Most of my DNA explorations have centered around my Dad’s Norwegian DNA because so many Norwegians have tested and the populations of those ancestors are only mildly endogamous; so it is easy to find new cousins and fun to work with those results.
My grandfather and me, summer 1955
My mother’s father was a German Jew. The number of DNA matches this gives me, my brother, and my two maternal aunts is astronomical. Frequently I will match someone from Eastern Europe for five or six large segments who cannot share an ancestor with us for the last 200-300 years and is even listed as a “distant cousin.” If they were Norwegian, that amount of shared DNA would make them my 2nd cousin.
This has been so frustrating that I just about stopped working on my Jewish DNA. A fellow Jewish researcher told me to ignore matches who did not have at least one 23cM shared segment!
Today there were dozens of news articles about the European Jewish founder effect suggesting that all Ashkenazim are descended from about 350 people who lived in about 1300 A.D. or so. This, combined with a fair amount of endogamy, would explain the large amount of shared DNA among European Jews.
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