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.
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........