Jewish ancestry

The Living DNA test does not report on percentages of Jewish ancestry.

The Living DNA test is based on geographical regions and so is able to establish the percentage similarity of your DNA to the population samples available in our reference dataset. Currently, in the family ancestry part of our testing package, we can compare with and report on your ancestry up to 150 worldwide regions.

If the region you are looking for is not included in this list, we cannot currently report on your percentages as we do not have a signature with which to compare it.

To look at why we are not able to include the Jewish faith as a regional signature, we need to understand a little more about the history of the Jewish faith or more specifically the Jewish diaspora, which refers to the involuntary dispersal of the Jewish population to more than one place.

When the originally dispersed people spread out and found new homes they tended to marry within their communities, which means that people in those communities started to share more and more common DNA and less DNA with those in non-Jewish populations at the same location. This starts to build an individual signature that could be linked to the faith but is not exclusive, as It is possible for someone outside the Jewish faith to share these markers.