Question of the Week: Do you have Jewish roots?

Question

Do you have any Jewish ancestors?

Please tell us about them with an answer below. You could also answer on Facebook or share the question image with friends and family on any social media to get them talking.

PS: Did you know we have a Jewish Roots project?

Comments

I never thought about this before doing a dna test . Both test show about 2% in my dna . Very interesting, to know this .

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My 23&Me DNA Test showed 2.7% Ashkenazic Jewish Ancestry,while it showed 3.4% Ashkenazic for my sister.And we had a grandmother,Miss Frances Barth.She was born in New Orleans,Louisiana,and was raised Catholic.But grandma Barth often referred to herself as being a"German Jew".Her parents were German immigrants;Mr.Emil Heinrich Barth,born 1862,in Baden-Baden,Germany,and Miis Magdalena(Lena)Klein,born 1863 in Alsace.I suspect that grandma's mother Lena Kelin was most probably Jewish,since Klein was a surname of some German Jews.

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I always suspected that I had Jewish roots back in my tree. When I had my DNA done it uncovered that I did have European Jewish roots that would have come in mt great great grandparents line when they immigrated to Canada from Prussia.

Answer 1

Mother is 99% Ashkenazi, Father is 97% Ashkenazi and in the remainder is a small amount of Iberian.

Answer 2

ב"ה

Yes, my mother's side. Mostly Sephardic and Mizrachi. One mtDNA Ashkenazi genetic marker. My ancestors were B'nay anusim.

Answer 3

Oh yes definitely on my mother's side from Iasi and Barlad, Romania and the Bialystok, Poland/Grodno, Belarus region.

Answer 4

I am Ashkenazi Jewish on both sides but have not got DNA confirmation. My family came from Russia, present-day Belarus, Galicia and Poland. They all emigrated to London in the 1880s and 1890s.

Answer 5

I have a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA on my paternal Eastern European side from Galicia (Ukraine/Poland) on two of three DNA tests (not Ancestry). I have no family history to associate with it that side of my family came to the US as Eastern Orthodox. It shows in varying amounts on both of my Dad's DNA tests, including Ancestry, and the few other close relatives on that side of the family that have tested. 

Answer 6

My 3rd great-grandfather's family came to America from the Bevis Marks Synagogue in England. His son, my 2nd great-grandfather, met and married an Irish Gentile girl and his family disowned him. They conducted a funeral for him and moved away, some say to Canada. As a result we have no idea who our Jewish ancestors are beyond my 2nd great-grandfather.

Answer 7

Most certainly. 99% Ashkenazi. Ancestors lived in Poland for generations.

Answer 8

Both sides of my family are Jewish.  My mother’s family was from the southern Baltic states and came to the US in the late 1890s and my father’s side was from Iraq (Baghdad) and Iran. My parents met on a boat to Israel.  Another fun fact: about 2.5 years after getting married, we determined that my wife (whose family was from Lithuania via South Africa) is a fourth cousin to my mother so my children and I are fifth cousins…

Answer 9

I grew-up being raised Methodist w/ English surname and generally Anglo-Celtic background--until when I was 30. Then I found-out my paternal grandmother was 1/2 Jewish, and her father was full Ashkenazi Jew, whose own father came from Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland) to England in 1838. My grandma grew-up in very anti-semetic times (WWI / WWII), therefore she never spoke of her Jewish roots & married at 16 to my Anglo-surnamed / heritage-ed Grandpa.

Comments

At first I thought my sister had posted this, the similarities threw me. We also were raised Methodist with my father's surname of Buscho and mother's maiden name of Weitzel. Orphaned as children we were raised by my father's parents with surname Buscho, definitely not Jewish. Then because I joined her in research I found Ashkenazi in our ancestry through my mother's side several generations back, nearly all of whom were born and died in Switzerland. More recent European ancestry was through my German grandparents born and raised in Russia (immigrated to US in 1912).  My three sisters and I suspected we had Jewish roots but both my mother's side and father's side emphatically denied we had Jewish ancestry. My father's father's ancestry was from Posen, Prussia immigrating to the US.with no Jewish roots. My mother's side has become a veritable salad bowl of Jewish roots through marrying Jews, most were Volga
Germans  in Russia denying Jewishness and migrating to America as Lutherans. I took a test for Jewishness with DNA Consultants and found 2 out of 4 markers show me to have Jewish Roots in Russia, they were on target from the genealogy my sister and I had done for the past 40 years but the company itself has been accused by other DNA companies of being a sham and not a reliable contact. For myself, the results and information I received from DNA Consultants was on target with our genealogy which I had not shared with them. Maybe it was just a fluke, maybe not. Everything they noted turned out to be exact and left my sister and me amazed that what DNA Consultants found was in line with what she and I had found but had not yet published. Now I'm finding more and more Jews in my ancestry, some by marriage and some by blood. It's pretty hard to ignore surnames like Wyss, Frey, Helavi, Weil, and so on....

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Hi Jeanne,

Your story's fascinating, but sadly Not unusual. So many families with Jewish heritage, for their own safety, changed their last names, their religion, etc., so as not to be tageted by racism & acts of hated. We did not walk in their shoes, so cannot judge them.

As to German surnames, many of them became Jewish last names too, as the German-Jew females intermarried w/ German men, or the German-Jewish men simply denied that THEIR last name was Jewish & simply said it was pure German.

Interesting your mom's last name was Weitzel! That was the last name of my "Uncle" George--a former L.A. motorcycle cop. He was not blood-related, but I adored him. In his case he was 1/2 German (no Jewish), 1/2 Irish.

If you can take an autosomal (auDNA / atDNA) test via FamilyTreeDNA.com, or via Ancestry, you could "compare" your Ethnicity % results against that other company---as now all of them have "refined" their work, to show more accurate percentages and of which ethnicities we actually descend from.

By the way.....POSEN, PRUSSIA, now Poznan, Poland, was a safe-harbor for Jews for centuries, until it wasn't, starting in about 1818, w/ a change in government that was anti-semitic. By 1848 huge numbers left Posen to elsewhere in Europe, or to the U.S., for freedom & safety. My own great-great grandfather, Julius Henry Fiedler emigrated to London, UK in 1838.

So your father's dad coming from there is a possibility of another line of Jewish. The thing w/ DNA though, is we might be 3/4 Jewish & 1/4 French, but have Only pulled the DNA from our French ancestors at the time of conception, & therefore only showing Percentages of French & other bits w/in those peoples' DNA. I don't show ANY of my 1/4 native American DNA--my cousins do!

Also in the U.S.--the histories of the American Indians, the Jews, & the African-American blacks have been "hidden", if possible--due to a wish to avoid serious consequences. In the case of the first two (Am. Indian / Jewish), you'll probably find almost 1/2 to 3/4 of Americans HAVE those ethnicities somewhere in their ancestry---it's just been hidden.

To me it's ALL enthralling as I love all cultures / all ethnicities--they just make our histories richer! : )

Anonymous (Spencer)

Answer 10

The family was atheist or agnostic  both sides of the family for 3 generations, but my mothers father was Jewish (Goldner) and we celebrated Jewish as well as Christian holidays just to keep up. Now when I was in grad school I was tissue typed so I could be cleared to work with a certain kind of virus and was told I had "Jewish genes". Then when I did Ancestry my Jewish genetic heritage was obvious and pointed to several areas of Europe.

Answer 11

When I first had my DNA test 5 1/2 years ago it said I was 6% Ashkenazi Jewish. I located the line on my father's side. It traces back through New York City to Germany and eastern Europe, and finally back to Spain (Sephardic?) which I found interesting. Now my nationality breakdown doesn't list Jewish any more, probably because it is such a small percentage? It now breaks down into Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and Eastern Europe.

Comments

Hello Gail, I have found that I have some Jewish DNA according to FTDNA although MyHeritage did not say so (both using ths same data).  I think if it has been identified then it really is there!  Different companies seem to emphasise different aspects of DNA.

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This is similar to what happened to me.

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Why do different companies give different values? Well, there is no "officially pure" set of Jewish dna (or dna of any other ethnic group) to compare yours with, only sets of people with deep roots within the group and no or few known ancestors outside it. Different companies have different reference groups, and to the extent that the composite genomes of these different groups differ from one another, the ethnicity percentages you receive will vary. Small values (single digits) may sometimes also show up without any historical connection at all, due to randomness and general admixture, or even statistical flukes in the algorithms.

So you may or may not have a connection; the best way to corroborate it (beside finding an actual paper trail, of course) is to look at your matches, and their trees: do you have a lot of matches with very high percentages of Ashkenazi heritage, "Jewish-sounding" (Kahn, Levine, Schmul, Goldstein, Rubin, ...) or generally Slavic names, ancestors in Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia/Soviet, Hungary, ...) and/or unusually many common matches showing the same properties? Then you likely do have some Jewish dna.  :)

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Thanks Olov.  Yes, in my case I have lots of matches with Ashkenazi people - or people with some Ashkenazi ancestry.  I also have lots of matches with Swedish people.  Although I have no known Swedish great-grandparents I have 19% Scandinavian DNA.  This makes me think that I must have some Viking ancestry.

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Judith, you most likely do have Viking ancestors, if nothing else due to the same statistical calculations that show that basically all living Europeans are descendants of Charlemagne -- for any single person living that long ago, either everybody today is a descendant, or nobody is.  :)

However, the ethnicity percentages do not go that far back, because a) the dna is getting mixed up too quickly between generations to give any useful data, and b) the reference groups generally don't check their members' family trees for more than a handful of generations, if that, and there's been a lot of migration inbetween. So your "Scandinavian" dna could be from relatively recent British or German or French (etc, etc) immigrants to Sweden affecting the "Scandinavian" reference group, or Swedes moving into Europe in, say, the 16th-18th century (there were lots of Swedish soldiers in Germany during the 30-year war, for example).

Basically, the ethnicity percentages can be trusted on the "continent" scale (Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Indigenous Americans etc) but not on the country level, there's just too much admixture. The only major group that has been isolated enough throughout history to make it work reasonably well is actually the Ashkenazi Jews (and possibly the Sephardic as well? I'm not sure); for the rest, it's simply too uncertain to be useful. Similar to how in a foreign city your GPS will tell you which street you're on, but may show you standing in front of the wrong door.

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I agree that not enough is known yet about our origins to know specific ancstry from DNA but nonetheless all our DNA comes from real people.  Even small amounts indicate an ancestor who was just as real as each of us is, but whom we'll probably never be able to identify.  I do know quite a lot about my family tree but I think there are other interesting factors such as languages, traditions, beliefs which give clues as to origins.

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It indicates an ancestor, certainly, and by studying our matches we can learn things about them -- including where they came from. But it is not possible to tell that just by looking at the dna, and it never will be, because dna simply doesn't have that kind of resolution. It is too mixed up by migration -- and there has always been migrants, there have never been any "pure" unmixed ethnic groups. So you can't say that this dna comes from this group, only that today it is common in this group, uncommon in this one and not observed in that one -- but this does not mean that it originated in the first one and spread to the second; it could be the other way around, or both got it from some third group where it is now lost (or which isn't considered a separate group today).

Ancestry actually does note in their "fine print" that e.g. dna that looks Scandinavian also is present (but less common) in Britain, Germany, Finland etc, but then they start talking about Vikings so that people can say "Oh, I must have Viking ancestry", without mentioning that the Vikings also brought people home and thus introduced new dna in Scandinavia. And this continued to happen for a thousand years, so there is no such thing as purely Scandinavian dna; below the level of "European dna" everything is a matter of probabilities. They should be saying things like "These segments have a 63 % probability of a Scandinavian origin within 5 generations", and then list the alternative hypotheses with their respective probabilities, but of course it sounds better to just say "You have 13 % Scandinavian dna" even if it isn't necessarily correct.

Bottom line: the data is in your matches and their family trees, not in your ethnicity percentages.  :)

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Thanks Olov.  Very interesting!

Answer 12

Yes DNA proves 9.6% Ashkenazi on my father’s side.

Answer 13

1 % Ashkenazi according to 23 and me. Otherwise mostly, more than 90 % , French- German. Born and raised in the westernmost part of Germany. All grand parents born the same place ( Trier)

Comments

I have a little less than 1% and so far have no clue which side of the family. I assume my father. It's a puzzle!

Answer 14

I don't, but my spouse and therefore child do.

I don't think I will ever know whether my mother-in-law (whom I never met; she died a decade before I met my spouse) even knew that her maternal grandfather was from a converted Jewish family. She was born in Budapest in the 1920s, so such facts were probably never talked about when she was growing up. (Her grandfather's family converted in the 1840s, very likely for career reasons rather than religious ones, but that's another thing I'll never really know for certain.)

My father-in-law, on the other hand, knew very well that his mother was born Jewish; she missed competing in the 1908 London Olympics, probably because of her heritage. (The histories/biographies all repeat the phrase _a megfelelő háttér hiányában_ "due to lack of the appropriate background".) She later converted to her husband's Protestant (Calvinist/Reformed) religion, which allowed her children to be deemed non-Jewish during WWII.

Answer 15

I have tiny bits of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi and Yemeni Jewish DNA - less that 1% each so I must have some Jewish roots.  My father thought his father's mother was partly Jewish and I think that she is possibly the source of all my Jewish DNA.  I would love to know more.  My paternal grandfather converted to Judaism.

Comments

ב"ה

Judith, thank you for sharing this. If you were to have your mtDNA tested, it might shed new light on your Jewish roots. FamilyTree DNA was set up partly to identify b'nay anusim, or descendants of Jews who were forcibly converted from Judaism to another religion against their will. Whereas auDNA can reach back 6 or 7 generations at the most, mtDNA can go back for thousands of years. Where genealogy leaves off, one can surmise what must have happened to a family by studying the historical records of Jewish migrations to avoid persecution.

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Thank you Marion.  I have had a mitochondrial test but I don't know what it might be telling me about the Jewish part of my ancestry.  I understand that a father does pass on his mtDNA but to the next generation only.  This would mean that my paternal grandfather would have passed mtDNA from his mother to my father but that it would not have passed on to me.  However I am not sure if I have got that right(!)  My father died in 1994 before such tests were easily available and never had one.  I know that there is be an unbroken line of mtDNA to me from the female side of my family.  The furthest back this takes me is to a woman called Mary Routledge who was born in Northumberland.  My biggest concentration of mtDNA matches is in Ireland (North and South), which surprised me.  Trying to do a mathematical assessment I have worked out that it was possible that my great-grandmother's grandparent or great-grandparent would have been Jewish - not so very far back and quite possibly within the memory of my great-grandmother or her parents.  I usually find that family stories are based on fact even if not completely right.  Gt-granma's name was Margaret Jackson, two very common names and not a bit "Jewish sounding" - but I've been told by the lovely people at JewishGen that there's no such thing as a Jewish surname.  I did find some Jacksons on the list of members of a synagogue at Stockton-upon-Tees.  Having been born in the Birmingham area she moved to Stockton as a young woman.  I;m not sure where to look from there.

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ב"ה

Thank you for your reply, Judith. Where did you have the mtDNA test? Different companies select different facts to report about your results. mtDNA is inherited only from the mother. The father cannot pass on his mtDNA to his children. However, he can pass on his Y-DNA to his sons. DNA of all kinds can hold some surprises. I remember being surprised at all the tests in my immediate family. You are right about family stories as well. Sometimes the stories are "embellished" to make them more interesting and exciting, although they get less true that way. Being Jewish is not measured by how Jewish a name sounds, so names cannot be used to prove or rule out Jewish vs. non-Jewish. Surnames are a relatively recent invention of the Christians. The people at JewishGen are right. Our Hebrew names do not include the use of surnames. The format is "given name" (son of or daughter of) "father's name," for example Yoel ben Levi.

I hope this helps some. Try looking on FamilySearch.com where new records are added on a regular basis. Synagogue records may also help, but they may not be available on the internet, so you have to visit in person.

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Thanks Marion.  Some helpful observations here.  However some scientists believe that mtDNA can be pssed down by fathers, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6108/

My initial DNA test was with MyHeritage.  I asked for those results to be passed on to Family Tree DNA (which is a free service with the initial fee) and with the same data their results were somewhat different.  Later I had a separate mtDNA test done by FTDNA who say on their website - which is excellent for giving scientific background - that fathers do pass on their mtDNA for one generation.

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ב"ה

Judith, thank you for the URL. As a scientist, I am naturally skeptical of the idea that mtDNA could be passed down through the paternal line. Just because a study is published does not mean that the experiment was done correctly or that the conclusion follows from the result. We have only to remember the studies of polywater, which had to be retracted when the conclusions were disproven.

However, I am open minded and I'll have a look at the study. Already I detect a flaw in the logic of "one generation only." It is always just one generation at a time when the mother passers her mtDNA to her children. Then another generation and another, always one at a time. This not being my field of research it may take me longer to evaluate it, but I'm open to changing my mind if sufficient proof is available.

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ב"ה

OK here is my take on the following article regarding paternal mtDNA inheritance:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12192017/

The paternal mtDNA was found only in muscle tissue due to an abnormal intolerance to exercise in a patient. This study was performed in a clinical setting with a view toward identifying the cause of the abnormality. The abnormal paternal mtDNA was not found in blood or hair roots, which contained only maternal mtDNA.

Normally, the maternal mtDNA "crowds out" the paternal mtDNA during early embryogenisis. However, if the paternal mtDNA has a mutation that consists of deletion of a large genetic sequence, the abnormal mtDNA can multiply much faster than the normal maternal mtDNA.

This concept is like manufacturing automobiles that have only one wheel instead of four (deletion of three wheels is like deletion of paternal mtDNA gene sequences in muscle tissue). The factory could make cars faster if the vehicles consist of fewer parts, and therefore make more abnormal cars per unit time. These defective cars would function about as well as the leg muscles in the patient with abnormal mtDNA.

It appears that because only normal maternal mtDNA was found in the patient's blood, this abnormal mutation would not be passed on to the patient's offspring because spermatazoa do not arise from muscle tissue in the legs. This is the origin of the "one generation only" idea.

The bottom line is that proliferation of paternal mtDNA is an abnormal genetic mutation that so far has not been shown to occur in subsequent generations. This study does not negate the validity of many other studies that demonstrate that mtDNA is inherited under normal circumstances from only the mother.

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Thanks.  I've tried to see the statement that I previously found in the FTDNA website, and of course I can't find it - but I'm certain I read it somewhere(!)  I have been looking at other articles and I can see what you mean but I think the verdict is that the jury is still out.  Not being a scientist I don't know but then possibly it's not clear to anyone yet anyway.

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I forgot to mention that I looked up b'nay anusim yesterday prompted by your reply.  I found an interesting recording of a webinar on YouTube:

Reclaiming Jewish Heritage Latinos, B'nai Anusim & Other

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ב"ה

More websites for b'nay anusim where a DNA project is going on:

https://www.bnaianusiminstitute.org/

Mapping the Genetic Identity of Bnei Anusim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsO2SIEw8y8

Also, look on Youtube for lectures of Dr. Henry Abramson.

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Thank you, I'll have a look.

Answer 16

1%. I thought it was an aberration until I traced my Post ancestors to the Netherlands and found out the family was originally Jewish.

Answer 17

Yes my grandmother was Jewish. I have 27% Ashkenazi DNA. Her paternal side came from a small town, Raudnitz an der Elbe, Bohemia, just north of Prague. I am DNA connected to almost everyone from the town. However I am challenged (brick wall) to find her grandmother whose surname may be "Dray". She immigrated from Stelemark Germany, married and died in Baltimore Maryland before any records were kept.

Answer 18

I have Jewish roots and would like to join that group.

Answer 19

My 3d great grandfather was Barney Aaron, the Jewish bare-knuckle pugilist who fought in London in the 1820s. He has his own Wikipedia page. The son from which I am descended converted when he married a Christian Yankee from Maine, so that's the extent of my Jewish ancestry.

Answer 20

I have a little less than 1% and so far have no clue which side of the family. I assume my father. It's a puzzle! I'm not sure where to start. I'm slowly adding family onto my tree. Perhaps one day the answer will reveal itself. My Dad's family came from the Netherlands and Scotland, My Mom's family were Cajun, German and Irish. Plus all the other ancestors and where they came from.