Sephardic Genealogy

09/04/2026

Who counts as Sephardic?

Many people with Spanish or Portuguese ancestry may have Jewish roots.
While meaningful, ancestry alone is not the same as being Sephardic.

The halachic (Jewish religious) definition is more precise—and more interesting.

08/04/2026

DNA Tests and Sephardic Ancestry: What They Don’t Tell You

If you’re using DNA to research Sephardic ancestry,
there’s something you need to understand.

07/04/2026

JewishGen Talks: Souls, Taxes, and Real Estate

In a recent JewishGen lecture, available on YouTube, Michael Waas explained four main types of Ottoman state records that can be used for Jewish family history: tapu tahrir registers, cizye registers, temettuat registers, and nüfus registers. His central point was that these government records can add much more than names. They can show synagogue affiliation, taxation, occupation, age, household structure, property, and sometimes even physical description. He stressed that they are especially valuable because they complement communal Jewish records rather than repeating them.

For the earlier period, he discussed the tapu tahrir cadastral surveys, which survive from parts of the empire between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. These can list taxable males by personal name and father’s name, and in some places by synagogue. His example was Salonica in 1615, where Jews were recorded under synagogues such as Otranto, reflecting older patterns of origin within the community. These registers are useful for reconstructing the shape and composition of a community, even if the personal detail is often limited.

He then turned to cizye registers, the poll-tax records for non-Muslims. These, he showed, can be more directly genealogical. In his examples from Izmir and Aleppo, they recorded names, fathers’ names, surnames, guild membership, and tax level. The Aleppo register of 1844–45 was particularly important because it included surnames, allowing probable family links to be proposed within the same record. In this kind of source, taxation also gives some indication of relative economic standing.

The richest records he described were the temettuat surveys, mainly from the 1840s, which dealt with real estate and taxation. These can include ages, occupations, household members, property, tax assessment, and addresses. His example from Izmir showed how one such register could identify several generations of a family, give their ages, describe appearance, note wealth, and place them on a named street. Finally, he discussed the nüfus registers, the Ottoman census system from the 1830s onward. These began mainly with males, but later expanded and in some cases included women and maiden names. His Monastir example showed a large multi-generational household headed by a communal rabbi.

On where to find these records, Waas said that many Ottoman government records are in the Ottoman archives in Turkey and can be obtained as scans, though access is not simple. Other material is held in places such as the Israel State Archives, Jerusalem repositories, and local Jewish community archives, including Izmir. He also said that JewishGen already has a number of relevant databases online, including material from Aleppo, Greece, Turkey, and Izmir, and that the wider aim of the project is to translate and index more of these records so that they can be searched more easily.

JewishGen Talks: Souls, Taxes, and Real Estate — Jewish Genealogy and the Ottoman Administrative StateThe Ottoman Empire, like all empires and states, was no...

05/04/2026

The Book of Mogador - The Lost Jewish World of Essaouira Revealed

In this talk, Sidney Corcos presents the story behind The Book of Mogador (Le Livre de Mogador), the result of more than 30 years of research into the Jewish community of Mogador, now Essaouira in Morocco. This vast work, published in four volumes in French and two in Hebrew, runs to more than 2,270 pages across 43 chapters.

Corcos explains how he traced the rise, life, and legacy of one of Morocco’s most important Jewish port cities. The project includes detailed genealogies of about thirty leading families, as well as a full volume of archival material: more than 5,500 marriages, birth registers, cemetery lists, Vichy-era documents, and more.

Born into one of Mogador’s leading Jewish families, Sidney Corcos has spent decades preserving the history of the city’s Jewish community. Drawing on family archives and public and private collections in several countries, he created one of the most substantial works ever produced on Moroccan Jewish history. He has also been involved in heritage work in Essaouira, including Bayt Dakira, the restored synagogue, and the museum devoted to the city’s Jewish past.

The meeting, recorded from Jerusalem on 29 March 2026, was interrupted by an Iranian rocket attack, so is slightly longer than usual.

How was the history of an entire Jewish community rebuilt from archives, family papers, cemetery records, and memory?In this talk, Sidney Corcos presents the...

05/04/2026

Jewish Edirne, known in Jewish history as Adrianople, was once one of the great Sephardic centres of the Ottoman world. Its synagogues, homes, cemeteries, and surviving records still tell the story of a remarkable community.

Follow for more on Jewish history, Sephardic heritage, and genealogy.

04/04/2026

The opening of the Suez Canal reshaped the Jewish world, by diverting trade from the old caravan routes through Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo, to Egypt. Important communities developed in Cairo and Alexandria.

04/04/2026

Book Review: Centinela contra judíos by Francisco de Torrejoncillo

Centinela contra judíos (‘Sentry against the Jews’) is a harsh anti-Jewish polemic from late seventeenth-century Spain, published in 1673. The author, Francisco de Torrejoncillo, was a Franciscan preacher in Spain's Extremadura region.

The book is direct about its purpose. In the prologue, Torrejoncillo says he is not writing about ancestry or genealogy. He says he wants to make Jews known by their customs. He also says the book is largely a compilation from earlier approved authors and scripture, put together so that “the Jews may be known.” That is the key to the whole work. It is not an original argument. It is a handbook of accusation.

The chapter list shows exactly what he is doing. He says Jews are presumptuous and lying, treacherous, despised, persecutors of the Catholic faith, untrustworthy, bound together everywhere as one body, restless, seditious, without true honour or nobility, and enemies of Christians. The book is not subtle. It is a systematic list of charges.

The tone is not scholarly in any modern sense. Torrejoncillo piles up Biblical passages, miracle stories, old chronicles, legends, and stock accusations. He does not test them. He uses them. Again and again, he treats Jews as a hidden danger inside Christian society. The approbatory texts at the front of the book make the same point. They praise the book as a warning against enemies who move among Christians disguised and concealed.

That is what gives the book its historical value. It was written long after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, in a world where the main target was no longer an openly Jewish community but their New Christian descendants many or most whom probably had little or no knowledge of normative Judaism. It shows how a churchman in that period thought about them: not as neighbours but as a permanent threat.

As a book, it is ugly, repetitive, and narrow. As an insight, it is very useful. It shows the mental world behind much of the suspicion found in Inquisitorial and limpieza de sangre (‘purity of blood’) material. It helps explain why so many Inquisition records focus on alleged hidden practice, family background, and inherited distrust. It is not an intelligent book, but offers a useful insight into early modern antisemitic thinking in Spain.

The book was republished multiple times. The link is to the 1718 edition. The image below is from the 1676 edition. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Centinela_contra_Judios/cco3IlnSCvcC

01/04/2026

The Genealogy of Sephardic Haroset

Haroset appears in Rabbinic literature of the early centuries CE, where it is discussed as part of the Passover meal rather than as a Biblical command. In the Mishnah and later the Talmud it is already a recognised element of the Seder, associated above all with the mortar of Egypt, and described as a thick mixture of fruit, liquid, and spices. There is no fixed early recipe. Instead, it seems to have been a flexible preparation based on local fruits, combined with wine or vinegar and seasoned to produce both the texture and colour required for its symbolic role. From the outset, therefore, haroset was a ritual concept rather than a standard dish, capable of adapting to different environments while retaining its meaning.

In the Sephardic world, this flexibility produced a family of related but distinct forms rooted in medieval Iberian practice. In Iberia, haroset likely combined apples, figs or dates, nuts (especially almonds), wine, and warm spices such as cinnamon, reflecting broader Andalusi culinary tastes. After the Expulsions, these patterns travelled widely. In the Ottoman lands, haroset became darker and more concentrated, often dominated by dates, raisins, and walnuts, sometimes reduced to a smooth paste. In Western Sephardic communities such as Amsterdam and London, apple-and-almond mixtures remained prominent, sometimes with citrus, retaining a closer link to Iberian balances of fruit and acidity. In North Africa, particularly Morocco, it could be almost entirely date-based and shaped into small balls. Across these variations, Sephardic haroset is typically richer, more spiced, and more cohesive in texture than northern European versions, reflecting both inherited Iberian tastes and the ingredients available across the diaspora.

The image shows Moroccan haroset balls.

01/04/2026

The Jewish Museum of Rhodes, Greece

The Jewish Museum of Rhodes, housed within the Kahal Shalom Synagogue complex, provides a clear and focused account of the island’s Ladino-speaking Sephardic community. Its exhibits draw on photographs, communal records, inscriptions, and domestic and ritual objects to reconstruct everyday life from the sixteenth century onwards, following the arrival of Jews expelled from Iberia who established a durable Ottoman-era community. The material situates Rhodes within the wider eastern Sephardic network, with connections to centres such as Salonika and Izmir, and gives a useful sense of religious practice, family life, and communal organisation.

The strongest and most affecting section addresses the destruction of the community in July 1944, when the Jews of Rhodes were deported by the German authorities to Auschwitz. The museum presents this through transport lists, testimonies, and family photographs, allowing individual lives to be traced with some precision. For genealogical purposes, these named records are particularly valuable, as they help bridge the gap between archival documentation and personal history.

Although the museum is modest in scale, it is thoughtfully arranged and benefits greatly from its setting within the historic synagogue. Moving between the exhibition rooms and the synagogue courtyard and prayer hall reinforces the continuity between the surviving building and the lost community it represents, giving the visit a coherence and immediacy that a larger institution might lack.

31/03/2026

Visit the Sephardic Balkans!

Dr Joseph Benatov leads tours of the Jewish Balkans. You can find details of his 2026 tours here:

Intellectually invigorationg Jewish herigate tours of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities of the Balkans.

31/03/2026

Happy Passover, חג פסח שמח, Boas Entradas de Pêssah, Pesah alegre and, of course, Happy Easter to all this page's Christian supporters.

The image below seeks, using AI, to give the impression of a Seder in Castile, shortly before the Expulsion in 1492. Note the use of a basket rather than a modern Seder plate. The costumes and items are reasonably accurate, but the AI couldn't get the Hagadah text right and has trouble imagining round matzot.