Alternate History: Japanese Avoid Midway To Attack South, Large Scandinavian Jewish Population

Went visiting the alternate history forum again and found a couple interesting scenarios that I'm posting here for your enjoyment.

Operation FS: Japan's Final Strike-One of Japan's military plans that was never actually executed was Operation FS, the planned occupation of Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia. The ultimate goal of the plan was to cut off Australia from the United States and force it out of the war. The plan was supposed to be executed after the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Midway. Fortunately the United States won that round and the plan, already in jeopardy due to the Battle of the Coral Sea, was shelved. In this scenario, due to some messages getting through to the Japanese high command that didn't in real history, the U.S. loses the carrier Yorktown as well as the carrier Lexington at the Coral Sea. This leads to the shelving of the Midway operation and the go-ahead to strike south. Although economic realities mean that Japan is still going to get reamed--and the timeline's opening states the operation will ultimately fail--how the Japanese ultimately fail and what effects this operation has elsewhere could be significant. And these types of scenarios are always fun to read if one is interested in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Gyðinga Saga - The History of the Jews of Scandinavia-In this scenario, there's a larger movement of Jews into Scandinavia earlier than in real life that leads to the emergence of a Jewish community that views itself as neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi. The main scenario has some plausibility issues--the latter part discusses the experience of these Jews under Nazi rule, but with a divergence that far back Hitler might not even come to power in the first place--but the follow-up discussion is pretty interesting. For starters, these Jews will be much, much more European genetically (due to intermarriage between male Jews and pagan women of other Scandinavian or Baltic ethnic groups, with the resulting children raised as Jewish) than the Ashkenazi, whose non-Jewish DNA is from a different European population and stopped entering the Jewish gene pool much earlier. This in turn led to discussion as to just what the Nazis, whose anti-Semitism was primarily racial rather than religious, would make of the Gydes. After all, the Nazis largely spared the Karaites, on the grounds they were more akin to Turkic peoples. One board member theorized that the Nazis would view them as "Judaized Germans" rather than racial Jews and try to "deprogram" them rather than exterminate them. This might resemble the German abductions of Polish (and other Slavic) children of ostensibly Aryan ancestry for Germanization.