African Jews Found Today and Their Y Haplogroups

 Nadene Goldfoot

This is my facebook friend who now lives with his family in Israel.  He left Africa every year to do his milueem in the IDF.  He's a lawyer and a rabbi to his people in Israel.  He's from the Maasai tribe.  I think he's amazing !  He's an example for all Jews, the most devoted who has given much of himself to Judaism and Israel. 

 The Maasai  are a Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting northern, central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.  

We have found that Israelites were traders from the early days on.  My theory is that traders found these groups and settled with their people, teaching them and marrying into their tribes.  Perhaps they were unable to leave or just didn't want to leave.  Being from the Middle East, it was most natural to find trading very beneficial.  There was the Silk Road where lots of trading went on.  The seas were another format for them to travel.  

A Y chromosome study by Elizabeth Wood et al. (2005) tested various Sub-Saharan populations, including 26 Maasai males from Kenya, for paternal lineages. The authors observed haplogroup E1b1b-M35 (not M78) in 35% of the studied Maasai,.  E1b1b-M35-M78 in 15%, their ancestor with the more northerly Cushitic males, who possess the haplogroup at high frequencies  lived more than 13,000 years ago.  The second most frequent paternal lineage among the Maasai was Haplogroup A3b2, which is commonly found in Nilotic populations, such as the Alur;   it was observed in 27% of Maasai males. The third most frequently observed paternal DNA marker in the Maasai was E1b1a1-M2 (E-P1), which is very common in the Sub-Saharan region; it was found in 12% of the Maasai samples. Haplogroup B-M60 was also observed in 8% of the studied Maasai,  which is also found in 30% (16/53) of Southern Sudanese Nilotes.  E1 is a very common haplotype among Caucasian 

Jews  tested.

Today is the time of the Ingathering of Jews from all corners of the earth.  We have gathered in Jews from all sorts of places who are all sorts of colors.  Usually, they have carried with them through oral traditions their connection to Judaism.  I've been involved with the Pashtuns, the 10 tribes of Israel who were carried away by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, and now find they are the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.  A few have been to Israel for a visit.  Possibly a few now live there.  Judeans were carried away to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 and 586 BCE.  Many of them were able to return by 538 BCE.  

Although Jewish identity has, since at least the second century CE, been passed by matrilineal descent according to Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, membership in the Jewish Kohanim has been determined by patrilineal descent . Modern Kohanim are regarded in Judaism as male descendants of biblical Aaron, a direct patrilineal descendant of Abraham, according to the lineage recorded in the Hebrew Bible (שמות / Sh'mot/Exodus 6).Their ancestry shows that  the Torah follows their genealogical history, making Aaron and all his male descendants as well as Moses and his, as the J1 Haplotype.  

Israelites who were freed by Moses and followed him in the number of 603,550 according to their 1st census were a mixed multitude of people, made up of the descendants of the original Israelites from Ur and other slaves taken by the Egyptians.  Today's Jews  tested for DNA have to been found to show up with several Y haplotypes, the J1 and J2, E, G, R, I, and Q.  Women's haplotype come to us from another part of the body so have a different set of ABC markers .  I have found that K is the most predominant with H, J and W following.

It was the males that were Yeshiva students, not the females.  Men were learning to read Hebrew and all the laws, and women were not expected to, though could.  There was no law against it to my knowledge.  Yet the child, if with his mother only, would not have learned all they could have if a boy.  I'm thinking of the Marrano children affected by the Spanish Inquisition and put in a position of possibly losing a father in the process.  Other conditions would have deprived boys of their fathers and their knowledge from their religion.  

A few Marranos have been listed as slave traders with their sailing ships in the 1600s.  They might not have known this would be frowned upon in their peer group if they had a Jewish peer group in the first place. The Holocaust also might have deprived a few lucky enough to have survived boys of their fathers, and were brought up in another's religion.  They cannot be held accountable for certain thoughts or acts because their birth ancestors were Jewish, nor could they have learned things a Jewish population might have known that he didn't.  

We're finding that much is handed down through DNA, tendencies in skills, etc, reactions to different things.  It is a unique study, and much has been learned through studying twins.  At any rate, an old wives' tale I love and think appropriate to this day is that a pregnant mother should have a wonderful 9 months of happiness and be able to think only good thoughts, for even her thinking can affect her unborn child in some way, possibly a negative way.  If all pregnant mothers were still in love with their husbands and had no worries, and good health besides, what wonderful lucky babies there would be.  

                                                                 

  Early research suggested that the 6/6 matches found among male Lemba of Southern Africa, a Black tribe,  confirmed their oral history of descent from Jews and connection to Jewish culture.(Thomas MG et al. 2000); Later research has been unable to confirm this although it has shown that some male Lemba have Middle Eastern ancestry.   "Early genetic testing supported some Lemba oral traditions related to origin of male ancestors in the Middle East. A Y-DNA genetic study in 1996 of 49 Lemba males suggested that more than 50% of the Lemba Y-chromosomes are West Asian in origin, and shared by both Arabs and Jews."

In an interview with NOVA, team member Dr. David Goldstein commented on the team's findings: "The first striking thing about the Y chromosomes of the Lemba is that you find this particular chromosomal type (Cohen modal haplotype) that is characteristic of the Jewish priesthood in a frequency that is similar to what you see in major Jewish populations. Something just under one out of every 10 Lemba that we looked at had this particular Y chromosomal type that appears to be a signature of Jewish ancestry. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that this Cohen genetic signature is strongly associated with a particular clan in the Lemba. Most of the Cohen modal haplotypes that we observe are carried by individuals of the Buba clan which, in Lemba oral tradition, had a leadership role in bringing the Lemba out of Israel."

I first heard about them from the book, THE LOST ARK OF THE COVENANT, by Tudor Parfitt, who went to Africa and found them in 1987, a tribe of 40,000 who spoke various Bantu languages,  found in South Africa and Zimbabwe who have the claim to be of Israelite origin.  Since early medieval time, there had been rumors of lost Jewish kingdoms in the darkest Africa.  This tribe believed that they left Israel and settled in a city called Senna, somewhere across the sea.  The tribe wanted  Dr. Parfitt to find Senna.  They had some Jewish customs.  They circumcised their boys.  They practiced ritual slaughter of animals, and with a special knife.  They would not eat pigs and a few other animals of Africa.  Here's what dates their time of separation from the body of Judaism;  they sacrificed animals on high places like our ancient Israelites! It's thought they migrated 2,500 years ago from the north.   They followed many of the other laws of the Torah.  The sighting of the new moon was of cardinal importance to them as it is for Jews.  Their clan name looked as if they were from Arabic or Hebrew or other Semitic language, thought Parfitt.   I did not agree that Parfitt had found the lost Ark there in Africa, but that is besides the point.    

Most Lemba today have already become Christians or Muslims.  I don't believe any are living in Israel                               

 Before World War II, a number of rabbis in Europe and the United States advocated for recognition of the Beta Israel of Ethiopia as Jews, AKA Falashas, and discussions continued after 1948 in the new State of Israel. In 1975 Israel’s Chief Rabbinate officially accepted these Ethiopians’ assertions of Jewish ancestry, which made them eligible for aliya, the ascent, or immigration, to Israel.                                                           

Hundreds and then thousands of Beta Israel/Falashas/Ethiopians fled the harsh conditions of their country and made the hazardous trek to Sudan (see Ben-Ezer 2005). By 1977 the Israeli government took decisive action by deciding to transport them to Israel, and in 1983 launched ‘Operation Moses’ which covertly airlifted over 6,500 persons from makeshift refugee camps there. After the Sudanese government objected to the Operation and forced its abrupt end, over 14,000 Falasha men, women, and children flocked to Addis Ababa. They were subsequently airlifted en masse to Israel during two days in the spring of 1991.  I lived in Tzfat from 1981 to 1985.  They came during this period and moved into the apartment across the street.  It was a city that had empty apartments, and happened to be one of the coldest cities, being on top of a mountain as high as Jerusalem was located.  They came wearing white sheets and were barefoot.  It didn't take long and they were dressed in modern clothing and shopping in our supermarket.  However, most had to do a stint at the hospital first because they had been exposed to so many parasites and needed to have a medical clearance first due to their past circumstances. 

                                                              

     This Ethiopian Jew is doing his IDF service in Nablus, in Samaria,

a part of the West Bank.  

           Today, Israel is home to the largest Beta Israel community in the world, with about 125,500 citizens of Ethiopian descent in 2011, who are mainly assembled in the smaller urban areas of central Israel.They speak Tigrinya and Hebrew and I hope, English as well as it's taught from 4th grade on in most public schools. 

DNA samples from Falasha Jews and Ethiopians were studied with the Y-chromosome-specific DNA probe p49a to screen for TaqI restriction polymorphisms and haplotypes. Two haplotypes (V and XI) are the most widespread in Falashas and Ethiopians, representing about 70% of the total number of haplotypes in Ethiopia.   Because the Jewish haplotypes VII and VIII are not represented in the Falasha population, we conclude that the Falasha people descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia who converted to Judaism.

The Kohen hypothesis was first tested through DNA analysis in 1997 by Prof. Karl Skorecki and collaborators from Haifa, Israel. In their study, "Y chromosomes of Jewish priests," published in the journal Nature, they found that the Kohanim appeared to share a different probability distribution compared to the rest of the Jewish population for the two Y-chromosome markers they tested (YAP and DYS19). They also found that the probabilities appeared to be shared by both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Kohens, pointing to a common Kohen population origin before the Jewish diaspora at the destruction of the Second Temple. However, this study also indicated that only 48% of Ashkenazi Kohens and 58% of Sephardic Kohens have the J1 Cohen Modal Haplotype.

If they are talking about surnames, there are plenty of Cohens walking around with surnames other than Cohen, Kohen, Cohn, etc.  In our family, Hochfeld, a surname from Germany, are Kohens.  The fact of this has been handed down orally from father to son, and they take their place in the synagogue after their Bar Mitzva at age 13.  There are special rules that Cohens do follow, such as being in a cemetery, reading first in the synagogue, etc., so they have known since time began who they are, until something has happened to the family and young boys were deprived  of this knowledge, thus men today just finding this out through DNA testing.  The Holocaust has had everything to do with this.

 In genetic genealogy and human genetics, Y DNA haplogroup J-M267, also commonly known as haplogroup J1 and the Cohen line, is a subclade (branch) of Y-DNA haplogroup J-P209 (commonly known as haplogroup J) along with its sibling clade Y DNA haplogroup J-M172 (commonly known as haplogroup J2).     

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Aaron

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/familylemba.html

Book: The Lost Ark of the Covenant by Tudor Parfitt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemba_people#:~:text=Early%20genetic%20testing%20supported%20some,by%20both%20Arabs%20and%20Jews.

https://shavei.org/zimbabwe-2/

https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/lemba-tribe-in-southern-africa-has-jewish-roots-genetic-tests-reveal

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10592688/#:~:text=DNA%20samples%20from%20Falasha%20Jews,number%20of%20haplotypes%20in%20Ethiopia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Jews_in_Israel#:~:text=Today%2C%20Israel%20is%20home%20to,urban%20areas%20of%20central%20Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-DNA_haplogroups_in_populations_of_Sub-Saharan_Africa

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10592688/#:~:text=DNA%20samples%20from%20Falasha%20Jews,number%20of%20haplotypes%20in%20Ethiopia.