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Saturday, December 8, 2018

Our Maligned Erev Rav: Or, Our Multitude of Slaves Rescued in the Exodus

Nadene Goldfoot                                           
Males and females have a different set of haplotypes.
We come from different branches of the tree of homo sapiens.
My male line came from the Q branch that had many little twigs on it as they all do.  
When I first got into DNA testing, I found out that my brother tested as a Q, later to be further tested as a QBZ67 at 111 alleles.  The origin for Q's about 25,000 years ago was Mongolia, Siberia and parts of Turkey.  As further testing showed, some evidence of them were finally found around Ur. which was Terah and his son Abraham's home for some time.  Then I was happy.  For I had found out about the Cohen gene.

I created a tree on my Family Tree Maker of the biblical history of our patriarchs.  Abraham was a product of them.  Moses was a product of Abraham.  Moses's brother, Aaron, who he met as an adult in the reunion of his Jewish family after being brought up in the royal house of a pharaoh, was of the DNA line, the Y haplogroup of J1.  A good majority of male Jews carry this haplotype. Why weren't all male Jews J1s or J2s?   Where did we fit in our biblical story?  Where did the E's and the Gs and the R's and some of those I's fit in? Even a few Ts have shown up in our family of Jewish people. 

Going back to the words of Moses, not only was it the descendants of Jacob's family that left with him but all the slaves.  They were the multitude of people who had been taken prisoner throughout the 400 years that Jacob's family of 70 had entered Egypt and stayed until Moses had rescued them.
                                                                       
The result was that they all were taught the same lessons by Moses throughout the 40 years, no doubt intermarrying with the original family; perhaps even since they had arrived upon the scene.  When a man is without sons and happens to be the leader of his tribe, his daughter's husband might be the one to take over.  He may have been of the Erev Rav or multitude group of people,, slaves in Egypt rescued along with the family line of Jacob by Moses.    That may be how our Q line became a 5% population  of the Jews.  It could have even be bigger at one time with the Holocaust paring down 6 million of us.

I fall into this thinking that all the problematic Jews in our midst are of the Erev Rav group.  They can't be true Jews, I think, which is exactly what many of our preceding rabbis have also thought.
They didn't know about DNA until just lately, and this proves to be nothing but unmitigated racial thinking.                                                               
                                                                           
My brother and I have DNA matches with many many people of Cohen haplogroups.  We tested with Family Tree DNA.  Then I have transferred our results to GedMatch.com as well for further testing and more people to compare with.  We have a couple thousand matches of people found to be from 2nd cousins all the way down to 5th cousins and even further.  It is said by geneticists that Jewish people are related to all other Jewish people by birth and are at least 30th cousins.  The thing is, after being 5th cousins or a little further back, we stop matching with discernible DNA segments of our 23 chromosomes.  There's no more evidence.  There's nothing to say like, "You and I match with a segment of 5 cMs on chromosome # 6.  Where was your family from?  Possibly from Lithuania, you say?  "

I have found that there are certain hapotypes typical of us Jewish people.  Now, there have even been 2 women of Sephardim  descent that I match.  They seem to be a mixture of Ashkenazi and Sephardic ancestry.  I'm Ashkenazi.  Our DNA would show our history to be true.  When Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 CE, we who were taken to Rome became the Ashkenazis and those who fled to Spain became the Sephardim.  70 CE was almost 2,000 years ago.  A generation is about on the average, 25 years.  That's 80 generations ago.  Our parents are going back 1 generation.  Our 1st cousins are in the next or 3rd generation.  This is going back far more than 30 generations, so it would be pretty hard to hook up with other Sephardim 77 generations ago.  The chances are better if their descendants were from the same city our descendants were living in, and that did happen in history occasionally.  Often, they didn't mix socially, though.  Perhaps language was a barrier to socialization.
                                                                         
Well known American Jewish people, haplogroups unknown. 
The men  could be Cohens, Levites or Israelites. 
Women today are thought to have come from 5 Jewish women of different eras.  
The beautiful fact is that we have found that Aaron was the brother of Moses and from Aaron comes the Cohens who were his heirs, and they were part of the tribe of Levi.  The Levites are the 2nd to read from the Torah with the Cohens being first.  The Levites should be J1s too, but we find that not all Levites are J1s who have tested today.  Yet most Cohens, actively serving as Cohens in the synagogue services, are found to be J1.  An R1 line has been found to be some Levites.  Things happen and the laws for the Levites have not been as stringent as for the Cohens.  Yet not all Cohens in the synagogue will be J1s.  Things have happened with their line as well. 

We do have several (harrumph) self hating Jews in our midst.  I'd love to see what their Y haplogroup is, but no can do.  The chances are high that they would turn out to be J1s or J2, and then I'd cry.  So much of how we think and feel comes from our DNA and also from our environment.  How we feel about our religion and Israel comes from both of these and how they are taught to us.

This is the 7th night of Chanukah  right now.  We are remembering how we almost lost our religion when the Greek Syrians were Hellenizing the Judeans, and thank goodness for Judah Maccabees, the Hammerer, they called him,  who put an end to that, and became one of the first guerrilla fighters, taking over Jerusalem again from these occupiers and cleaning out our Temple and finding a spot of oil that lasted for 8 wonderful days until more could be found in the next town.

Knowing more about our male haplogroups should never be used against us.  It's how we behave towards our own people that counts.  It does help scientists settle that ago old debate as to which is the most important, DNA or environment, though.  Moses had 2 parents that were Jewish but his environment was mostly Egyptian as a prince, though we know that he was nursed by his own mother who was the  wet nurse who Miriam, his birth sister, had supplied for the Egyptian princess. Before he was told of his background, he felt sympathy for the slaves and killed an overseer with a whip for beating one almost to death.  He was reported to be the killer and had to leave, heading out for unknown territory in the desert.  Was it his upbringing or his genes that caused him to react? 

One interesting tidbit is that the majority of the Jews in my brother's Q line were published writers.  It must be a skill that flows within our genes. 

One of our cultural tidbits is that education is high on the social scale of being a necessity.  So between that environment and DNA's offering of skills, we have some pretty good people.  This can be said for all Jewish people.  We have been homeless for 2,000 years until 1948.  One thing that was found to stay with us, though we could lose all our belongings in our movement from country to country seeking acceptance, we could always take our education with us in our minds. 

Resources: https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2013/09/y-haplogroup-matches-to-goldfoot-on-23.html
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2013/09/mt-haplogroups-for-goldfoot-from-to-x.html

 https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-haplogroup-we-be.html
https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2009/09/jewish-womens-dna.html
https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/04/using-dna-to-learn-about-our-jewish.html
https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/05/dna-study-of-jews-covers-3000-year.html
https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-genetics-tells-us-about-our.html
https://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/my-chromosome-bearing-sephardic-jewish.html

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