Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, MaHaRa'M of Rothenburg - Maharam of Rothenburg Matches 14th Century Erfurt Sample

Adam, thanks for the link to this study (also saw your post & discussion on the Jewishgen listserve)...quite fascinating and enlightening. I haven't absorbed it all yet, but frankly it seems to be a thrilling window into the origins of the Ashkenazi community that will be relevant to most of us, Rothenburg descendants or otherwise. More later...just wanted to express appreciation ASAP!

Thanks Deb. There is so much to investigate in these data. Please let me/us know if you are able to place the J2a samples with any modern lines.

Private User This really is incredible work. Please tell us which is the best DNA test to get to be part of the study. Love to see if this tzaddik is really our 22nd great grandfather!

Private User It's incredible how the team was able to obtain these samples. Their report is unprecedented for Jewish Genealogy not only because 1350 is quite early in the Ashkenazic history, but also because we now have a group of around 33 individuals from the same community, giving us a look at the population genetics in an early Ashkenazic community.

In answer to your question, you should first be aware that from the autosomal perspective (i.e. the whole genome) most modern persons of Ashkenazic descent are going to match the Erfurt samples closely: this is because there weren't that many Ashkenazim to begin with and this population in 1350 Erfurt is going to be related to probably every Ashkenazi alive today. What I am saying is that it's a foregone conclusion that you will be matching the entire group, some more closely than others. If you mean to see whether you are a close autosomal match to the Maharam of Rothenburg-related sample then you should know that such a test cannot confirm or disprove a direct 22 generation ancestry in that sample. The only way to confirm direct descent would be using a ydna haplogroup test and that would only work if the person tested is a son-after-son descendant of the Erfurt sample only (highly improbable).

That said, to see how you match the Erfurt group autosomally, you would need to first have an autosomal dna test done (for example Family Finder at FTDNA or any of the other ones) and then use the raw data from that test to compare to the Erfurt group using for example MyTrueAncestry (this may require a fee of some sort to MyTrueAncestry; there are instructions on that site about how to upload your raw data). I have heard that not all of the Erfurt samples are yet available at MyTrueAncestry, but that they appear to be adding new ones sequentially over time.

Maybe someone has other options I am not aware of.

Thanks, Private User!