Jewish Nobility of Poland-Lithuania & All Rus'

Identifying the SNPs of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish Nobility
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About us

This project is for people who descend from Polish-Lithuanian Nobility of Jewish Extraction: the collective ethnic group of all those Nobles who can trace their ancestry, by conventional or genetic genealogy, back to Polish-Lithuanian Jewish ethnic roots. Usually, such Polish-Lithuanian Jewish families are those which lived in Poland-Lithuania and converted to Christianity before 1764 under a variety of circumstances for various reasons (mainly Sabbateans) being awarded noble status as szlachta by the articles of the 3rd Lithuanian Statute (1588-1840) inheriting their Godparents' Arms & Titles. Although the Polish Sejm limited the material rights of neophytes to the level of a burgher or village estate in 1764, in 1768 neophytes living in the area of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were excluded from this limit if the family had converted before 1764. Initially, such families also enjoyed a privileged social status in Russia after the Partitions of Polish-Lithuania from 1772 onward as the rights and privileges of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility were consolidated by Tsarina Catherine II the Great in 1785 in her “Letters of Charter to the Nobility”. Nobles had the exclusive right to own land with serfs, were exempted from compulsory service, from all taxes and duties, had a monopoly on the most profitable industrial production, etc.. Hence all Russian partitioned Polish-Lithuanian nobles also became considered as Russian nobility too.