Tracing our ancestors: secrets of the Árpád dynasty and Jewish Hungarians revealed 

DNA is arguably the closest thing to a “god” that science has yet discovered. The double helix shapes nearly every facet of life on this planet. DNA as evidence is more powerful than a group of eyewitnesses or a book of photographs. A strand can put a criminal in prison for life, or exonerate an innocent person, decades into their sentence. And it’s not really surprising that a good while before criminal cases were routinely settled by the science of DNA, parents, or accused parents, were using it to determine the age-old question: Who’s your daddy? 

As early as 1988 a process known as DNA fingerprinting began gaining prominence for use in paternity tests. With DNA, the ‘maybe’ element of blood type tests was over. To the delight of some and the consternation of others, a child’s father could be definitively determined. Today untold thousands of both mothers and possible fathers, use home DNA paternity tests.

Other kinds of “paternity tests”, can of course, give us much more than information about the father of a single offspring. In 2020, Hungarian and other European scientists sequenced the genome of DNA from the skeletal remains of Hungarian King Béla III, along with that of an unknown Árpád family member found in the Royal Basilica of Székesfehérvár. The fascinating results indicate that the highly influential Árpád dynasty , Hungary’s first royal dynasty, likely traces its ancient origins to a region near modern northern Afghanistan. The road to what became Hungary appears to dip into parts of now-Iran, fuses with peoples once living in parts of Russia and also seems to have a Serbian connection. Those scientifically-minded and or curious should definitely try to read the full paper published by the European Journal of Human Genetics. 

What such a finding means about Hungary and its people is up to individual Hungarians, but if nothing else, it’s greatly interesting. It would also seem to put to bed any ridiculous notions of anyone being “pure-blood” anything. Every human is an amalgamation; multiple entities united into the person we see in the mirror.   

Another recent interesting find, again courtesy of DNA testing, is that Hungary may also have many more people of Jewish heritage than once thought. A 2019 study by the popular find-your-ancestor website MyHeritage revealed that Hungary has the highest percentage of Jewish ancestry outside of Israel. Based on samples of close to 5,000 people living in Hungary, the director of the European Jewish Demography Unit at the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Dr. Daniel Staetsky, says the study concluded that some 130,000 Hungarians have an ethnic ancestry that is 50 percent or more Ashkenazi Jewish.