Taking a look at my blonde hair and green eyes ... I have so many identities that make me powerful — Jewish, adopted, Sephardic and Ashkenazi — and that will always be true.

An earlier study of Beethoven's hair also found high levels of lead, but this research was later debunked when it was discovered that the locks belonged to an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. However ...

The new findings contradict previous assertions that Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages originated in the Near East, or from mass conversions to Judaism in the Khazar kingdom, an empire in the north ...