(JTA) – In a genetic study of 6,589 people from five Latin American countries, about a quarter displayed traces of what may be Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

Geneticist Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque and his colleagues published their findings two weeks ago in Nature Communications magazine, in an article titled “Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance.” Converso is the Spanish-language word for people who converted from Judaism to Christianity during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Many conversos, or anusim in Hebrew, fled to Latin America. Overall, converso genes account for only a small part of the ancestries of the study populations from each country, ranging from one percent in Brazil to four percent in Chile. The researchers used a set of DNA variations, or haplotypes, observed to be common among Jews with roots in the Iberian Peninsula.

But converso genes “are widespread,” Chacón-Duque told JTA. Some 23 percent of the 6,589 people sampled showed some genes – or more than five percent of their ancestry – associated with Sephardic, East Mediterranean or South Mediterranean ancestry, “probably stemming mostly from the clandestine colonial migration” of conversos, the researchers wrote. While the study indicates that converso genes have spread far and wide in Latin America, he added, the research sample of fewer than 7,000 people “doesn’t necessarily mean that a quarter of Latin Americans have Sephardic genes.”

CAP: An Orthodox Jewish Colombian family shown in 2012. (Paul Smith/For the Washington Post/via JTA)