Nadene Goldfoot
German-born Albert Einstein, Ashkenazi Isaac Mizrahi, Sephardi, family from Syria
Ashkenazi Jews are from the same group of Jews who are Sephardi or their subgroup, Mizrachim. They all came from the Jews held as slaves for 400 years in Egypt and had left with Moses in the Exodus 1:1-2:4 of the Torah. Our Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was born to Ashkenazi parents from Warsaw, Poland. Benjamin himself was born in Tel Aviv in 1949. Einstein was from Germany. I am Ashkenazi being my paternal grandfather and grandmother came from Lithuania and Poland. We have a German surname that had been Goldfus. My grandmother was so tiny, under 5 feet tall, and listed on the 1910 census as being dark complected. She had black hair and brown eyes, but when I knew her, her skin tone wasn't any different than mine. Her husband had brownish hair and possibly a red beard. He was 6 feet or more.
Abraham's family, who lived at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, had resettled in Canaan as they felt they had to leave Ur (today in Iraq), a city of idol worshipping and child sacrifice, and Abraham had had a revelation that there was only one real G-d and wanted his descendants to believe this as well. The environment of Ur was detrimental to their upbringing and belief system.
Abraham was our known ancient ancestor and his younger son Isaac and grandson, Jacob who are our ancestors are our Patriarchs Jacob had 12 sons and a daughter, Dinah. Those 12 sons had sons and daughters who became the family of 70 that went into Egypt seeking refuge from starvation and stayed. Son Joseph had already been taken to Egypt and awaited the surprise of meeting up with his estranged family. He was now a mighty man working right under the Pharoah. The family and their descendants became slaves and lived in Egypt for a total of 400 years.
It was Moses, from the tribe of Levi, who came back for them and led them out in the Exodus. The family and their friends had grown to be 600,000 who left with him. All 600,000 were with Moses as he received the 10 commandments, and so all people followed Moses in respect to these commandments and are later called "Jews."
Moses had written in the Torah that Abraham, who would have been Moses's 3rd great grandfather, was with the group called the Israelites who had settled in Ur where he was born. Jacob later was called Israel after wrestling with an angel and overcame him, thus was conferred upon him this more auspicious family name of Israel.
Jews were at odds with each other politically and over taxes and the south revolted from the north when King Solomon of Israel had died in 933 BCE (before the common era-also called BC-before Christ by some). The south broke off and called itself Judah, after one of the 12 sons who was ancestor of the tribe of Judah. Judah was Jacob's 4th son by Leah, his first wife. It was the largest of the 12 tribes. So we had two kingdoms then, the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. Judah chose for their first king, Rehoboam (933-917 BCE). Israel chose for their king, Jeroboam (933-912). Rehoboam was Solomon's son and successor, serving Judah. Sometimes Israel at this period is referred to as Samaria because the city of Samaria became the capital of of the kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem was still the capital of Judah as it had been in Israel.
The tribes of Ephraim, the leader, and Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Naphtali, Asher, Dan, and living in Transjordan's area were the tribes of Reuben, Gad and part of Manasseh who all remained in the kingdom of Israel. It was a wealthier kingdom. It had greater political importance. It lasted for 210 years and had 19 kings with 9 dynasties. It's very first king was King Saul in the 11th century BCE, son of Kish of the tribe of Benjamin. King David, the next king, was from the tribe of Judah.
The kingdom of Judah was the smaller of the two. It was made up of the tribes of Judah and most of Benjamin and had also absorbed the tribe of Simeon which was isolated in the extreme southern part of Eretz Israel. They had no normal access to the sea which was the trade route most took. It occupied no more than 1/3 of the area that Israel occupied. It was poor and unimportant to the world. For this reason it never was involved with international rivalries like Israel was. Life in Judah was more tranquil. Because Jerusalem and the Temple was in their kingdom, they preserved the Mosaic monotheism in a purer form. The monarchy went peacefully from father to son in this House of David, which started with King David (1010 -970 BCE). Judah had 20 kings with the last being Zedekiah in 597-586 BCE, all descendants of King David. The kingdom of Judah lasted from 933 to 586; 347 years. May I remind readers that the United States of America will only be 237 years old on July 4th, 2013.
By 40 BCE the Parthians captured Jerusalem. It fell to Herod in 37 BCE who ruled it as a Roman vassal until his death in 4 BCE. The Romans crucified Jesus in 29 CE and the Romans rule was unbearable for the Jews. The people revolted in 66 CE. They had 3 years of independence only to be retaken in 70 CE with the Romans burning Jerusalem down. Bar Kochba in 132 CE was the last to fight against the Roman power and lost.
Many Jews of course were killed in the struggle. Jews fled to all parts of the world Those that were familiar with the outside world in trading or having been slaves knew about Rome, so because there were already Jews from their families living there, they headed for Rome. From there they moved slowly into France, then Germany and finally, eastern Europe. These were to be called the "Ashkenazis" a term from the Hebrew language meaning "Germany." They must have lived in Germany for several generations before being forced to move out. Ashkenazi Jews speak Yiddish, a mixture of Hebrew and German and a little extra from lands they traveled through.
The Jews in the USA are mostly Ashkenazim though we do have Sephardim as well. They both came to America starting in the 1850's onto the 1920's by boat. Actually, there were Sephardim who came to America very early, just after 1620. The first synagogue in America was built by the Sephardim. They were the first to arrive. Germans came over and were more economically established. The poor eastern Europeans, my grandparents among them, were the last to arrive escaping pogroms and a very hard isolated life in the Pale of Settlement controlled by Russia.
The Jews who remained in the Middle East moved in the other direction and settled in Spain, Portugal and North Africa. They are the Sephardim, which is another Hebrew word meaning "Spain." They speak Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish, which show where they have lived. They had gone through the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, leaving their beloved Spain for Portugal, which turned against them as well in the fever of oppressing Jews. The name also refers to those Jews who were merchants in Holland and those that settled in Morocco, Italy, Palestine, Syria and Balkans and central areas of the Turkish empire, like Salonica and Constantinople.
A sub-group of the Sephardim are the Mizrachim, people who settled in North Africa and the Middle Eastern countries. It comes from the Hebrew word of Mitzrayim meaning "Eastern." and is also the word in Hebrew for Egypt. I taught English in the junior high in Safed (Tzfat) in the Galilee and one of the other English teachers was a very young lady from Egypt, a Mizrachi. She said that there weren't any Jews except a few old ones left in Egypt. This was in 1981.
55-60 % of the Jews in Israel are Mizrachim. There was a big discrepancy in the education between Ashkenazis and Sephardis in Israel. The Mizraichim -Sephardis were not given the opportunities that the Ashkenazis managed to get for their secular education, especially those Ashkenazi from France and Germany. the places of enlightenment. Mizrachim were 2nd class citizens or dhimmis in the Arab world. Life must have been hard there as well. Israel is a good place to make all equal. There, they are just Jewish. The army is another place that irons out any differences. Here, they are all getting the same education. Isaac Mizrachi, pictured above, is a Brooklyn-born Sephardi who is a famous American fashion designer. Brooklyn has been the bastion of Ashkenazis. His family was from Syria.
However, what's nice is that any Jew can walk into any synagogue service and it will be understood as all are schooled in Hebrew and the service will have some % of it in Hebrew, from all to a little. They follow the same format, as decided long ago.
The differences we have had between each other started in the 16th century CE. in the synagogue rite and tradition. The Sephardim went back to the time of Babylonian Jewry and Ashkenazim went back to Palestine after 132 CE when Eretz Yisrael was named Palestine or Palestaena by the Romans. Their differences also showed up in how they pronounced some Hebrew words, reflected by the language they had learned to speak as a 2nd language. During Passover the Sepharis allow rice to be eaten while Ashkenazis don't allow it during our 8 days. We maintain family traditions in this custom.
I was told a story by a fellow teacher in Safed in that if you go to a Sephardi's home for Shabbat, he will leave the wine bottle on the table, but if you go to an Ashkenazi's home for Shabbat, the wine bottle is taken away after the first glass. That's a little snippy, but Sepharis are known for their generosity. They are most gracious hosts. You see, I, as an Ashkenazi, received a better education this way by being with both groups of Jews.
The surprise is that an Ashkenazi group, the Hasidim, adopted the Sephardic ritual though not its pronunciation. In the world, Ashkenazis make up 4/5 of the Jewish population of 0.02% of world population except in Israel, which has 6 million Jews. There, the non-Ashkenazi communities are the majority. One of the strongest groups of Ashkenazi immigrant aids is ACI-Americans and Canadians in Israel. Perhaps we'll see more Jews move to Israel from these countries. I was one of them, but am now a Yored, a returnee, due to family circumstance.
What tickles me is that the Arab nations have had to deal with Jews who are made up of Mizrachis and Sephardis, Jews who know the ways of the Arabs in business and in politics as they lived among them are hep to dealing with Arabs. You can't pull any wool over their eyes, like you might with the American Ashkenazis. Jews in Arab lands were treated as 2nd class citizens and suffered through several pogroms, themselves. When it happened that Israel was pronounced a state among the world's nations on May 14, 1948, the Arab world fell apart! Jews had to move out, most going to Israel or face persecution. This is why Abbas can't face dealing with Netanyahu, who is a native Sabra. A Sabra is a person born and raised in Israel. The word refers to a cactus called the "prickly pear" which is native to Israel. The word refers metaphorically to both the person and the cactus of having a prickly exterior with a tender interior. An Israeli may come on strong, but has a heart of gold, thanks to our Torah teaching.
Today we see Ashkenazim and Sephardim marrying each other. Speaking for myself, those Sephardim and Mizrachim are beautiful people. Ofra Haza was a Yemenite, a beautiful woman. My Turkish Jewish relatives who married my Ashkenazi cousins are to die for, they are so good looking. Somehow my paternal Ashkenazi aunt was blessed with her black curly hair and dark brown eyes and milky white skin so that it's hard to tell her from any Sepharic Jewish lady. The Jewish Iranian doctor who married my Ashkenazi cousin looks like any other Ashkenazic Jew. It's too hard to tell us apart by looks.
DNA testing shows that there is a Cohen gene identified as J1 haplogroup in the Ydna found in testing men. It is presumed that it goes back to Aaron, who was the first Cohen of our religious rites in Judaism. Moses, his brother selected him for this responsibility. J, J2 and J1 rose up 10,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and includes Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Kurds. Most are from Iran and Iraq where it is thought to have originated and then carried by traders into Europe, central Asia, India and Pakistan. While the majority of J is not of Jewish people, the majority of Jewish men fall into J.
We have a family friend who knew he was Cohen and performed in the synagogue as a Cohen. This is a fact handed down from father to sons. He had his dna tested. Yes, he was a J1 or J-M267, a Cohen. His family surname was not Cohen. Surnames have had to be bought from the country one lived in. They finally demanded that we have surnames for tax and army purposes. A name with Gold in it was more expensive than some other names.
There are a few other haplogroups found in Jews. Not all of us were direct descendants of Jacob who came out of Egypt in the Exodus. We even have had a few converts along the way, such as Sammy Davis, the singer and dancer. We did have in about the 7th century CE the Khazarian Empire whose king or Kagan converted to Judaism. His royal house followed suit. The rest of his constituents were free to chose as they saw fit any religion they had a fancy to, such as Christianity or Islam.
We have Jews who test having E. This originated out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Groups in Africa and the Middle East have been found to have this one. Even some people near the Mediterranean, showing an ancient genetic influence from the Middle East to Europe have this. E3a is a common lineage among African Americans. E3b evolved in the Middle East before going into the Mediterranean and is found in Arab populations, east and north Africa, among Berbers and in SE Europe.
There are Jews with G, a haplogroup originating along the eastern edge of the Middle East or India or Pakistan 30,000 years ago. Moses only lived about 3,500 years ago, so this is going WAY back. The G2 branch with a P15 mutation is found in the Caucasus, Balkans, Italy and Middle East.
My own paternal family haplogroup is Q1b1a and Q's are found in northern and central Asian population s as well as in Native Americans., who also are tribal, by the way. It is thought to have originated in central Asia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago and migrated through northern Eurasia into the Americas. Native Americans are Q3's.
R,R1, R2 came from NW Asia between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago. R2 is found in India, Iran and central Asian population while R1 is very common in Europe. There is an R branch that is Jewish.
R1b are the common European which expanded throughout Europe after the last ice age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. It contains the Atlantic Modal Haplotype.
We have only 14 million Jews in the world of 7 billion people. We Jews all came from the same source unless we came through some conversion. Conversion was not common. It happened only occasionally as we did not proselytize. That's what makes us so interesting for population dna scientists to study. Our lives have been held in isolation by other countries. Their population did not allow marriage to Jews. We say that if the mother is Jewish, so is the child. In Italy we were kept in isolation, locked in at night in ghettos. In Russia we were kept in the Pale of Settlement, isolated from other people, living in Jewish shtetls. Some Jewish men in their trading travels did marry foreign women who would convert. Their children were Jewish.
Update 11/13/14 Here is the history of my Goldfoot family, which had been Goldfus coming from Germany originally. Having had information now from familyfinder on Family Tree DNA in Houston, Texas, and connecting to 2 great researchers of segments of chromosomes, I find that the Jonah (Iones) Goldfus I found in Telsiai, Lithuania born in 1730 there came from Jews in Germany. Goldfus (anglicized to Goldfoot in England) came from a branch of Wertheimers around Worms, Germany (Rhineland) from Rabbi Samson or his brother, Moses Wertheimer born 1658-1724. From him I share chromosome segments from Rabbi Solomon Yitzhake, known famously as RASHI, and from him is the oral history of being descended from King David of Jerusalem. 1010 BCE to 970 BCE. At the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, my line shows segments from the Kalonymos family which is very well known originally from Lucca, Italy who also had family members in Mainz and Speyer, Germany. Kalonymos-a Greek name from the Hebrew "Good name", a translation of Shem Tov, showing that Jews were taken to Rome first, staying as slaves in that part of the world, then moving on to Germany. This is the usual trail taken by Jews later called Ashkenazi Jews. RASHI was born in 1040 and died in 1105 in Troyes, France, but had studied in Worms, Germany which was a big important center for Jewish studies. So the history was that at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, we went to Rome, then later on to France and Worms, Germany. Later, my Goldfus line migrated up to Lithuania and finally in around 1880-1890 was able to go to England, then Ireland and finally the USA.
When a Jew converts we say that his soul must have stood with us at Mt Sinai when we received the Torah in the first form as the 10 Commandments from Moses. There is to be no distinction between him and the other Jews. He is a member of Israel.
Roman Empire 117 CE
Update 2/25/16 The Romans and their army went into SW Germany in 15 BCE and occupied it. Probably Jews from Judah had been there either in trading or taken by the Roman soldiers to do manual labor for them in Germany. They knew the route and when the Temple in Jerusalem was burned down and Jerusalem as well, people fled and were not allowed to return. Those that took the route to Germany were a little later called Ashkenazim. Those that fled to Spain were the Sephardim.
Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Abraham's Children; race, identity, and the DNA of the chosen people by Jon Entine
added 10/16/13 http://www.youtube.com/
The Jews of Khazaria 2nd edition by Kevin Alan Brook
Reference: http://www.jewfaq.org/ashkseph.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzion_Netanyahu
Finding Our Fathers: A guidebook to Jewish Genealogy by Dan Rottenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Mizrahi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
http://www.villa-rustica.de/intro/index02e.html updated 2/25/16
German-born Albert Einstein, Ashkenazi Isaac Mizrahi, Sephardi, family from Syria
Ashkenazi Jews are from the same group of Jews who are Sephardi or their subgroup, Mizrachim. They all came from the Jews held as slaves for 400 years in Egypt and had left with Moses in the Exodus 1:1-2:4 of the Torah. Our Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was born to Ashkenazi parents from Warsaw, Poland. Benjamin himself was born in Tel Aviv in 1949. Einstein was from Germany. I am Ashkenazi being my paternal grandfather and grandmother came from Lithuania and Poland. We have a German surname that had been Goldfus. My grandmother was so tiny, under 5 feet tall, and listed on the 1910 census as being dark complected. She had black hair and brown eyes, but when I knew her, her skin tone wasn't any different than mine. Her husband had brownish hair and possibly a red beard. He was 6 feet or more.
Abraham's family, who lived at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, had resettled in Canaan as they felt they had to leave Ur (today in Iraq), a city of idol worshipping and child sacrifice, and Abraham had had a revelation that there was only one real G-d and wanted his descendants to believe this as well. The environment of Ur was detrimental to their upbringing and belief system.
Abraham was our known ancient ancestor and his younger son Isaac and grandson, Jacob who are our ancestors are our Patriarchs Jacob had 12 sons and a daughter, Dinah. Those 12 sons had sons and daughters who became the family of 70 that went into Egypt seeking refuge from starvation and stayed. Son Joseph had already been taken to Egypt and awaited the surprise of meeting up with his estranged family. He was now a mighty man working right under the Pharoah. The family and their descendants became slaves and lived in Egypt for a total of 400 years.
It was Moses, from the tribe of Levi, who came back for them and led them out in the Exodus. The family and their friends had grown to be 600,000 who left with him. All 600,000 were with Moses as he received the 10 commandments, and so all people followed Moses in respect to these commandments and are later called "Jews."
Moses had written in the Torah that Abraham, who would have been Moses's 3rd great grandfather, was with the group called the Israelites who had settled in Ur where he was born. Jacob later was called Israel after wrestling with an angel and overcame him, thus was conferred upon him this more auspicious family name of Israel.
Jews were at odds with each other politically and over taxes and the south revolted from the north when King Solomon of Israel had died in 933 BCE (before the common era-also called BC-before Christ by some). The south broke off and called itself Judah, after one of the 12 sons who was ancestor of the tribe of Judah. Judah was Jacob's 4th son by Leah, his first wife. It was the largest of the 12 tribes. So we had two kingdoms then, the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. Judah chose for their first king, Rehoboam (933-917 BCE). Israel chose for their king, Jeroboam (933-912). Rehoboam was Solomon's son and successor, serving Judah. Sometimes Israel at this period is referred to as Samaria because the city of Samaria became the capital of of the kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem was still the capital of Judah as it had been in Israel.
The tribes of Ephraim, the leader, and Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Naphtali, Asher, Dan, and living in Transjordan's area were the tribes of Reuben, Gad and part of Manasseh who all remained in the kingdom of Israel. It was a wealthier kingdom. It had greater political importance. It lasted for 210 years and had 19 kings with 9 dynasties. It's very first king was King Saul in the 11th century BCE, son of Kish of the tribe of Benjamin. King David, the next king, was from the tribe of Judah.
The kingdom of Judah was the smaller of the two. It was made up of the tribes of Judah and most of Benjamin and had also absorbed the tribe of Simeon which was isolated in the extreme southern part of Eretz Israel. They had no normal access to the sea which was the trade route most took. It occupied no more than 1/3 of the area that Israel occupied. It was poor and unimportant to the world. For this reason it never was involved with international rivalries like Israel was. Life in Judah was more tranquil. Because Jerusalem and the Temple was in their kingdom, they preserved the Mosaic monotheism in a purer form. The monarchy went peacefully from father to son in this House of David, which started with King David (1010 -970 BCE). Judah had 20 kings with the last being Zedekiah in 597-586 BCE, all descendants of King David. The kingdom of Judah lasted from 933 to 586; 347 years. May I remind readers that the United States of America will only be 237 years old on July 4th, 2013.
By 40 BCE the Parthians captured Jerusalem. It fell to Herod in 37 BCE who ruled it as a Roman vassal until his death in 4 BCE. The Romans crucified Jesus in 29 CE and the Romans rule was unbearable for the Jews. The people revolted in 66 CE. They had 3 years of independence only to be retaken in 70 CE with the Romans burning Jerusalem down. Bar Kochba in 132 CE was the last to fight against the Roman power and lost.
Many Jews of course were killed in the struggle. Jews fled to all parts of the world Those that were familiar with the outside world in trading or having been slaves knew about Rome, so because there were already Jews from their families living there, they headed for Rome. From there they moved slowly into France, then Germany and finally, eastern Europe. These were to be called the "Ashkenazis" a term from the Hebrew language meaning "Germany." They must have lived in Germany for several generations before being forced to move out. Ashkenazi Jews speak Yiddish, a mixture of Hebrew and German and a little extra from lands they traveled through.
The Jews in the USA are mostly Ashkenazim though we do have Sephardim as well. They both came to America starting in the 1850's onto the 1920's by boat. Actually, there were Sephardim who came to America very early, just after 1620. The first synagogue in America was built by the Sephardim. They were the first to arrive. Germans came over and were more economically established. The poor eastern Europeans, my grandparents among them, were the last to arrive escaping pogroms and a very hard isolated life in the Pale of Settlement controlled by Russia.
The Jews who remained in the Middle East moved in the other direction and settled in Spain, Portugal and North Africa. They are the Sephardim, which is another Hebrew word meaning "Spain." They speak Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish, which show where they have lived. They had gone through the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, leaving their beloved Spain for Portugal, which turned against them as well in the fever of oppressing Jews. The name also refers to those Jews who were merchants in Holland and those that settled in Morocco, Italy, Palestine, Syria and Balkans and central areas of the Turkish empire, like Salonica and Constantinople.
A sub-group of the Sephardim are the Mizrachim, people who settled in North Africa and the Middle Eastern countries. It comes from the Hebrew word of Mitzrayim meaning "Eastern." and is also the word in Hebrew for Egypt. I taught English in the junior high in Safed (Tzfat) in the Galilee and one of the other English teachers was a very young lady from Egypt, a Mizrachi. She said that there weren't any Jews except a few old ones left in Egypt. This was in 1981.
55-60 % of the Jews in Israel are Mizrachim. There was a big discrepancy in the education between Ashkenazis and Sephardis in Israel. The Mizraichim -Sephardis were not given the opportunities that the Ashkenazis managed to get for their secular education, especially those Ashkenazi from France and Germany. the places of enlightenment. Mizrachim were 2nd class citizens or dhimmis in the Arab world. Life must have been hard there as well. Israel is a good place to make all equal. There, they are just Jewish. The army is another place that irons out any differences. Here, they are all getting the same education. Isaac Mizrachi, pictured above, is a Brooklyn-born Sephardi who is a famous American fashion designer. Brooklyn has been the bastion of Ashkenazis. His family was from Syria.
However, what's nice is that any Jew can walk into any synagogue service and it will be understood as all are schooled in Hebrew and the service will have some % of it in Hebrew, from all to a little. They follow the same format, as decided long ago.
The differences we have had between each other started in the 16th century CE. in the synagogue rite and tradition. The Sephardim went back to the time of Babylonian Jewry and Ashkenazim went back to Palestine after 132 CE when Eretz Yisrael was named Palestine or Palestaena by the Romans. Their differences also showed up in how they pronounced some Hebrew words, reflected by the language they had learned to speak as a 2nd language. During Passover the Sepharis allow rice to be eaten while Ashkenazis don't allow it during our 8 days. We maintain family traditions in this custom.
I was told a story by a fellow teacher in Safed in that if you go to a Sephardi's home for Shabbat, he will leave the wine bottle on the table, but if you go to an Ashkenazi's home for Shabbat, the wine bottle is taken away after the first glass. That's a little snippy, but Sepharis are known for their generosity. They are most gracious hosts. You see, I, as an Ashkenazi, received a better education this way by being with both groups of Jews.
The surprise is that an Ashkenazi group, the Hasidim, adopted the Sephardic ritual though not its pronunciation. In the world, Ashkenazis make up 4/5 of the Jewish population of 0.02% of world population except in Israel, which has 6 million Jews. There, the non-Ashkenazi communities are the majority. One of the strongest groups of Ashkenazi immigrant aids is ACI-Americans and Canadians in Israel. Perhaps we'll see more Jews move to Israel from these countries. I was one of them, but am now a Yored, a returnee, due to family circumstance.
What tickles me is that the Arab nations have had to deal with Jews who are made up of Mizrachis and Sephardis, Jews who know the ways of the Arabs in business and in politics as they lived among them are hep to dealing with Arabs. You can't pull any wool over their eyes, like you might with the American Ashkenazis. Jews in Arab lands were treated as 2nd class citizens and suffered through several pogroms, themselves. When it happened that Israel was pronounced a state among the world's nations on May 14, 1948, the Arab world fell apart! Jews had to move out, most going to Israel or face persecution. This is why Abbas can't face dealing with Netanyahu, who is a native Sabra. A Sabra is a person born and raised in Israel. The word refers to a cactus called the "prickly pear" which is native to Israel. The word refers metaphorically to both the person and the cactus of having a prickly exterior with a tender interior. An Israeli may come on strong, but has a heart of gold, thanks to our Torah teaching.
Today we see Ashkenazim and Sephardim marrying each other. Speaking for myself, those Sephardim and Mizrachim are beautiful people. Ofra Haza was a Yemenite, a beautiful woman. My Turkish Jewish relatives who married my Ashkenazi cousins are to die for, they are so good looking. Somehow my paternal Ashkenazi aunt was blessed with her black curly hair and dark brown eyes and milky white skin so that it's hard to tell her from any Sepharic Jewish lady. The Jewish Iranian doctor who married my Ashkenazi cousin looks like any other Ashkenazic Jew. It's too hard to tell us apart by looks.
DNA testing shows that there is a Cohen gene identified as J1 haplogroup in the Ydna found in testing men. It is presumed that it goes back to Aaron, who was the first Cohen of our religious rites in Judaism. Moses, his brother selected him for this responsibility. J, J2 and J1 rose up 10,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and includes Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Kurds. Most are from Iran and Iraq where it is thought to have originated and then carried by traders into Europe, central Asia, India and Pakistan. While the majority of J is not of Jewish people, the majority of Jewish men fall into J.
We have a family friend who knew he was Cohen and performed in the synagogue as a Cohen. This is a fact handed down from father to sons. He had his dna tested. Yes, he was a J1 or J-M267, a Cohen. His family surname was not Cohen. Surnames have had to be bought from the country one lived in. They finally demanded that we have surnames for tax and army purposes. A name with Gold in it was more expensive than some other names.
There are a few other haplogroups found in Jews. Not all of us were direct descendants of Jacob who came out of Egypt in the Exodus. We even have had a few converts along the way, such as Sammy Davis, the singer and dancer. We did have in about the 7th century CE the Khazarian Empire whose king or Kagan converted to Judaism. His royal house followed suit. The rest of his constituents were free to chose as they saw fit any religion they had a fancy to, such as Christianity or Islam.
We have Jews who test having E. This originated out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Groups in Africa and the Middle East have been found to have this one. Even some people near the Mediterranean, showing an ancient genetic influence from the Middle East to Europe have this. E3a is a common lineage among African Americans. E3b evolved in the Middle East before going into the Mediterranean and is found in Arab populations, east and north Africa, among Berbers and in SE Europe.
There are Jews with G, a haplogroup originating along the eastern edge of the Middle East or India or Pakistan 30,000 years ago. Moses only lived about 3,500 years ago, so this is going WAY back. The G2 branch with a P15 mutation is found in the Caucasus, Balkans, Italy and Middle East.
My own paternal family haplogroup is Q1b1a and Q's are found in northern and central Asian population s as well as in Native Americans., who also are tribal, by the way. It is thought to have originated in central Asia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago and migrated through northern Eurasia into the Americas. Native Americans are Q3's.
R,R1, R2 came from NW Asia between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago. R2 is found in India, Iran and central Asian population while R1 is very common in Europe. There is an R branch that is Jewish.
R1b are the common European which expanded throughout Europe after the last ice age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. It contains the Atlantic Modal Haplotype.
We have only 14 million Jews in the world of 7 billion people. We Jews all came from the same source unless we came through some conversion. Conversion was not common. It happened only occasionally as we did not proselytize. That's what makes us so interesting for population dna scientists to study. Our lives have been held in isolation by other countries. Their population did not allow marriage to Jews. We say that if the mother is Jewish, so is the child. In Italy we were kept in isolation, locked in at night in ghettos. In Russia we were kept in the Pale of Settlement, isolated from other people, living in Jewish shtetls. Some Jewish men in their trading travels did marry foreign women who would convert. Their children were Jewish.
Update 11/13/14 Here is the history of my Goldfoot family, which had been Goldfus coming from Germany originally. Having had information now from familyfinder on Family Tree DNA in Houston, Texas, and connecting to 2 great researchers of segments of chromosomes, I find that the Jonah (Iones) Goldfus I found in Telsiai, Lithuania born in 1730 there came from Jews in Germany. Goldfus (anglicized to Goldfoot in England) came from a branch of Wertheimers around Worms, Germany (Rhineland) from Rabbi Samson or his brother, Moses Wertheimer born 1658-1724. From him I share chromosome segments from Rabbi Solomon Yitzhake, known famously as RASHI, and from him is the oral history of being descended from King David of Jerusalem. 1010 BCE to 970 BCE. At the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, my line shows segments from the Kalonymos family which is very well known originally from Lucca, Italy who also had family members in Mainz and Speyer, Germany. Kalonymos-a Greek name from the Hebrew "Good name", a translation of Shem Tov, showing that Jews were taken to Rome first, staying as slaves in that part of the world, then moving on to Germany. This is the usual trail taken by Jews later called Ashkenazi Jews. RASHI was born in 1040 and died in 1105 in Troyes, France, but had studied in Worms, Germany which was a big important center for Jewish studies. So the history was that at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, we went to Rome, then later on to France and Worms, Germany. Later, my Goldfus line migrated up to Lithuania and finally in around 1880-1890 was able to go to England, then Ireland and finally the USA.
When a Jew converts we say that his soul must have stood with us at Mt Sinai when we received the Torah in the first form as the 10 Commandments from Moses. There is to be no distinction between him and the other Jews. He is a member of Israel.
Roman Empire 117 CE
Update 2/25/16 The Romans and their army went into SW Germany in 15 BCE and occupied it. Probably Jews from Judah had been there either in trading or taken by the Roman soldiers to do manual labor for them in Germany. They knew the route and when the Temple in Jerusalem was burned down and Jerusalem as well, people fled and were not allowed to return. Those that took the route to Germany were a little later called Ashkenazim. Those that fled to Spain were the Sephardim.
Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Abraham's Children; race, identity, and the DNA of the chosen people by Jon Entine
added 10/16/13 http://www.youtube.com/
The Jews of Khazaria 2nd edition by Kevin Alan Brook
Reference: http://www.jewfaq.org/ashkseph.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzion_Netanyahu
Finding Our Fathers: A guidebook to Jewish Genealogy by Dan Rottenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Mizrahi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
http://www.villa-rustica.de/intro/index02e.html updated 2/25/16
