East/Northeast Asian Admixture in Ashkenazic Jews (original) (raw)

by Kevin Alan Brook

Occasionally I get comments from Ashkenazic Jews from eastern Europe that they or certain members of their families have a few physical characteristics typical of East Asian peoples belonging to the Mongoloid race, such as something Asiatic about their eyes, cheekbones, or hair thickness. There are also some photographs of Ashkenazim where such features are faintly evident, although European and Middle Eastern (West Asian and Southwest Asian) phenotypes prevail in most families.

It turns out there is a genetic basis for a small amount of East Asian and Northeast Asian (East Siberian) ancestry in Ashkenazim, just as there is in some neighbors of Ashkenazim such as non-Jewish Hungarians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Russians, though the Mongoloid inputs into these populations didn't always come from the same source populations. Let's review the evidence we have so far:

East Asian hair thickness allele in some Ashkenazic Jews

On August 6, 2012, results from 230 Ashkenazic Jews who took the 1540C allele test were added to The ALlele FREquency Database's Graphical display of Allele Frequencies for Val370Ala - Locus Ectodysplasin A receptor by Kenneth Kay Kidd, Professor of Genetics at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

This page explains: “This is a C/T SNP in the coding region of EDAR gene. [...] The 1540C allele of this polymorphism has been reported to be associated with Asian-specific hair thickness (Fujimoto A etal).”

The full citation of this study is: Akihiro Fujimoto, Ryosuke Kimura, Jun Ohashi, Kazuya Omi, Rika Yuliwulandari, Lilian Batubara, Mohammad Syamsul Mustofa, Urai Samakkarn, Wannapa Settheetham-Ishida, Takafumi Ishida, Yasuyuki Morishita, Takuro Furusawa, Minato Nakazawa, Ryutaro Ohtsuka, and Katsushi Tokunaga."A scan for genetic determinants of human hair morphology: EDAR is associated with Asian hair thickness." Human Molecular Genetics 17:6 (March 15, 2008): pages 835-843. The authors wrote, “It was inferred from geographic distribution of 1540T/C and the long-range haplotype test that 1540C arose after the divergence of Asians from Europeans and its frequency has rapidly increased in East Asian populations. These findings lead us to conclude that EDAR is a major genetic determinant of Asian hair thickness and the 1540C allele spread through Asian populations due to recent positive selection.”

"Modeling Recent Human Evolution in Mice by Expression of a Selected EDAR Variant" by Yana G. Kamberov, Sijia Wang, Jingze Tan, Pascale Gerbault, Abigail Wark, Longzhi Tan, Yajun Yang, Shilin Li, Kun Tang, Hua Chen, Adam Powell, Yuval Itan, Dorian Fuller, Jason Lohmueller, Junhao Mao, Asa Schachar, Madeline Paymer, Elizabeth Hostetter, Elizabeth Byrne, Melissa Burnett, Andrew P. McMahon, Mark G. Thomas, Daniel E. Lieberman, Li Jin, Clifford J. Tabin, Bruce A. Morgan, and Pardis C. Sabeti in Cell 152:4 (February 14, 2013): pages 691-702 states: “An adaptive variant of the human Ectodysplasin receptor, EDARV370A, is one of the strongest candidates of recent positive selection from genomewide scans. [...] EDAR370A has been associated with increased scalp hair thickness and changed tooth morphology in humans[...] Spatially explicit simulation, haplotype, and maximum likelihood analyses suggest that 370A originated once in central China more than 30,000 years BP with a selective coefficient that is one of the highest measured in human populations.”

Of the Ashkenazim Kidd tested, 1.7% of them were found to have the 1540C allele, with the remaining 98.3% having the 1540T allele.

By contrast, none of the 52 Sephardic Jews or 80 Yemenite Jews Kidd tested have the 1540C allele. Nor do any of the Samaritans, Bedouins, or Palestinian Arabs of the Israel-Palestine region have it. The Druze have a very small frequency of carrying it. Kuwaitis sometimes have it too, and Somalis for some reason have it in a significant frequency.

The 1540C allele is most prevalent among East Asian peoples like the Japanese and Qiang. It's also common in Amerindians, who mostly descend from North/East Asians. One also finds it in Asian lands west of East Asia among part-Mongoloid peoples like Kazakhs, Hazaras, and Khantys. Among European peoples who possess quantities of 1540C are those with known East/North Asian ancestry including Chuvash, Finns, Hungarians, and Russians, but also Greeks and Adygei. It is not, however, found among most West European populations like French, Italians, Danes, Irish, British, and Sardinians.

As a side note, Figure 1 in "Positive Selection in East Asians for an EDAR Allele that Enhances NF-kB Activation" by Jarosław Bryk, Emilie Hardouin, Irina Pugach, David Hughes, Rainer Strotmann, Mark Stoneking, and Sean Myles in PLoS ONE 3:5 (May 21, 2008): e2209 is consistent with Kidd's results in finding the EDAR allele 370A in a small number of Russians, and, likewise, looking at Figure 1 in Kamberov et al.'s study there is a barely-perceptible red sliver (designating the 370A variant) on the pie chart for the Northern Russians whom Kamberov's team tested. The more westerly European peoples tested by Kamberov's team entirely lack the allele.

How to find your personal EDAR result
Want to know if you have the East Asian version of EDAR? If you've been autosomally tested by 23andMe, Family Tree DNA, or AncestryDNA,download your raw data, open the file, and look for the row marked "rs3827760". If you see AA or TT, you don't carry the East Asian version. If you see AG or CT, you inherited the East Asian version from only one of your parents, but still have an increased chance of having straighter and thicker hair and shovel-shaped incisors. If you see GG or CC, you inherited the East Asian version from both parents.

Some specific East Asian haplogroups in some Ashkenazic Jews

Haplogroup evidence shows that several ancestral lines from East Asian women came into the Ashkenazic population hundreds of years ago through interracial relationships. The existence of such relationships before the 19th or 20th century wasn't documented; we only know they took place because of the genetic evidence.

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The mtDNA haplogroup M33c is found among Ashkenazim from Belarus as well as among South Chinese people "but from absolutely nowhere in between" those two regions, reported the genetic genealogist Ted Kandell to the Y-DNA-G2c group at Yahoo! Groups as well as hereand here, though he mistakenly called it M33c1.

Family Tree DNA's "Jewish Ukraine West" project has Jews whose ancestors lived in western Ukraine and Moldova. The following project members confirmed that their haplogroup is M33c as of February 16, 2015:

Autosomal DNA component analysis
confirms partial East Asian ancestry
of Ashkenazic Jews
"No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews" by Doron M. Behar, Mait Metspalu, Yael Baran, Naama M. Kopelman, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Ariella Gladstein, Shay Tzur, Havhannes Sahakyan, Ardeshir Bahmanimehr, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Kristiina Tambets, Elza K. Khusnutdinova, Aljona Kusniarevich, Oleg Balanovsky, Elena Balanovsky, Lejla Kovacevic, Damir Marjanovic, Evelin Mihailov, Anastasia Kouvatsi, Costas Traintaphyllidis, Roy J. King, Ornella Semino, Anotonio Torroni, Michael F. Hammer, Ene Metspalu, Karl Skorecki, Saharon Rosset, Eran Halperin, Richard Villems, and Noah A. Rosenberg was published in the journal Human Biology's December 2013 issue (volume 85, number 6) on pages 859-900. Here are two relevant quotations from it: * “Minimal distinction is visible between the Western and Eastern Ashkenazi Jews but a minutely elevated membership is visible in the Eastern Ashkenazi group for the largely East Asian clusters _k_9 (yellow) and _k_10 (orange).” * “Within the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, we do see a signal (2.2%) of components common in East Asia that are less visible in Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe or European Sephardi Jews (0.6%). These components also appear in Eastern Europeans and in some Middle Eastern populations, such as Yemenis, so that it is difficult to attribute their minor elevation in Eastern Ashkenazi Jews to a particular origin.”
(Yemenis have pointed out that their people from the Hadhramaut region of Yemen had intermarried with people from Malaysia and Indonesia. This would explain some of their eastern genetics.)
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18 out of 21 Ashkenazic samples tested in laboratories for use in the "HapMap 3, HGDP-CEPH, and Behar et al. (2010) datasets" discussed hereand graphed herecarry detectable amounts of "East Eurasian" ancestry (shown on the graph in red), usually around 1% or 2%, with the highest amount (3%) detected in sample number 433. The presence of this component is also true of the Ashkenazic sample submitted to the "Genomes Unzipped" project by Dan Vorhaus, who is coded as "DBV001" on the graph here.
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The Somali-Canadian genetic researcher "drobbah" used a well-constructed G25 model to determine ancient admixture proportions for different population clusters of Ashkenazic Jews. In his post of the results, he found that Ashkenazim from Ukraine average 1.2% East Asian, Ashkenazim from Russia average 1.8% East Asian, Ashkenazim from Poland average 1.0% East Asian, Ashkenazim from Lithuania average 1.4% East Asian, and Ashkenazim from Belarussia average 1.2% East Asian, but Ashkenazim from Germany score 0% East Asian.
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The genetic testing company 23andMehas tested the DNA of many Ashkenazim and reported back that they have a small amount of East Asian ancestry. This used to include what were purported to be tiny fractions from the Turkic-speaking **Yakut (Sakha)**people of eastern Siberia or a people closely related to them, but William Boyce told me in March 2015 that 23andMe had updated their methodology or their reference samples and a result was that the formerly "Yakut" segments in Ashkenazim were usually reclassified as "Broadly East Asian" and, later, as "Manchurian & Mongolian". * Two American personalities whose recent ancestors were all East European Ashkenazim and were genetically tested by 23andMe for the episode "Our People, Our Traditions" in season 2 of PBS's television series "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. were found to have 0.1% East Asian admixture: the attorney Alan Morton Dershowitz and the playwright Tony Kushner. Many of Dershowitz's recent ancestors lived in the western Galician region of the Austrian Empire in towns that are now part of Poland. At least some of Kushner's ancestors also lived in Poland. * The architect Frank Gehry (Goldberg)'s recent ancestors were all East European Jews from the Russian Empire in cities that are now part of Poland and Belarus. On the episode "Visionaries" in season 3 of "Finding Your Roots", it was revealed by 23andMe that Frank has 0.1% East Asian admixture. * Joseph M. Cohen, whose recent ancestors were Ashkenazim on both sides of his family, was found to have 0.1% East Asian admixture, as shown on his 23andMe results here. * Neil Gaiman, a writer whose ancestors were all Jews with roots in Poland and eastern Europe, wrote on December 10, 2012 here: "According to @23andMe, genetically I am 99.6% Ashkenazi, 0.3% unspecified European and 0.1% East Asian. I want to know the story of that .1%" Nearly a decade later, on February 2, 2022, Neil wrote herethat 23andMe had updated his estimates to read 99.8% Ashkenazi Jewish + 0.2% Korean. * Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, from a Jewish family, wrotehere that 23andMe told her "I am 97.2% Ashkenazi and only 2.6% European, with .2% of my DNA being East Asian and/or Native American." * Jason Greenberg, all of whose recent ancestorswere Ashkenazim, hailing from Romania, Belarus, Poland, and the Austrian Empire, was surprised by 23andMe's speculative modeestimatinghe's 0.1% "East Asian" on top of his 96.3% Ashkenazi and other European population elements. Its standard and conservative modes don't propose any East Asian ancestry for him. * "Arkady", an adoptee who discovered through genetic testing that all his recent ancestors were Ashkenazim, wrote here that 23andMe estimated he's 0.1% "Japanese" plus less than 0.1% "Broadly East Asian". * Gary Niemen, an Ashkenazic Jew, wrote in GEDmatch's General Interest Items discussion subforum that he scores less than 0.1% "Korean" plus between 0.1% and 0.2% "Broadly East Asian" on top of his 94.6% Ashkenazi and other European and Middle Eastern population elements. * Judd R. Rothstein, an Ashkenazic Jew whose ancestors lived in Ukraine (Odessa, Yalta, Uman), told me, "I had an autosomel DNA test done on my great uncle, [...] and it confirmed that he has East Asian ancestry [...] 23andme said that my uncle was related to the people of 'Yakut' [...] my uncle's percentage was .01 which on a conservative estimate which and .02 on standard--which is why it could not have been of recent origin." * Deb Berger wrote this comment to the YouTube.com video "Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)" uploaded by ttkturan: "I just had my DNA test done and was found to have 99.4% Eastern European DNA, - 94.4% Ashkenazi, 4% other Eastern European and and .6% Asian with a bit less than .1% Yakut. Interesting!" I assume Deb tested through 23andMe as that has both Ashkenazi and Yakut reference populations and a category called "Eastern European".
However: some non-Jewish European people such as some ethnic English and some people with mixed English/French/German/Swiss/and-or/Irish ancestry also show (or at least showed prior to 2015) small amounts of Yakut component at 23andMe, usually also just 0.01%. The supposed Yakut admixture is not exclusive to Ashkenazim by any means.
Small amounts of admixed elements of ancestry back more than 5 or 6 generations (such as an Amerindian ancestor who married into a predominantly European family) are often not detectable using 23andMe's "Ancestry Painting" technique because the inheritance of DNA from a particular ancestor many generations ago is not guaranteed. The specific element they categorize as "Ashkenazi" is the concatenation of ancestral roots shared between Eastern Ashkenazim and Western Ashkenazim, that is Middle Eastern + Western/Southern European. "Eastern European" is an extra element admixed into Eastern Ashkenazim from peoples like Poles and Lithuanians.
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Jeffrey D. Wexler told me he tested both of his Ashkenazic parents' autosomal DNA through the genetic testing company Family Tree DNA. Then he used the autosomal DNA functions on GEDmatch and discovered that his mother (whose grandparents lived in Botosani, Romania and Grigoriopol, Moldova in the late 19th century) "has a Siberian admixture that is not insubstantial." He used the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project's Jtest utility which includes an Ashkenazi reference population. Jeff told me, "According to Jtest, my Mom has a Siberian admixture of 1.71%. [...] Koryak and Chukchi are identified as two of her secondary populations. By comparison, according to Jtest my Dad (JBW) is so Ashkenazi that he doesn't have any secondary populations on mixed mode population sharing. (All of his ancestors lived in Poland as of the early 19th century.) Nevertheless, Jtest shows that he has a Siberian admixture of 0.64%." Koryaks and Chukchis live in the Russian Far East. Although a similarity between his mother and those tribes was found, it doesn't mean his most recent purely or predominantly Mongoloid ancestor was a member of one of those tribes, because in comparisons of mixed mode population sharing "the software looks for two-population fits that could explain one's autosomal DNA make-up, but that your ancestors might not come from either of the populations", as Jeff explained. So his ancestor may have been some other kind of Siberian. Jeff wrote herethat his ancestors also included Ashkenazim from Poland and Ukraine and there's a story in his family that one of his ancestors was a Sephardic Jew from Turkey, and Jeff stated that his personal Jtest estimates he's 1.04% Siberian.
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Cyndi Norwitz is "100% Ashkenazi" whose mother's roots lie in Slovakia and father's roots lie in Poland and Belarus. DNA companies report her Ashkenazic component to be between 94% and 100%. She wrote herethat Jtest says she has 0.62% East Asian autosomal admixture but no Siberian admixture and that her EUtest results include 0.81% East Asian but again no Siberian admixture. She also got tested through 23andMe, which she told me reported "I've got 0.1% Yakut (and <0.1% nonspecific East Asian) on speculative. Both on my X. My brother and dad don't have it, so it came from my mom."
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"John Doe" a.k.a. Guy J. Jacks provided his Eurogenes results here. His Jtest results show 0.30% East Asian but no Siberian admixture. Similarly, his EUtest results show 0.35% East Asian but no Siberian. His Eurogenes K=15 results herecontend that he's 0.62% Southeast Asian, lacking the Siberian element, and allegedly 0.29% Oceanian. His Eurogenes K=13 results here read 1.02% for East Asian. Keep in mind, however, that K=13's results for percentages under 2% are sometimes false readings; for example it gives some Ashkenazim false Amerindian scores.His ancestors were Ashkenazim who lived in Poland, the Galician region of western Ukraine, Germany, and the Posnen region of eastern Prussia.
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I saw the results of a person whose recent ancestry is entirely Ashkenazic with ancestors who lived in the 19th century in Galician Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. Their Jtest score for "EAST_ASIAN" is 1.16% (and their "ASHKENAZI" score is 28.55%), their EUtest score for "EAST_ASIAN" is 1.39%, and their Eurogenes K36 score for "South_Chinese" is 0.40%.
People of fully Ashkenazic ancestry in recent generations always show "ASHKENAZI" scores between 25 and 40 percent in GEDmatch's Jtest, and usually above 27 percent. With that in mind, I obtained further estimates of East Asian and Siberian admixture from Ashkenazim to supplement this section: * A person scoring 27.41% "ASHKENAZI" has 2.51% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest (the highest I have seen so far for a full Ashkenazi), the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they're 98% Ashkenazic plus 2% Chinese or 97.9% Ashkenazic plus Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese, Eurogenes K=13 suggests they could be 3.20% East Asian, and Eurogenes K=36 suggests they're 1.46% Indo-Chinese (Indochina geographically includes southeast Asia) but gives them zero scores for "South_Chinese" and "East_Asian". * A person scoring 28.21% "ASHKENAZI" has 2.33% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 2.1% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or 2.2% Korean or Japanese, Eurogenes K=13 estimates they are 2.12% "East_Asian" and Eurogenes K=36 estimates they are 1.09% "East_Asian" plus 0.69% "Malayan". * A person scoring 27.69% "ASHKENAZI" whose known ancestors were all Ashkenazim in Ukraine and Poland has 2.08% "EAST_ASIAN" and 0.84% "SIBERIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 2.2% Japanese or Korean or 2% Northern Han Chinese or 1.9% Chinese or 2.9% Kazakh or 1.1% Chukchi or Koryak with the remainder Ashkenazic, and 23andMe suggests they're 0.3% Yakut. * A person scoring 31.81% "ASHKENAZI" has 2% "EAST_ASIAN" and 0.52% "SIBERIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 1.2% Chinese or 1.3% Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese or 0.1% Selkup or Chukchi or 0.2% Kazakh with the remainder Ashkenazic, and Eurogenes K=36 suggests they're 1.07% "South_Chinese" and 0.15% "East_Asian" but zero percent "Indo-Chinese". * A person scoring 28.7% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.92% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 98.7% Ashkenazic plus 1.3% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese, Eurogenes K=13 suggests they're 1.26% East Asian, and Eurogenes K=36 suggests they're 1.41% "Indo-Chinese" but gives them zero scores for "South_Chinese" and "East_Asian". * A person scoring 29.23% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.39% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 99.3% Ashkenazic plus 0.7% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese, and Eurogenes K=13 suggests they're 2.50% East Asian. * A person scoring 28.31% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.66% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest and the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 98.8% Ashkenazic plus 1.2% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese. * A person scoring 30.84% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.58% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, and the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 99.3% Ashkenazic plus 0.7% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese. * A person scoring 29.73% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.27% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 99.5% Ashkenazic plus 0.5% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or Korean or 99.6% Ashkenazic plus 0.4% Japanese, and Eurogenes K=36 suggests they're 0.34% "South_Chinese". * A person scoring 28.48% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.25% "SIBERIAN" and 0.34% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, and the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 99.2% Ashkenazic plus 0.8% Nganassan or 99.1% Ashkenazic plus 0.9% Chukchi or Koryak or 98.9% Ashkenazic plus 1.1% Selkup. * A person scoring 27.64% "ASHKENAZI" has 2.31% "SIBERIAN" in Jtest, and the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 1.9% Nganassan or 2.1% Koryak or 2.1% Chukchi with the remainder Ashkenazic. * A person scoring 27.34% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.97% "SIBERIAN" in Jtest, and the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 1.9% Koryak or 2% Chukchi or 1.6% Nganassan with the remainder Ashkenazic. * A person scoring 31.55% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.54% "SIBERIAN" and 0.95% "EAST_ASIAN" in Jtest, and Eurogenes K=13 suggests they're 1.97% Siberian and 1.54% East Asian. * A person scoring 27.17% "ASHKENAZI" has 1.52% "EAST_ASIAN" and 0.13% "SIBERIAN" in Jtest, the Jtest oracle's mixed mode suggests they could be 99.1% Ashkenazic plus 0.9% Chinese or Northern Han Chinese or Korean or Japanese, and Eurogenes K=13 suggests they're 1.76% East Asian. * Many people of full Ashkenazic descent have zero "EAST_ASIAN" and "SIBERIAN" scores in Jtest.
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Seth Rogoff ordered an autosomal DNA test from Family Tree DNA. He then processed his raw data through the Eurogenes ANE (Ancient North Eurasian) K=7 test which calculated for him, as he posted here, that he has 1.90% "East_Eurasian" ancestry. His Jtest estimates are 0.80% East Asian and 0.81% Siberian as he postedhere. His recent ancestors were Ashkenazim from Ukraine (including the Galician region), Poland, and Lithuania and his "Ashkenazi Diaspora" ethnic component level in Family Tree DNA's myOrigins screen is 100%.
"John Doe" a.k.a. Guy J. Jacks, another Ashkenazi (whom I also discuss further up this page), was told by the Eurogenes ANE K=7 test that he's 0.31% East Eurasian, as he wrote in a comment here.
P. F., another person who knows his recent ancestors were Ashkenazi, and whose Ashkenazi ethnic component level in 23andMe is about 95% on standard view and about 99% on speculative view, was told by the Eurogenes ANE K=7 test that he's 4.08% East Eurasian, as he wrote in a comment here.
However, the Eurogenes ANE K=7 test in its version housed at GEDmatch is known to be partly defective at least for wildly overestimating some people's ANE scores.
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Peter B. Golden told me he tested his autosomal DNA through National Geographic's Geno 2.0 and learned he has 2% of the "Northeast Asian" component (that includes the peoples of China, Japan, and Mongolia in their definition). Peter's recent ancestors and relatives were Ashkenazim who lived in Belarus and Russia proper. Geno's admixture detection technique traces a person's ancestry several thousand years back. That's much further back than 23andMe can trace.
Likewise, Brian wrote here and herethat his ancestors were mostly Ashkenazim from the Galician region of western Ukraine except for one Jewish family line from Germany and that Geno 2.0 informed him he's 2% "Northeast Asian".
David, posting under the pseudonym "Phyllis Sharon", wrote here that all his recent ancestors were Ashkenazim and that Geno 2.0 told him he's 3% "Northeast Asian".
Boyce told me that an Ashkenazi woman in his project who carries N9a3 is reported to be 2% "Northeast Asian" by Geno 2.0 and that her family's oral history claims her great-great-great-grandmother (the ancestor she inherits N9a3 from) came from Mongolia.
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Martin Davis' recent ancestors were all Ashkenazim. The New York Genome Center's DNA.LAND interpreted Martin to be 2% "Northeast Asian: Siberian", as he wrote inside GEDmatch's Native American discussion subforum. This category is derived from population samples from the Chukchi, Itelmen, Koryak, Chaplin, Naukan, and Sireniki peoples.
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"Targum", whose recent ancestors were all Ashkenazim, wrote here that he is estimated by WeGene.com according to their algorithm in place as of January 2017 to have 1.77% of his ancestry stemming from peoples of China, including 1.04% Uygur (northwestern China) + 0.57% Lahu (a people in Yunnan province in southwestern China, south of Sichuan province) + 0.14% Hmong-Mien.
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Ted Kandell's four grandparents were Ashkenazim from Ukraine, Belarus, and Romania. Professor Doug McDonald analyzed Ted's raw data and suggested that "East Asia" ancestry exists on portions of his chromosomes 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 16, as Ted showed us here. The trouble is McDonald also identified a few other segments as "America" in origin which can't be right but must instead refer to descent from Eurasian people who are related to Amerindians.
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Ted Kandell wrote herethat "Ashkenazi Jews and South Chinese" sometimes share some "autosomal segments". However, I have never seen an autosomal segment shared between Ashkenazim and Chinese that properly triangulates in a cluster, and in any event these segments are small in size.

Other genetic traits
that can be suggestive
of partial East Asian ancestry
in Ashkenazic Jews
The ABCC11 gene includes the SNP rs17822931 whose allele settings determine whether a person's ear wax is dry or wet. A person carrying genotype AA (equal to TT) has dry ear wax. Although not all East Asians have the dry type of wax, and not all European Christians have the wet type, the general trend is that the dry type is much more prevalent among East Asians. On January 6, 2021, Daniel Nussbaum II, M.D. told JewishGen's mailing list about his comparisons between Ashkenazic Jews and other Caucasoid people: "This is purely anecdotal, but once I learned of the two different types of ear wax, I noticed a higher incidence of flaky dry ear wax in my Jewish patients."
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SUMMARY: Genetic testing consistently shows 1-2% Northeast Asian and East Asian (not Central Asian) ancestry in Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe.
From Chinese. The Ashkenazic mtDNA haplogroup M33c2 is certainly of Chinese origin.
**Likely from Khazars.**From what we know this eastern ancestry came from _maternal_Asian ancestors, not from the paternal Khazar ancestors one would expect to find if Khazar male converts including from the ranks of the royalty and nobility of Khazaria had been among the ancestors of Ashkenazim. The Khazar conversion involved both males and females yet there is no trace of Asiatic male lineages in Ashkenazim. On the other hand, one North Caucasian male lineage (G2a-FGC1093), likely from a man who lived in Khazaria, whatever his ethnic identification, exists in Ashkenazim.Tatiana Tatarinova's genetic study of bonafide medieval Khazars found no shared uniparental branches and no autosomal similarity between the Khazar and Ashkenazi populations. That being said, Tatarinova's sample size of Khazar samples was relatively low and it is likely that the Ashkenazic maternal haplogroups A-T152C!-T16189C! and N9a3 did exist among the Khazars, and other genetic researchers' models show that in fact there is a small Central Asian/North Asian component to Ashkenazic autosomal DNA that could be interpreted to be Turkic. Bayazit Yunusbayev, et al. reported in their 2015 article "The Genetic Legacy of the Expansion of Turkic-Speaking Nomads Across Eurasia"that "western Turkic peoples sampled across West Eurasia shared an excess of long chromosomal tracts that are identical by descent (IBD) with populations from present-day South Siberia and Mongolia" and suggested that the first Turks did come from that area. New evidence places some of the East Eurasian ancestors of Ashkenazim within the geographic realm of Turkic and Mongolian speakers both past and present.
**Probably not from Yakuts.**The miniscule amount of supposedly Yakut ancestry that some Ashkenazim used to show in 23andMe has since been reassigned in their samples to show undifferentiated East Asian descent instead. There is no evidence of any kind that supports a connection with the Turkic-speaking Yakuts.
**Not from Kalmyks.**Some Kalmyk (Oirat Mongolian) women converted to Judaism in Siberia in the 1810s-1820s and soon thereafter married Ashkenazi men, especially those living in the town of Kansk. They presumably had children with them who stayed in the Jewish communities of Siberia and may have descendants there today. This is too recent an episode, and too far from the Pale of Settlement, to explain the small but widely distributed East Asian ancestral traces in most Ashkenazi Jewish families from Belarus/Lithuania/Romania/etc. The genetic types of the East Asian elements in Ashkenazim don't closely match those of the Kalmyks anyway.
**Possibly not from Evenki.**Some Evenki people in eastern Siberia descend from mixed Evenki-Ashkenazi marriages. Some Polish Jewish men had participated in the 1863 uprising in Warsaw against the Russian tsars and as punishment got exiled to Siberia. Some of these exiled Polish Jews married local Evenki women and they had children who still had descendants alive in Siberia as of the end of the 20th century and presumably still do. The descendants of the mixed marriage married other Evenkis. As in the case of the Kalmyk-Ashkenazi marriages, this event is far too recent and far too distant from the Pale of Settlement to explain any of the results we see from eastern Europe. It remains unknown whether there had been any case of an Evenki-Ashkenazi intermarriage prior to the 19th century, or whether the woman who introduced N9a3 to Ashkenazim was instead a member of some other tribe like Buryat or Nanai.
**Not from Israelites.**Autosomal DNA population portraits at the K=12 level prepared by "Dienekes Pontikos" hereinclude samples from 10 Iraqi Jewish individuals. It is well established that Iraqi Jews are substantially descended from the ancient Israelites and are related to other Jews in the world. Although half of the Iraqi Jews in this sample have small amounts of South Asian ancestry, none have any East Asian or Siberian ancestry. This suggests none of the ancient Israelites did either. This impression is strengthened by the total lack of Siberian ancestry in Iranian Jews, Georgian Jews, and Yemenite Jews in the K=20 admixture paintings in the study "Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans" by Iosif Lazaridis et al. 2014 and the absence of the East Asian 1540C allele in Sephardic Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Samaritans. It doesn't seem relevant, then, to point out that some modern Lebanese and Syrian people also have a bit of Northeast Asian in them, or that some Kuwaitis possess 1540C. As Razib Khan pointed out,the presence of East Eurasian admixture in some Muslim Middle Easterners is not usually found in non-Muslims from the region and "is surely the impact of Islamic slavery, of Turks".