Nadene Goldfoot
The Jewish people and the Arab Muslims both came from Abram, son of Terah who lived in Ur of the Chaldees which was a city at the mouth of the Euphrates River that emptied into the Persian Gulf. Geneticists have found that we even share a little DNA with the Arabs. "Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool." All Jewish groups were found to be genetically closer to each other than to Palestinians and Muslim Kurds. Abram was married to Sarai, and after arriving in Canaan, they used the names of Abraham and Sarah.
Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, with followers worshipping several main gods and thousands of minor gods. The three main gods were Ea (Sumerian: Enki), the god of wisdom and magic, Anu (Sumerian: An), the sky god, and Enlil (Ellil), the god of earth, storms and agriculture and the controller of fates.
Where did Abram's father, Terah, come from? His line went back like this: Nahor I, to Serug of the Chaldees (Kasite) Sumeria, Mesopotamia, to Reu, to Peleg, to Eber, to Shelah, to Arpachshad, to Shem, to Noah who saved his family and a pair of all the animals on the ark to Lamech, to Methuselah, to Enoch who supposedly had a 365 year lifespan. The Babylonian calendar of the period also had 365 days of a year. Some think the story of Enoch was a Babylonian sun-myth, but it may show that our line was originally from Babylonia, and Babylon today sits in Iraq. Howdy, Iraqis, we may be cousins!
Ur of the Chaldees was possibly Ur of the Cassites. The Kassites (/ˈkæsaɪts/) were people of the ancient Near East, who controlled Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire c. 1531 BC and until c. 1155 BC (short chronology).
It was an ancient Babylonian city. Abraham's family lived there before they left for another city, Haran. Sir Leonard Wooley has done excavations in Ur (I have his book) and revealed that Ur had a highly civilized nature. He also found evidence of an extensive flood at an earlier date.
Abraham had a brother, Haran who was the father of Lot. Haran had died in Ur. (Gen.11:26-31). It was a trading town of NW Mesopotamia AND a center for the moon cult. Assyrian inscriptions from this period mention a Habiru (Hebrew) settlement. By the 12th century, there still was a small Jewish community living there.
In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern. For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the Rhine Valley.
When the Arabs conquered Iraq in 637, the Jews helped them., because their Sassanid government persecuted Jews. Then Jews were expelled from Arabia so came and settled in Kufa. Iraq Jews were the center of the world's Jewish life. The Turkish conquest in 1534 made life a little better. By 1917, the British took over Iraq's Jews who lived mainly in Bagdad. Iraqis got their independence in 1932 and celebrated by persecuting the Jews. Then later they killed hundreds of the Jews in a pogrom during the revolt of Rashid Ali in 1941. In 1948, Iraqi troops attacked Israel along with other countries. They've never signed an armistice agreement with Israel. Israel's Operation Ezra and Nehemiah air lifted Iraqi Jews to Israel. From 1951 to 1952, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted between 120,000 and 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel via Iran and Cyprus. The massive emigration of Iraqi Jews was among the most climactic events of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim World. These Jews lost all their property by leaving as it was all confiscated. 123,500 more Iraqi Jews left for Israel since that first exit in 1948. .
Genetic studies on Jews are part of the population genetics discipline and are used to analyze the chronology of Jewish migration accompanied by research in other fields, such as history, linguistics, archaeology, and paleontology.
According to geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Jewish groups also show genetic proximity to Lebanese, Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze in addition to Southern European populations, including Cypriots and Italians.
As far as Jewish men have been tested, we find that approximately 35% to 43% of Jewish men are in the paternal line known as haplogroup J1 (Cohen gene) and its sub-haplogroups. This haplogroup is particularly present in the Middle East and Southern Europe. 15% to 30% are in haplogroup E1b1b, (or E-M35) and its sub-haplogroups which is common in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe. My father was a Q, a smaller group.
In 1992 G. Lucotte and F. David were the first genetic researchers to have documented a common paternal genetic heritage between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. Another study published just a year later suggested the Middle Eastern origin of Jewish paternal lineages.
In 2000, M. Hammer, et al. conducted a study on 1,371 men and definitively established that part of the paternal gene pool of Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa and Middle East came from a common Middle East ancestral population. They suggested that most Jewish communities in the Diaspora remained relatively isolated and endogamous compared to non-Jewish neighbor populations.
Because of Iraq being an enemy of the state of Israel, I doubt if we've had had a chance to study the DNA of Iraqis compared to Jews yet. There is on Family Tree DNA the Iraqi Sada Project group for Iraqis that have had theirDNA test through FTDNA. However, many do reside in Israel.
But, studying Iraqi Jewish women in Israel doing the mt haplogroup testing, they found that according to the 2008 study by Behar, 43% of Iraqi Jews are descended from five women. Genetic studies show that Persian and Bukharan Jews descend from a small number of female ancestors.
In (Genesis 17:5) G-d changed Abram's name to Abraham, a contraction representing his new status as av Hamon--father of a multitude---whereas the name Avram represented his former status as only av Aram---father of Aram, his native country. Aram was used in the Torah for Syria's name. Iraq's state was simply referred to as Mesopotamia, the country in SW Asia. Babylonia was top gun then.
In (Genesis 18:1-8) G-d visited Abram to show him honor for having carried out the commandment and to acknowledge that he had thereby elevated himself to a new spiritual plateau. As if to show what it was about, the name of Abraham made him so uniquely worthy to be the spiritual father of all mankind, the Torah related what he did on the 3rd day after his circumcision, when the wound is most painful and the patient most weakened.
The genetic profile of Palestinians has, for the first time, been studied by using human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variability and haplotypes. The comparison with other Mediterranean populations by using neighbor-joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses reveal that Palestinians are genetically very close to Jews and other Middle East populations, including Turks (Anatolians), Lebanese, Egyptians, Armenians, and Iranians. Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences. The relatively close relatedness of both Jews and Palestinians to western Mediterranean populations reflects the continuous circum-Mediterranean cultural and gene flow that have occurred in prehistoric and historic times. This flow overtly contradicts the demic diffusion model of western Mediterranean populations substitution by agriculturalists coming from the Middle East in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition.
Resource;
Torah
Tanakh-Stone Edition of ArtScroll Series
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopediahttps://reference.jrank.org/biography-2/Woolley_Leonard.html
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/mesopotamia#:~:text=Mesopotamian%20religion%20was%20polytheistic%2C%20with,and%20the%20controller%20of%20fates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#:~:text=%22Our%20recent%20study%20of%20high,to%20Palestinians%20and%20Muslim%20Kurds.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
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