Early Modern Jewish History in Eastern Europe
The claim is that Sephardim settled amongst the Ashkenazi community of eastern Europe? What was going on there?
The Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a massive European country that at its greatest extent in 1619 more or less included the modern states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine. It’s neighbours were the Protestant Swedish Empire, Orthodox Christian Russia, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, Catholic Hapsburg Austria and the then-insignificant state of Brandenburg-Prussia.
Ashkenazi Jewish historic memory seems to start with the Fiddler on the Roof world that followed the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was attacked and partitioned by its greedy neighbours. The Council of the Four Lands, a secular semi-autonomous Ashkenazi Jewish government in Poland-Lithuania is now barely remembered.
King Alexander Jagiellon had welcomed Jews to settle in Poland in 1503. There is no evidence that the settlers included Jews expelled from Spain. Jagiellon’s successors followed his tolerant policies. Poland became known as “heaven for the Jews”. Migrants arrived from Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Religiously, the diverse Ashkenazi communities were drawn together by authoritative texts coming from the Sephardi diaspora in the Mediterranean, notably the Shukhan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) by Yosef Karo, published in Venice in 1565.
Sephardim in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
I think it is highly unlikely that destitute Jewish refugees from Spain in 1492 safely crossed thousands of miles of hostile territory – including countries and territories from which Jews were banned – to join Ashkenazi communities in the Rhineland, central or eastern Europe. The already dangerous options of crossing the Mediterranean to Muslim territories or more tolerant Italian states, or to go to Portugal, were considerably safer AND these were known places. What did the average Sephardic Jew know, if anything, about the Ashkenazi world in 1492? If this happened, why is there not a single document chronicling what would have been an incredible event?
What about the Ashkenazi rabbinic dynasties with family trees back to Spain? An unevidenced family tree is not accepted as evidence in genealogy. There are also rabbinic family trees back to King David and Adam & Eve.
What about family members with ‘swarthy’ looks? I don’t think there is a specific Sephardic look. I have Ashkenazi friends with darker skin tones than Sephardic friends. How someone looks is not evidence of where one of their ancestors may have lived 500 years ago.
Ashkenazi and Sephardi DNA
What about DNA? This is more interesting. We would expect to see Y-DNA and mt-DNA matches between Ashkenazim of Sephardic origin and individuals of Iberian origin? I am not a geneticist but understand that – with the large number of Jews taking DNA tests – a single Ashkenazi family seem to have an ancestral Y-DNA link to Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula.
A number of Sephardim and Ashkenazim have shared patrilineal ancestry but it is possible to estimate the date of the shared patriarch, and in almost every case this pre-dates the emergence of distinct Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities.
An autosomal (family finder) DNA test can offer some insights into some ancestors living around 200 years ago, but the DNA inherited from a single ancestor 500 years ago is likely to be undetectable. Ashkenazi Jews who receive a result telling them that they have – for example – 5% Iberian/Greek/Mediterranean DNA are making a huge assumption to assume that this indicates a distant Sephardic ancestor. It probably doesn’t.
What do we know about Sephardim in the Ashkenazi Pale of Settlement?
Sephardic Jews – apparently from the Ottoman Empire and Venice – settled in the newly established Polish town of Zamość in 1588. A wooden synagogue was built in the 1590s, to be replaced by a stone structure after 1610. By the 1620s the Sephardic community had disappeared. The balance of probability is that they left, but there may have been ‘inter-marriage’ with the local Ashkenazi population.
The Dutch had a substantial trade with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including importing grain. Unquestionably Western Sephardim were involved in this trade. What happened to them? I don’t know. They probably left. It is possible that some of them got stranded in Poland-Lithuania during the Deluge (the Swedish and Russian territory-grabs between 1648 and 1667) but no reference has yet been found in the vast Amsterdam historic archives.
The subject has been reviewed by Susan Sherman and Alexander Beider, and you should be able to find their articles on the Internet. Ton Tielen uncovered the 1660-1662 confession of a Francisco Domingo de Guzmán AKA Samuel Aboab to the Madrid Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in which he revealed the names of around 5,000 Jews, including a small number living in Poland (AHN, Inquisition Archives, Liber 1127).
As far as I am aware there are no Sephardic records in Poland. Information relating to Sephardim in Poland can probably be extrapolated from the synagogue and notarial records of Amsterdam, Hamburg and other places. The Danes taxed ships passing through their territory, but I don’t think they collected passenger names. I don’t know if any Sephardic names appear Polish court records and other official sources. The expert on Polish Jewish genealogy is Michael Tobias of JRI-Poland. JewishGen and various Facebook groups may also be useful. ‘A Guide to Jewish Genealogy in Poland’ by Susan Fifer was revised in 2014 by Geoff Munitz and is published by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain.
The important thing to be remembered by Ashkenazim researching possible Sephardic ancestors is that normal rules of genealogical research apply. You research back one generation at a time, relying on authoritative sources. A family tradition is interesting, and should be carefully recorded, but is not evidence. This includes Hassidic dynasties claiming Sephardic ancestry. You may not jump generations in ‘proving’ Sephardic ancestry.
Generally, the simplest explanation is best. An Ashkenazi genealogist with a large platform claims that their TALALAY ancestors from Mogilev, Belarus, adopted the surname in the 19th Century not from local Slavs called TALALAY but from a similarly named family in 14th Century Catalonia. Allegedly the family crossed Europe from one end to the other, secretly remembering (or misremembering) the surname for 500 years. There is no evidence to support the claim. There is no evidence of equivalent family histories. Anyone is free to mythologise their ancestors like this, but it is not genealogy. Is it more likely a surname was adopted locally or from someone generations and a continent away?
I think such fantasies contain a belief that Sephardic ancestry is somehow superior to Ashkenazi. It seems to me that the story of how a family reached eastern Europe from the Rhineland, survived the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the horrendous history thereafter, is in every way equally deserving of serious study.
The Truth is Out There
Genetic genealogy may eventually prove or disprove various theories. The Avotaynu DNA Project has found Sephardic and Ashkenazi families with shared patrilineal ancestry. The current (2021) state of research is that maybe 10-20% of Ashkenazim have shared ancestry with Sephardim. This may suggest shared ancestry in the 10th to 12th Centuries in the territory now occupied by France. The suggestion is that some settled in the Rhineland, the cradle of Ashkenazi civilisation while others found their way over the Pyrenees. It is very early days, but currently this seems to me to be the most likely explanation.
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