Toward a Sephardic Haplogroup Profile in the New World

Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman

Department of Marketing

School of Business

Rutgers University

New Brunswick, NJ 08903

DNA Consulting

1274 Calle de Comercio

Santa Fe, NM 87507

Sephardic Jews are defined as those living on the Iberian Peninsula prior to 1492, when the Edict of Expulsion was signed by their Most Catholic Majesties of a united Spain, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile and Leon. Estimates of the number of Jews who went into voluntary or involuntary exile range from 100,000 to 300,000, depending on the source used,¹ but this does not really account for the larger segment of the population that had earlier converted, at least outwardly, to Catholicism. In 1391, in response to violent anti-Jewish riots across Spain, an estimated 200,000 took this expediency.² Perhaps the majority of these continued to practice Judaism in secret, becoming Crypto-Jews.

An equal number is believed to have converted superficially in 1492, after the introduction of the Inquisition, and were henceforth known as New Christians, Conversos or Marranos. Factoring in population growth, this would bring the total number of former Jews living in Spain and Portugal to around 500,000 by the early 1500s. Unlike the 1492 edict, which allowed non-converting Jews to go into exile abroad, subsequent laws and regulations forbad conversos to leave the country, for it was feared they might go to other Catholic countries where they would return to the open practice of Judaism. They were also barred from emigrating to the New World.

The Sephardim who left Spain, either as Jews or Crypto-Jews, spread throughout the Mediterranean, venturing as far as the Balkans and Ottoman Empire in the East, and Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, the Balearic Islands, Azores, Madeira, Canaries, France, Belgium, Germany, Alsace, Low Countries, and Britain in the West. Some fled as far as India, Indonesia, Ceylon and China.³ In all these places, the Sephardim generally prospered, becoming plantation owners, merchants, international traders and bankers, as well as craftsmen, shop owners, and peddlers.⁴ Wherever they settled, they also tended to practice endogamy (in-group marriage), striving to preserve both their genetic heritage and their religious traditions.⁵

What were the origins of the Sephardic Jews? Where and when did they form into a coherent community? Most historians believe that a small contingent of Hebrews from ancient Judea made its way to the Iberian Peninsula by the time of the rise of Rome, while others hold the nucleus of Sepharad may have arrived as early as the building of the Second Temple in the sixth century BCE.⁶ Wexler⁷ has proposed that the majority of Sephardic Jews were of North African Berber origin and converted to Judaism sometime before the 711 CE invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Muslims.

Hirschman and Yates have sought to demonstrate that the majority of Sephardic Jews came into existence with a large-scale conversion event in southern France circa 750-900 CE. The latter proselytizing movement, they propose, was centered on the establishment of a prominent Talmudic academy in Narbonne.⁸ Supporting this latter-day conversion of Frankish, Burgundian and Languedoc populations to Judaism is the research of Gerber showing that many Sephardic Jews believed themselves to be descendants of King David of Israel.⁹ This belief was evidently fostered by the Babylonian Jews who founded the Narbonne academy. As Gerber states, “The Sephardim believed themselves to be descendants of Judean royalty, tracing their lineage back to King David.”¹⁰

According to these researchers, it was the Master of the Narbonne yeshiva, Machir ben Habibai, ostensibly of Davidic descent himself, also known as Theodoric, count of Septimania, who introduced this tradition when he arrived in 771 CE.¹¹ Thus when these western Europeans converted to Judaism, they saw themselves as adoptive heirs of the “House of David.” In a few generations this mythic lineage became remembered as a hereditary claim founded on blood and genealogy, and was passed forward as truth.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the population structure of colonies of Sephardic Jews in the New World by using the data from a number of recent country-specific DNA projects. We also attempt to come to some general conclusions about the original genetic profile of Sephardic Jews and to address the question of whether the majority came from Palestine, North Africa or Western Europe.

In a sense, all Jews are converts or descendants of converts; it is just a matter of when they converted. Contemporary Judaic scholars acknowledge that the monotheistic, endogamous Hebrews of the Bible are largely mythic constructions used to create cosmological coherence and a nationalistic concept of “peoplehood” across a very diverse landscape of tribes and ethnic groups in the ancient Middle East.¹² It was the rule rather than the exception among various groups of early Jews to backslide into the worship of pagan deities, especially Astarte/Ashtoreth, the consort of the most powerful Canaanite god, Baal.

It is also worth pointing out that not even the most concerted genealogical studies have been able to establish a direct, unbroken link to the first rabbis, high priests of the Temple, or patriarchs.¹³ Instead of using a model of predestined continuity built around a core of founding fathers and mothers, we are perhaps better advised to approach Judaism as a multi-ethnic religion that has survived the cataclysms of history by constantly reinventing and reconstituting itself. If historical Jews have gone through bottlenecks and disintegration, they have also experienced periods of triumphal expansion and efflorescence, during which conversion to Judaism was widespread. The Roman world was one such golden age, and medieval Spain, we propose, was another.

Even at the time of the Roman-instigated dispersal from Palestine, Jews consisted of several varied social classes, royal, aristocratic and commoner lineages, and wavering degrees of commitment to monotheism and the Mosaic law.¹⁴ Furthermore, many had become Hellenized long before the Diaspora, taking on Greek names, speaking, reading and writing in Koiné Greek rather than Hebrew, and even adopting Greek customs such as social bathing and visiting pagan temples.¹⁵

Let us first consider the genetic ancestry of the Ashkenazi Jews, who have been much more extensively studied than the Sephardim. Wexler, in Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity,¹⁶ argues that while a few founder lines of the modern Ashkenazic branch of Judaism were from the Middle East, the majority of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe had its genetic roots in Central Asia. This was also the explosive thesis of Arthur Koestler, who proposed that the convert Khazars who ruled between the Caucasus and the Volga contributed the principal component to Ashkenaz.¹⁷ Such ethnic theories have been embraced by Palestinian Arab leaders as much as they have been ferociously denied by Israeli statesmen and academicians. But let us take a dispassionate look at the following population frequency tables.