---
title: "Sephardic Jewish DNA: Iberia, the exile and the ancient sources"
description: "What ancient DNA says about Sephardic ancestry across Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa and Iberia, why 'Sephardic' covers several different genetic histories, and how a qpAdm model separates the Levantine, Iberian and North African layers."
canonical: https://www.ancestrify.io/blog/sephardic-jewish-dna-ancient-origins
date: 2026-08-30
updated: 2026-10-19
author: "Ancestrify"
---

# Sephardic Jewish DNA: Iberia, the exile and the ancient sources

Where does Sephardic Jewish DNA come from? From the same Levantine base as the other Mediterranean Jewish communities, descending from Bronze Age Canaanite-related populations, plus southern European admixture that is hard to split between Iberian, Italian and Balkan sources, and a Maghrebi layer in the North African communities. Ancestrify models that base from your raw DNA.

"Sephardic" is a word that describes a liturgy, a language and a history, and it is stretched over
at least three different genetic stories. There are the communities that left Iberia after 1492 and
settled in the Ottoman Empire, in Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Sofia and Sarajevo. There are the
communities of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, where Iberian exiles joined much older Jewish
populations. And there are people in Spain, Portugal and Latin America who descend from converts
who stayed, and who often come to genetic testing with exactly that question. This post covers
what ancient DNA can say about each, and what a qpAdm model does with a Sephardic genome. It is
part of the series introduced in [Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA](/blog/jewish-ancestry-ancient-dna-qpadm).

As everywhere in the series: ancestry is not identity, and nothing here is a statement about who
is Jewish.

## The shared base

The genome-wide studies of living Jewish communities found that Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek and
Italian Sephardic Jews cluster with the other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish communities,
close to Ashkenazi Jews and to Levantine populations, and not with Spaniards or Turks (Behar et al.
2010; Atzmon et al. 2010). The Levantine component of that ancestry is, as far as the ancient
genomes can tell, the same Bronze Age Canaanite ancestry that underlies every Levantine population,
a mixture of the local Levantine Neolithic lineage with a substantial Iranian- or Caucasus-related
layer (Haber et al. 2017; Agranat-Tamir et al. 2020). It is described in the post on the
[Canaanite source population](/blog/canaanite-ancestry-bronze-age-levant-dna).

On that base, the different Sephardic communities carry different admixture. The Ottoman
communities carry southern European ancestry that is difficult to separate between Iberian,
Italian and Balkan origins, because all three are Mediterranean populations with largely
Anatolian-farmer ancestry and modest steppe input. The North African communities carry, in
addition, a Maghrebi component and are on average closer to Ashkenazi and Ottoman Sephardic Jews
than to their Berber and Arab neighbours, which reflects the arrival of the Iberian exiles into
older communities that had themselves stayed largely endogamous (Campbell et al. 2012).

## The converso question

A recurring reason people with Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, Colombian or Brazilian ancestry order
an ancient-DNA analysis is a family tradition of Jewish descent. It is worth being clear about what
the genetics can and cannot support.

A Y-chromosome study estimated that around a fifth of Iberian paternal lineages could be assigned
to a Sephardic-like origin (Adams et al. 2008), a figure that has been much debated because the
haplogroups involved (chiefly J and E1b1b) are also common across the Mediterranean for reasons
that have nothing to do with Jewish history. A haplogroup alone is never evidence of a share of
ancestry, and it is certainly not evidence of a religious history. At the genome-wide level, a
Levantine component in an Iberian genome is real and measurable in aggregate, but it has several
possible sources: Phoenician and Punic settlement, the Roman-era eastern Mediterranean, the
Islamic centuries, and Jewish communities, all of which drew on a similar Levantine pool. A model
can tell you that your genome carries a Levantine share and how large it is. It cannot tell you
which of those histories delivered it.

That is not a reason to skip the analysis. It is a reason to read the result as what it is: a
measurement of ancestry, with a standard error, that is consistent with several histories. The
family tradition then stands or falls on documents, not on DNA.

## What a qpAdm model does with a Sephardic genome

qpAdm writes your genome as a mixture of 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](/blog/understanding-qpadm) and the numbers in
[the reading guide](/blog/how-to-read-qpadm-p-value-z-score-standard-error). For a Sephardic
genome the two eras of the report usually resolve like this.

**Hunter-Gatherer and Neolithic Farmer era.** The Anatolian and Iranian farmer sources and the
Natufian source carry most of the weight, as they do for every Jewish community. The European
admixture shows as Western Hunter-Gatherer and Western Steppe Herder shares, and for a North
African community an Iberomaurusian share can be tested: for a Libyan, Tunisian, Moroccan or
Algerian declaration our analyst moves the Iberomaurusian reference off the outgroups before any
model is fitted, so it can be a source.

**Classical Antiquity era.** This is where the three Sephardic histories separate, and where the
analyst's search is spent. The starting model is Canaanite beside a southern European source. The
questions are then:

- Which European source fits: the Iron Age Iberian population, Imperial Italy, or the Aegean? These
  are close in genetic space, and separating them depends on the file's coverage. The report shows
  the standard error that tells you how well they were separated.
- Does an [Indigenous Berber](/ancestry) source earn a place? It is part of the search for a Libyan,
  Tunisian, Moroccan or Algerian declaration, and whether it earns its place is the data's answer:
  a model that carries a source the genome does not need is rejected by the nested-model check.
- Does the Levantine share prefer the Canaanite source to the Iron Age Phoenician or Roman-era
  Eastern Mediterranean references? For most Jewish genomes it does, which is one reason the
  Canaanite source was added; for an Iberian genome with a Punic history the Phoenician source may
  fit as well or better, and that difference is itself informative.

Each of those comparisons is a separate run with its own p-value, and only the model that survives
all of them is published. The [Ancestry Workbench](/workbench) lets you re-run them yourself on your
own merged sample afterwards.

## What the model does not say

- It does not tell you whether your Levantine ancestry came through a Jewish community, a
  Phoenician port or the Islamic centuries. The sources are populations of the past (the southern
  Levant stands on present-day genomes where the record holds no ancient ones), and all three
  histories drew on the same ones.
- It does not identify a family, a surname or a town. Those are questions for records and for
  [Ancient Matches](/ancient-matches) and relative-finding tools, not for an admixture model.
- It does not measure Jewishness, and it is not evidence for or against anyone's status.

## Related reading

- [Jewish ancestry and ancient DNA: the series introduction](/blog/jewish-ancestry-ancient-dna-qpadm)
- [Ashkenazi Jewish DNA](/blog/ashkenazi-jewish-dna-ancient-origins), the community Sephardic
  genomes are most often compared with
- [Phoenician and Punic DNA across the Mediterranean](/blog/phoenician-punic-dna-mediterranean),
  for the other Levantine history of Iberia
- [The Canaanite source population](/blog/canaanite-ancestry-bronze-age-levant-dna)
- [Why qpAdm for Jewish genomes](/blog/jewish-ancestry-ancient-dna-qpadm#why-qpadm-rather-than-a-percentage-tool)

## References

- Adams, S. M. et al. (2008). The genetic legacy of religious diversity and intolerance: paternal
  lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. *American Journal of Human
  Genetics*, 83(6), 725–736.
- 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.
- Campbell, C. L. et al. (2012). North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive,
  orthogonal clusters. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 109(34), 13865–13870.
- 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.