Ashkenazim with Sephardic Ancestry

Many Ashkenazi families believe they have Sephardi ancestry. The belief rests on family tradition, on surnames, on genealogical claims, on the interpretation of DNA results, and sometimes on appearance or instinct.

Some of these families are right. Sephardim and Ashkenazim have lived alongside one another for centuries in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, Venice, Vienna and the Ottoman Balkans, and they intermarried. Where that happened it is documented, and it can be traced.

But for families whose ancestry is entirely from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, the evidence is thin to the point of absence — and it is absent in a very particular way, which this page sets out.

This page is not an attempt to take anything away from anyone. It is an attempt to say what is known, what is not, and — most usefully — where it is worth looking and where it is not.

Where is it worth looking?

Take this first, because it is the practical answer and it comes from Randy Schoenberg, who has done more than most to test these claims.

If your family tradition of Sephardi ancestry is attached to a place where there was a Sephardi community — Hamburg, Amsterdam, Livorno, Venice, Vienna, or anywhere south of that — it is worth investigating.

If it is attached to Lithuania, Latvia or Poland, it is almost certainly a recent legend.

That is the whole page in two sentences. Everything below explains why.

What about the rabbinic dynasties?

Branches of a number of Ashkenazi rabbinic dynasties carry traditions of Sephardi descent: Spira (Shapira), Luria, Katzenellenbogen, Epstein, Horowitz — and dozens of others. The claim has even been made for the Chabad Lubavitch dynasty.

None of these traditions can be traced to the medieval period. They appear, so far as anyone has established, in early modern and modern times — and the reason is not hard to see. Medieval Spain produced the greatest Jewish philosophers and jurists of the age. A rabbinic dynasty claiming descent from them is claiming intellectual authority through the body, exactly as royal houses claimed descent from biblical kings or pagan gods.

The Horowitz case, which has been settled

The Horowitz family is the best-documented example, and it is worth setting out in full because it is the model for the rest.

The Horowitzes take their name from Hořovice, near Prague, and produced a long line of eminent rabbis. The tradition of Spanish descent — usually from the Benveniste Halevi family — is everywhere on the internet.

Randy Schoenberg and Rabbi Marmorstein investigated it, and found the opposite of evidence. Rabbi Shabtai (Sheftel) Halevi Horowitz died in 1660. He wrote a detailed ethical will that includes his own genealogy back five generations, and that argues explicitly for the importance of knowing one’s family history and yichus. It makes no mention of Spain whatever.

So the principal bearer of the family tradition, writing in the 1650s about his own ancestry at length, did not know he was Sephardi.

Where the legend actually came from is traceable. In the 1820s a man named Marcus Fischer forged a Hebrew chronicle in Prague — a forgery not exposed for about a century — which described unnamed Jews from Spain founding the Prague community in the 1500s. A book on the Prague cemetery in the 1840s speculated, without foundation, that the Todros family came from Spain. And in about 1882 a Horowitz descendant published the suggestion that the family descended from the Benveniste Halevi of Spain — apparently because one Horowitz rabbi had been styled “prince of the Levites”, and the only other man ever so styled was Judah Halevi.

A speculation, published once, repeated without citation, for a hundred and forty years. It has since found its way into a scientific paper.

And the genetics agree. The Avotaynu DNA Foundation’s assessment of the published Horowitz paper is that the lineage is clearly Ashkenazi and founded some 1,400 years ago — and that of 1,500 non-Ashkenazi men tested, not one carried it.

Adam Brown’s summary is worth quoting exactly: unless the Horowitzes count as Sephardi “running across Europe, putting their foot down on base in Portugal, spending maybe a hundred years or so, and then coming back to Germany”, there is no evidence of Sephardi ancestry.

Epstein appears to be a myth of the same kind and the same date, though it has not been examined as thoroughly.

What about individual family traditions?

Three cases, of different strengths.

The Mendoza story

Around the millennium, a document called the Mendelson Family Society History Write-Up reached us. A Mendelevitch family from Butin, Russia, took the name Mendelson on reaching the United States in the early twentieth century. Before emigrating, Abe Mendelson had visited an elderly relative, Schmule Meyer, who kept a sefer hazichronot — a book of memory.

According to those notes, the earliest ancestor was Israel Mendoza, a merchant murdered in 1650 near Tevely while travelling home from Łódź to Kobryn — killed by two hired labourers, who were caught after the innkeeper heard them complaining he had carried less money than they expected. His grandson Arya Labe adopted the surname Mendelevitch, described as “the Russian name for Mendoza”.

It is very specific — names, dates, places, a circumstantial story. And from the Sephardi side we have no knowledge of an Israel Mendoza in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, nor of anyone of that name in northern Europe at that date.

The honest answer is a large question mark. It is exactly the kind of tradition that should be recorded carefully, and exactly the kind that Y-DNA could settle. If a male-line Mendelson from this family tests with the Avotaynu study, we will know.

Looks and instinct

On Who Do You Think You Are?, Nigella Lawson wondered whether her family might be Sephardi because of her sister’s appearance. Both Sephardim and Ashkenazim come in every shape and colouring, and origins cannot be read from a face.

Instinct is stranger, and it connects to the crypto-Judaism claims treated elsewhere on this site: there are people who have concluded they have Sephardi ancestry because of how it feels. That is a psychological response, not a genealogical one, and it should be respected as the first without being mistaken for the second.

Did Sephardim genuinely reach Ashkenazi lands?

Yes, by two routes, and both are real.

Through the Ottoman Empire

Sephardim followed the Ottoman expansion into Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and the Balkans, and the southern borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were where Ottoman and Habsburg territory met. This is the likelier route by far, and — as the genetics section below shows — it is where the evidence actually is.

Through western trade

Merchants from Amsterdam, Hamburg and London traded eastward, and a few settled.

Zamość, 1588. Jan Zamoyski, an enlightened magnate building a Renaissance city, invited merchants of various nations, granting them citizenship rights and the right to a synagogue and a burial ground. Among those who came were Sephardim, apparently from the Ottoman Empire and Venice, with a wooden synagogue in the 1590s replaced in stone after 1610. Names identifiable as Sephardi include Zakuto — recorded as Italicus but in fact from Lisbon by way of Amsterdam — and de Campos. By the 1620s the community had gone. The likeliest explanation is that they left; intermarriage with the local Ashkenazim is possible. Claims that particular modern families descend from them are speculative.

Gdańsk (Danzig). This is the most interesting find, and it comes from Ton Tielen’s work in the Spanish Inquisition archives.

The confession of Francisco Domingo de Guzmán, alias Samuel Aboab, made to the Madrid tribunal in 1660–1662, names something like four to five thousand Jews across Europe — Amsterdam above all, but also London, Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Hamburg, Glückstadt and smaller places (AHN, Inquisition Archives, Liber 1127).

Among them is a community at Gdańsk — families named Espinoza, Navarro, Lobo, Diaz, Benzo and Coronel — trading with Amsterdam and even with Portugal, with a secret synagogue, secret because Jews were not permitted to live in the city. As former Catholics they were well placed to conceal themselves in a Catholic country.

After this we hear no more of them. And the Ashkenazi families of that region who claim Sephardi ancestry do not carry names like Espinoza, Navarro or Lobo. Could some have stayed and left descendants? Yes. Is there documentary evidence? No.

Israel Mendoza is said to have been murdered near Tevely in 1650 — some 500 kilometres from Gdańsk. Whether there is a connection, nobody knows.

One that turns out not to be true

Moses Montalto is said to have settled in Poland in the seventeenth century and built a synagogue in Lublin where the congregation prayed in the Sephardi rite.

Ton Tielen’s work in the Amsterdam notarial archives shows that Montalto lived in Amsterdam until late 1636, went to Lublin on a business trip leaving his wife, brother and children behind, and died there in the spring of 1637. He plainly intended to return, and a few months is not enough time to build a synagogue. What the archives do contain is the subsequent legal wrangling over his inheritance.

What does the archival silence show?

This is the strongest evidence on the page, and it is negative evidence of an unusually good kind — because the records exist, they are extensive, and they cover exactly the question.

The Amsterdam Dotar. The dowry society provided for Sephardi brides across the entire world through its correspondent network — Brazil, the Caribbean, Italy, the Ottoman lands, North Africa. None in eastern Europe.

The despachos. The Amsterdam and London communities funded members to travel to their homes across the world. Ashkenazim were funded to travel to eastern Europe. Sephardim were not.

The Amsterdam marriage records. Swetschinski counted the marriage banns for the seventeenth century and Levie Bergefeld for the eighteenth. No Sephardim came from eastern Europe to marry in Amsterdam. The closest is south-eastern Europe — Salonica, the Greek cities, Turkey, even Palestine — and a single marriage involving someone from Vienna. There were plenty of Ashkenazim from eastern Europe in Amsterdam; they did not marry in the Portuguese synagogue.

The poor relief lists. The table of countries to which Amsterdam sent its poor with a subsidy includes France, the New World, London, Hamburg and Gibraltar — and, near the bottom, Poland: three heads of families, who may have been Ashkenazi or Sephardi; the original entries would settle it.

The inference is the important part. The Sephardim of Amsterdam had an unrivalled knowledge of where Sephardi communities were, because they sent money to all of them — as our Israel page describes at length. They did not see a viable Sephardi community in the east to which they could send their poor. They saw them in south-eastern Europe: Salonica, Monastir. Not in the Ashkenazi heartland.

Hamburg tells the same story. Michael Studemund-Halévy’s Biographisches Lexikon der Hamburger Sefarden, built from thousands of gravestones at the Altona cemetery with biographical detail for each, shows very few links to eastern Europe — a handful of merchants who traded with Poland and Gdańsk, and no more. Hermann Kellenbenz’s Sephardim an der unteren Elbe is the classic study and points the same way.

What does the genetics show?

This is where most of the confusion originates, and it is worth taking slowly. Neither of the authors of this page is a geneticist; what follows is drawn from the Avotaynu DNA Foundation’s work and from Adam Brown’s public statements.

The three tools, and what each can do

Autosomal DNA — the “family finder” tests. You inherit half from each parent, a quarter from each grandparent, and so on. It is useful for roughly five or six generations. Beyond that the signal from any one ancestor becomes vanishingly small. It cannot answer a question about 1492.

Mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the mother, mutates so slowly that its resolution is far too coarse for a 500-year question.

Y-DNA, inherited from father to son, is the tool. It is what the Avotaynu DNA Study collects, testing Jewish men and men of Jewish patrilineal descent, and it is where the answers to this question will come from.

The trap that catches everybody

On any Jewish genealogy forum, an Ashkenazi Jew reports a few per cent of “Mediterranean”, “Italian”, “Southern European” or “Iberian” ancestry, and someone immediately suggests that their ancestors fled the Inquisition.

This is almost always wrong, and there is a good reason why.

Ashkenazi Jews carry a substantial Southern European — largely Italian — component, because that is where the Ashkenazi population was formed. Jewish men from the Levant settled in Italy and the Rhineland in the early medieval period and married local women. That component predates 1492 by many centuries.

A commercial test reporting Mediterranean ancestry in an Ashkenazi Jew is therefore reporting something real — and it is evidence of how the Ashkenazi population came into being, not of a Sephardi refugee.

The finding that matters most

Adam Brown’s work identifies something that resolves the confusion precisely:

There are a fair number of lineages in the Ashkenazi community that came from Iberia — and joined the proto-Ashkenazi population, probably in France, about 1,400 years ago.

So Iberian-origin lineages genuinely are present among Ashkenazim. They arrived around the sixth or seventh century, at the formation of the population — not after 1391 or 1492.

That is the single most useful distinction available, and it explains why so many people get a result that looks like confirmation and is not.

What has and has not been found

Not found: a substantial number of post-1391 non-Ashkenazi Y chromosomes in eastern Europe from anywhere other than the Ottoman Empire.

Found: Ottoman Sephardi Y-DNA carried by men identifying as Ashkenazi, concentrated where you would expect — in the borderlands between the former Habsburg and Ottoman empires, which is precisely where the two populations met.

One family in Belarus appears to carry what might be described as Western Sephardi Y-DNA. There are reports of families in Sweden and Finland.

And here is the awkward part. The great majority of families carrying traditions of Sephardi ancestry are in Lithuania and Latvia — far to the north of where the genetic evidence is. The traditions and the lineages are in different places.

The 99 per cent observation

Adam Brown makes an observation that ought to be better known, because it inverts the entire question:

When a non-Ashkenazi lineage is found among the Ashkenazim of Europe, 99 per cent of the time the family had no idea. When there is a claim of such a lineage, proof very rarely follows.

The traditions and the evidence are not merely uncorrelated. They are close to inversely correlated. The families who turn out to have non-Ashkenazi ancestry are, overwhelmingly, families with no tradition of it.

The honest caveats

The asymmetry. Ashkenazi Y-DNA is comparatively easy to identify because a small founder population produced a very large modern one. Sephardi genetics has the opposite problem — a large ancestral population reduced to a relatively small modern community — which makes Sephardi lineages harder to characterise and means fewer are yet described.

The pruned tree. As Bennett Greenspan puts it, we have a good picture of the Jewish genetic tree, but it is a deeply pruned one. We can see the large Ashkenazi clusters clearly because millions of their members reached America, Canada and Britain before 1920. A small family group that settled in one Hungarian village, never emigrated, and did not survive the Shoah would be invisible to us.

It is early. The Avotaynu study tests several dozen men a month in the non-Ashkenazi communities, specifically looking for these links. The picture will change.

But the direction of travel is clear enough to say this: if there were large numbers of Ashkenazim of post-1492 Sephardi descent, we would expect to be seeing it by now, and we are not.

Where did the belief come from?

Several mechanisms, all documented, and they compound.

Rabbinic status. Claiming descent from the sages of Spain asserted direct transmission from the greatest generation of Jewish scholarship.

The Haskalah. The Jewish Enlightenment in central and eastern Europe looked west and saw the Western Sephardim — integrated into their host societies as Jews, prosperous, educated, accepted. To claim Sephardi ancestry was to place oneself a step above one’s neighbours.

Wissenschaft des Judentums. Nineteenth-century German Jewish scholarship promoted the myth of a golden age in Spain in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived in harmony and culture flourished. Its most visible legacy is architectural: Moorish-style synagogues in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and across central Europe. The allure of the Sephardic is a nineteenth-century German invention as much as anything else.

Philanthropy. Montefiore and others travelled east to improve conditions for Jews there, reinforcing an association between the Sephardim and wealth, modernity and progress.

And a mechanism that produced actual false Sephardim. When Glückstadt was founded in 1616 by the King of Denmark to rival Hamburg, he invited specifically Sephardi Jews. From 1622 Jews were barred from the rest of Denmark — but Sephardim were admitted. A number of Ashkenazi Jews accordingly came in claiming to be Sephardi. The first Jewish community, at Fredericia in 1638, was Sephardi; an Ashkenazi one was permitted two years later. In the meantime there were Ashkenazim circulating in the region who had every reason to maintain the claim — and who traded into the Baltic and eastern Europe.

A family tradition of Sephardi descent may therefore be perfectly genuine as a tradition, and record a seventeenth-century legal fiction rather than a fifteenth-century migration.

One specific confusion worth clearing up

Nusach Sefard is not the Sephardi rite. It is an Ashkenazi liturgy incorporating Lurianic kabbalistic elements, brought back from the Holy Land by Ashkenazi travellers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it is used by Hasidim who are entirely Ashkenazi.

A family whose synagogue in Lithuania was “Sephardic” was almost certainly Nusach Sefard, and this is very likely the origin of a good number of these traditions.

What about traffic in the other direction?

It is well documented that Ashkenazim joined Sephardi communities and were absorbed.

Morpurgo — an Ashkenazi family from Marburg in Austria that joined the Sephardi community of Venice and became, to all appearances, Sephardi.

Eskenazi — a common Sephardi surname in the Ottoman lands, naming a family that had arrived from the Ashkenazi world generations earlier.

Since we can see the traffic one way, it is reasonable to expect some the other. The reason we see one and not the other is largely that the Sephardi records are far better than the Ashkenazi ones — Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Livorno kept registers that eastern European communities did not.

And the genuine case, which is Amsterdam

There is one setting where Ashkenazi families demonstrably do acquire Sephardi ancestry, and it should not be lost among the negatives.

Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Amsterdam began intermarrying from about 1810, and the convention was that the woman followed the man: a Sephardi man marrying an Ashkenazi woman brought her into the Sephardi community, while a Sephardi woman marrying an Ashkenazi man followed him into the Ashkenazi one.

This happened a great deal. So there are certainly Ashkenazim in Amsterdam with Sephardi ancestry — documented, datable and traceable in excellent records.

If you are Ashkenazi and your family passed through Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, Venice or Vienna, this is a real question with a real chance of an answer.

What should you do?

Record the tradition carefully. Write down what you were told, by whom, and what they said they were told. Find distant and older relatives and record their versions separately. Whether or not it turns out to be true, it is family treasure, and variations between versions are themselves informative.

Then apply ordinary genealogical standards. Rabbi Malcolm Stern’s commandments are the foundation of the IAJGS code of conduct, and four of them apply directly here:

I am a genealogist dedicated to true knowledge about the families I am researching.

Thou shalt use family traditions with caution, and only as clues.

Thou shalt not hang nobility or royalty on your family tree without verifying with experts.

Thou shalt clearly label the questionable and the fairy tale.

Research back one generation at a time, on authoritative sources. You may not jump generations. This applies to Hasidic dynasties exactly as it applies to everybody else.

And consider Y-DNA. For this particular question it is the only tool with the necessary reach, and the Avotaynu DNA Study is where the work is being done. If your family carries a specific, detailed tradition — as the Mendelson family does — a male-line test could settle in a fortnight what documents cannot settle at all.

Conclusions

In western Europe, Western Sephardi and Ashkenazi families lived side by side from early modern times. Intermarriage is documented from the second half of the eighteenth century and relationships earlier. Ashkenazim with Sephardi ancestry in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, Venice and Vienna are a real and researchable category.

Migration to eastern and central Europe was possible and, on the evidence, very small. Where it happened, the migrants were more likely Eastern Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire than Western Sephardim from the Atlantic world — which is exactly what the Y-DNA is showing.

And no Ashkenazi family living as Ashkenazim has yet been traced back to Iberia by documents. Not one. That may change; the archives of eastern Europe are perhaps two per cent online, and the genetic study is young.

Until it does, the honest answer to most of these questions is that we do not know — and saying so is not a weakness. It is where research starts.

Help us find records

We would like to be shown evidence we have not seen. In particular:

Y-DNA results from Ashkenazi men with specific family traditions of Sephardi descent — above all from the Mendelson/Mendelevitch family
Any documented line from an Ashkenazi family to a named individual in Iberia or in a Sephardi community
Records of the Gdańsk community named in the 1660–62 Aboab confession
Anything further on the Zamość Sephardim after the 1620s
Evidence of Ashkenazim passing as Sephardim at Glückstadt and in the Baltic trade

If you hold any of this, please email [email protected].

Research services

We do not do speculative research. If you have a solid reason to believe you have Sephardi ancestry — a family in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, Venice or Vienna, or a documented connection to a Sephardi community — get in touch and we will help. If your ancestry is entirely from the Pale of Settlement and all you have is a tradition, we will tell you so, and tell you what would need to be true for it to lead anywhere. You can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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