“…Whereas recent Y-chromosomal studies have identified a trend of genetic affinity among Jewish populations [12,15,18], most notably a shared group of haplotypes common in Jewish priests from different Jewish populations [16,52,53], past autosomal studies of multiple Jewish populations have been somewhat more equivocal regarding the clustering of Jewish populations separate from non-Jewish populations [13,14,17,19,54-56]. Recent genomic studies that have identified a component of distinctive ancestry for Jewish individuals have largely focused on Ashkenazi Jews sampled in the United States in relation to the broader European-American population [7-10], finding most recently that individuals with even partial Ashkenazi ancestry can be detected on the basis of principal components analysis [10].…”