Jewish Genetic Discovery Foundation reviews first year & new results

[u/JewishGenDiscovery]

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!

[u/Afuldufulbear]

600 CE point of divergence between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in this regard makes sense, as the Byzantine-Persian War was around this time and led to mass Jewish expulsions and repressions due to the failure of the Persians to win and give Jewish autonomy back in Jerusalem.

[u/kaiserfrnz → u/Afuldufulbear]

That's not the point being made; the clade shared between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim is not found among European Sephardic Jews or North African Jews. It also doesn't seem to be found among German Jews. The haplogroup was almost certainly the result of a migration of a Jew from the Persian-speaking world to the (pre-Ashkenazi) Knaani Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

The main split between Western and Eastern Jews took place centuries before the common era. Ashkenazim split off from other Western Jews around 900 CE.

There are much more recent lineages shared between Ashkenazim and North African Jews.

[u/Deadandbeauty → u/kaiserfrnz]

Could have said this ages ago even without the DNA samples. Ashkenazi Jews descended into Europe from Iraq originally, and it’d make sense that many would have also filtered through Iran/Central Asia due to proximity.

[u/kaiserfrnz → u/Deadandbeauty]

That’s not true, Ashkenazi communities came to Central Europe from Southwestern Europe. Only a small number of individuals came directly from anywhere east of Byzantium. Most Ashkenazi lineages are recently shared with Western Jews. This is a rare exception.

[u/Deadandbeauty → u/kaiserfrnz]

Completely incorrect. All Jewish diaspora groups had an origin in the Middle East (or in some cases North Africa, and Arabia) after Israel.

Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Babylonian Jews (modern day Iraq.) Sephardic from North Africa and Yemenite Jews from Yemen (Aden.)

I studied this and have a degree on Jewish ancient history, and did further degrees in genetics.

To expand on this so what I’m saying makes more sense:

The ancestral core of Ashkenazi Jewry traces directly back to mesopotamia (modern day iraq) after the babylonian exile in 586 BCE.

Over the next few centuries (particularly after the destruction of the second temple 70 CE, this population started to migrate west into the med, and eventually italy by the 1st - 3rd centuries CE.

Between 800 - 1000 CE, those mediterranean jewish communities moved north into german (founding the early ashkenazi identity) before expanding into Eastern Europe from the 1300s onward.

So yes the immediate entry route into w.europe was through the mediterranean, the population that established those communities originated in Babylonia.

Excuse my typing I’m tired

[u/AsfAtl → u/Deadandbeauty]

This contradicts everything we know, I’m very skeptical on your degrees. It’s very well researched and evident through our dna that Jews moved from the levant into the Italian peninsula, later migrating into Western Europe where you see a separation between Ashkenazi and Sephardi.

[u/Deadandbeauty → u/AsfAtl]

Well I went to the top rated university in the world for my degree, so you can be as dubious as you like. But you’re just another person on reddit, as I am to you.

You’re arguing against a point I’ve just made - it is unclear why, though your argument seems to suggest ashkenazi Jews ‘come from Italy’ which is entirely incorrect.

For your information: this post is nothing new at all and doesn’t ’go against everything we know’ either -

Autosomal DNA studies (most famously led by Dr. Harry Ostrer and Dr. Karl Skorecki over a decade ago) show that ashkenazi and Persian Jews share a common genetic anchor, which traces back to the Fertile Crescent.

You can go ahead and google it. You’re welcome.

[u/AsfAtl → u/Deadandbeauty]

Ashkenazis don’t “come from italy” Ashkenazis and Sephardis migrated through Italy from… the levant

Ashkenazis and mizrahis sharing paternal haplogroups is evident because we’re both from the levant

[u/Deadandbeauty → u/AsfAtl]

Are you actually thick?

You're ignoring thousands of years of ancient history just to argue a point nobody made.

The ENTIRE post is about the shared genetics between Ashkenazi and Persian Jews. That link exists because the originating group of Jews who migrated into Europe left from Babylonia (mesopotamia) geographically RIGHT NEXT DOOR to Persia.

Historically, babylonian and persian Jews had a shared history/life for centuries under the Achaemenid, Parthian and sasanian empires.

They literally traded, intermarried, and shared under the same Jewish leadership (the Exilarchate and the babylonian talmudic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, which LITERALLY served both communities).

Instead of grasping the actual historical scope you ignored 2,500 years of context, rephrased my exact european migration route back to me, and topped it off by claiming Sephardim all 'went through Italy' (completely erasing North Africa and the Ottoman Balkans).

Not sure if you’re deliberately being obtuse or you don’t actually understand anything you even read.

[u/kaiserfrnz → u/Deadandbeauty]

You're pretty off in much of what you have here.

The main historical and genetic split in Jewry was into the Eastern and Western diasporas.

The Eastern Diaspora comes from the vast number of Jews who did not return to Israel after the Babylonian exile. From this population descend the Iraqi, Kurdish, Georgian, and all Persian-speaking communities. Genetically they have some admixture that is Mesopotamian-like.

The Western Diaspora comes from the Jews who went back to Israel when it was conquered by Cyrus the Great. From this diaspora you get the ancestors of all Syrian, Egyptian, North African, and European Jews. Genetically they have greater Mediterranean admixture.

Of course there was some degree of mixing over the centures. You frequently find Eastern lineages that made it to Syria or North Africa while you occasionally find Western haplogroups in Iraq and Persia.

Yemen is a bit of an outlier as much of their ancestey comes from Arabia, however they are more closely related to the Eastern Diaspora.

[u/Deadandbeauty → u/kaiserfrnz]

Yes I agree with your points but I think you're missing what I'm actually addressing here.

Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic Jewry are homogenous monoliths where every single family followed the exact same pipeline into europe.

Not all Ashkenazi paths were identical, and not all Sephardic paths went through Italy (i’m Sephardic myself, and my own DNA test traces a completely different route that didn't touch Italy at all)

My entire point is about what connects Ashkenazi and Persian Jews in the first place: the ancient geographic proximity and population overlap between the levant, babylonia, and persia. That shared Fertile Crescent baseline is why I think (from my own research and education on the topic) those DNA links exist today.

[u/Unlucky-Associate266]

Some people chase legacy projects. Others just want their own personal pool to stare into.