New Evidence from Yemenite Jews and Scandinavia. 12 March 2026, 23 Adar 5786.
DNA Changes. Food for Thought. Rabbi Yossi Mizrachi in a recent talk noted that the Jews from Yemen when they fist came to Israel were much darker than they are now. See: Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi - Do ultra orthodox jews believe in evolution?
# If Adam was black how do you have white people? If Adam was white how do you have blacks? How do you have Chinese? Orientals? How do you have so many different kinds of people, Chinese, Oriental, this that, blond, Scandinavian? How? The answer involves the continent, the air that people breathe, changes in the DNA the genes, changes in the DNA of people. If you are a dark Yemenite from Yemen next to the Houthi (Houti) over there, with your father and mother and "Saadia", and "Yichia", and "Zechariah". They all moved from Yemen to Israel - it (Israel) is not Scandinavia but it is also not Yemen, - and after two three generations, and all the Temanim (Yemenites) stay together, They are much lighter today, much much lighter than their grandparents when they came to Israel. Their grandparents when they came to Israel - some of them looked like Ethiopians, - that's how dark they were. Do you know one Temeni (Yemenite) in the woprld today that looks like an Ethiopian? You don't have it. Same thing people went to the area of the North Pole, over there you know Finland, Scandinavia, all these areas, all of them blond, blue eyes. Do you ever see someone who was born to Scandinavian people that is not blonde? They all blonde. Why is that? They lived there for hundreds of years. Slowly, slowly, it changed. It changed all of them to be lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter even without being mixed. - without. Jews by the way look like all kinds of people, white. black. blond, Arab Jews, German Jews, even Japanese and Chinese Jews. Why? The Jews always lived in exile, hundreds of years here, Hundreds of years there. So the Jews started to look like the people of the surroundings. #
====== Rabbi Mizrachi explains how many of the Yemenite Jews when they first came to Israel were similar in color to Jews from Ethiopia. Now they are still relatively darker than most other groups but much less so than in the past. This may be explained in part by intermixture with other groups BUT it cannot explain all the change.
This reminded us that in Scandinavia in the Iron Age and Viking Times the DNA was much less homogeneous than it is now. Nowadays North European types predominate overwhelmingly. In the past they did not Mediterranean and other types were much more prevalent.
The explanations (see below) suggested by the "experts" is that perhaps the non-native Scandinavian newcomers all had less children than the Scandinavian ones. Nevertheless they do not know for sure that this was the case. So too concerning the Yemenites color is determine by DNA, if color changes so does the DNA.
We often think of the Vikings as ultimate explorers, taking their culture with them to far-off lands. But we may not typically think of Viking age Scandinavia as a hub for migration from all over Europe.
In a study published in Cell, we show this is exactly what happened. The Viking period (late 8th century to mid 11th century) was the catalyst for an exceptional inflow of people into Scandinavia. These movements were greater than for any other period we analysed.
What's also striking is that later Scandinavians don't show the same high levels of non-local ancestry present in their Viking-era counterparts. We don't completely understand why the migrants, genetic impact was reduced in later Scandinavians, but there are some possibilities.
Two previous studies noted extensive migration into Scandinavia during the Viking age.
Since the study was based on a 2,000-year chronology, it was not only possible to see there was an increase in migration during the Viking era, but also that it starts to fall with the onset of the medieval period.
The non-local ancestry that arrives in the region at this time falls away in later periods. Much of the genetic influence from eastern Europe disappears and the western and southern influence becomes significantly diluted. The best way to explain this is that people who arrived in Scandinavia during Viking times did not have as many children as the people who were already living there.
We also looked at influences that began at earlier periods in time. For example, the DNA of modern Scandinavians changes gradually as you travel from north to south. This genetic 'cline', or gradient, is due to migrations into the region of people carrying shared genetic similarities known as the Uralic component.
Modern examples of where the Uralic genetic component can be found are among Sami people, people in modern Finland, some Native Americans and some central Asian groups.
In the largest genetic analysis of Viking remains ever conducted, paleogeneticist Ricardo Rodr guez-Varelal and his colleagues at Stockholm University and the Stockholm-based Centre for Paleogenetics analyzed Scandinavian burials going back 2,000 years.
The researchers compared 297 of those genomes to those of 16,638 modern-day Scandinavians and more than 9,000 people with ancestries spanning Europe and western Asia.
Viking Age Scandinavia was far more genetically diverse than its present-day populace.
'Modern Scandinavians have less non-local ancestry than Viking Age samples,' said the study. 'In some regions, a drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that ancient immigrants contributed proportionately less to the modern Scandinavian gene pool than indicated by the ancestry of genomes from the Viking and Medieval periods.'
British-Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia from the Viking period, while eastern Baltic ancestry was more localized to Gotland and central Sweden, they explained. Traces of British and Irish ancestry are still evident in modern Scandinavian genomes.
But those who came to Scandinavia during the heyday of Viking raiding and trading, whether merchants, missionaries or captives, have all but vanished from the gene pool of present-day Scandinavia.
'The drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that the Viking period migrants got less children, or somehow contributed proportionally less to the gene pool than the people who were already in Scandinavia,' Stockholm University geneticist Anders Gotherstrom, a report co-author, told the science journal Inverse. ======
