Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA: what a qpAdm model can tell you

If you have Jewish ancestry and have taken a consumer DNA test, you have probably seen a single line in your results: "Ashkenazi Jewish", "Sephardic and North African Jewish", or a similar label with a percentage beside it. That number is not wrong, but it answers a narrower question than most people think it does. It says how closely your genome resembles a reference group of present-day people who identify as Jewish. It does not say where that ancestry came from, how much of it is Levantine, how much is southern European, Iranian, Arabian or Caucasian, or whether any of those claims would survive a statistical test.

This guide is about the second set of questions, which is where ancient DNA and the qpAdm method come in. It is written from the inside, since we sell a qpAdm analysis, so it tries to be exact about what the method can and cannot say for a Jewish genome rather than persuasive. The companion posts go deeper on each community: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Yemenite and the Mountain, Georgian and Bukharian communities, plus the Canaanite source population that all of them share.

One thing first: ancestry is not identity#

A genome is not a membership card. Nothing in this guide, and nothing in any report we publish, is a statement about whether someone is Jewish, about halachic status, about conversion, or about belonging. Jewish identity is religious, cultural, legal and familial, and none of those things are measured by allele frequencies. Converts have no Levantine ancestry and are fully Jewish; plenty of people with substantial Levantine ancestry are not Jewish at all. A qpAdm model describes the ancestral populations a genome resembles. That is the whole claim, and it is a claim about biology, not about who you are.

What ancient DNA has established#

Two decades of population genetics on living Jewish communities, and a much shorter but decisive period of work on ancient genomes, agree on a picture that is now fairly stable.

Most Jewish communities share a Levantine core. The genome-wide studies of 2010 showed that Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian, Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian and Kurdish Jewish communities cluster together and with the non-Jewish populations of the Levant, rather than each community clustering with its host population (Behar et al. 2010; Atzmon et al. 2010). The exceptions are the Ethiopian and Indian communities, whose genomes largely resemble their neighbours, and which are best understood as communities with a different demographic history.

That core is Bronze Age Canaanite. Ancient genomes from Megiddo, Hazor, Sidon, Abel Beth Maacah and other sites of the second millennium BC describe a population that was a blend of the local Levantine Neolithic (itself descended from the Natufian foragers) with a substantial Iranian- or Caucasus-related component that had been arriving since the Chalcolithic (Haber et al. 2017; Agranat-Tamir et al. 2020). When present-day Jewish and Arabic-speaking Levantine groups are modelled against these genomes, a Canaanite-related population supplies a large part of their ancestry, with the remainder differing by community.

The remainder is where the communities diverge. Ashkenazi genomes carry a southern European component, mostly Italian-like, that amounts to roughly half of their ancestry by most estimates, plus a smaller eastern European share (Xue et al. 2017; Waldman et al. 2022). Sephardic communities of Turkey, the Balkans and North Africa carry Iberian and local admixture on the same base. Iraqi, Iranian and Kurdish Jews carry more Iranian-related ancestry and less European. Yemenite Jews sit between the Levant and Arabia. The Caucasus and Central Asian communities add local Caucasian and Central Asian ancestry to a Persian-Jewish core.

Founder effects shape everything. The Ashkenazi population passed through a severe bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago, to a few hundred effective founders (Carmi et al. 2014), and the medieval genomes from Erfurt show that the founder event and the modern ancestry profile were already in place by the fourteenth century (Waldman et al. 2022). Several other communities have their own, smaller bottlenecks. This matters for testing, as the next section explains.

Why the consumer label is a different kind of answer#

Consumer ancestry panels work by comparing your genome with reference sets of living people. For most of the world that is a reasonable proxy for geography. For Ashkenazi Jews it produces something unusual: because of the bottleneck and centuries of endogamy, Ashkenazi genomes are so similar to one another that they form their own tight cluster, and the panels treat that cluster as a category in its own right. A person with four Ashkenazi grandparents is reported as very close to 100% "Ashkenazi Jewish".

That is a correct statement about resemblance to a reference group and a completely circular statement about origins. It cannot tell you that roughly half of that ancestry is Levantine, because the Levantine and European halves are both inside the reference. It cannot separate Italian from Levantine, Iranian from Canaanite, or Iberian from Moroccan. It also cannot fail: there is no version of the calculation that comes back and says the proposed explanation is inconsistent with the data.

The general buyer's guide explains the contrast for any genome; the Jewish-genome buyer's guide goes through it for this case specifically.

What qpAdm does instead#

qpAdm is the method from the ADMIXTOOLS package, developed in David Reich's laboratory, that most published ancient-DNA admixture studies have used since 2015, including the Levantine and Ashkenazi studies cited above. It takes a target genome, in this case yours, and asks whether it can be written as a mixture of a chosen set of ancient source populations, tested against a fixed set of distant outgroups. It returns a weight for each source, a standard error on each weight, and a single p-value for the whole model. The p-value can reject the model. That is the property that separates a test from an estimate, and it is set out fully in Understanding qpAdm and the reading guide for the three numbers.

For a Jewish genome the sources are ancient populations, not living communities. The Canaanite genomes of the Bronze Age Levant are one source. Imperial Roman Italians, Aegean Greeks, Iranian farmers, Arabian Peninsula populations, Germanic and Slavic groups, Iberians and North African Berbers are others, depending on the community. The model then says, for example, whether an Ashkenazi genome is compatible with being a mixture of Canaanite and Imperial Italian ancestry, in what proportions, with what uncertainty, and whether a third source is needed at all.

Since August 2026 our source catalog carries a dedicated Canaanite (2000 - 1200 BC) source, built from the Israel_MLBA genomes of Megiddo, Hazor and their neighbours, precisely because modelling a Jewish or Levantine genome without a Bronze Age Levantine reference forces the model to split that ancestry between Iron Age and Roman-era proxies that already carry Aegean and Anatolian admixture. The full source directory lists every population, with a page for each.

What a Jewish qpAdm report looks like#

Every report models two eras. The Hunter-Gatherer and Neolithic Farmer era writes your genome in terms of the deep ancestral streams of western Eurasia: Anatolian and Iranian farmers, Natufian foragers, steppe herders, European hunter-gatherers. For Jewish genomes of every community the Anatolian, Iranian and Natufian farmer sources carry most of the weight, with the steppe and hunter-gatherer sources marking the European admixture in Ashkenazi and Sephardic genomes and absent or near zero in Mizrahi and Yemenite ones.

The Classical Antiquity era is where the communities separate, because the sources are closer in time to the events that made them. A typical Ashkenazi model uses the Canaanite source beside Imperial Italy, sometimes with a small Germanic or Slavic share; a typical Iraqi Jewish model uses Canaanite beside an Iranian-related source; a Yemenite model tests Canaanite against the Arabian Peninsula source; a Sephardic model tests Canaanite against Iberian and North African sources. Which of these the analyst tries, and in which combinations, is the work the service pays for, and it is described in each community's post.

For every era the report publishes the model, each source's weight with its standard error and Z-score, the p-value, and the complete outgroup list; the Reading view adds the full record (chi-square, degrees of freedom, f4 rank, SNP counts, nested models) and a written explanation from the analyst of why your genome resolved into these sources. Every number in that record is explained in The model record explained.

What it cannot do#

Three limits are worth stating before you buy, because they are specific to Jewish genomes.

1. It cannot resolve the bottleneck away. Drift after a founder event makes a population slightly unlike every ancient source at once. A well-composed model absorbs this; a poorly composed one produces a rejected model or a source with an inflated weight. It is one reason every model we publish is composed by hand rather than by rotating combinations until one passes.
2. It cannot separate closely related sources with a low-coverage file. Canaanite versus Iron Age Phoenician, or Imperial Italian versus Aegean, are close in genetic space. The standard error that tells you how well they were separated is set by your file's coverage, and no analyst effort can shrink it. Check your file's coverage for free in the file check before paying.
3. It says nothing about identity, descent from any named person, tribe or lineage, or religious status. A weight on the Canaanite source means your genome is well described as partly resembling those people. It does not mean any individual buried at Megiddo was your ancestor, and it is not evidence for or against anyone's Jewishness.

The publish bar#

Every model we publish, at every tier, must clear the same numeric bar: p above 0.05, and for every source in every era a Z-score above 3 in magnitude and a standard error below 0.10. The four tiers, from €29.99 to €59.99, buy more search effort past the first passing model, not a different bar and not different report content. A Jewish genome, with its several candidate sources per era, is one of the cases where the deeper tiers earn their price: the difference between a two-source and a three-source model is exactly the kind of question the extra search settles.

After the report you can unlock the Model Lab and run your own models on your own merged sample, with the same panel of ancient genomes, including the medieval Erfurt Jewish genomes and every Levantine group in the AADR. Expect rejections; they are the method working.

Where to start#

• Read the post for your community, then the Canaanite source.
• Check your raw file's coverage in the free file check.
• Order the qpAdm analysis at the tier you want; the report is the same at every tier.
• If you want distances and a PCA rather than a formal model, the Global25 service compares your coordinates with the modern Jewish community averages and the ancient Levantine samples directly, and Ancient Matches scans your genome for shared segments with individual ancient people.

References#

• Agranat-Tamir, L. et al. (2020). The genomic history of the Bronze Age Southern Levant. Cell, 181(5), 1146–1157.
• Atzmon, G. et al. (2010). Abraham's children in the genome era: major Jewish diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry. American Journal of Human Genetics, 86(6), 850–859.
• Behar, D. M. et al. (2010). The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature, 466, 238–242.
• Carmi, S. et al. (2014). Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins. Nature Communications, 5, 4835.
• Haber, M. et al. (2017). Continuity and admixture in the last five millennia of Levantine history from ancient Canaanite and present-day Lebanese genome sequences. American Journal of Human Genetics, 101(2), 274–282.
• Waldman, S. et al. (2022). Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century. Cell, 185(25), 4703–4716.
• Xue, J. et al. (2017). The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history. PLoS Genetics, 13(4), e1006644.