Gene Migration — How the Past Moves Through Us

A few days ago, I wrote about the sound outside my window — a cry that felt both immediate and ancient, arriving from the present but echoing across centuries. After publishing that piece, I found myself needing to step back — not away from the moment we are living in, but deeper into the currents that shaped how that moment landed inside me. This essay is part of that turning: a reflection not on events, but on inheritance — on how belonging, fear, and hope travel across generations, long before they take on names or slogans.

When I first received the results of my genetic test, I didn’t know what to expect. There it was on the screen — a precise, almost clinical declaration: 98.1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, 1.9 percent Iberian. I stared at the numbers, fascinated but unsure what they really meant. “Ashkenazi” was a term I’d grown up with, but to see it rendered as data — percentages and chromosomes — felt oddly impersonal, a code stripped of memory.

Science can measure strands of inheritance, but not the stories that run through them. DNA is a mirror of probabilities, not certainties — a map of origins written in statistical language. It can reveal kinship and migration, the contours of a people’s journey, but it cannot account for faith, exile, fear, or the choices that shaped who we became. The double helix is precise, yet it tells only part of the truth; the rest lives in memory, in language, in the stories we carry forward.

I set my DNA report aside for years before returning to it, wondering what those numbers truly revealed. Was there something in my genetic inheritance that could illuminate the ancient question, Who am I? What follows is not an answer, but a story — an ancient story of becoming that continues to unfold, and one I share with many.

Part One: Genetic Roots and Migratory Paths

My genetic roots trace back to ancient Judea and Israel, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. Through conquest, exile, and renewal, those roots branched outward into Europe, where the Ashkenazi Jewish community took shape. The faint Iberian trace in my DNA carries its own echo — a remnant of medieval Spain before the expulsion of 1492.

These migrations did not unfold in a single sweep, nor even within a single lifetime. They stretched across centuries, measured not only in distances crossed but in generations born and buried along the way. Families settled for decades — sometimes for hundreds of years — before being uprooted again. Children learned local tongues, prayed in borrowed melodies, and believed — often sincerely — that they had finally arrived. Then history shifted. Borders hardened, rulers changed, protections vanished, and what had felt permanent proved provisional. Jewish movement across the world was slow, uneven, and deeply human — shaped by marriages, trades, births, losses, and the stubborn hope that this place, at last, might hold.

The story begins in the Levant, where Jacob’s sons gave rise to a people who would bear the name Israel — a name born not in triumph, but in struggle. After the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE, ten of the original tribes were scattered and absorbed into surrounding populations. What endured in Judea were the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and the priestly tribe of Levi, who carried forward the traditions and faith of Israel into the Second Temple period.

When Rome crushed the Jewish revolts of 70 and 135 CE, destroying Jerusalem and ending Jewish sovereignty, the Judean people were scattered across the empire. Yet paradoxically, Jewish life endured even in the heart of Rome itself. Synagogues, schools, and trading communities flourished in Rome and southern Italy, forming one of the oldest continuous Jewish presences in the world. From these Mediterranean roots, Jewish life spread northward into Europe, branching into new cultural forms.

Out of these dispersals emerged three great streams of Jewish civilization: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi — shaped by shared ancestry and faith, yet formed by the geography, languages, and pressures of different worlds.

Sephardi Jews flourished for centuries in Muslim Spain and Portugal, creating a luminous culture of poetry, science, and philosophy. The expulsion of 1492 scattered them across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Italy, where they carried the Ladino language and followed sages such as Maimonides.

Ashkenazi Jews developed their identity in Christian Europe — first in the Rhineland, later in Poland, Lithuania, and the Russian Empire. There they spoke Yiddish, a fusion of Hebrew, German, and Slavic tongues, and studied the legal traditions shaped by Rashi and his successors. Pogroms, expulsions, and Tsarist decrees eventually drove them toward new continents.

Mizrahi Jews — “Eastern Jews” — remained in or near the ancient lands: Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and Kurdistan. Some trace their lineage to those exiled in Babylon after 586 BCE. Under Islamic and Persian rule, they preserved ancient languages, melodies, and customs, forming some of the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth.

Each of these strands preserved the same core prayers and scriptures, yet gave them voice through different music, rhythms, and speech. Hebrew evolved into Ladino and Yiddish; prayer absorbed the cadences of Arabic and Latin; memory became a portable homeland — an ark borne from place to place.

These paths help explain the geography of my own ancestry — Austria and the Russian Empire — regions that absorbed generations of Ashkenazi Jews pushed eastward by persecution. Across millennia of expulsions — Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, medieval, modern — Jewish life adapted and endured, taking root wherever it was carried. Each era layered its own memories onto the last, so that what survived was not only belief, but habit and temperament: vigilance learned slowly, patience refined over generations, and the quiet knowledge that safety, when it came, was never guaranteed to last.

Part Two: The Meaning of Israel

For centuries, Israel lived in memory and prayer — a promise whispered across generations. In the modern era, that promise became a nation: a marvel of ingenuity and survival, and also a source of fierce division. Loved by some, reviled by others, defended and denounced, Israel today carries the weight of politics and accumulated pain.

Yet the word Israel long predates the state. Before it named a land or a people, it named a transformation.

The name enters the tradition not as a mark of virtue, but as the outcome of reckoning. It belongs first to Jacob — a man who was clever, ambitious, and deeply flawed. He was no saint. Urged on by his mother and driven by fear and desire, he deceived his blind father and stole the blessing meant for his brother. When the betrayal was exposed, Jacob fled, leaving behind a brother humiliated and enraged.

For years he lived in exile, prospering through cunning as much as endurance. He built a family, amassed flocks, learned how to survive by negotiation and guile. But survival did not absolve him. The past waited.

When Jacob finally turned homeward, he carried not only wealth and children, but unresolved guilt. Word reached him that Esau was approaching — with four hundred men. His fear was not symbolic. He had reason to be afraid. He had broken trust and taken what was not his to take.

That night, on the banks of the river, Jacob was left alone. There, in darkness, he wrestled — not toward victory, but toward accountability. By morning he emerged wounded, limping, renamed. Israel: one who strives, one who wrestles with God and with men and does not turn away.

The blessing he received could not erase what he had done. It came instead as a wound — a permanent reminder that transformation carries cost. Only after that struggle did reconciliation become possible. When Jacob finally met Esau, he bowed, wept, and said words that echo across generations: “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.”

This is the story carried forward in the name Israel — not innocence, not entitlement, not moral purity, but the lifelong labor of confronting one’s own shadows. It names not a possession, but a task: to wrestle honestly with fear, guilt, and responsibility, and to keep faith in the possibility of becoming whole.

Perhaps that is why the word continues to draw me — not as flag or ideology, but as living metaphor. In another language I came to know later in life, Sanskrit, the same impulse is called sadhana — a disciplined path of self-inquiry and awakening. Both name the same human work: the struggle to reconcile what is divided within us.

Part Three: Continuing Migrations

My DNA is not merely a scientific measure; it is a testament to continuity shaped over time. My mother and her family were saved from the Nazis in British Mandate Palestine, where she met and married my father — a South African Jewish soldier of Lithuanian descent. His parents, Louis and Neena, had also met in the Holy Land around 1910 and were married there before beginning their journey to South Africa.

In 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, I too felt the pull of that ancient homeland and returned to Israel for a time before my path carried me onward.

My wife and I eventually made our home in Amherst, while our daughters built theirs in Brooklyn, where five grandchildren now continue the unfolding story — one that carries not only my Jewish ancestry but also the Swedish-Finnish heritage of my beloved wife, Nina. Their inheritance is a confluence of migrations and cultures — northern and southern, Jewish and Christian, Old World and New — a reminder that identity is never single-rooted, but always branching.

And yet, even as their lives unfold freely, I sometimes feel older currents stirring within me — echoes of vigilance and unease shaped over centuries, passed down quietly through gesture, warning, and habit. The question of what it means to be Jewish has never been abstract for me, but in these times it has become newly urgent.

Closing Reflection

Tracing these tangled paths of ancestry and exile, I find myself holding two truths — one born of bloodline, the other of conscience. As a descendant of those who once walked the hills of Judea, I feel the pull of that homeland in my bones — a lineage inscribed not only in scripture, but in memory itself.

Yet I cannot ignore that this same land holds the breath and longing of others who have tended it for centuries, whose roots also run deep. I remain a steadfast advocate for Israel’s existence; history and family give me reason enough. But I cannot make peace with zealous extremes that uproot another people in the name of divine promise.

To live as a Jew in this moment is to feel the name Israel echo through every argument and silence — defended and condemned, invoked with love and anger alike. It is a name that shelters and wounds, that carries both memory and demand.

I carry within me the echoes of those who fled and survived, and the vigilance my mother passed on when she warned me, “Never forget Israel.” Those echoes were not forged in a single catastrophe, but shaped over centuries — through long intervals of ordinary life punctuated by rupture, each generation passing forward what it had learned about endurance, caution, and hope.

For me, that tension is not a curse, but a calling — to wrestle with faith, compassion, and truth, and to keep a small flame of hope alive. To speak, however uncertainly, is to honor both my ancestry and my humanity.

In the end, the genetic report on my screen was not merely a set of numbers, but a kind of compass — pointing not only to where we came from, but toward the long and difficult journey of becoming whole, and of finding our way home.