Abstract
The Spanish government recently announced an official fast-track path to citizenship for any individual who is Jewish and whose ancestors were expelled from Spain during the inquisition-related dislocation of Spanish Jews in 1492. It would seem that this policy targets a small subset of the global Jewish population, that is, restricted to individuals who retain cultural practices associated with ancestral origins in Spain. However, the central contribution of this manuscript is to demonstrate how and why the policy is far more likely to apply to a very large fraction (i.e., the vast majority) of Jews. This claim is supported using a series of genealogical models that include transmissible “identities” and preferential intra-group mating. Model analysis reveals that even when intra-group mating is strong and even if only a small subset of a present-day population retains cultural practices typically associated with that of an ancestral group, it is highly likely that nearly all members of that population have direct genealogical links to that ancestral group, given sufficient number of generations have elapsed. The basis for this conclusion is that not having a link to an ancestral group must be a property of all of an individual’s ancestors, the probability of which declines (nearly) superexponentially with each successive generation. These findings highlight unexpected incongruities induced by genealogical dynamics between present-day and ancestral identities.
Highlights
Present-day Jews predominantly self-identify as either Sephardic or Ashkenazi
Model of Genealogical Dynamics with Assortative Mating Consider the genealogical dynamics of a population of N(g) individuals where g~0 denotes the ancestral population of interest and gw0 denotes each successive prior generation such that g~g0 denotes the present
A series of simplified genealogical models have been proposed and analyzed in which individuals retain a set of identities
Summary
Origins of Sephardic Jews are generally attributed to the Jewish community based in Spain and Portugal that was expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the late 15th century, whereas Ashkenazi Jews generally attribute their origins to Central and Eastern Europe, pre-dating the expulsion [1,2]. These divisions are, at least culturally, considered to be long-standing, for example, the protagonist of the classic 19th century farce ‘‘The King of Schnorrers’’ (which is set in the late 18th century) – Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa – reacts in horror at the prospect of his daughter marrying an Ashkenazi, rather than a Sephardic, Jew: ‘‘A Sephardi cannot marry a Tedesco [Ashkenazi]! The following question is asked: to what extent should any Jew living today expect to have one (or more) Jewish ancestors expelled from Spain in 1492
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