Book Review:
"How History and Genetics Define Jewish Diversity and Identity" 
5/5 stars
" Info packed updating of interdisciplinary topic" 
*******
Of the book: 

-127 pages/11 chapters. 11.5/per
-99 references=0.8/per
-There are a few spelling mistakes, and a lot more work should have been done to point the sources back to the text.
-Appendix and glossary, but no index. (The suggestions for further reading may be the bibliography, but that's not clear.)

This book only takes 2~3 hours to read, and at that time-cost there's really no excuse not to read it. 

It should probably be read once and then reread 6 months to a year later. 

This is essentially a broadside with a brief synopsis of Genetics as well as the history surrounding the situation. (It also puts me in mind of "Legacy," by Dr Harry Ostrer.)

The same story is told again and again, which is essentially: some number of Jews start out in place X, and through war or expulsion move to place Y. And while there, they pick up bits of genetic variation from surrounding populations. 

The overwhelming majority of Jewish history has been Diaspora history:

1. And those in The Diaspora have most of the time been quite a bit richer than those in Eretz Yisrael--and that is what kept them living in the Diaspora in preference to Israel. (American Jews are a lot better off on average than Israeli Jews, and they also don't have compulsory military service.)

2. It seems that when Jews live with each other, their internal bickering gets out of hand and makes it difficult to live there. (The Hasmomean Dynasty, THEN. The bar-Kochba revolt, THEN. Obstructive, non-working, non-contributing, non-tax paying Haredim in Israel, NOW.)

In some cases, these Jews stabilized into some sort of endogamy (Europe)  and in other cases they were so overwhelmed by the local population that there are only a few traces of Jewish ancestry left (sub-Saharan Africa); the question becomes "what is the range of Middle Eastern ancestry versus that of local populations?"

The Lost Tribes is also a powerful myth that will not die: in reality, the Northern Kingdom was conquered and the people were just displaced--as was the habit of Assyrians.
*******

Most interesting points: 

1. Debunking of the ever-undying Khazar hypothesis. AGAIN. 

2. Falasha Mura≠ Beta Israel 

3. Bene Israel≠Cochin≠Baghdadi Jews 

4. There are about 50,000 Lemba. Most are Xtian. Some are Muslim. 

5. As of the time of the book, there were about 50 million Igbos. About 3,000 out of that total are Jewish (according to some definitions).  For the record, that is 0.006%

6. It is silly to say that someone is 1% Scandinavian or 2% Spanish when those small percentages lie within the margin of error. (I have noticed the DNA testing services are very coy about their margins of error.)

7. 14,000 wars have taken place between 3500 BCE and the late 20th century, with billions of people killed or displaced.

8. "Owing to the high degree of intermarriage and the end of endogamy, it will soon be nearly impossible to establish the genetic relatedness of Jews living in the Diaspora to a single Jewish ancestry." 
*****

Extended thoughts: 

1. In the minds of a lot of people, everyone else is a sideshow to the Ashkenazim. Often, they themselves don't know anything about other traditions that are actually *older* than their own. 

This book does remedy some of that, though there's much more to learn. 

2. The author takes the trouble to debunk the 4 Favorite Useful Idiots of Anti-semites (these 4 are super-popular among Hebrew Israelites, and that right there should tell you something). 

a. Paul Wexler wrote a book called "The Ashkenazi Jews," and he seems to think that they are Slavic descendants of Khazars. He is a linguist, and not a geneticist.

b. Arthur Koestler (a journalist, and not a geneticist) wrote a book called "The 13th Tribe" (in 1976), which also argued in favor of the Khazar hypothesis. This is before the entire human genome have been sequence, let alone Genome Wide Association Studies.

c. Shlomo Sands is a professor of History (again, not Genetics) and seems to promote the Khazar hypothesis. 

d. Ehran Elhaik has published papers in support of that, although he is an extreme minority opinion (also, the only one of these that is actually trained in genetics).

3. It seems that Ashkenazim descended from about 20,000 Jews that moved from Italy into Europe during the first millennium (Roman Empire Jews are thought to have been between 4 and 6 million people)--and then these were subject to a severe bottleneck about 7 to 8 centuries ago and the remaining 350 to 450 (!) are the founding population of modern-day Ashkenazim.

4. The author suggests (and he is not the first) that modern day Israel is creating a new type of Jew because of the coalescence of populations from many parts of the world. Mixed marriages are quite popular over there - - and far more than they are in the Diaspora. He also notes that a lot of these Diaspora cultures were intact up until moving to Israel, at which point they were immediately destroyed by amalgamation. 

Verdict:  Recommended.

Vocabulary: 

Romaniotes
Yevanic
Judeo-Georgian (Kivruli)
Frawardigan
Neofiti
Susiti
Judeo-Tat (Juhuri)
Single Tandem Repeats
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms 
Genome Wide Association Study