DNA and Haplogroup of Jewish People

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

The best thing I've done is take DNA testing seriously and get into my DNA and my haplogroup.  To understand oneself is to know who your parents are and all their ancestors, do a family tree, and then take some DNA tests.  So much of where our talents lie are inherited talents. With Jewish people, our history is found in the Bible/or Tanakh, as we call it in Hebrew.  The more you learn, the more you want to go deeper.  

Updated:Through testing, you'll find a lot of 4th and 5th cousins.  With 4th cousins, that's going back to your 64 4th great grandparents.  Going back to 5th cousins means going back to your 128 5th great grandparents.  The next level of 6th means that you have 256 ggrandparents and so on.  The pot our genes comes out of holds a lot of ancestors.  Luckily, our skills that we inherit usually come from our nearby ones, although there could be exceptions.  

We do have 99% of our DNA in common with all other homo sapiens.  It's that 1% that's exclusively ours that we can match with other people who share our ancestors.  That's the exciting part that turns us into detectives in finding these people.  

                                              

  I discovered through 23 & Me that my DNA contains 2% Neandertal.  I've read every one of Jean M. Auel's novels like the Clan of the Cave Bear, who include Neandertals in her stories of early Cave Man.                                        

A haplogroup is the branch on the tree of early human migrations and genetic evolution.  Haplogroups are defined by genetic mutations or "markers" found in Y chromosomes (the male line) and mtDNA testing (the female line).  These markers link the members of a haplgroup back to the markers first appearance in the group's most recent common ancestor.  Haplogroups of have a geographic relation. 

                                                

According to our story, Jacob's family tree went back into the beginnings of the bible.  He's the father of 12 sons who became the 12 tribes of Israel.  According to my research, he was the son of Isaac and grandson of Abram/Abraham.  His haplogroup should be the same as his sons, and this should go on to be the same on down the generations.  I find that it should have been called what the scientists of today have called "THE COHEN GENE OF J1.  Since Jacob was a J1 or should have been, all 12 sons should have been the carrier of this as well, so that's how it works.  it only changes a little through a mutation and that takes a long time to happen.  So why aren't all Jewish men carrying J1?  What happened?              

What happens if a man does not produce sons to carry this on?  It stops.  Evidently this happened.  Jacob had 12 sons by 4 wives.  He also had a daughter.  Leah, his first wife, had 6 sons and the daughter.  Rachel had 2, Leahs handmaiden had 2, and Rachel's handmaiden had 2.                 

 At one point, a son did not produce a son, and only produced daughters.  Their husband would have taken over responsibilities including their male line, whatever it was.  People in those days were tribal.  They had gone from family groups to tribes, and then clans where they took in other tribal populations, though Jewish ones.  This is how a few other haplogroups developed amongst the 12 tribes and the Jewish people.                

The priests in the Temple were charged to be from the direct line of Aaron, older brother of Moses who was from the tribe of Levi.  Moses was born in 1391 BCE and died in 1271 BCE.  His male descendants told their sons orally that they were to carry on this position.  Today, the Cohens are the first to read from the Torah on a Shabbat (Saturday) morning in the synagogue.  My 5th cousin, Herb Hochfeld,  knew he was a Cohen and did this.  He DNA tested and this was verified.  He was a J1 or J-M267.  So it's not just all men with the surname of Cohen.  Others have picked up other surnames for different reasons.  But Herb's male line hadn't lost who they were and what was expected of them for these past 3,417 years.  I think that's pretty amazing!

This fact certainly could have been lost in Europe, though, with the 2nd World War interfering with our lives.  Men could be Cohens and not know it unless they have been DNA tested. 

We still find certain haplogroups are more common.  The J1 seems to have a big population.  Another very common one is E-L117.  My father's line is Q, and after testing 111 alleles, is now called QBZ67. There is a branch starting with G, and I, and R.  

Tree of life with branches of haplogroups

Women's haplogroup have different letters of the alphabet.  My paternal grandmother is a W. W (Wilma) is a small group that appears in the western Ural Mountains, the natural border between Europe and Asia and the eastern Baltic area, and is also found in India. This is what my Polish/Lithuania grandmother turned out to be. Not all W’s are Jewish, of course. It occurred first about 20,000-25,000 years ago in NE Europe or NW Asia. Her branch was one of the last discovered of any female haplogroup since Bryan Sykes wrote THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE and discovered the 7 major lines of females. W is like the 8th discovered and didn't make it into his book.   K is the most common Jewish female haplogroup that I've noticed.  He called K women, Katrine.  W has been called Wilma.  

Ashkenazi Jewish women were down to 4 basic women to carry the future population, the scientists tell us.  Evidently when they were found there were only 4 different haplogroups of these Jewish women who wound up in Germany after being taken to Rome after 70 CE.  I bet one was K.                                                           Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Golda                                               Meir         

Hedy Lamarr Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.     

Gal Gadot of Israel playing Wonderwoman.  Gal Gadot-Varsano is an Israeli actress and model. At age 18, she was crowned Miss Israel 2004. She then served two years in the Israel Defense Forces as a soldier, whereafter she began studying at the IDC Herzliya college, while building her modeling and acting careers.      

One of our IDF female soldiers of Israel.  

                   

  J is also used for women, which is confusing. J:  7% of Jewish women are found to be J1, (Jasmine) which originated about 40,000-45,000 years ago in Near East or Caucasus/ central Asia and is associated with the spread of farming and herding in Europe during the Neolithic Period beginning 10,000 years ago. It’s common in the Middle East and among Jews. J2 is localized in the Mediterranean. J is 17% European originating in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago and is the 2nd largest haplogroup for women. Another J listed is 5% European originating in N. Spain about 17,000 years ago.  Bryan Syke's  book goes into where they first originated and gives us great detail about it.  

                               

Paul Newman's father was Jewish, mother wasn't but he saw himself as a Jew. His father was the son of Simon Newman and Hannah Cohn, Hungarian Jewish and Polish Jewish emigrants from Hungary and Vistula Land. Paul's mother was a practitioner of Christian Science. She was born to a Slovak Catholic family in Peticse (near Homonna) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

    That is the interesting part of knowing the haplogroup.  Scientists have found the place of origin for each branch.  For instance, our Q line was first discovered in Siberia, Mongolia and parts of Turkey.  Our branch somehow became a Jewish line, while others became the native Americans of North and South America. 

Jeff Goldblum found out about his roots with Henry Louis Gates. 

TV programs about genealogy and DNA are popular.  Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a documentary television series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that premiered on March 25, 2012 on PBS. In each episode, celebrities are presented with a "book of life" that is compiled with information researched by professional genealogists that allows them to view their ancestral histories, learn about familial connections and discover secrets about their lineage.

Season Six was shown from October 2019 to October 2020 with two new episodes airing weekly in October 2019, eight episodes airing weekly in January and February 2020 and six episodes airing weekly in October and November 2020. All episodes air on Tuesdays.  There are many other interesting programs about finding one's ancestors.  

Be a detective and so some research about you and your family.  You will have a far better understanding and patience with yourself if you do, and you'll appreciate how you got here in the first place.  DNA is so fantastic as to how it all works.  It's one of those important wonders of the world.  

update: 12/17 21:  I just ran across this info and thought I'd share it as we Jews are an endogamous people.

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within the same ethnic, cultural, social, religious or tribal group. In endogamous populations everyone will descend from the same small gene pool. People will be related to each other in a recent genealogical timeframe on multiple ancestral pathways and the same ancestors will, therefore, appear in many different places on their pedigree chart. Endogamy can be the result of a conscious decision or cultural pressure to marry within the selected group but also occurs as a result of geographical isolation (for example, in island communities).

Examples of endogamous groups include Jews, Polynesians, Low German Mennonites, the Amish, Acadians or Cajuns (French settlers in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada), French Canadians, people from many Arab countries, people from Newfoundland and people from many islands. Endogamy is also a problem in early Colonial American populations.

The interpretation of DNA results from endogamous populations can be particularly challenging because such people will typically have large numbers of matches in the DNA databases.

The interpretation of autosomal DNA matches can be particularly difficult, especially in the case of endogamous populations where the pedigrees cannot be traced back beyond the 1800s. The relationships will often be more distant than predicted.

The Family Tree DNA Family Finder matching algorithms were modified with effect from 21st April 2011 to downweight matches between Jews in order to provide more accurate relationship predictions.[1] 23andMe make similar adjustments for customers with Ashkenazi ancestry.[2]

For people with Jewish ancestry it has been suggested that you need to have at least one long half-identical region of 23 cMs or more to have some hope of finding the relationship in genealogical time.[3]  (https://isogg.org/wiki/Endogamy)   Are they talking about a segment of 23cMs?  

Resource:

https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-haplogroup-we-be.html

Deep Ancestry Genographic Project by Spencer Wells

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE, by Bryan Sykes

DNA & Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick & Andrew Yeiser

Jacob's legacy, A Genetic View of Jewish History by David B. Goldstein 

DNA TRADITION; The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews, by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Your_Roots