A far larger proportion of Hungarian citizens have partial Jewish origins than the residents of any other country in the world, with the exception of Israel — this, according to a study conducted by statistician Daniel Sztacki, the Jewish People Policy Institute and the MyHeritage website. Based on DNA test results submitted by 4,981 residents of Hungary, fully 7.6 percent came back showing Jewish origins of at least 25 percent, indicating one or more Jewish (generally Ashkenazi) grandparent.

Compare the 7.6 percent proportion in Hungary to just 3.5 percent in the United States and 3.0 percent in Canada. What is perhaps even more fascinating is that 12.5 percent of Hungarian respondents were at least 10 percent Jewish, compared to only 4.7 percent in the U.S. and 4 percent in Canada. A total of 4.2 percent of respondents from Hungary received results showing that they were at least 50 percent Jewish.

As an aside, I only discovered five years ago, through an Ancestry.ca DNA test, that I am 53 percent Jewish. Like a great many people in Hungary, I had no knowledge of the fact that my father’s family was Jewish. The study by Mr. Sztacki notes that in Hungary it was particularly common for parents and grandparents to consciously conceal the family’s suffering during the Holocaust and their Jewish origins from their children and grandchildren, due to a lingering fear of antisemitism.

Based on these numbers, Mr. Sztacki suggests that the number of residents of Hungary who are at least 50 percent Jewish stands at around 130,000. This number should give government statisticians and those involved in the census in Hungary some pause, as official figures significantly underestimate the size of Hungary’s Jewish community. Figures from 2013 placed this at just 10,985 (this is the number of people who would have self-identified as Jewish), but researchers in Hungary have generally estimated the actual number, based on the origins of one of more parents, at being much closer to the estimate provided by Mr. Sztacki.