Between Sicily and Tunisia: an ancient Jewish lineage spans the world
The pan-Mediterranean saga of haplogroup E-Y102667
A discovery spanning continents and centuries
The Jewish Genetic Discovery Foundation (JGDF) has uncovered a remarkable story written in DNA—one that connects Jewish families from Tunisia to Turkey, from Sicily to Puerto Rico, across 1,500 years of history. By identifying two new members of an ancient genetic cluster dating to Late Antiquity (around 550 CE), researchers have illuminated the far-reaching branches of a single Jewish family that likely originated in the central Mediterranean after Rome’s fall.
The first discovery: the lineage of a prominent Tunisian family
The first breakthrough came from Jewish Genetic Discovery Foundation 1 (JGDF1), a descendant of one of Tunisia’s most prominent Jewish families. While his family’s recent history traces to eastern Algeria, their deeper roots extend back to Beja, Tunisia, in the 18th century.
JGDF1’s Y-chromosomal analysis revealed he belongs to haplogroup E-Y6923, an impressively widespread genetic lineage. This haplogroup’s five primary branches appear across a remarkable spectrum of Western Jewish communities: Ashkenazi, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Turkish, and Greek Jews, as well as people of distant Jewish ancestry from Sicily, French Canada, Alsace-Lorraine, Peru, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Every man in this lineage descends from a single common direct paternal ancestor who lived around 186 CE (with 95% confidence that this date falls between 134 BCE and 459 CE).
The late antique connection: E-Y102667
What makes JGDF1’s result particularly significant is what it reveals about a more recent sub-branch of E-Y6923 called E-Y102667, a late antique lineage dating to approximately 545 CE (95% confidence interval: 8-959 CE). This lineage has proven especially prominent among Tunisian and Libyan Jews.
Before JGDF1’s test, E-Y102667 consisted of just three known branches:
One branch represented by a non-Jewish Sicilian
A second branch represented by a Libyan Jew documented in a 2017 scientific study (Behar et al.)
A third branch, E-BY92944, which itself contained two sub-branches, one which includes Jewish families from Tunisia and Libya (common ancestor around 1056 CE), and another defined by several Puerto Rican families
A direct medieval link between Tunisia and Libya
JGDF1’s genetic signature is special because it establishes a direct, specific connection between his Tunisian Jewish family and the anonymous Libyan Jewish sample from the 2017 academic study. Together, they form a distinct branch called E-Y147356, dating to approximately 1226 CE (95% confidence: 417-1710 CE). Before this latest discovery, that Libyan sample had no known genetic connections more recent than 1,500 years ago.
This finding represents a second medieval-era connection between Tunisian and Libyan Jews within the E-Y102667 lineage. Given how few Tunisian and Libyan Jews have been tested at this level of genetic resolution, this discovery is particularly significant. It reinforces the historical understanding that Tunisian and Libyan Jewish communities were, fundamentally, one interconnected community, with E-Y102667 serving as an important founding lineage.
The second discovery: an Ottoman connection
The second major finding involves another JGDF participant whose paternal line traces back to Istanbul. He represents the first Jew with roots in the former Ottoman Empire to appear within the E-Y102667 lineage. Specifically, he belongs to the E-BY92944 sub-branch, sharing an ancestor with Tunisian and Libyan Jews—as well as a cluster of Puerto Rican families—around 741 CE (95% confidence: 225-1131 CE).
While Sephardic-identified Turkish Jews can trace their ancestry to multiple older communities—Romaniote, Southern Italian, and Iberian—this result suggests that this particular tester’s late antique or early medieval ancestry traces back to the large, interconnected Jewish communities of the central Mediterranean, specifically those of Tunisia and Sicily.
One clan’s journey across 1,500 years
Together, these two discoveries illustrate the extraordinary reach of a Jewish family that likely originated in the late antique central Mediterranean. This was a tumultuous period after Rome’s fall, when these territories swung between Germanic and Byzantine control.
Over the following 1,500 years, this lineage’s descendants embarked on remarkable journeys: westward to Andalusia and eventually across the Atlantic to Puerto Rico, and eastward to the narrow streets of Jewish Istanbul. Yet as JGDF1’s result helps demonstrate, its legacy would continue to burn bright throughout the centuries in its original epicenter: the central Mediterranean.
Implications for understanding Western Jewish history
Beyond the specific stories of these two families, the findings carry broader significance. E-Y102667’s close genetic connection to one of the largest Ashkenazi lineages (E-Y6940), along with three other smaller cousin branches with wide Jewish distribution, helps demonstrate the shared Mediterranean roots of Western Jewry. These genetic links illuminate how diverse Jewish communities across Europe, North Africa, and eventually the Americas all trace back to the Jewish populations of the Roman Mediterranean world.
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The relationship between the Puerto Rican families line and the Istanbul Jewish line can reflect an early migration from the central Mediterranean zone to Spain, a slightly later split after arriving in Spain resulting in the contemporary Istanbul-Jewish family being expelled from Spain after 1492 and the ancestors of the Puerto Rican families becoming conversos and later migrating to Puerto Rico. On the other hand this relationship could reflect, as you suggested, a split between the lines while still living in the central Mediterranean zone with the ancestors of the Puerto Ricans heading west to Spain and the other family heading east to the Byzantine lands, (there are clear genetic and historical evidences of Jewish migration from Italy to the Romaniote communities over time). But there could be another historically possible scenario in which after the early migration of the ancestors of the Puerto Rican families westwards to Spain, another part of the family remained in the central Mediterranean zone, (Sicily, Apulia or Calabria), until being expelled in 1492/6 by the Spanish authorities, (who directly/indirectly ruled those lands from the early 15th century to the early 18th century), finally finding their way to Istanbul. All those options reflect the complex history of the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean basin in particular and the Western Jewry in a wider perspective.
Nice piece. This lineage appears to be ancestral to a well-sampled, broad Ashkenazi group, E-Y6938. Equally interesting (and perhaps coincidental) is the existence of the closely related lineage with an earlier root, the Greek-Jewish E-14802.