like blacks and whites were once forbidden to marry. Over the years there has been more inbreeding. Tom and I are an example of a mixed marriage, so I’m learning.

Yeah, this is the funny part. We used to “argue” in a funny way about being a bi-racial couple. He always insisted that’s what we were, and I was like, “Naw, Jewish is a religion, not a race. I’m white, you’re white…”

But I guess it really is both, LOL. We get a kick out of the name Ashkenazi too because it sounds so Indian. As silly as it may sound, I felt a surge of pride to be this unique Ashkenazi despite not doing anything to earn it, and the fact that I don’t have an exciting mix of things in my heritage.

Also funny was how Tom joked about me being the purebred while he was the mutt, LOL. It’s true, too. His composition looked more typical with him being 99.6% European, 36.9% French & German, 26.7% Scandinavian, 22.7% British & Irish, and 0.6% Finnish. He also had something like 1% unassigned.

This entry is getting a bit long so I will save additional info I’ve learned for another time.