The People Closest to Jewish DNA: Our Cousins

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

                                  Who Are the Kurds (Smithsonian) Today there are an estimated 25 million to 40 million Kurds, mostly Muslim, about half in Turkey and most of the others in Iran, Iraq and Syria. They are arguably the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent state of their own—a situation that, for many Kurds, is in painful contrast to their former glory and is a source of frustration and anger.  Source: Smithsonian. 

Israel is friends with the Kurds. Israel has endorsed Kurdish independence.  Saladin would have been proud. 

   

President Trump has had lots of contradictory things to say about the Kurds, who until just two years ago were allied with the United States in northeastern Syria.  The Kurds, you may recall, are a stateless and predominantly Muslim ethnic group divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.  The Kurds are great friends of Israel, so when Trump turned against them, it was a big blow to both.  Even Trump’s staunchest Republican congressional allies expressed outrage at the prospect of abandoning Syrian Kurds who had fought the Islamic State group with American arms and advice. It was the latest example of Trump’s approach to foreign policy that critics condemn as impulsive, that he sometimes reverses and that frequently is untethered to the advice of his national security aides.

Ezra's educating his people, giving a lesson about our history since he's a Cohen and has returned from Babylonia to help his people.  

Kurds lived in Kurdistan, a mountainous region now divided among Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.  The 1st Jewish settlers went to Kurdistan as early as the time of Ezra of 5th century BCE.  The early beginnings of Jewish immigration are attested by the Aramaic dialect spoken by Kurdish Jews up to modern times, close to the language of the Babylonian Talmud and the speech of the Nestorian Christians in Kurdistan.  

"The people closest to the Jews from a genetic point of view, may be the Kurds, according to results of a new study at the Hebrew University.  Scientists who participated in the research said the findings seem to indicate both peoples had common ancestors who lived in the northern half of the fertile crescent, where northern Iraq and Turkey are today.  some of them, it is  assumed, wandered south in  pre-historic times and settled on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean." 

"A sample of 526 Y chromosomes (the male line) representing six Middle Eastern populations (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Kurdish Jews from Israel; Muslim Kurds; Muslim Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian Authority Area; and Bedouin from the Negev) was analyzed for 13 binary polymorphisms and six microsatellite loci. The investigation of the genetic relationship among 3 Jewish communities revealed that Kurdish and Sephardic Jews were indistinguishable from one another, whereas both differed slightly, yet significantly, from Ashkenazi Jews. The differences among Ashkenazim may be a result of low-level gene flow from European populations and/or genetic drift during isolation. Admixture between Kurdish Jews and their former Muslim host population in Kurdistan appeared to be negligible. In comparison with data available from other relevant populations in the region, Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors". 

                                                 

                           Jewish and Arab boys playing soccer 

Yet, new information now tells us that " a new genetic study shows that many Arabs and Jews are closely related. More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.

Dr. Michael Hammer is a Research Scientist in the ARL Division of Biotechnology at the University of Arizona with joint appointments in Neurology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and is a member of the Steele Children’s Research Center, Bio5, and the Arizona Cancer Center. Dr. Hammer’s research spans the fields of medical genetics and human population genetics. For the past 20 years, Dr. Hammer’s group has published over 100 articles documenting the African origin of human diversity, interbreeding between modern humans and archaic forms of the genus Homo, and genome diversity in the great apes. 

The results match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai. They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times. And in a recent study of 1371 men from around the world, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost  indistinguishable  from that of Jews."                           

     Rabbi Chaim David Hochfeld (1829-1904) from Belaya Tzerkaw, Ukraine, Bessarabia, Russia, a J1-a real authentic Cohen of J-M267 Y haplotype, also commonly known as haplogroup J1  buried in Portland, Oregon.  He is an Ashkenazi Jew, having been living in Europe after 70 CE.  

Our Cohens carry the Y haplogroup of J1 for the most part.  I had a Muslim friend deeply into his Ydna and genetics as a whole who was J1c3d.  His mother may have been a Pashtun from Afghanistan, but his father was from Syria.  

             Chaim Weizmann and Emir Feisal at Paris Peace Conference, a Jew and an Arab.  Wouldn't it be amazing if they could have taken a DNA test and if they had the same Y haplogroup?  "Within the framework of the Paris Peace Conference, a political accord was signed on January 3, 1919, by Dr. Chaim Weizmann in the name of the Zionist Organization and by the Emir Feisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca."

                                                 

"Intrigued by the genetic similarities between the two populations, geneticist Professor Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men. Her team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel in the past few generations; most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer. The Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they clustered into just 3 of many groups known as haplogroups. Other short segments of DNA called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common ancestors within the past several thousand years. The study, reported here at a Human Origins and Disease conference, will appear in an upcoming issue of Human Genetics."  Her Researcher interests: Human molecular genetics. Gene therapy. Genetic control of SV40 viral assembly. Genetics of past populations.

Resource: 

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5460712---https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11573163/---https://www.science.org/news/2000/10/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry

https://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/mfadocuments/pages/the%20weizmann-feisal%20agreement%203-jan-1919.aspx#:~:text=03%20Jan%201919&text=Within%20the%20framework%20of%20the,of%20the%20Sherif%20of%20Mecca.    

https://library.louisville.edu/ekstrom/gov_intl/kurds

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1274378/

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-syria-ap-top-news-international-news-politics-ac3115b4eb564288a03a5b8be868d2e5

February 19, 2012

Who Truly Deserves a State? The Kurds or the Palestinians?

By Victor Sharpe  https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/02/who_truly_deserves_a_state_the_kurds_or_the_palestinians.html   Top Articles By American Thinker