IT IS not often that cultural and religious persecution makes countries more diverse, but the Spanish Inquisition may have done just that. It now seems that many Spanish and Portuguese people have Jewish or North African ancestors.
In 1492 Catholic monarchs forced Muslims and Sephardic Jews to 鈥渃onvert, go, or die,鈥� says Mark Jobling, a geneticist at the University of Leicester, UK. If they chose to convert, the groups were more likely to integrate into society by marrying Christian Europeans.
To gauge the extent of this social integration, Jobling and colleagues analysed the DNA of over 1000 Spanish and Portuguese men who aren鈥檛 themselves Jewish or Muslim. Focusing on the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son, Jobling鈥檚 team matched the DNA to that of modern Basques, North Africans, or Sephardic Jews. They found that 1 in 5 men had a Jewish ancestor, and in 1 in 10 a North African ancestor (American Journal of Human Genetics, vol 83, p 633).
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Stephen Oppenheimer of the University of Oxford says Jewish migrations up to 10,000 years ago from the eastern Mediterranean might confound the results. But Chris Tyler-Smith of the Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, says that slight individual differences in genetic markers on the Y chromosomes suggest Iberians and Sephardic Jews share ancestry more recent than several millennia ago.