The Jewish ancestry of the Iberians
Published by Avi Green on Sunday, December 07, 2008 at 1:56 PM.
An interesting new discovery in the genetics field:
From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spaniards have genes similar to Sephardic Jews, a study has found.There's some more here. By the way, I think I remember reading years ago that a lot of Armenians are distantly related to the Israelis. This page may offer more insight on that.
A report in the American Journal of Human Genetics says almost a fifth of Spaniards have genes similar to Sephardic Jews. With a population of more than 40 million, Spain may thus have 8 million citizens with "Jewish" genes.
"The genetic composition of the current population is the legacy of our diverse cultural and religious past," study author Francesco Calafell, on the evolutionary biology faculty at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, said Friday. Along with researchers from Leicester University in England and the Wellcome Trust, the study compared DNA samples from 1,140 men in Spain, Portugal and the Balearic Islands with established data on Moroccans, Algerians, and Sephardic Jews in Istanbul and Israel.
"The work shows that religious conversions and subsequent marriages between people of different lines had a significant impact on modern populations both in the Balearic Islands and in Portugal," another author Elena Bosch said in a statement.
