Part V on Hittite Origins in Possible DNA Follow-Up with Anatolia, Turkey

 Nadene Goldfoot                                    

               Hittites probably looked like Turks, as shown above.  

Evidence tells me that I was wrong.  My father's haplogroup of QBZ67 should not be from the Hittites.  

We know that Hittites came from Anatolia.  Since identifiable bones of ancient Hittites have not been found or used as yet, we are not sure of what their DNA would be for the mt or Y haplogroups, but we can make educated guesses.  The haplogroup Q is said to have come from Siberia, Mongolia and parts of Turkey.  Could that have been from Anatolia?  This occurred 24,500 years ago.  

 Haplogroup Q-M242 is one of the two branches of P1-M45 also known as K2b2a (The other is R-M207).  My theory was that Q found in Jewish populations might be from Hittites who originated in Anatolia.  My father's haplogroup is QBZ67 (big Y test).  It might be more logical that the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, born in Mongolia,  is the ancestor of our haplogroup.                     

Q-M242 is believed to have arisen around the Altai Mountains area (or South Central Siberia), approximately 17,000 to 31,700 years ago. Being the origin was that long ago, a branch  would have had time to migrate to the Mediterranean's land of Israel. The Altai Mountains, also spelled Altay Mountains, are a mountain range in Central and East Asia, where Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan converge, and where the rivers Irtysh and Ob have their headwaters. 

However, the matter remains unclear due to limited sample sizes and changing definitions of Haplogroup Q: early definitions used a combination of the SNPs M242, P36.2, and MEH2 as defining mutations.

Suzanne Marie Redalia Sullivan has a 

·BS in anthropology from UCLA 1976Upvoted by 

Rob Jacobson

, Dabbling in DNA analysis and Genealogy.  She writes that The mtDNA haplotype T2b has been determined to originate in northeast Anatolia. In ancient times this area was occupied by Hittites and Luwians. This particular haplotype is connected with royal houses of Denmark and Russia, but is found throughout Europe. I’m sorry to provide such a tenuous connection, but I don’t have any data about DNA testing of Hittite remains.                 

Hittites likely carried Haplogroup J2 as their main Haplogroup. Haplogroup J2 is the main Haplogroup of the Levant and Turkey and originated there:

The most common haplogroup in Turkey is J2 (24%), which is widespread among Mediterranean, Caucasian, and West Asian populations. Haplogroups that are common in Europe (R1b and I; 20%), South Asia (L, R2, H; 5.7%), and Africa (A, E3*, E3a; 1%) are also present.    By contrast, Central Asian haplogroups (C, Q, and O) are rarer.  There goes my theory.  Q-M242 is the predominant Y-DNA haplogroup among Native Americans and several peoples of Central Asia and Northern Siberia.

 The culture of the Anatolian Turks in Asia Minor underlies the Turkish nationalist ideology.  During the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks, who were influenced by Persian civilization in many ways, grew in strength and succeeded in taking the eastern province of the Abbasid Empire. 

By 1055, the Seljuks captured Baghdad and began to make their first incursions into Anatolia.  Of course, our Jewish history shows that Jews were in Baghdad even before this late date with Abraham who was from Ur of the Chaldees.  

Kutluk Ozguven

 · Studied Linguistics at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) (Graduated 1900) and was asked, 

Are Turks descendants of Hittites?

Originally Answered: Are some Turks descended from Hittis?  Not some but with near-zero exception all Turks descended from the Hittites. To say an average Turk never had any Hittite ancestors demands plain low IQ, blind chauvenism, or a lack of understanding of the basic arithmetic calculations.

Hittites ruled Anatolia directly or through alliances for centuries, well over four centuries, let us cut down to five, and until the Bronze Age collapse. They also extended their control to Syria at times. Hittites formed a substantial part of the Anatolian population.

Kerem Caliskan 

· from Ankara, Turkish, a mixture of tatar, bosnian  answered, Are the modern day Turkish people direct descendants of the  Hittites?  

Calling direct will be assertive. Anatolia is the biggest mosaic of different ethnicity. When you visit Greece and Aegean or Blacksea regions of Turkey you will see the similarities.  So where have the Hittites gone? Or many other civilizations that took part through our history? This is same for mid Anatolia.  Especially once you go to cities like Cankiri which seems to be conservative within gene changes, you can find huge resemblence with old Hittite archeological remainings.

Anatolia is the biggest practice of gene exchange and also the protection. My family migrated back to Anatolia on last days of Ottoman Empire and we were taught that this was our last land for our roots. In no part of Middle East or Europe you can find such mixture and yes we're descendants of Hittites, Assyrian, Arabs, Kurds, Caucassians and Turks as a result.                                      

Modern humans spread out of Africa relatively recently, around 50,000 years ago, and made their way to Russia, new research suggests.  Why?  

The research, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, describes how these early steps led to our species colonizing the planet.

The Out of Africa scenario is well known but only a few hominid fossils or artefacts have emerged to explain when the great trek began and how humans  dispersed.

Populations of Homo sapiens migrated to the Levant (Middle East)  and to Europe between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, and possibly in earlier waves as early as 185,000 years ago.

An international research team, delving into a site of ancient volcanic ash on the River Don around 400 kilometres south of Moscow, found teeth, stone and ivory tools that suggest Homo sapiens moved there some 45,000 to 42,000 years ago.

The study found that over 90 per cent of the ancestry of modern-day people from Lebanon was derived from the Canaanites. Our Bible connects the Hittites with the Canaanites (Gen.10:15).  Some lived in Canaan in an earlier period.  From the 15th century BCE the Canaanites and from the 14th century, the people of Syria applied the name, Canaanites to themselves.  Canaanites were a mixture of Horites, Hittites and Hebrews.  

Resource:

http://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-y-haplogroup-movements-of-people.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_Q-M242

https://www.quora.com/Have-scientists-successfully-extracted-ancient-Hittite-DNA-and-made-a-determination-as-to-whether-a-modern-population-is-related-to-any-extent

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_people#:~:text=The%20Turkish%20people%2C%20or%20simply,in%20Turkey%20and%20Northern%20Cyprus.

https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/01/15/1826844.htm

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

Chaim Weizmann; First President of the State of Israel, in World War I in Palestine (Part II)

Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

Chaim Weizmann, 1st president of the state of Israel: (b:1874 in Motel city, near Pinsk, Brest Region of Belarus-d: 1952), about my paternal grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus's age who was born in Telsiai, Lithuania. Later, this will all be referred to as the Russian Empire.  Answering a census question will be the answer, born in Russia.  Chaim is buried in Rehovot, Israel where the national project, YAD CHAIM WEIZMANN has been erected in his memory.  WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE.   It's a research institute, dedicated in 1949.  

                                                 

Chaim Weizmann grew up in a family that dreamed of a rebuilt Zion even before the Zionist movement existed.  He organized support for the movement, and attended all but the first of the World Zionist Congresses.  Chaim soon became a World Zionist leader.  He was not yet 30 when he led the opposition to Herzl's plan for a temporary homeland in Uganda.  

It was in 1903 that Herzl bought into England's offer of this African state being anti-Semitism had become so terrible. The Uganda Scheme was a proposal presented at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 by Zionism founder Theodor Herzl to create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa. He presented it as a temporary refuge for Jews to escape rising antisemitism in Europe. 

                                               

At the congress the proposal met stiff resistance. To those attending, this was simply a band-aid.  They wanted the permanent solution of their land in Palestine.  The only problem was it was in the hands of the Ottoman Empire, but they had had about 3 groups of Jews who had returned and were living there already, the people who made Aliyah. The large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine began in 1882.  

The pronounced persecution of Russian Jews between 1881 and 1910 led to a large wave of emigration. Since only a small portion of East European Jews had adopted Zionism by then, between 1881 and 1914 only 30–40,000 emigrants went to Ottoman Palestine, while over one and a half million Russian Jews and 300,000 from Austria-Hungary reached Northern America, my paternal grandparents among them.

Why didn't more go to Palestine and live under the Ottoman Empire? The USA was so enticing, so free, and streets were already there, paved with gold.  Going to Palestine was almost like going to conditions that Uganda had to offer.  Read:  THE SETTLERS, by Meyer Levin.  (about Palestine from the turn of the century to the Balfour Declaration, Nov 2, 1917)

WWI had brought terrible misery.  In 1914, the Jewish population in Eretz Yisrael was 85,000.  At the end of the war, it was fewer than 55,000.  Nearly 1/3 had died of starvation, illness, or exposure.  But they achieved by proving they could be equals in anything that a great power could undertake, even in the longest and bloodiest war the world had yet known.  They gained self-confidence.  In this end, great Britain, with the support of the USA, had declared that the Jews were entitled to a national home in Palestine.       

They had also made common cause with the Arabs, another group long oppressed by the Turks.  During the war, Chaim Weizmann had met with Emir Feisal, on of the most important of the Arab leaders.  The 2 men had agreed that there was room enough in Palestine to fulfill the dreams of both Arabs and Jews.                                              

Lord Balfour (1848-1930) who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905. with which Herzl negotiated in 1902-3.  He was Foreign Secretary in 1917 and issued the Balfour Declaration, and was always outspokenly devoted to the Zionist ideal.  

Weizmann's work as a research chemist had brought him to England, where he met a leading British statesman, Lord Arthur James Balfour.  Balfour tried to convince Weizmann that the Jews should accept Britain's off of a homeland in Uganda. 

It was Weizmann who convinced Balfour that Palestine was the only place that could mobilize the loyalty, energy and commitment of the Jewish people.  This was the reason that submerging themselves in other people's countries didn't help the Jewish soul. Look what happened in England.  Jews had been thrown out of the country from 1290 to 1655;  365 years of not being allowed to enter!  Countries had been turning against Jews.  If they weren't expelled, they were being forcibly converted.  Those that remained were suffering from pogroms.   They had to get back to their origins.  Balfour became an enthusiastic Zionist.

During World War I, the British had a problem which only a chemist could solve.  The  country needed a steady supply of the chemical acetone to make ammunition.  before the war, this chemical had come from Germany.  Where would the acetone come from to fight Germany?

Weizmann was able to provide the answer.  He succeeded in producing acetone from corn, which was plentiful in England.  through his political and chemical work, Weizmann came to know most of the political figures in England.  the time would come when these contacts would help the Zionist cause.                         

          The Ottoman-German attack on the Suez Canal

The Turks launched 2 attacks on the Suez Canal, something important to England as it was the key link between Britain and India, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, which cut the shipping distance from England to India by more than 4,000 miles.  The British didn't trust the Egyptians to defend the Canal, but an excellent defense, however, would be a strong Jewish settlement in Palestine.

                                             

This map shows the land of Palestine-but Jews got only 10% of it for their Jewish Homeland.  All the decision-making in dividing it was not considering the where the Jewish ancient homeland laid.  They barely included Jerusalem and then argued over it, ignoring where Judea and Samaria was (Israel's ancient homeland.)  The Jews had miraculously created Tel Aviv by then on the coast.  Tel Aviv was started in 1909.  By 1921 it was a separate town from Jaffa, where it had been a garden suburb.  

On 2 November 1917, British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, issued a statement of British government policy, which has since become known as the Balfour Declaration. It stated: "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The Declaration's promise of a homeland for the Jews was later accepted internationally and incorporated into various resolutions.

The Balfour Declaration, encouraging and allowing Jewish immigration, was on the docket.  A small but influential group of wealthy but Hellenized English Jews fought this move. They were afraid Zionism might damage their position in England where they enjoyed full political rights for only one generation!  Now, Zionists were showing loyalty to Palestine!                            

The President of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, cabled the British government his approval of a Jewish homeland.  This broke the deadlock.  On November 2, 1917, Lord Balfour, by then Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, issued a letter which stated: 

    His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. 

France, Italy and the US officially agreed.   

Remember the Jewish Mule Corps?  While the Jewish Legion was being formed, the British launched their attack in Palestine under the command of General Edmund Allenby.  Within a few weeks, Allenby drove the Turks from Jaffa.  On December 11, 1917, he marched into the City of David to proclaim "A NEW ERA OF BROTHERHOOD AND PEACE IN THE HOLY LAND."  Allenby's arrival in Jerusalem took place on HANUKKAH.  On the same day, Jews celebrated both the liberation of Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917-------and from the Syrian Greeks more than 2,000 years before.   

The war wasn't over yet.  Winter rains prevented Allenby from ending his conquest.  That winter was the worst for the Yishuv.  The Turks attacked the Jewish farm settlements, mercilessly robbing and murdering.  At last, the Spring came and Allenby---now joined by the Jewish legion----marched north.  The Turks fled.  Jabotinsky himself led a Jewish unit across the Jordan River in pursuit.  By September 1918, the last of the Turkish forces in Palestine had been defeated.  Two months later, WWI ended.  

Resource:

A Young Person's History of Israel, 2nd edition, by David Bamberger

Facts About Israel, published by division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia  

More on World War I: Ottoman Empire Expulsion of Jews From Palestine

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

                                                                      Djemal Pasha

The Ottoman–German Alliance was an alliance was ratified on August 2, 1914, shortly following the outbreak of World War I. The alliance was created as part of a joint-cooperative effort that would strengthen and modernize the failing Ottoman military, as well as provide Germany safe passage into neighboring British colonies

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers, the Germans. Many people from the opposing Allied countries lived in Palestine, and its Turkish officials considered them a threat to military security. More Jews had immigrated to Palestine in 5 waves, starting in 1881 from Russia and a few other eastern European countries. Pogroms that occurred there were driving the Jews out of Russian areas and back to their origins.   

Two waves of expulsion occurred as part of Turkish failed defense of their fading empire.

In December 1914, the Turks expelled up to 6,000 Jews who resided in Jaffa (a city originally in the area of the tribe of Judah). They were resettled in Alexandria, Egypt.  In February 1915 in Syria, Djemal Cemal Pasha exercised absolute power in both military and civil affairs. Cemal Pasha was convinced that an uprising among local Arabs was imminent. Leading Arabs were executed, and notable families deported to Anatolia.  The Ottoman Empire then issued forcible drafts of Jews into the army, demanding Jews to take Ottoman citizenship or either getting expelled from the region before 15 May 1915. Following the devastating effect of the Lebanese famine, situation worsened.  

                                                                          

 Aharon Aharonson ((Hebrew: אהרון אהרנסון‎) (21 May 1876 – 15 May 1919) was a Jewish agronomist, botanist, and Zionist activist, who was born in Romania and lived most of his life in the Land of Israel, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Aaronsohn was the discoverer of emmer (Triticum dicoccoides), believed to be "the mother of wheat.")    described the situation,  "Meanwhile, people are literally starving. Horrified sights have seen our eyes: old women and children wandering, hunger and nightmare-madness in their dying eyes, no food falling under them and dying.  "An unnamed eyewitness stated,  "Even wealthy people in Jerusalem are becoming recipients (of alms) and even courting the remaining."

The repulse of British forces in Palestine in the spring of 1917 was followed by the loss of Jerusalem in December of the same year. The Ottoman authorities deported the entire civilian population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, The Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation, pursuant to the order from Ahmed Jamal Djemal Pasha on 6 April 1917. Tel Aviv and Jaffa are joined together, Tel Aviv being the garden suburb of Jaffa.  Founded in 1909, Tel Aviv  became a separate town in 1921.  In this same year were Arab riots going on, forcing Jews to leave Jaffa and find refuge in Tel Aviv.  

The Muslim evacuees were allowed to return before long. 

At the same period, the Balfour Declaration was being negotiated (published on 2 November 1917) in which the British Government declared its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

By January 1917, British forces had crossed the Sinai Desert and were about to invade Palestine, which alarmed the Turkish authorities. The Ottoman Empire began to become skeptical of the residents in the region, mostly Jews, as the Ottomans disdained them for alleged collaboration with the British.

                                                       

Ottoman officers who successfully defended Gaza during the first battle

The First Battle of Gaza was fought on 26 March 1917, during the first attempt by the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) to invade the south of Palestine in the Ottoman Empire during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War. Fighting took place in and around the town of Gaza on the Mediterranean coast when infantry and mounted infantry from the Desert Column, a component of the Eastern Force, attacked the town. Late in the afternoon, on the verge of capturing Gaza, the Desert Column was withdrawn due to concerns about the approaching darkness and large Ottoman reinforcements. This British defeat was followed a few weeks later by the even more emphatic defeat of the Eastern Force at the Second Battle of Gaza in April 1917.

At the start of March, all the inhabitants of Gaza were expelled, a town of 35,000–40,000 people, mostly Arabs. They had 48 hours to leave "even if crawling on their knees" of the men were conscripted and the rest scattered around Palestine and Syria, first to nearby villages and then further afield as those villages were also evacuated. Death from exposure or starvation was widespread. Gaza did not recover its pre-war population until the 1940s.

Over 40,000 Jews had been forcibly deported, many would not return until after the British conquest and some died on their way, but many Arabs did. Friedman holds that this was a deliberate decision on the part of the Ottoman authorities. Sheffy regards that it is more reflective of cultural and behavioral differences: the Arabs had no central organization, and with their experience of how government decrees were enforced, just remained nearby until the storm had passed, whereas the Jews obeyed the evacuation decree as a group. In any case, when New Zealand troops entered Jaffa in November 1917, only an estimated 8,000 of the previous population of 40,000 was present.

On 28 March 1917, Djemal Pasha ordered the evacuation of the inhabitants of Jaffa. They could go wherever they liked except Jerusalem or Haifa. Farmers with crops in their fields, the workers of the winery in Rishon Lezion, and the teachers and students of the Mikveh Israel school and the Latrun estate were excluded.  

                                                             

             In 1917, Ottoman forces at the shores of the Dead Sea

 Djemal Pasha, who was in charge of the Greater Syrian Theatre of the war, was forced to provide explanations.            

   Ottoman Authority telling Jews to evacuate from Tel Aviv on April 6, 1917; A total of 1,500 Jewish evacuees are thought to have died after heading north and being forced to lead a nomadic existence.

                                                              

The procession to return the exiled Torah scrolls back to Tel Aviv and Jaffa in 1918.

 Ahmed Jamal Pasha effectively separated these groups. The Jewish evacuees returned after the British conquest of Palestine, in the summer of 1918.   

It followed one month after the expulsion of all the inhabitants of the similarly-sized Arab city of Gaza City. This coincided with the larger and systematic repression on minorities by the Ottoman Empire during the World War I.

However, as Turkish nationalism began to rise in the late 19th century, the Jewish position in the empire came into question. The Young Turks, who came to power in 1908, openly espoused the idea that all non-Turkish subjects had to be Turkified. Even though the Ottoman leaders did not target the Jews for Turkification, their skepticism of Jewish motives increased and as a result of it, they became increasingly hostile towards the Jews.                                                         

The homes and property of the Jews of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were kept in the possession of the Ottoman authorities, and they were guarded by a handful of Jewish guards. Djemal Pasha also released two Jewish doctors to join the deportees. Nonetheless, many deportees had perished during the harsh winter of 1917–1918 from hunger and contagious diseases due to negligence by the Ottoman authorities: 224 deportees are buried in Kfar Saba, 15 in Haifa, 321 in Tiberias, 104 in Safed, and 75 in Damascus.

Many Jewish deportees ended up in Zichron Yaacov, Hadera, Petah Tikva and Kfar Saba, with few chose to go to Jerusalem despite being forbidden by the Ottoman authorities. Sympathizing with the situation, local population decided to provide needed medical and financial support. But when winter 1917–1918 arrived, the situation worsened for many deportees and many died by hunger, famine, starvation and maltreatment, as several Yishuvs didn't receive them and thought they could be Ottoman spies. Deterioration of condition had prompted many Jews to flee and several of them had migrated to Egypt, or Europe and the United States.

On 3 October 1918 forces of the Arab Revolt entered Damascus accompanied by British troops, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule.  The Ottomans finally were  defeated due to key attacks by the British general Edmund Allenby.  

Ottoman casualties of World War I, the Ottoman Empire mobilized a total of 2.6 million men. It lost 325,000 men and 400,000 were injured. 202,000 men were taken prisoner, mostly by the British and the Russians, and one million deserted, leaving only 323,000 men under arms at the time of the armistice.

The financial losses are also huge with an expense of 398.5 million Ottoman Lira, the equivalent of 9.09 billion gold francs of the time: the Empire was practically bankrupt in 1918.

Resource;

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Jaffa_deportation

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

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

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/1917-jews-expelled-from-tel-aviv-1.5244091