The Jewish communities of Iraq, Iran and Kurdistan are the oldest continuously documented Jewish diaspora, with a history in Mesopotamia that begins in the sixth century BC and, in the case of the Babylonian academies, shaped Jewish law for a thousand years. Genetically they are also the communities that sit closest to the ancient Levant, which makes them the clearest case for what an ancient-DNA model can and cannot say. This post is part of the series introduced in Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA, and as everywhere in it: ancestry is not identity, and nothing here is a statement about who is Jewish.
"Mizrahi" is a modern umbrella word. In this post it covers the Iraqi (Babylonian), Iranian (Persian), Kurdish and Syrian communities, which share a genetic profile; the Yemenite community has its own post, and the Caucasus and Central Asian communities have theirs.
Where the communities sit#
In the genome-wide studies of living Jewish populations, Iraqi, Iranian and Kurdish Jews form a cluster of their own that lies closest, among all Jewish groups, to the non-Jewish populations of the Levant and northern Mesopotamia, and that carries the least European ancestry of any of the large Jewish communities (Behar et al. 2010; Atzmon et al. 2010). Syrian Jews sit between that cluster and the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities. What separates the Mesopotamian communities from Levantine Arabs and from the other Jewish groups is a larger share of Iranian-related ancestry, a modest signal of endogamy, and, for the Iranian Jewish community in particular, its own founder event.
The two ancient layers#
The ancient genomes of the region explain that profile with two populations.
The Bronze Age Levant. The Canaanite genomes of Megiddo, Hazor, Sidon and their neighbours describe a population made of the local Levantine Neolithic lineage and a substantial Iranian- or Caucasus-related layer that had been arriving since the Chalcolithic (Haber et al. 2017; Agranat-Tamir et al. 2020). When present-day Jewish and Levantine groups are modelled against those genomes, a Canaanite-related population supplies a large part of their ancestry. This is the Canaanite source in our catalog, described in its own post.
The Iranian plateau and Zagros. The Neolithic farmers of the Zagros, known from Ganj Dareh and Wezmeh Cave, are a lineage distinct from the Anatolian farmers who settled Europe, and their descendants supplied the Iranian-related ancestry that spread west into the Levant during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age and that dominates present-day Iranian, Kurdish and Caucasian populations (Lazaridis et al. 2016; Narasimhan et al. 2019). A Mesopotamian Jewish genome carries more of this ancestry than a Levantine one, which is exactly what a community that lived for two and a half millennia between the Tigris and the Zagros should look like.
Agranat-Tamir and colleagues made the point directly: the present-day groups that are best described by their Bronze Age Levantine genomes plus additional Iranian-related ancestry include the Jewish communities of Iraq and Iran, alongside Levantine Arabic-speaking populations, while the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities need a European source in addition.
What a qpAdm model does with a Mizrahi genome#
qpAdm writes your genome as a mixture of ancient source populations, tested against a set of outgroups, and returns a weight, a standard error and a Z-score for every source and a p-value for the model that can reject it. The method is described in Understanding qpAdm and the numbers in the reading guide.
Hunter-Gatherer and Neolithic Farmer era. A Mizrahi genome is one of the cleanest cases in the whole catalog. The Anatolian Neolithic Farmer, Iranian Neolithic Farmer and Natufian sources carry essentially all of the weight, with the Iranian farmer share larger than in an Ashkenazi or Sephardic genome, and the Western Steppe Herder and Western Hunter-Gatherer sources at or near zero. A model that carries a European source anyway will usually have that source's Z-score fall below 3, and the nested-model check will drop it.
Classical Antiquity era. The starting model is Canaanite beside the Bronze and Iron Age Anatolian source, which carries the Caucasus- and Iranian-related side of West Eurasian variation in this era, with the Parthian Iran source (the Liar Sang Bon genomes from Gilan, the only Classical-era genomes from Iran itself, added in September 2026) tested for the Iranian plateau share; the Iranian farmer share is resolved in the earlier era. The questions the search settles are how much of the Iranian-related ancestry is already inside the Canaanite reference (a real issue, since the Canaanites carried some), whether the Eastern Mediterranean source fits the Levantine side better than Canaanite for a Syrian genome, and whether the Arabian Peninsula source earns a place for a genome from Baghdad or Basra. For a Syrian Jewish genome the analyst also tests the Aegean and Imperial Italian sources, since that community absorbed Sephardic exiles after 1492. Each of those is a separate run with its own p-value, and the report keeps the one that survives.
The report shows the standard error on the Canaanite weight, which tells you how well the model could separate the Levantine from the Iranian-related ancestry in your particular file. Because those two sources overlap, this is the number to look at first, and it is set by your file's coverage, which you can check for free in the file check.
What the model does not say#
- It does not say that any individual from Megiddo or Ganj Dareh was your ancestor. A source is a reference population the model tests against.
- It does not resolve the Babylonian exile as an event. The sources are Bronze Age and Neolithic populations; the model describes the ancestral streams, not the road they travelled.
- It does not measure Jewishness. A Kurdish Muslim genome and a Kurdish Jewish genome may model very similarly, and that is a statement about shared ancestry, not about either community.
Related reading#
- Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA: the series introduction
- The Canaanite source population
- Yemenite Jewish DNA and Mountain, Georgian and Bukharian Jewish DNA
- Neolithic farmer ancestry explained, for the Anatolian and Iranian farmer sources
- Why qpAdm for Jewish genomes
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. 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.
- 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.
- Lazaridis, I. et al. (2016). Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East. Nature, 536, 419–424.
- Narasimhan, V. M. et al. (2019). The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia. Science, 365(6457), eaat7487.
