Published: 20 June 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
WHEN MY PARENTS sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company late last year and were informed via email a few weeks later that they are both “100% Ashkenazi Jewish”, it struck me as slightly odd. Most people I know who have done DNA tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas – Chinese, British, West African.
Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents’ DNA.
After arriving in eastern Europe around a millennium ago, the company’s website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and by custom, mixing only occasionally with local populations.
Isolation slowly narrowed the gene pool, which now gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them apart from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test.
FULL STORY What does it mean to be genetically Jewish? (Guardian)
Photo: Gyula and Erszebet Keimovits, the author’s great grandparents. His own parents took a DNA test to establish their genetic ancestry.
