Are there Ashkenazim with Sephardic ancestry?

 

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 17^th 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”. 19^th Century German Jewry admired Sephardic history and this may have encouraged people to claim Sephardic ancestry for status reasons.