Usually when one thinks of the ethnic identity of Hungarian Jews the association is made to Ashkenazi Jewry, with a subtle admission that, perhaps, a few Sephardic immigrants settled in Budapest in the years following the 1492 Expulsion from Spain. Add to this the monumental Dohany Street Synagogue which evokes a subconscious Sephardic past, and a mysterious quality emerges as to the true identity of the Hungarian Jewish mosaic that continues to thrive and live in Budapest and that has had such a significant influence on world history.
The first Jewish communities in the region of Hungary were established in the Roman period. This region, which up until World War I was known as Hungary, also included Slovakia, parts of Ukraine, Transylvania, and parts of the Balkans. From the 2nd century CE a Jewish presence in the Roman province of Pannonia is evidenced by monuments identifying individuals as “Judeus” (Jewish), depictions of Menorahs, and inscriptions of portions of the Shema, “G-d is one” (Patai 1996: 21 – 27). It is not clear if there is any continuity between this ancient Jewish community of Hungary and the present day Jewish community of Budapest, which historical and archaeological sources suggest disappeared with the decline of the Roman Empire.
The region of Hungary was settled by the Magyar tribes of central Asian origin during the 9th and 10th centuries. During the 8th century CE they had been an allied tribe with the Khazars, a people group of Turkish origin who ruled over the Pontic Steppe and the North Caucasus, today Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and the Southern Russian republics. The Magyars broke off their alliance with Khazaria and along with the Kabars, another allied Khazar tribe, settled the Carpathian basin (Tomory 2007).
The Caucasus is a primary region to search for the genetic artifacts of Khazaria and Yunusbayev, et al, found that Dagestan populations were closer to Turkish Anatolia and Cyprus than any other population that they analyzed supporting the Anatolian origin of the Khazar tribes (Yunusbayev 2006: 475). Undoubtedly, there was some genetic impact of the Khazars upon both the Magyars and the Ashkenazi community of Eastern Europe, but it is not known how significant.
The Khazar King or “Kagan” and ruling class had converted to Judaism and their capital city of Atil (Brooke 2006) was most likely located in the region of modern day Dagestan, a logical place to look for the genetic artifacts of Khazaria. Genetics researchers found a signifcant frequency of E-M35 and G-M201 in the North Caucasus, but surprisingly an absence or low frequency of R1a1-M17 (Yunusbayev 2006: 474-475), which had previously been suggested as the genetic link to the Khazars among Jewish populations, especially suggested as the origin of the R1a1 Levites (Behar 2003; Nebel 2005; Levy-Coffman 2005: 19; Nebel 2007). The near complete absence of R1a1-M17 in the North Caucasus casts doubt on a simplistic connection between the Khazarian Kagan/King and ruling class and the R1a1 Levites. In addition, Levi families in R1a1 are not found with any tradition or surname linking them to a Kagan origin.
[Ed. note: Current research indicates that the majority of the Jews of the Kingdom of Khazaria were Jews from the Persian Empire who sought refuge in the Khazar Kingdom after the Kagan (King) and noble class converted to Judaism. Today, the Levites in R1a1 are thought to be of Iranian origin.]
In contrast, researchers have found a high concentration of Haplogroup J-M172 (“J2”) and J xM172/J-p12f2 (“J1”) in Dagestan (Yunusbayev 2006). A cursory search for the surname “Kagan,” the Khazar title for King, at the online YDNA database Ysearch.org will yield several individuals who have made their YDNA available to the public for research. Families who listed their surname as Kagan were found to be in haplogroup J1, an initial surprising connection between Jewish tradition and the Khazars.
Nevertheless, Haplogroup J, including both J1 and J2, is common in all Jewish populations in Israel and the Diaspora, at a combined total of 30%, some report it even higher. It is reasonably identified as one of the haplogroups associated with the Semitic people groups that lived in the region of ancient Israel and the Levant (Nebel 2007; Genographic: “J-M304”). As biblical period archaeologists gradually accept the validity of human DNA analysis in archaeological research, and as DNA is extracted from skeletal remains unearthed during archaeological excavations, a much more complex picture will emerge as to the actual genetic heritage of the ancient Israelites.
The analysis of the genetic impact of the Khazars upon the Ashkenazi community, in general, and among Hungarian Ashkenazim in comparison to the indigenous residents of Dagestan and the surrounding region, is as of yet unexplored and controversial territory for future research.
Genetics aside, textual evidence suggests that already at the beginning of the establishment of the House of Arpad, which ruled over Hungary from the ninth century onward, there was a significant Jewish impact upon both the laws and economy of the Hungarian Kingdom (Gyemant 2005: 130). Later in the 13th century, King Bela IV of Hungary enacted a Charter of Rights affording “rights and obligations” to Hungary’s Jewish inhabitants (Gyemant 2005: 131). The protection of the rights and safety of the Jewish communities of Hungary rooted in Hungary’s King and noble class was a symbiotic relationship that was to become one of the defining characteristics of the history of the Jewish people in Hungary and one which eventually would led many Hungarian Jews to seek noble status themselves and publicly identify as Hungarian Nobility (McCagg 1972: 25-27, 75).
Some Israelis today with Hungarian Jewish roots will tell you of the noble connection in their family. Omer Yair, is a Hebrew University International Relations student who grew up on Kibbutz Maale Gilboa and served as an Officer in the Israel Defense Forces. If you ask him, he will tell you with a smile of the certificate of noble status that his great-great-grandfather received from Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. Persecution may have been a factor that led many Hungarian Jews to acquire certification of noble status or title, but perhaps, many more among those in Hungary with a tradition of nobility preserved another aspect of their identity that has remained hidden ever since under the guise of a noble surface.
A widely known characteristic and “distinctive feature” of Sephardic Jewry is “its sense of noble descent” (Zohar 2005: 9). Historians do know of a Sephardic presence in Hungary, following an emigration of Sephardim from Spain in the late sixteenth century when Hungary was under the rule of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. It was believed that with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Hungary’s Sephardim “seem on the whole to have retreated after 1688 with the Sultan’s armies” (McCagg 1992: 11). Encyclopedia Judaica researchers indicated that there were at least two waves of emigration of Sephardim from Spain, the first in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the second in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which included immigration into Hungary, as well as Austria and Poland (Kerem 2007: 293).
Many Hungarian Jewish families do have traditions of Sephardic descent. One such individual is Nir Mekler. Nir is a 3rd year Archaeology student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His extended family includes leaders and rabbis of the Ponivitch Yeshiva in Bnei Brak just outside of Tel Aviv. On his mother’s side his grandfather, Ephraim Cohen, was from Budapest, Hungary and passed on to his family a tradition of being descended from Sephardic Jews who immigrated to Hungary.
An alternative explanation of the disappearance of Hungary’s Sephardim is assimilation into Ashkenazi culture and nominal conversions motivated by fear of persecution in post-Ottoman Hungary to the Christian churches of the region, Calvinist (“Reformatus”), Greek Orthodox, and Catholic; an Eastern European parallel to the historical phenomenon of Sephardic
Conversos in Spain and the New World (Zohar 2005: 9).
DNA testing is shedding new light on the fate of Hungary’s Sephardim. Ilyse Friedman Steiner is a freelance graphic designer who lives in Deerfield, IL with her husband and two children and is descended from a Hungarian Jewish family. She wanted to find out more about her family history and explore their traditions of having Sephardic roots. She decided to try genealogical DNA testing with Family Tree DNA.
Her great-great-grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Klein, was from a small town located near the city of Debrecen in the Northern Great Plain region of Hungary. He was a rabbi with the tradition that he was descended from a family of Sephardic origin that had immigrated to Hungary from Spain via Germany. The Klein family paternal DNA (YDNA) results came back in Haplogroup E-M78. Haplogroup E is common in all Jewish populations in Israel and the Diaspora, including Sephardic Jews, and is one of the haplogroups associated with the Semitic people groups that lived in the region of ancient Israel (Semino 2004; Shen 2004).
[Ed. note: A growing consensus among genealogical researchers indicates that the lineage of E-M35/E-M78 should be associated with the Davidic lineage, that is, the Semitic lineage of the House of David for its link to the origin of the Semitic language among the Afro-Asiatic language families of Northeast Africa and since leading Jewish families with the tradition of descent from the House of David are found in E-M78. DNA is generally accepted as a reliable way to research and establish family lineages even among many in the Orthodox Jewish community.]
Branches of Ilyse’s family were from cities all over this region, including Munkacs, Hungary once a center of Hasidic Judaism. Ilyse also tested the mtDNA of her maternal lineage, which is of Hungarian Jewish origin from the town of Zsolna, Hungary (today Zilina, Slovakia). Her mtDNA results showed her haplogroup to be U1b, which was also recently found to be common at a significant percentage (11.1%) among Jewish women from the Cochin Jewish community of India (Behar 2008), although her specific mtDNA haplotype did not suggest a close affinity to Cochin Jews. The Cochin Jews by tradition first settled in India during the 1st Temple Period during the time of King Solomon, but are known to have received a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Holland in the years prior to and following the 1492 Expulsion from Spain.
Other branches of her family also have traditions of Sephardic origin, which are yet to be researched through genealogical DNA testing. All branches of her family were from the region that was known in the 17th and 18th centuries as “Magyar Israel,” which today includes the Northern and Northern Great Plains regions of Hungary, Slovakia, and Western Ukraine (Jelinek 2007: 682).
Genetic genealogical research is also invaluable for those seeking their Jewish roots and to explore traditions of Jewish origins in their families. Bennett Greenspan, founder of Family Tree DNA (http://www.familytreedna.com), the first and largest DNA driven genealogy research firm, commented:
“Jewish DNA testing is really in full swing. At FTDNA we have an Ashkenazi database that has reached critical mass, [but] not yet so for the Sephardim or Mizrahi section of our database. Time and testing will solve this problem. The real winners in this testing are the untold numbers of non-Jews who actually are descended form someone Jewish that, in most cases, [had] to leave Judaism to save their lives...the reaction to finding a Jewish ancestor is usually quite positive for these folks.”
DNA genealogy is growing at an exponential rate and amateur genetic genealogists number in the hundreds of thousands as they trace their recent and more ancient roots to fill in the unknowns of their family tree.
Sometimes, even individuals of known Jewish descent find some surprises when they start doing DNA testing. Bennett Greenspan, owner of Family Tree DNA, himself found such unexpected results when he tested a Hungarian Jewish branch of his family from “Magyar Israel” in the region of Hungary and Slovakia today that once was densely populated by Jewish communities.
In Bennett’s family tree, the Newman, Klein, and Webber families all lived within a short distance of each other in close proximity to the city of Kosice, Slovakia (once called Kassa, Hungary). This is the same region where above mentioned Family Tree DNA customer, Ilyse Steiner’s family lived. In one particular lineage, Bennett found one of his male ancestors to be in YDNA haplogroup G2a with many exact genetic matches to Ashkenazim, but also several Sephardim from Turkey, and a few individuals not identifying as Jewish from Scotland and Germany, but places where Sephardim are known to have assimilated. Haplogroup G2a is very common among Sephardic Jews and Bennett indicated that possibly up to 20% of Sephardic men today are in G2a, as well as 10% of Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews (Genographic: “G2-P15”).
A few days walk from Kosice, Slovakia across the Hungarian border is the small town of Derecske, Hungary, located close to Debrecen, the capital city of the Northern Great Plains region of Hungary. Here too in the tiny little a town of Derecske, the family of Alexander Kiss (Kiss is the Hungarian translation of Klein), who now live in Canada, the USA, and Hungary, turned to DNA genealogy to find out more about their family. They found the majority of their exact matches were in places as far away as the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, as well a few in nearby Slovakia. But most important for the Kiss family were two matches in particular. The first, an exact match to a young Orthodox Rabbi (YDNA 12/12; 22/25) living in Israel whose family hold the tradition of being Levites, and the second, a closely matched Sephardic family (YDNA 11/12; 22/25) that by tradition fled from Extramadura, Spain after the 1492 Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion to settle in Morocco.
While geneticists are still debating the origin of this lineage as it bears upon the Levites, the Kiss family and their DNA cousins are at one end of a lineage of families with the surname Levi or derivatives and with the tradition of being Levite that spans a genetic distance of 0 to 6 in single stepwise mutations at 12 STR markers, suggesting a common male ancestor and genetic commonality for what may be a truly ancient tradition.
Alexander Kiss was expelled from the Hungarian Air Force in 1944 and deported as a prisoner to a Nazi Labor camp in Austria until the end of the war. While he was still alive, when he was asked he did not want to discuss his family origin other than stating that he was not Hungarian, but rather some other ethnicity. Something his daughters said he called “his secret” and one he took to his grave.
In another small town on the Great Plains, located in southern provincial Hungary near the Romanian border, is the town of Békés, Hungary. For years Esther and Judit Hagyo-Kovacs had been saying that the town tradition of a migration of Armenian Jews to Békés is part of the heritage of their family. In recent generations, the family shortened their name to H.Kovacs, and some today just use the common surname, Kovacs. The Medieval Armenian Jewish community was originally Mizrahi Jewish from Iran or Iraq or directly from Israel in the Byzantine Period, but they left no trace for historians to follow after the Middle Ages aside from occasional documented references in various locations in Europe such as 17th century Holland and possibly communities established on Crete, Greece during the time of the Venetian Republic (697 - 1797 CE). The first synagogue in Békés was built in the 17th century during the Ottoman period in Hungary and was Sephardic, but was later burned to the ground due to anti-Semitism after the Ottoman Turks were defeated in 1699 CE. The question arose as to whether the Armenian Jews that settled in Hungary were from the Medieval Armenian Jewish community or the Ottoman Period Sephardic-Mizrahi Jewish community of Persia and Iraq who arrived in Békés, Hungary via Armenia?
Esther and Judit kept searching for something to connect them with their Jewish heritage and tradition in their family. They even renovated the local synagogue in Békés at their own expense, where Judit ran a restaurant, community center, and non-profit community newspaper, and a Holocaust memorial to the Jews of Békés.
The H.Kovacs family researched their family tree at Hungarogens in Budapest, a traditional genealogical research firm that was started after World War II to help families find relatives after the Holocaust. Hungarogens discovered the family tree of the H.Kovacs family was filled with names with “blanks” instead of religion on branches all over their family tree. These “blanks” were the places where their ancestors had not written any religion into the local town birth records.
A local rabbinical student and Jewish historian indicated that only after the mid-19th century was there a large influx of religious Ashkenazi Jewish families into the area (Balogh 2007). The Balog maternal ancestors could only be traced back to circa 1820s, but no place or dates of birth were recorded in the Békés town records. In response to the above research, an amateur genealogist revisited the family tree research of the Hagyo-Kovacs family only to find a seeming discrepancy in the research of Hungarogens, finding that Rebeka Kelemen, mother of Julianna Balog, was their most distant maternal ancestor. Cross-referencing with the Yad Vashem victims database indicated that several Kelemen families from nearby Békés-csaba in Békés county were murdered in the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Enter genealogy by DNA.
The mtDNA of the direct maternal line of Julianna Balog (and Rebeka Kelemen) was tested through her youngest son who is still living, Geza Hagyo-Kovacs, a proud great-grandfather himself. Geza H.Kovacs' mtDNA was shared among his brothers and sisters, Imre, Eszter, Julianna, Gabor, and Laszlo, and is still found among living cousins of the Hagyo-Kovacs family. Eventually, Ashkenazi Jewish exact matches began to appear in their mtDNA HVR1+HVR2 list. But then in April 2008, Dr. Doron Behar, et al, published a new study on the maternal lineages of non-Ashkenazi Jews. Listed among the mtDNA haplotypes of Mizrahi women was something remarkable. In the same haplogroup as had been tested for Julianna Balog, was a mtDNA haplotype that was almost the exact same sequence as that of the Hagyo-Kovacs family through their maternal ancestors, Julianna Balog and Rebeka Kelemen, and 17% of Mirazhi women from Iraq and 4.9% of Mizrahi women from Iran and is considered to be the founding maternal lineage of the Jewish exile community from Jerusalem to Babylon in the 6th century BCE (Behar 2008). They also found exact matches to woman from Iran, Armenia, Syria, Kuwait, and Arab-Israelis, Palestinians, Druze, and Bedouin among their results in the Family Tree DNA database. A remarkable and ancient Jewish maternal lineage found among this family from Southeastern Hungary near the Romanian border where Sephardic Jews were known to have established Synagogues in the Sephardic liturgical tradition.
Estonian genetics researcher, Dr. Richard Villems, one of the co-authors of the paper, “Counting the Founders: The Matrilineal Genetic Ancestry of the Jewish Diaspora” (Behar 2008) suggested that the “FGS" Full Genome Sequence data (the entire mtDNA sequence) would be even more conclusive.
[Ed. note: Since the original writing of this article, continuing research has found that, in fact, these were Persian Jews who arrived in Hungary via Armenia between the years 1541 - 1699 as part of the wider movement of Sephardic Jews all throughout the Ottoman Empire. New discoveries in the genealogical research of the Hagyo-Kovacs family in 2012 have confirmed that both paternal and maternal lineages are of Persian Jewish origin; See: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Sephardim).]
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