Sephardic World’s meeting on Sunday 14 November 2021 discussed Ashkenazi traditions of Sephardic ancestry. This is a fascinating question that pulls together these two streams of Jewish genealogy. You can watch a video of the meeting here.
Obviously, many Ashkenazim and Sephardim have shared pre-medieval
ancestry. The question is whether some Sephardim settled in Ashkenazi
communities after the Expulsion from Spain in 1492, and were absorbed into
those communities.
In the vast archives of Western Sephardic communities (Amsterdam/London/Hamburg)
there is no indication of Western Sephardim being absorbed into Ashkenazi
communities. So far, y-DNA research by the Avotaynu DNA project has identified
just one Ashkenazi family (from Belarus) that appears to have a Western
Sephardic patriarch. Western Sephardic merchants who were in cities such as
Danzig/Gdansk seem to have gone home.
It is not clear if the non-Ashkenazi Jews in early 17th
Century Zamość in Poland was Italian, Sephardic or a bit of both. It is also
unclear what happened to them and whether they left any genetic legacy.
In the area that once formed the borderlands between the
Ottoman Empire and the Christendom there are self-identified Ashkenazi families
with Sephardic patrilineal ancestry. Possibly these include descendants of Sephardim
who had travelled north from places like Constantinople and Salonika, and later
found themselves under Hapsburg rule when the Ottomans were driven south.
Claims of Sephardic ancestry made by some Hassidic dynasties
are unproven at best. The genealogy of the Horowitz family is questioned. The claim
that the Talalay family of Mogilev originated in Catalonia is unsupported by
evidence. Talalay is a Slavic surname.
We are left with the question of why so many Ashkenazi
families have these traditions of Sephardic ancestry. It is still early days for
DNA research, and of course some communities have been destroyed. With
exceptions, the best working hypothesis seems to be what John M. Efron has called
“the allure of the Sephardic”. 19th Century German Jewry admired
Sephardic history and this may have encouraged people to claim Sephardic
ancestry for status reasons.
