My DNA is totally Jewish — and I’m a bit miﬀed

It was curiosity that made me do it. That, and a little bit of vanity. I was hoping for a surprise, something unexpected and intriguing about my family history, like an Indian ancestor, or a drop of Viking blood — something to fire up my imagination.

But my DNA test results could not have been more banal or predictable. They told me that I am 99 per cent European Jew (Central and Eastern Europe), with one per cent Middle Eastern genes.

It certainly feels like the joke is on me. I paid £70 and patiently waited for over two months to find out something you could have told me by looking at me: I am pure Ashkenazi Jew. Inbred. Not even a sniff of Sephardi, let alone anything else. Honestly, I have never been so disappointed. I should have deposited my saliva somewhere more useful. Like a tissue.

In the advert for the website that I used, it says you can “discover your unique ethnic mix”. Assuming that the test is accurate — and there is some controversy over the reliability of these tests — what I discovered is that there is no mix in me at all. My ethnicity is only unique in the sense that it’s all one and the same.

The website tells me that I now have lots of third and fourth cousin matches, but I’d have to pay another £90 to find out anything else about them. I’m not going to bother. Let’s face it: pretty much all the Jews I know are fourth cousins, or thereabouts.

With so much Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, I do now feel that it would be very wise to get a BRCA test, in case I carry the mutation prevalent in Ashenazi Jews that greatly increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. My research has also revealed that 75 per cent of Ashkenazi jews are lactose intolerant, which makes me wonder if I should be avoiding dairy.

Ultimately, taking the DNA test has made me question what being Jewish really means. As an secular Jew, with a strong Jewish identity but no religious belief, it’s something I’ve often pondered. Perhaps as a reaction to the Nazis, we’ve been encouraged to reject the idea of Judaism as an ethnicity, to view ourselves not as a race but a people. But if my DNA is pure Jew, if all my blood for generations is Jewish, how can I think of it as anything else?