Three Jewish communities grew up on the far side of the Iranian world from the Levant: the Mountain Jews of Dagestan and Azerbaijan, who speak Juhuri, a Jewish dialect of Persian; the Georgian Jews, who speak Georgian and have been in the country since at least the early Middle Ages; and the Bukharian Jews of Samarkand, Bukhara and the Fergana valley, who speak Bukhori, another Jewish Persian. Genetically the three are variations on one theme, and the theme is Persian. This post covers what the data show and what a qpAdm model does with a genome from any of them. It 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.
A Persian-Jewish core with local admixture#
In the genome-wide study that first sampled all three communities, the Jews of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan clustered nearest to the Iranian Jewish community, and through it to the Iraqi and Kurdish Jews and to the Levant, rather than to their Georgian, Azeri or Uzbek neighbours (Behar et al. 2010). Each community then shows admixture from where it lives: the Georgian and Mountain Jews carry a Caucasian component, and the Bukharian Jews a Central Asian one with a small East Asian-related share of the kind that the Turkic and Mongol centuries left across the region.
That picture matches the communities' own accounts of a dispersal from Persia along the Silk Road and into the Caucasus, and it explains why they share so much with one another. The Mountain Jews in particular show a strong founder signal, with the long runs of homozygosity of a small community that stayed closed for many generations in the mountains.
The ancient references#
What ancient DNA adds is a set of populations against which "Persian-Jewish core" and "local admixture" can each be tested rather than assumed.
The Bronze Age Levant. The shared Jewish component is, as for every community in this series, the Canaanite ancestry of Megiddo, Hazor and Sidon: a Levantine Neolithic base with a substantial Iranian- or Caucasus-related layer (Haber et al. 2017; Agranat-Tamir et al. 2020). This is the Canaanite source, described in its own post.
The Iranian plateau. The Zagros Neolithic farmers of Ganj Dareh and Wezmeh Cave are the ancestral lineage of present-day Iranian, Kurdish and Caucasian populations (Lazaridis et al. 2016), and they are the reference for the Iranian side of a Persian-Jewish genome.
The Caucasus. The Caucasus hunter-gatherers of Satsurblia and Kotias, sequenced in 2015, are a lineage closely related to the Iranian farmers and are the deep ancestry of the Caucasus and, in mixture with eastern European hunter-gatherers, of the steppe (Jones et al. 2015). A Georgian or Mountain Jewish genome carries more of this ancestry than a Levantine one.
Central Asia. For a Bukharian genome the model also needs the Bronze Age steppe herders whose descendants settled Central Asia, and the East Asian-related lineages that arrived with the Turkic expansions (Narasimhan et al. 2019).
What a qpAdm model does with a genome from these communities#
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. This is the era that does the most work for these communities, because its sources are exactly the deep lineages just listed. The Anatolian and Iranian Neolithic farmer and Natufian sources carry the Levantine and Persian ancestry; the Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer source measures the Caucasian admixture directly, and its Z-score is the number that tells a Georgian or Mountain Jewish genome apart from an Iranian Jewish one; and for a Bukharian genome the Western Steppe Herder and Northeast Asian sources measure the Central Asian admixture. A source that does not earn a place, such as a European hunter-gatherer share in a Mountain Jewish genome, is dropped by the nested-model check rather than carried at a weight of a few percent.
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 variation in this era, and since September 2026 the Parthian Iran source (the Liar Sang Bon genomes from Gilan, the only Classical-era genomes from Iran itself) is tested for the Iranian plateau share. The catalog still has no Caucasus source for Classical Antiquity, so for these communities the earlier era remains the more discriminating one, and the analyst's rationale says so. For a Bukharian genome the Pontic and Finno-Ugric Volga sources are tested for the steppe and eastern side of the picture.
The report publishes every weight with its standard error and Z-score, the p-value, and the complete outgroup list, and the Reading view carries the analyst's written explanation of why the genome resolved as it did. The standard errors are 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 confirm or deny the traditional accounts of the communities' origins. A model that passes with a Canaanite and an Iranian source is consistent with a Persian-Jewish dispersal; it is also consistent with other histories that drew on the same ancient populations.
- It does not say that any individual from Megiddo, Ganj Dareh or Satsurblia was your ancestor.
- It does not measure Jewishness. A Georgian Jewish genome and a Georgian Christian genome may model with overlapping sources, and that is a statement about shared ancestry, not about either community.
Related reading#
- Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA: the series introduction
- Mizrahi Jewish DNA, for the Iraqi, Iranian and Kurdish communities these three descend from
- The Canaanite source population
- Hunter-gatherer ancestry explained, for the Caucasus hunter-gatherer source
- 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.
- 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.
- Jones, E. R. et al. (2015). Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians. Nature Communications, 6, 8912.
- 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.
