Last year, Spain announced that it would provide a fast track to citizenship for Sephardic Jews—Jews of Spanish descent (the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492). While there hasn’t been movement forward by the Spanish government on this proposal, it can serve as the basis for an intriguing thought experiment: how many Jews of Sephardic descent are there?
Joshua Weitz, a biologist at Georgia Tech, recently wrote a short paper posted on the arXiv that explores this from a mathematical perspective. Weitz found that even if the likelihood of mating between Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities is incredibly low (less than 2%), in less than twenty generations all Jews are actually of Sephardic descent, even though only a small portion of the population might identify as such!
Related on the SLP
Read the full, original story here: The Universality of (Sephardic) Ethnicity, as Explained by Mathematical Genealogy
