Will Spain’s Jewish and Muslim Descendants Come Home?
Will thousands of Spaniards and Portuguese revert to their ancestral religions of Islam and Judaism when they get genetic proof of their religious ancestry? The first step has already begun in the US.
While Catholicism still remains the largest religion of U.S. Hispanic adults, an increasing number of Hispanic adults identify as religiously unaffiliated, a Pew Research Center survey of 3,029 U.S. Latino adults in August 2022 found.
Former Catholics cited the clergy sexual abuse scandal, a lack of LGBTQ inclusivity, opposition to legal abortion, and the rule that women can’t be priests as reasons for leaving the Catholic church.
Pew found the share of Latinos identifying as Catholic dropped from 67% in 2010 to 43% in 2022. Among the 65% who said they were raised Catholic, 23% said they no longer identified as such.
“They’ve left the Catholic church, and they now identify with some other faith or no faith at all. That’s a pretty steep decline,” Pew researcher Besheer Mohamed told Religion News Service.
The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass forced conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies reconquered Spain from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reported according to the NYTimes (12/4/08).
In the decade and one half since the genetic evidence was discovered both Portugal and Spain passed laws granting citizenship to those Jews who can give evidence of Spanish Jewish heritage. Neither state has done this yet for Muslims of Andalusian ancestry.
Twenty percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11 percent have DNA reflecting Moorish ancestors, the geneticists found.
The study was based on an analysis of Y chromosomes by biologists Mark A. Jobling of the University of Leicester in England and Francesc Calafell of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. They developed a Y chromosome signature for Sephardic men by studying Sephardic Jewish communities in places where Jews migrated after being expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496.
They also characterized the Y chromosomes of the Arab and Berber army that invaded Spain in 711 CE from data on people living in Morocco and the Western Sahara.
After a period of three to four centuries of toleration under the Arab Umayyad dynasty, Spain entered a period of religious intolerance, with its Muslim Berber dynasties forcing some Christians and Jews to convert to Islam.
Then the victorious Christians began expelling Jews and Muslims after forcing them to convert, and finding a high level of secret Jews among the ex-Jews.
Because most of the Y chromosome remains unchanged from father to son, the proportions of Sephardic and Moorish ancestry detected in the present population are probably the same as those just after the 1492 expulsion of Jews and the 1609 expulsion of secret ex-Muslims.
