Ashkenazi Jews, your DNA is actually largely Italian. Here’s why.

Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi men in Jerusalem, c. 1900. Courtesy of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

By Ilana Strauss September 25, 2025

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.

Many Ashkenazi Jews assume their ancestors came straight from ancient Israel to Germany and Eastern Europe. But that leaves out a huge, often overlooked chapter. When their ancestors left Israel, they didn’t head directly north. They went to Italy, where they lived for nearly a millennium before moving east. This missing period in Italy holds the key to understanding the real relationship between Ashkenazis, Europe, and imperialism. It also offers clues to some complicated questions: When did non-Jews begin treating Jews differently? And why did the idea of Jews as a religion, rather than an ethnicity, take hold?

The story begins with Roman conquest

In 63 BCE, the troops of Pompey the Great captured Israel and took thousands of Jews as slaves. Over the next century, Jewish revolts failed, and the Romans renamed the land Syria-Palestina. They looted the temple and spent its gold to build the Colosseum. Tens of thousands of Jews — 100,000 according to Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus — were sent by ship to Italy as slaves. At the same time, some free Jews migrated to Rome to escape the famine and poverty brought on by conquest. Italy’s small Jewish community suddenly grew large and visible.

This imperial legacy is still etched in Ashkenazi DNA. Genetically, Ashkenazis are roughly half Levantine, but much of the rest traces to Southern Europe, and the admixture “possibly occurred in Italy, given the continued presence of Jews there,” found a 2017 study led by researchers at Columbia University. Martin Richards, a genetics professor at the University of Huddersfield, told the Forward that this pattern points to a one-time event in the first or second centuries BCE, when many Jews arrived in Italy and married locals before intermarriage sharply declined. While Richards can’t say exactly what triggered this event, the timing points to the influx of slaves and impoverished immigrants following Rome’s conquest.

What was life like for Jews in Roman Italy?

As slaves, conditions were harsh — some Jews even fought as gladiators, historian Samuele Rocca told the Forward. But within a century or two, most gained freedom. Freed Jews blended into Roman life, working as tanners, artisans, doctors, even knights. Pagan Italy was a multicultural mosaic with many gods and peoples, so Jews, though worshiping a different god, fit right in.

Like American Jews today, they were another culture in a vast, diverse empire. That may not be a coincidence: the American Founding Fathers were well-versed in Roman history, and they sought to build a similar kind of country — one with a senate, free elections, and religious tolerance, Rocca said.

Romans saw Jews as Mediterranean neighbors, somewhat like Greeks with a different accent, Rocca explained. “You have repulsion. You have admiration. You have irony. You have contempt,” he said. “But hate? You have no real hate.”

Jews fit into Rome better than other foreigners. Germans, used to monocultural feudal societies, struggled to adapt to Rome’s markets and multiculturalism and often rebelled, earning the label “barbarians.” “Romans never felt threatened by Jews as they did by other groups,” Rocca said. Romans even allowed Jews to refrain from work on Shabbat.

But then Rome became Christian, and Roman leaders began discriminating against Jews, banning intermarriage with Christians, forbidding the construction of new synagogues, and excluding Jews from civil service. Something else shifted too: the way Jews were described.

In pagan Rome, Jews were widely understood as an ethnic group from Judea. No one disputed that they were an ethnicity with a homeland. As Christianity expanded, that homeland became spiritually significant to Christians. Jesus had lived in Israel, and the Church came to see the land as theirs by divine right.

“The Christian Church really began to colonize Judea,” Rocca explained. “They began to build a lot of churches. They tried to show that they were the real owners.” In order to solidify that claim, Christians needed to weaken Jewish ties to the land. That’s when non-Jews started calling Jews a religious group rather than an ethnicity. “It all started there,” said Rocca.

Ironically, this pressure may have strengthened Jewish attachment to heritage. Before Christianity, Italian Jews practiced Judaism differently than those in Judea. Magistrates ran temples instead of rabbis, and prayers sometimes happened in Greek or Latin, not Hebrew. Under Christian oppression, Italian Jews looked to their Levantine relatives, adopting rabbinical traditions and returning to Hebrew prayers.

From Italy to Germany and Eastern Europe

Around 1000 C.E., some Italian Jews moved north into what is now Germany, and later into Eastern Europe. This population eventually became Ashkenazi Jews. Unlike in Italy, however, Jews in Germany and Russia found no place within the dominant society. As Mediterranean people — and as non-Christians — Jews didn’t look or act like central or eastern Europeans. And unlike in Rome, they never found a secure footing.

“The Jews did not really fit,” Rocca said. “They were not farmers, they were not knights, and of course, they were not monks.” Barred from owning land, confined to ghettos, and forced to wear identifying clothing, Ashkenazi Jews lived apart from their neighbors — and their DNA reflects it. A thousand years in Germanic and Russian lands left only a faint genetic trace.

As in Italy centuries earlier, persecution spurred cultural renewal — 19th-century Eastern European Jews began reviving Hebrew, echoing their ancestors’ responses to antisemitism.

Ultimately, the story of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe is not one of privilege or conquest. They did not gradually — or ever — become European. Many first arrived as slaves. Afterward, they remained outsiders and were repeatedly targeted. The European strands in their culture and DNA came not through integration, but through displacement.

That separateness was not, at first, a denial of identity. Pagan Romans largely saw Jews the way Jews saw themselves: as an ethnicity from Judea. That only changed when Christianity took hold and began to claim the Jewish heritage and homeland as its own.

Romans took the ancestors of Ashkenazis out of Judea. Europeans never granted them European identity but also tried to strip them of their Judean identity. And so outsiders came to imagine that Jews didn’t really come from anywhere — that Jews weren’t really a people, and therefore, did not really need a home.