Toward a Sephardic Haplogroup Profile in the New World

Table 1 is based on the data in Behar et al.’s 2004 comparison of Ashkenazi Jews with “European non-Jewish populations,” consisting of 64 French, 34 Germans and 31 Austrians, 56 Hungarians, 50 Poles, 54 Romanians and 59 Russians. The study highlights four presumably Central Asian and Middle Eastern lineages reflected in the present-day Ashkenazi male population: J* and J1=19%, J2=19%, E=19.7% and G=9.7% and argues that the Ashkenazic population is more Middle Eastern than the surrounding ‘host’ populations.

But a comparison of Ashkenazi haplogroup E (to single out one common Ashkenazi haplogroup) with a different set of populations gives us a substantially altered perspective. In Table 2, taken from the study by Semino et al (2004), we can view the distribution of Haplotype E within several European, Mediterranean, North African and Middle Eastern populations (sub-Saharan populations and certain others are omitted in our summary). Here we see that Ashkenazi Jews have a total E (presumably all E3b, none E3a) of 18.2%, of which 11.7% is subclade 123 and 5.2% is subclade 78 (“Balkan”); none is subclade 81 (“Berber”) which reaches its highest levels among the Berbers of North Africa. Thus, the absence of Berber lineages would appear to be diagnostic of Ashkenazi Jews, and wherever it is found it can be assumed to be indicative, strictly speaking, of Sephardic ancestry, not Ashkenazic (for example, the four instances in Behar’s data set).

By the same token another haplogroup, R1a1, while practically non-existent in Sephardic populations, has been found characteristic of Ashkenazi Jews (Don, we need the Behar R1a cite here). Such non-overlapping and mutually exclusive haplogroups can help us distinguish between the two Jewish populations.