Nadene Goldfoot
As we know, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel since Abraham and his family settled there in about 1938 BCE and maintained a continuous presence for over 3,000 years according to Archaological and historical evidence. Here we see some of Jacob's sons. He had 12, and they had multiplied many times.
Jewish civilization in Israel was already over 1,000 years old when Rome destroyed the Holy Temple and conquered the Jewish nation in the 1st Century. This happened in 70 CE, about 2,008 years since Abram was there. Josephus claims that 1.1 million people were killed during the siege, of which a majority were Jewish.
All the people killed could no longer produce heirs. A million people lost their lives, meaning all those people, now dead, were carrying genes for the next generation and were stopped. Each person's pair of 23 genes were lost, one set from father and one from mother. Only those left alive could produce. This is a bottleneck, leaving only certain people able to hand down their genes. In other words, A population bottleneck is an event that drastically reduces the size of a population. ... The population bottleneck produces a decrease in the gene pool of the population because many alleles, or gene variants, that were present in the original population are lost.
Rome exiled only a portion of this population. The remaining Jews, banned from Jerusalem, flourished for centuries in other Jewish towns, such as (Yavne/Jabneh/Jaffa, Rafah, Gaza (Ashkelon and Caesarea. We now have the remains that were alive from the bottleneck. The genes they carry are being shared with their descendants, and in this way are multiplying, but only these certain genes.
The Jewish population was decimated by the Crusaders in the 12th century CE, but it rebounded in the next centuries and grew as Jews returned in waves of immigration and settled in Safed, Jerusalem Tiberius and Hebron. We see another bottleneck , losing many possibilities of genes in a next generation. Now the possibilities of many different genes and narrowed way down to a few hardy ones.
After 1850, the Jewish population grew further.
By the 1870s, Jews once again were the majority religious group in Jerusalem.
Early modern Zionists began purchasing land and establishing thriving communities like Tel Aviv in 1909, even while the land was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire-up until 1917, the end of WWI.
In thousands
In the 1930s, Palestine had 475,000 Jews.
At this same year, Europe & Russia had 8,900 Jews.
North and South America had 1,200
Asia without Russia: 510
Africa: 375
Australia, New Zealand: 15
Totaling without Palestine: 11,000 Jews
Each continent would develop just those particular genes, generation after generation, and if done long enough, would take on a certain look of identification.
By 1939
Europe & Russia had 9,650 Jews
North and South America had 5,500
Asia without Russia: 850
Africa: 625
Australia, New Zealand: 33
Total: 16,658 Jews
By 1954 after a huge bottleneck
Europe & Russia had 3,348 Jews
North and South America had 5,925
Asia without Russia: 1,645
Africa: 707
Australia, New Zealand: 60
Total: 11, 685 Jews
A loss of 6,000,000, Jews in Holocaust, mainly from Europe and Russia by the Nazis. Another Einstein could have been wasted.
By 1988
Europe and Russia had 2,607 Jews
North and South America had 6,447
Asia without Russia: 3,692
Africa: 142
Australia & New Zealand: 90
Total: 12,979
Resource:
Magazine: ISRAEL101, 2010 p. 38-hot topics: things you should know
Book: DNA & Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick & Andrew Yeiser
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia-statistics, p, 885-886
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