Why do many European Jewish people share similar appearance despite not coming from a shared genetic heritage?

Question

I do hope that this question does not cause offence, because I mean it seriously.

I am curious to learn why many (not all) European jews share similar physical characteristics, even though their descendancy may be very distant.

For example, many Jewish women have frizzy black hair, prominent forehead, olive skin.

I have many Jewish friends and although clearly many Jewish people look very different, it seems that some physical characteristics are shared, even if those people have no close descendancy to a particular regional background. My close friend 'looks Jewish' and yet their family has lived in the UK for many generations.

I do hope this question does not cause offence. I'm not saying that 'all jewish people look alike' because there are clearly huge variations in appearance, but I do think that some physical attributes are just that - attributable to Jewish people more than others.

Why is this the case? It is difficult to say that Christians look alike.

Answer 1

I hope no-one takes offence to your question. It is a valid one and you clearly state this as a generalisation and obviously understand that there is a huge variation in jewish appearance, but yes, there is some characturistics that are considered 'jewish'.

I think it is as someone has already said, there is a geographical orrigination and historically jews have not married out of religion, although this is of course a generalisation in its self. So the gene pool has largely remained intact. Obviousy the genes for those characturistics have been carried through the generations and not been widely circulated among other religious backgrounds. Although again I stress those characturistics are not exclusively jewish and intermarriage has scattered them about into other cultures too.

Perhaps even, many of those characturistic genes are recessive, and therefore generally appear in the more pure jewish families than the ones of more mixed race.

But I do dissagree with about the 'christian' look. I'm sure out of a line up of jews, christians, muslims, hindus, buddists and many other religions, that someone could pick out a christian. Generally speaking of course. I'm sure we could also find many traditianaly jewish or traditionally muslim looking people and actually find that thay are infact christian or buddist.

Answer 2

I am quite surprised at your question. There are so many Jewish people who do not look "Jewish" are blond ,blue eyed, light skin.
Jews have inter-married for centuries, look at the Russian or Polish Jews you can hardly tell the difference from Christians.
Maybe the very religious Jews who live in closed communities might resemble a certain type, but others? No way.

Answer 3

It might be because the Jewish people marry other Jewish people not talking about nationality but relligion wise. So even if no common genetic heritage eventually there starts new heritage from the marriages.

Answer 4

Most Jewish people are descended from the Israelites and others who joined the religion. It's an ethno-religious group.

Answer 5

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