Originally Posted by
Viriatus91
I am not familiar with the average DNA of Sephardic Jews, but do they have significant North African ancestry? Do they tend to have some sort of Ashkenazi DNA show up? I have seen many Latinos have both North African and Ashkenazi show up in their DNA in percentages of over 2%.
From the parish records from the village of my ancestors in Portugal I found that it was all Old Christians in the XVIII century, and they tended to marry among one another and to some extent with the inhabitants of two other villages that seemed to be only Old Christians. According to 23andme I have 0.5% North African DNA, but 0% Ashkenazi and Subsaharan African, would a Sephardic Jew show higher percentages of these?
In my parents' village, going through parish records that marriages with individuals from the closest village were non-existent until the XIX century, and even after then, these were very few. After talking with my mother and some others, they said that the individuals from the neighboring village were looked down upon. They were called "rabinos" (rabbis) or "judeus" (Jews). This prejudice lasted well into the present day, despite most people in my parents' hometown not knowing exactly what those terms meant. In fact I remember older people referring to a thief or dishonest person as a "judeu", and had no idea that it was a real religion. I looked at some of the church records from that neighboring village and did see some old testament names in the XVII century records like Judith, Samuel and Ezekiel, which I imagined were of Jewish origin. In my parents village they all had names like John, Joseph, Mary, etc. One man from that "Jewish Village" told me that his grandparents would still refuse to work on Saturday and light candles on Friday nights, though they were ignorant of the origins of these traditions. If this prejudice lasted so long, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to endure this under the threat of the inquisition during the XVII and XVIII centuries.
We have to remember that the vast majority of Muslims in Iberia were not directly North African immigrants, but rather people who did convert to Islam because it often gave them some benefit. This was also the case throughout the Balkans under Ottoman Rule. I would be curious what the DNA of a Morisco from the XVI century would have looked like.
Apparently so many of the early Spanish migrants to the colonies were New Christians, that when Hernan Cortes attempted to expel them from New Spain, they were found to be too numerous and their expulsion would have been detrimental. The same was true in Brazil where it appears that the majority of early European immigrants were New Christians. Remember the Inquisition was slower to establish itself in the New World.
I know during the Union of the Crowns from 1580-1640, many New Christians left Portugal to Castile as merchants and from there or Brazil to Spanish America. In Buenos Aires these "Portuguese" were over half of the "blancos" in the small city during the early 1600s. They were particularly prominent smuggling slaves and silver out of Buenos Aires to bypass the Spanish Crown's official route through Cartagena. In Peru they were also numerous, that the ones whom became wealthy in mining were occasionally targeted by the inquisition, such as in 1639.
In Cape Verde, many of the early settlers were New Christians as well, and I have seen Cape Verdeans get DNA results where Ashkenazi Jew shows up significantly.
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