DNA study shows 20 percent of Iberian
population has Jewish ancestry
By Nicholas Wade
Published: Thursday, December 4, 2008
Spain and Portugal have a history of
fervent Catholicism, but almost a third of the population now turns out to have
a non-Christian genetic heritage.
About 20 percent of the current population
of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent bear
Moorish DNA signatures, a team of geneticists reports.
The genetic signatures reflect the forced
conversions to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries after Christian
armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control.
The new finding bears on two very different
views of Spanish history: One holds that Spanish civilization is Catholic and
all other influences are foreign, the other that Spain has been enriched by
drawing from all three of its historical cultures - Catholic, Jewish and
Muslim.
The genetic study, based on an analysis of
Y chromosomes, was conducted by a team of biologists led by Mark Jobling of the
University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra
University in Barcelona.
The biologists developed a Y chromosome
signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places
where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in the years from 1492 to
1496.
They also characterized the Y chromosomes
of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in 711 A.D. from data on people
now living in Morocco and Western Sahara.
After a period of forbearance under the
Arab Umayyad dynasty, Spain entered a long period of religious intolerance,
with its Muslim Berber dynasties forcing both Christians and Jews to convert to
Islam, and the victorious Christians then expelling Jews and Muslims or forcing
both to convert.
The genetic study, reported online Thursday
in the American Journal of Human Genetics, indicates there was a high level of
conversion among Jews.
Jonathan Ray, a professor of Jewish studies
at Georgetown University, said that a high proportion of people with Sephardic
ancestry was to be expected.
"Jews formed a very large part of the
urban population up until the great conversions," he said.
The genetic analysis is "very
compelling," said Jane Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City
University of New York, and weighs against scholars who have argued that there
were very few Jewish conversions to Christianity.
Ray raised the question of what the DNA
evidence might mean on a personal level. "If four generations on I have no
knowledge of my genetic past," Ray said, "how does that affect my
understanding of my own religious association?"
The issue is one that has confronted
Calafell, an author of the study. His own Y chromosome is probably of Sephardic
ancestry - the test is not definitive for individuals - and his surname is from
a town in Catalonia; Jews undergoing conversion often took surnames from place
names.
Jews first settled in Spain during the
early years of the Roman empire. Sephardic Jews bear that name because the
Hebrew word for Spain is Sepharad.
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