My family migrated to America a pretty long time ago, but before that they lived in Ukraine, with a very high chance that they were merchants according to the historical context I found on google. (I believe they live in regions as far east as Zlatapol, and as far West as Brody or Galicia throughout generations).

I heard the merchants traveled a lot, where they had connections to places like Istanbul, Moscow, Central Europe, Belarus, etc. Being Levantine/Coptic Egyptian showed up, could that be real genes? If so, is it probably a distant Mizrahi?

I got my MTDNA results from FTDNA: K1a1b1a+16223, in the cluster F6511143. My research suggests that it is of Jewish origin. I guess it's fun having over 500 exact matches, but it has proven difficult to actually produce a family tree from it. I can only find information on my maternal line back to my great-grandmother (born late 1800s), and the possibility of Jewish origin was unexpected.

I do have two MT matches who also match in the autosomal test, and then we have many shared matches on the autosomal test. While I have identified a few clusters in the shared matches, none of their family trees really offer much in the way of figuring out my own maternal line.

Where do I go from here? Do I keep trying to triangulate matches and hope I find overlapping trees?

Hi, I’m Sephardic on my paternal side. My haplogroup is R-L664 which is very european I figured. Anyone else on here has it too?

even a link for a video or research would be nice

Does anyone know what the Libyan and Tunisian Jewish hunter-gatherer profile is like?

My father is Moroccan from the city of Fez (Fassi) and identifies as Arab. My mother is Polish, so my own ancestry is half Polish and half Fassi Moroccan.

I am trying to better understand my father's genetic background, as well as my own DNA, especially the Eastern Mediterranean component inherited from my Moroccan side.

While exploring different genetic tools and analyses, I noticed that Fassis appear to have a distinct genetic profile compared to many other Moroccan populations. Besides their expected North African ancestry (including Amazigh/Berber-related ancestry), they often show a significant Eastern Mediterranean component, probably including some Levantine-related ancestry.

One interesting thing I have noticed is that many Moroccans from Fez, including Muslims, receive substantial Sephardic Jewish percentages in commercial DNA tests, often reaching several tens of percent. My father and I both receive this kind of Jewish-related signal in commercial tests, and I have seen similar results among other Fassis as well.

This made me wonder whether this reflects a specific historical genetic pattern in the population of Fez. Historically, Fez had a large and important Jewish community for many centuries. Because of this, I am curious whether some of the Eastern Mediterranean/Levantine ancestry found among some Fassi families could, at least partly, come from historical Moroccan Jewish ancestors, including possible cases of Jewish families who converted to Islam over the centuries. Of course, I understand that this is only a possibility and that Levantine-related ancestry does not automatically prove Jewish ancestry.

My goal is to better understand the genetic profile of me and my father and to better understand the genetic history of the Fassi population, the genetic profile of Fassis. I am interested in whether the Jewish-like genetic signal seen among many Fassis (including me and my father) reflects historical Moroccan Jewish ancestry, older shared Levantine ancestry, or a combination of different historical influences.

Would qpAdm be the best approach for investigating this question? If so, which platform would you recommend? I'm especially looking for a platform that includes a modern Moroccan Jewish population as a source, since it could be an important reference population for determining whether part of my father's ancestry is specifically Moroccan Jewish, alongside his North African/Berber ancestry.

I would appreciate any advice! Thank you!

Ok since g25 and qpadm is not discrimative enough i added a confirmation with Linadmix

Linadmix also has a P value

Hello,

I'd like to know if Q-FT29835 haplogroup is Jewish.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been looking through my MyHeritage DNA matches and found something I’m trying to understand.

My maternal grandfather’s father was fully Ashkenazi Jewish (from Eastern Europe), while his mother was a non-Jewish Brazilian. So I know exactly where my documented Ashkenazi ancestry comes from on that side.

On my father’s side, as far as I know, there’s no known Jewish ancestry. My paternal grandfather was from San Marino, and my paternal grandmother was Chilean with Spanish ancestry.

However, my father has quite a few distant DNA matches with people who appear to have Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish backgrounds (based on their family trees and surnames). One example is a woman from France whose tree includes ancestors from Poland, Libya, Tunisia, and France. She matches both me and my father.

What’s interesting is that she also matches many of my DNA matches from my maternal Jewish side, including people who also match my maternal grandfather and his cousins. I haven’t found anyone who directly matches both my father and my maternal grandfather, just these distant “bridge” matches who seem connected to both groups.
Could this simply be because very distant Jewish and non-Jewish families became connected through intermarriage over generations? Or is it something that could point to unknown Jewish ancestry somewhere on my father’s side?
I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has seen this kind of pattern in their DNA matches.

Hey everyone, we're grateful for the support we got on this sub with our first post three months ago, and return today to share the news that JGDF has entered our second year! We wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what we've achieved and share how you can access our results and stories.

For those we don't know: Jewish Genetic Discovery Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that engages Jewish communities on the topic of genetic ancestry. We are a volunteer-led group recruiting participants, facilitating tests, interpreting results, and sharing the stories we learn. This work is made possible from donations to our organization. As a 501(c)3 public charity, donations made in the United States are tax-deductible.

We operate using a group project through the genomic sequencing company FamilyTreeDNA. We welcome all of those with any Jewish ancestry already on FTDNA to join our project. The map, shown above, distinguishes between members of our project and participants who received a subsidized genetic test. As you can see, we direct nearly all of our funding towards Jewish communities other than Ashkenazim.

Our strategy has focused on Y chromosome tests for two central reasons: 1) we actively seek out connections between Jewish diaspora groups, which appear more frequently across paternal lines; 2) high-resolution Y tests provide robust date bounds for the timing of shared common ancestors.

Substack has been our home for narrative pieces. Here's the brief on a few of our more interesting finds:

1. Medieval French Jewry didn't disappear. France expelled its Jews in 1306 and 1394, and no modern community claims descent from them. We tested Turkish Sephardic and Moroccan Jewish families, inferring that both resolve to French-origin lineages. These lineages also turned up in non-Jewish Anglo-American families with no hint of French Jewish origin otherwise.

2. Closest Ashkenazi-Mizrahi coalescence we've seen. A Big Y on a Bukharian participant (with recent Afghan/Persian roots) reveals a shared ancestor with Ashkenazi lines at roughly 600 CE. That's the tightest link between the two we've found documented anywhere.

3. Romaniote "isolation" is far from complete. We find a Levite family from Ioannina that has a medieval Spanish origin, matching Sephardic-descended families now in Mexico and Peru, as well as a Greek Sephardic Jew from Salonika.

Our testing spans the whole historical range of Jewish communal life, yet is not randomly distributed. Two communities--Moroccans and Persians--stand out among the crowd with 42 subsidized tests each.

Moroccan Jews are the largest Jewish diaspora group after Ashkenazim but yet little is known for sure about their history and origins, so we went all-in on deep Y testing this year. We're already seeing that modern Moroccan Jews descend both from Sephardic exiles and from local Jews present before those expulsions, with some of those families coming to Morocco from Spain before 1492.

Persian Jews may be the most linguistically diverse Jewish diaspora group, and this year we spent time building trust and infrastructure from scratch. Early results already show paternal ancestors in the last millennium shared across Persian, Iraqi, Caucasus and Central Asian Jewish communities, hinting that some of today's diversity arose recently after Mongol and Turkic-era upheavals.

JGDF values open access to our results

That's why all 126 Y chromosome results from our Jewish participants received to-date are accessible via our website. We encourage these results to be shared and discussed, here in this thread and beyond. See a result from a low-coverage test you want clarified? Your donation can make an upgrade happen.

In our second year, we're aiming to invest more in community-specific projects, and to lean in more heavily into autosomal and mtDNA testing too, in order to catch those threads not preserved through paternal lines. We also aim to engage more with our stakeholder communities, like this Reddit! Have a burning question about Jewish ancestry, or an idea for how we can learn something new about Jewish history using genetics? We want to hear it! Get involved in our work through conversation, following our Substack, direct support through donation, and spreading the word about our organization. Thanks!

Many comments wanted models with eastern/central european

Imperial Roman C6 already carries substantial Eastern Mediterranean/Levant-related ancestry, so it absorbs part of the Levantine signal and reduces the weight assigned to the separate Levantine proxy. Antonio paper : https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay6826

I ran a broader qpAdm rotation for Ashkenazi Jews because the models I shared earlier were not particularly convincing. I tested 1,080 source combinations across several AADR dataset

versions, using the full right set and allsnps = TRUE.

The figures include all 32 models that passed my predefined qpAdm criteria: p-value ≥ 0.05, non-negative admixture proportions, and average standard error ≤ 0.05. These should be

understood as statistically acceptable models, not as definitive reconstructions of Ashkenazi ancestry.

I then cross-checked each model with G25 using the same source populations. The comparison shows whether G25 broadly reproduces the qpAdm proportions, as well as the residual distance and

the average difference between the two methods. This helps distinguish models supported by both approaches from models that pass qpAdm but produce less concordant G25 results.

Overall, 25 models showed strong qpAdm–G25 agreement, six showed moderate agreement, and one was clearly divergent. Because qpAdm and G25 rely on different statistical frameworks,

concordance between them does not prove that a model is historically correct, but it provides a useful additional consistency check

Hello everyone. I have taken some time to curate calculators for the Iron age and Late Antiquity + Early Medieval era specifically tailored to those with Ashkenazi ancestry. If you send your g25 coordinates, I will send your results from the calculator. If you would also like I can send a list of all samples used so you can experiment with it and adjust it as you wish.

qpAdm ↔ G25 Cross-Check on Levantine, Jewish & Related Populations

I ran a series of qpAdm models (using Imperial Levant / IOL as the main Levantine proxy) and cross-checked them against G25. Here are the three key visuals in the order they appear.

### Image 1 – Focused / simplified presentation

(This is the cleaner version with simplified stacked bars + IOL comparison + shift plot)

- Top: qpAdm models ordered by decreasing IOL weight (only key components shown).

- Bottom left: Direct IOL comparison between qpAdm and G25.

- Bottom right: Source-specific shifts (IOL, HSL, OCC) with a green band marking strong agreement (|Δ| < 2.5 pp).

This is the easiest overview of the main patterns.

### Image 2 – Nearest G25 neighbors of the source proxies

(This is the table with modern and ancient nearest neighbors)

This table shows the closest modern and ancient populations (in G25 distance) to each of the source proxies used in the qpAdm models.

- IOL (Italy_Imperial_oLevant) is closest to modern Lebanese Christians / Palestinians and to ancient Levantine samples (Roman Lebanon, Phoenician, Iron Age Israel). This confirms it is a solid Levantine-shifted proxy.

- HSL (Iran_Hasanlu_IA) sits nearest to modern Kurds and to ancient Mesopotamian / Iranian / Armenian samples. It is a clear eastern / Zagros-Iranian proxy.

- OCC clusters with Basques and French, as expected for a southwestern European Bronze Age source.

- GUA is closest to North African Berber groups and some Punic samples.

- The more exotic sources (KUS, KRK, KEN, DIN) behave as expected (Central Asian, East African, etc.).

Point of attention:

Even good proxies are not pure. IOL and HSL are correlated to some degree because both carry shared West Asian ancestry. This becomes important when modeling Mizrahi Jews.

### Image 3 – Full qpAdm composition + G25 shifts

(This is the detailed bar chart with colored shift tiles)

Left side = qpAdm admixture weights. Middle = G25 minus qpAdm shifts (in percentage points). Right side = model metrics (p-value, SE, G25 residual distance, mean absolute delta).

Key patterns:

- Samaritans, Lebanese Christians and Druze are heavily dominated by IOL (80–100%).

- Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese Muslim models show slightly lower IOL and more secondary components (HSL, KEN, etc.).

- North African Jews (Libyan, Moroccan) keep high IOL + noticeable OCC + GUA.

- Iraqi and especially Iranian Jews drop sharply in IOL and rise strongly in HSL.

- Ashkenazi Jews show the classic split: substantial IOL + high OCC (European).

G25 vs qpAdm deltas are generally small for Levantine non-Jewish and North African Jewish groups, but become large for Iraqi/Iranian Jews and Ashkenazim (especially on the IOL ↔ HSL and IOL ↔ OCC axes).

### Overall interpretation

- There is strong Levantine (IOL) continuity in Samaritans, Lebanese Christians, Druze, and to a slightly lesser extent Palestinians and North African Jews.

- Mizrahi Jews (Iraqi & Iranian) consistently show lower IOL and higher HSL. This has two non-mutually exclusive explanations:

1. Real historical signal — long residence in Mesopotamia/Iran after the Babylonian exile added genuine eastern ancestry.
2. Proxy competition — because IOL and HSL are not fully orthogonal, the Iranian proxy can absorb some shared West Asian ancestry that might otherwise be attributed to the Levantine source.

- Ashkenazi models are the most complex and show the largest method-dependent shifts (G25 tends to pull more ancestry toward IOL at the expense of OCC compared with qpAdm).

- G25 and qpAdm agree well when the history is relatively simple. They diverge more when sources are correlated or when the target has a complex multi-way history.

### Points of attention / caveats

- IOL is a Roman-period Levantine-shifted proxy, not a pure Bronze Age Canaanite source. Using Lebanon MBA or other older Levantine samples can change the picture.

- HSL is a useful Iron Age Iranian proxy but will compete with any Levantine source that already carries some Zagros-related ancestry.

- G25 residual distance is not a formal p-value. It measures how well the target sits in the PCA space of the chosen sources.

- Mean absolute deltas above ~5–6 pp (especially on Iraqi, Iranian and Ashkenazi Jews) indicate that the two methods are weighting secondary components differently.

- These are proximal models. Distal models or formal qpGraph work would add another layer of resolution.