How Endogamous Are We Jews Who Are An Endogamous People ?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                             

                             Ashkenazic Jewish grandmother, Zlata Jermulowske from Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania born January 11, 1886, a part of my life and her parents were Joshua Charles "Hatzkel" Isaiahel Jermulowskie and possibly Esther Decatsky, but not 100% sure. We know his first wife died and he remarried a Dora Leah and had more children from which Zlata was the last to be born to Esther before her death.   In fact, Esther may have died giving birth to Zlata.   Before her time, men were able to marry multiple women at a time, given the example of Jacob who had 4 wives. Was she related to her husband, Nathan Goldfoot?  If my father had a DNA test done (born in 1908) we would be able to tell.  My father's sister was related, however, to her husband by testing of one of her daughters.  The connection was closer than I had thought.  The test is available at GedMatch.(Genesis) com.  Give it a name from the program you have provided and it can tell if its parents were related.    

Muslims, with Islam established after Mohammad's death in 620, have allowed men to have 4 wives at a time.   

Endogamy was very common among Ashkenazi Jews; they very rarely married non-Jews, and if they did it usually meant that the offspring were not raised Jewish. That's why it is more common to find traces of Jewish DNA among non-Jewish Slavs than it is to find Slavic DNA within Ashkenazi Jewish populations.

Being they stayed together as a group, and often lived in very close proximity, such as in ghettos, they were marrying their spouses who were actually related to them with unions happening in their families in previous generations so they were not aware of their family trees. 

Abraham had married Sarah who was his niece, and they knew of this.  One thing the Jews never did, and the Egyptian royalty did, was to marry their sisters.  Cousins were acceptable, however.  

Polygamy was practiced with Solomon setting the example, having a 1,000 wives and concubines.  His reasoning was more for making peace with other people by marrying into their royal families, which seemed to work, however.  

Jacob had 4 wives while his father, Isaac had only one, Rebecca.  Proverbs 31 seems to picture a monogamous household.  The society reflected in the Talmud is essentially monogamous, with only a handful of rabbis being recorded as having more than one wife.  This ideal of Jewish life with one wife continued.  

The takkanah of Rabbi Gershom Ben Judah (965-1028)forbade polygamy in about 1000 CE.  This was like a law now that gave formal sanction among Ashkenazi Jews to what was already generally accepted.  

How was such a law policed?  We have no policing in Judaism.  I would think that peer pressure would control such a law to being prescribed.  My thinking is that by 1500, people were doing pretty well in not taking multiple wives with the exceptions of divorce and death like today.  No more harems like Kings David and Solomon.  So we can say that for the past 1,000 years, there has been no polygamy within the Jewish Community.  

The Rabbi, known as Rabbenu (Our teacher) Gershom Meor ha-Golah (Light of the Diaspora) was born in Metz of Lorraine thatwas a former region in northeast France bordering Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. and later lived in Mainz, Germany  where he directed an academy. 

    At the time in Rhineland/Germany, the Crusades were starting in 1096-1999 with attacks against Jews in Northern France and especially in the Rhineland where massacres occurred in Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Cologne, etc...and in Jerusalem in 1099 as well.  The 2nd Crusade of 1147-1149 attacked Jews in the same places because of a Monk, Rudolf in France and Rhineland.  We Jews were never good enough to suit the Christians.  No wonder these Rabbis went overboard trying to wipe out sin in Jews.  

 He was considered the earliest notable Western European Jewish scholar, a famous Rabbinic authority.  He was one of the 1st commentators on the Talmud. Since there are 2 distinct Talmuds, one from Palestine and the other called the Babylonian Talmud, he may have worked on the Palestinian one,  and corrected many copyists' errors.  Gershon  also transcribed  the biblical Masorah to ensure accurate  reading.   According to tradition, he wrote an entire commentary on the Talmud, but only fragments  have survived.  Rabbi Gershom's legal decisions and regulations (takkanot) were accepted as binding by European Jewry;  they included bans on polygamy, divorcing a  woman without her consent, reading letters directed to others, cutting pages out of books, and mocking converts who had returned to Judaism (which would have been mainly the the Marranos, Spanish who were forced to accept Catholicism to evade death.                                   

                    Crusaders during their hayday...

As if G-d is listening to all this horror coming from his mind along with the good decisions, what happened to his family seems just.  His son (and possibly his wife) was forcibly baptized in 1012, and Gershom wrote a number of penitential prayers  expressing his grief.  

Joshua Cohen also agrees with me with his article about the twisted logic of Medieval German piousness.  "Sefer Hasidim, or Book of the Pious", was its greatness, authored by Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (1140-1217) and/or his father Samuel (the latter working under the influence of his father, Kalonymus ben Isaac the Elder). Most scholars agree that Rabbi Judah’s student, Rabbi Eleazar Rokeach, compiled the extant text. Kalonymus is a family line my Goldfoot family is connected with.  Seems as if some rabbis were overworking their minds on what compiled a sin in Germany during this period. 

It was in 1096 that the German Crusaders massacred Jews in European towns.  Shortly after in 1099, the Jewish community in Jerusalem was massacred by the Crusaders.  

Among the Spanish and Oriental Jews (Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews) on the other hand, polygamy continued to be legal, though by no means general. 

 In Italy, down to the 17th century, a person whose wife was barren was occasionally permitted by papal license (Catholicism) to take a 2nd wife.  With Europeanization of many oriental communities in recent generation, polygamy has become increasingly rare.  

Traditionally, the groom  is to smash a wine glass...this looks like a can used in this Israeli wedding. Shattered glass symbolizes the fragility of our relationship and reminds us that we must treat our relationship with special care. This custom was also incorporated into the ceremony to remind everyone that even at the height of personal joy, we must, nevertheless, remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70. Note the Israeli large prayer shawl used by all the men of Israel.  

In Israel, monogamy is now enforced by law, though existing polygamous marriages are recognized.  Being 20% of the population are not Jews, but Muslims who allow 4 wives to this day, I'm not sure how Israel is handling this situation.  Their population as increased quickly, I note. Since at least 1959, polygamous marriages have been prohibited in Israel, which applies to members of each confessional community, including the Jewish and Muslim.  And that's how the law is written.  DNA testing will tell the tale.  

In the Palestinian Territories, unless its been changed recently, "Polygyny, whereby a husband has more than one wife, is explicitly permitted under Islam. There are also the classical injunctions that a man must treat all co-wives equitably and provide them with separate dwellings, and a man must declare his social status in the marriage contract.  This is why their numbers have increased.

Polyandry, whereby a wife has more than one husband, is not permitted. Residents of East Jerusalem are subject to Israeli marriage law, which since at least 1959 has barred the formation of polygamous unions in Israel.

In the USA Polygamy as a crime originated in the common law, and it is now outlawed in every state. In the United States, polygamy was declared unlawful through the passing of Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882.Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced polygamy between 1840 and 1890. At present, the Church strongly asserts that God's standard for marriage is only between one man and one woman.  Devoted Church members opted not to practice polygamy. During the year 1857, about half of the people living in the Utah Territory are in a polygamous family. By 1870, this number of people living in polygamous households dropped to about 25 to 30 percent. It has continually declined through the passage of time.  Mostly, groups living in Mexico practiced it.  However, the LDS (Mormons) have continued, and even have TV sit-coms about all living together.                                          

Well, Polygamy helped to create endogamy that we find in our DNA today. it's not surprising to find that some of our relatives are related to each other.  My father's sister's DNA shows a genetic connection to her husband from Germany, and she and my father's line were from Lithuania.  The connection, quite obvious in the DNA, is not prevented by countries of the people.  It could go back as far as to ancient Israel, or obviously-to Germany where Ashkenazic Jewry started.  I think that's our situation.  

I've traced my father's line of Goldfus as far back as to the 1700s in Telsiai, Lithuania finding Iones 'Jonah' Goldfus c:1730.  There was a Swedish invasion in 1710 into Telz, as it's called today, which had to have been the Vikings!  2/3 of its population perished from epidemics with that happening.   A few Jews were known to be living in this city in the 1400s.  The Crusaders mentioned Jews being there  in 1320.  Chances are that my father's people were there from Germany by the 1500s at least.  

Diseases inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern often occur in endogamous populations. Among Ashkenazi Jews, a higher incidence of specific genetic disorders and hereditary diseases has been verified, including: Alport syndrome. Colorectal cancer due to hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer is another.

Tay–Sachs disease is the most commonly known, which can present as a fatal illness of children that causes mental deterioration prior to death, was historically extremely common among Ashkenazi Jews, with lower levels of the disease in some Pennsylvania Dutch, Italian, Irish Catholic, and French Canadian descent, especially those living in the Cajun community of Louisiana and the southeastern Quebec. Since the 1970s, however, proactive genetic testing has been quite effective in eliminating Tay–Sachs from the Ashkenazi Jewish population.  

Parkinson's has hit my family in a cousin by marriage who turns out to be my 4th cousin.   The disease (G2019S/LRRK2 mutation; The LRRK2 mutation on the main haplotype, shared by 1. Ashkenazi Jews, 2.North Africans, and 3.Europeans, initially arose in the Near East at least 4000 years ago. Because of a founder effect, the ancestors of present-day Ashkenazi Jews may have kept the low-frequency G2019S mutation through the different diasporas, whereas Near Eastern daughter populations lost the mutation. The mutation might then have been "reintroduced by recurrent gene flow from Ashkenazi populations to other Jewish, European, and North African populations. The present-day frequency of the mutation in control populations (0.05% in Europeans, 0.5% in North-African Arabs and 1% in Ashkenazi Jews) may support this scenario".)

What's happening to the Diaspora?  Two out of every five Diaspora Jews is married to a non-Jew, though rates of assimilation vary widely with two European countries representing the extremes: Poland has the highest rate of intermarriage and Belgium the lowest. These are some of the findings of a special report on intermarriage published.  About two-thirds of U.S. Jewish adults are either married (59%) or living with a partner (7%). Among those who are married, many have spouses who are not Jewish. Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried.  That's higher than in Europe.  The closeness of our Jewish population is widening to the point of losing the Endogamous character today in the Dispora, though it is continuing in Israel. At least there, Ashkenazi and Sephardi marriages are happening along with mizrachim, giving the genes fresh partners.   

Resource;

https://uncoveringjewishheritage.com/tag/endogamy/#:~:text=Endogamy%20was%20very%20common%20among,DNA%20within%20Ashkenazi%20Jewish%20populations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_the_Palestinian_territories#:~:text=Since%20at%20least%201959%2C%20polygamous,including%20the%20Jewish%20and%20Muslim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jews#:~:text=Diseases%20inherited%20in%20an%20autosomal,to%20hereditary%20nonpolyposis%20colorectal%20cancer

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sefer-hasidim-rabbi-judah-of-regensburg-early-13th-c

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/polygamy#:~:text=Polygamy%20as%20a%20crime%20originated,Anti%2DPolygamy%20Act%20of%201882.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/marriage-families-and-children/

Insights Into Male and Female Differences in Genealogy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

There are differences between the sexes.  Within males and females are chromosomes identified as the X for females and Y for males that come from our cells.  These are the male line and the female lines. We inherit 23 chromosomes from each parent and the X and Y are the last one, the 23rd.   The male inherits both the X and the Y lines but can only pass on to their children the Y line.  The female does not have the Y line, only her X line which she passes onto her children.  A common Y line for Jewish men is J1 (cohen gene) while the common Jewish line for the Jewish women seems to be K.  

                                               

This is why men are so important in  testing our DNA.  Test a man for both the X and the Y lines and you have the knowledge of his father, and all the male grandparents down the line to Adam. 

A man also has the genes of his mother and her mother, so on back to Eve.  If a woman wants information about her inheritance of genes, she should ask her brother to test, which I did.  That way we both have the information about our father and our mother.  If our father lived long enough to test, his test would show the information on his father's line and his mother's line, which is a different mother from our mother, important to us but is not our mother.  She would be our paternal grandmother.  

A female only has the X line so cannot find what the line of her father was.  Each line has a name.  For instance, the Cohens in the Jewish family are found to be the same, so are called J1.  My father's line is a Q, and further testing has labeled it as QBZ67.  A female passes on her X line to her daughters.  

  The oldest male in the family should test as their information can go back further.  They will show genes inherited that we may not receive.  That's another thing.  You and your siblings inherit some of the same genes and some different ones, too.  That's why they are not carbon copies of you.  It's great if all siblings test in a family when they can afford to do it.  You can get a broader picture of your family that way.                                     

Aunts and Uncles are important to test. Male cousins can tell you all about your mother's side of the family if you're a female.  My mother's line was Robinson.  My male 1st cousin was of immense great help in finding out what her father's line was all about. 

 My maternal uncle had an operation on his mitral valve and had to have it replaced with a pig valve, which was done during a certain period.  He was then found to have an irregular heart beat called a-fib.  I inherited this gene and also had a mitral valve problem which could be repaired, thank goodness, without the need for a new valve.  I have a-fib. I'm said to have an enlarged heart.  My father also had an enlarged heart.  We can inherit heart problems from both sides of the family.  Yikes.

This DNA tells us what groups of people were intermarrying with our family groups, and history may tell us why they came to join our settlements.  

Jews who came from Poland are very diverse genetically.  People came from many countries to Poland in medieval times, and in the 18th century migrated from Poland to other lands such as Rumania, where they found Byzantine Jews from Constantinople living there.  They also found some refugees from the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century already living there.  There was also a Jewish migration from Lithuania into the area around Bialystock, Poland around 1495.  

Back in the 3rd and 4th centuries, Jews fleeing oppression in the Middle East, as the Temple in Jerusalem and the city were destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, fled and settled in Southern Italy from where they moved to Northern Italy and then into the Rhineland of Germany and then further east into what is the eastern part of Germany and then later into Poland.  

Ashkenazic DNA is a mosaic of the Jewish communities it has lived in and shared with others for hundreds of years, so where the point of origin is for each family is hard to tell.  Was it Western Asia, Europe or the Middle East----or all of these?    That's why scientists in genetics do studies of the male Y chromosome and why it's so important to every diverse group of people.  Jews are a good group to study because they are endogamic, that is that they have intermarried within the family ever since Abraham married his niece, Sarah.  They were from today's Iraq in a city called Ur.  The Egyptians married their sisters and brothers.  Many family groups of Muslims are also endogamic.  Jews tried to marry within their own Jewish circles, but often the men would marry someone in the land area they were in for long periods of time.  

                                                

                    Remember the Frisco Kid with Gene Wilder?

                  I guess my Nathan Goldfus/foot  was the Telsiai Kid

The early settlers of the USA had to marry people within their neighborhood considering travel then was by horse, or horse and buggy.  They didn't go very far unless they just couldn't find a mate in their circle, then had to travel further away from home.  My paternal grandparents were Nathan Goldfoot, formerly "Goldfus" of Telsiai, Lithuania,  whose line was from Germany, and Zlata "Hattie" Jermulowski/e of Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania/Poland who claimed she was a Litvak (Lithuanian).  They met up in the mountains of Idaho in a mining town of Council because the train was recently laid down there.  Of course, they married; the only Jews there and that were single. He was almost 6 feet tall and she was barely taller than a midget.  She had to stand on a chair to kiss him.    Zlata was there with her half-sisters and their husbands as well.  They married in Boise, Idaho, not knowing how to read or write in English.  You should see the spelling on their marriage certificate.  Thank goodness that I could read the witnesses names better.   Nathan had traveled from Lithuania to England, Ireland, Canada, Idaho and then Oregon.                                                         

It has been said that American Jews constitute about 27 to 30% of any group whose distinguishing characteristic is intelligence.  Scientists reveal that the mean Jewish IQ is about one standard deviation above that of other Europeans.  About  27 to 30% of Ashkenazim have the mother's lines of the K haplogroup.  This may be important or not.  Our father's mother was not a K but a W, another female line, and our IQ's are very healthy.  Smart people tend to be drawn to other smart people, and so on.  It becomes something inherited.  Environment draws it out.  Give a child the proper stimulating environment and he can reach his potential. Parents rarely realize that they are the most important teachers of a new life and are laying down the thinking patterns of the children.  Of course a fantastic teacher can do a lot to develop that capability, harumph, hmm!!! Or Squash it!!!!

 Resource:

Tracing Your Jewish DNA For Family History & Ancestry by Anne Hart, 2003, 

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

Who Gentiles Think Jews Are While What Jews Think They Are

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

     Jews being herded down a Lithuanian street at the beginning of WWII in 1941 and will be taken away.  

We already know that Nazis thought that Jews were an inferior race that needed to be removed from society.  Quite a few Christian churches have been involved with this attitude ever since Jews were accused of killing Christ.  I had a personal experience once in a small eastern Oregon town when I visited a church with a "friend," and the Preacher spoke, looking directly at me, of all the reasons Jews were bad, going on and on the whole time until I was able to get out of there, something I haven't ever forgotten.  It was a traumatic experience.  My "friend" saw nothing wrong, smiling through the whole experience, as I remember.

Because of Hitler's frenzy against Jews, I grew up hearing that we were not a race but a religion.  We were the same color as other white people.  Most of us had dark hair while a few others had lighter hair, even blonde on occasion.  Some even stood out with red hair, and a lot had curly hair. 

Since then, DNA has been invented, and I find that we have become an endogamous people, having married into each other's tribes over all these years.  I read where we may be 20th cousins to each other without knowing it.  We originally started with Abraham and Sarah, and this multiplied into Jacob and his 12 sons who were the fathers of 12 tribes, and we Jews are the descendants of the tribe of Judah with a few Benjamin and maybe Simon's tribes included in the mix.  

Our Cohen line has been found to be the man carrying J1 haplogroup.  Are we a race, then?  We're a race made up of several haplogroups, and have found that our females are descendants of 4 Jewish women. After all, Moses freed ALL THE SLAVES OF EGYPT, the 12 tribes and others who wanted to join them.  Who didn't want to be a freed slave?  They must have all left at the call. We're a race who believes in ONE G-d and laws governing our behavior toward our fellow man.What are our rules?  The Golden Rule; not to do things to people we wouldn't want done to us.    That's our religion.  We take responsibility for our actions and in a group plea to God, ask for forgiveness once a year on Yom Kippur.    

 "Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist, born in the Soviet Union,  has claimed that American Jews are the only people in the world who believe that Jews are not a race.  She has stated, "It's lovely to think that being Jewish is a religious tradition, but you sort of have to have the luxury of the United States of America to be able to do that.  Elsewhere, it is actually whom you're born to.  

The Soviet Union's politics demanded that the people give up their religion so have done everything to wipe out any religion.  It's a country of atheists.  In the 1970s Jews were put in prison for learning Hebrew.  My Hebrew teacher, Sarah in Haifa, Israel,  told us about communicating with a man who would later  make aliyah to Israel, and  that she was teaching Hebrew to in her personal letters, hoping he wouldn't be caught. 

Gessen was listed as Jewish on her birth certificate, because she was born in the Soviet Union to parents who themselves were listed as Jewish on their birth certificates.  They felt they weren't religiously observant.  It was looked upon as a race. They were already becoming assimilated Jews as it was. 

That's what has happened to American Jews.  It's natural that Jews have wanted to be wanted, like, by their neighbors and peers.  Alan M. Dershowitz wrote his book, THE VANISHING AMERICAN JEW-in search of Jewish identity for the next century  in 1997.  

"During Einstein's era of 1879 to 1955, anti-Semitism was common in the USA and had its own cohesive force among Jews.  Jews were excluded from universities, clubs, gyms, and professions." Though we are now 2% of the population, far more were meeting the criteria of attending medical school but couldn't get in because of the quota system.                                 

Israel's Ethiopian Jewish population, descendants of the Queen of Sheba and her handmaidens when they visited Solomon.  I was in Safed when they arrived, living right across the street. They have suffered for their religion from the Christian Ethiopians, always being attacked.  

       A lawyer of Kenya, Africa, my friend who traveled from Africa to Israel every year to serve his Milueem month of army service after his 3 years and has finally moved his family to Israel and lives there full time.   Testing showed that he and others had the J1 cohen gene showing they were definitely Jewish which was his religious practice before the testing.   

The difference between Jews and Blacks was great but they were both treated  just as badly in the USA.  Jews came from an ancient Middle East where writing and reading were invented along with trading, and most Blacks came from undeveloped Africa who remained connected to their different religion, some of which had been converted to Islam.   Here we thought there were 3 lines of Jews, the Ashkenazi who after 70 CE's burning of Jerusalem wound up in Germany speaking Yiddish; the Sephardi of Spain who spoke Ladino and the Mizrachi of the Middle East.  Now we have found the 4th group of African Jews as well, both North Africa and Central Africa.                                   

Europe's Migrant Crisis  took many years for the League of Nations-era world to find places for the refugees of the 1930s and ’40s

Sometimes this anti-Semitism was the official policy of the US government, as typified by the refusal to accept larger numbers of European Jewish immigrants at the Evian conference on Jewish immigration from Nazi-occupied countries in 1938.  The first concerted effort to find homes for those displaced by Nazi aggression came in July of 1938, when 32 nations sent representatives to Evian, France, on the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Germany had just recently annexed Austria, and it was obvious to all involved that many thousands of people—primarily Jews—would soon need new homes, if they did not already have one. As TIME noted that month, the conference got off to a bad start: though the opening speeches were lofty, it took a full two days to elect a president of the conference, as each attendee feared that his name would be thus linked with what would likely be failed attempt to solve the problem.

 Or anti-Semitism showed up  by the refusal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz in 1945 to prevent Jews from being transported to the death camp. Sometimes this anti-Semitism was part of everyday social contact, such as that described in the popular novel and subsequent move, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.  

Here, Gentile Philip and his son took on the role of Jews and suffered from anti-Semitic remarks with the little boy being called a "dirty Jew" by his schoolmates. They were of the same race as their peers, but seen as a religion, to them an unacceptable religion, not only different from theirs but had harmed their Son of a G-d himself.  This is how anti-Islamists see the difference between Jews and Muslims and how churches support Muslims but are against Jews. 

Just as the Greek Jews started assimilating in biblical days, so have American and other Jews of the world.  I'm so pleased to find pockets of orthodox Jews  keeping our religion.  Israel is doing just that, knowing who they are.  Religion is taught in their public schools.  They are living in the very places that are described and talked about in the "Old Testament", our Tanakh. This is why they must keep their 80% Jewish population to 20% others. 

                                    

 For a long time, Jews were told they were a religion, for it is a religion in contrast with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. We were told emphatically by our parents that we were not a race, like Hitler was saying.  Now I'm finding everyone accepting that we are indeed a race.  I'll accept that we  are a people with the unique religion of Judaism and who is related to each other more often than not to some degree. Our religion also has standards of who we are.  We are Jewish if our mothers were Jewish.  If our mothers weren't born Jewish, they would have been converted to Judaism.  I certainly have an abundance of 4th and 5th cousins.     

Resource:

Book: Legacy-A Genetic History of the Jewish People by Harry Ostrer

https://time.com/4030159/evian-conference/

 

  

How Close Were Our Distant Ancestors? Genealogy Takes a Look at Endogamy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

We know that when man first started, they lived in family groupings.  From a family, they would join another close family to become a clan, and so forth until it was large enough to be a tribe.  A tribe is a group of clans.                            

Looking at our origins, Abram, whose name became Abraham, had married his niece, Sarai, whose name became Sarah.  She was not only his niece but his wife and 1st cousin.

She took precedent over the wishes of her  Egyptian  handmaiden who had produced Abram a son when there was a conflict of interests. 

Their genes were from the same origins.  Abram's father was Terah, and Terah's father was Nahor I. Haran and Abram were brothers. Sarah's father was Haran  and Haran's father was Terah, and Sarah's brother was Lot.  Sarah's great grandfather was Nahor I.                                                   

They had a son named Isaac. Isaac  married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel and sister of Laban.   Bethuel is the son of Nahor II. Nahor II is the son of Terah.  Rebekah  is Abram's grandniece and grandmother of Rebekah and Abram is her 1st cousin once removed.                                                 

  Terah, father of Abram and Haran and son of Nahor I, son of Serug.

In the account of Terah's family mentioned in the Book of Genesis (Genesis 11:26–32), Nahor II (Hebrew: נָחוֹר‎ – Nāḥōr) is listed as the son of Terah, amongst two other brothers, Abram and Haran (v. 26,27). ... Nahor married the daughter of his brother Haran, Milcah, his niece (v. 29).

                                                                         

My Family Tree Maker software program could not conceive of Isaac and Rebekah being related.  This was too much for it.  I checked and checked.  So maybe they have become a fairly good distance from each other.  I think the name, Milcah, threw it a punch, so I think I'll surprise it.    

Isaac:(father)  Abraham and Sarah, Terah and Amathlai, Nahor I and Iyoska, Serug and Milcah

Rebekah:(father) Bethuel, Nahor II and Milcah, Terah and Amathlai, Nahor I and Iyoska, Serug and Milcah

Serug and Nahor had married a Milcah, which is confusing.  

Serug (Hebrew: שְׂרוּג‎ – Śərūḡ, "branch"; Greek: Σερούχ – Seroúkh) was the son of Reu and the father of Nahor, according to Genesis 11:20–23. He is also the great-grandfather of the prophet and patriarch Abraham, thus the ancestor of the Ishmaelites and the Israelites.

In the Masoretic text on which modern Bibles are based, he was 30 years old when Nahor was born, and he lived for another 200 years, making his age at death 230. However, the Septuagint (LXX) and Samaritan Pentateuch texts state that he was 130 on fathering Nahor; the Samaritan Pentateuch gives his age at death as 230, stating that he lived another 100 years, while the LXX has 200, making him 330 at his death.

Further details are provided in the Book of Jubilees, which gives the names of his mother, Ora (11:1), and wife, Milcah (11:6). It also states that his original name was Seroh, but that it was changed to Serug in the time when Noah's children began to fight wars, and the city of Ur Kesdim was built, where Serug lived. It says this Serug was the first of the patriarchal line to abandon monotheism and turn to idol worship, teaching sorcery to his son Nahor.

We have 23 chromosomes, numbered from 1 to 23.  The 23rd determines sex, and is given the title of Y for male and X for female.

                                            

DNA is seen as a double helix, It's deoxyribonucleic acid, the blueprint of life, the sequence of chemicals that defines each of us as being unique, with the exception of identical twins who share the same genetic makeup.  

Here is a copy of a male and female 1st cousins on chromosome #1.they shared genes on 2 other places on #1 as well.  

Think of a chromosome as a yardstick that is numbered with cMs.

From point 26,748,812 to 43,705,961 measured 22.17cMs.  This cousin pair shared segments of genes on every chromosome except #13, 14, 16, and 20.  Chromosome #1 has the  most known genes (2,968) and the 23rd/Y chromosome has the fewest (231).  The total number of genes is estimated at 30,000.  It's not as close as siblings, but interesting enough.  

 Whether you belong to the line of Abraham and either his Egyptian Hagar or his relative and first wife, Sarah, your ancestors no doubt started the same way in a family group that became a part of a tribe somewhere.  Even the English started as tribes. 

 The tribe out of Abraham turned out to become 12 well-known tribes that could be called a nation, and was the 12 tribes of Jacob.  They were the basis for Israel.  Jacob's name was changed to Israel, but we still refer to him mostly as Jacob.  Names stood for certain things, like feats;  you do something fantastic and your title becomes your name.  This nation numbered 601,730 by the time Joshua and Moses had led them back to Jacob's old home of Canaan after being prisoners in Egypt for 400 years.  They had been Egyptian slaves with a certain slave mentality for so long that Moses deliberately took his time, 40 years, getting to Canaan, which wasn't that far away by 2021 standards, in order to turn them into a new people, prepared for what their future held.  

                                                                             

                                                          

Joshua was one among the many in  this group, and showed signs of bravery when he saw the Canaanites who were much larger and taller than the slaves, who must have been held on short rations, keeping them rather short, like what happened in WWII to people.  We see after a more nutritious diet, they produced much taller children.  So I imagine that's what happened to the slaves after 400 years.  Joshua saw the Canaanites, but he thought they could take them on if needed.  The other 2 spies sent with him were frightened when they saw their height.

                                            

 Joshua was from the tribe of Ephraim and he was the dispenser of where each tribe would live, so he placed Ephraim next to Judah, the largest tribe with 76,500 people.  Ephraim had 32,500.  They had lost 8,000 people in the 40 year Exodus, while Judah had lost only 1,900. 

 The 12 tribes would become a nation after many years when Saul, son of Kish of the tribe of Benjamin in the 11th century BCE was selected by the prophet, Samuel to be their king.  

By then there was a pretty good admixture of genes among the people.  Their future was to remain an endogamous people, however, putting to good use some very popular genes.

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific social group, religious denomination, caste, or ethnic group, rejecting those from others as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. Endogamy is common in many cultures and ethnic groups. 

                                                  

Endogamy, also called in-marriage, custom enjoining one to marry within one's own group. The penalties for transgressing endogamous restrictions have varied greatly among cultures and have ranged from death to mild disapproval. When marriage to an outside group is mandated, it is referred to as exogamy.

The nation of Israel came up with rules about how close in relationship one could NOT marry.  So have nations of today. In the United States, second cousins are legally allowed to marry in every state. However, marriage between first cousins is legal in only about half of the American states.Oct 16, 2019

 In Judaism, the rules:  People we don't marry:

(a) His mother, grandmother and ascendants; the mother of his grandfather; his stepmother, the wife of his paternal grandfather, and of his ascendants; and the wife of his maternal grandfather.

(b) His daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter and her descendants; his daughter-in-law; the wife of his son’s son, and descendants; and the wife of his daughter’s son.

(c) His wife’s daughter or her granddaughter and descendants.

(e) His sister, half-sister, his full or half-brother’s wife (divorced or widowed) except for Levirate marriage with the widow of a childless brother, and the full or half-sister of his divorced wife in her lifetime.

(f) His aunt, and uncle’s wife (divorced or widowed), whether the uncle be a full or half-brother of his father or mother.                                        

Icelanders love keeping track of how they're related, which has made them "the world champions of human genetics.” There are only 320,000 people who live in Iceland, and most are descended from a small clan of Celtic and Viking settlers. Thus, many Icelanders are distant (or close) relatives. Sometimes too close.  The national preoccupation with heredity has yielded an unexpected professional benefit: Concerns about wading into the shallow end of the gene pool are just a small part of the Icelandic obsession with genealogy. As Iva Skoch explained in Global Post, when two Icelanders meet, the first question is usually, "Hverra manna ert bu?" (Who are your people?) Bookstores are stocked with thick volumes on the histories of Icelandic families.“Having the genealogy of the entire nation is one of the things that has turned us into the world champions of human genetics.”  I believe they all check their genealogy out before marrying to see if it's okay.

                                                       
                              Abraham given Hagar by his wife, Sarah  

While parental consanguinity is known to increase the risk of birth defects in offspring, it is hard to quantify this risk in populations where consanguinity is prevalent.  Consanguinity is the characteristic of having a kinship with another person. Many jurisdictions have laws prohibiting people who are related by blood from marrying or having sexual relations with each other. The degree of consanguinity that gives rise to this prohibition varies from place to place.                                             

Where our ancestors really had no choice in the matter due to lack of a population in those days, they had smaller box of genes as well.  We've accumulated many more in our choice of producing children, I would think.  We're carrying genes from well over 4,000 years of accumulation of fairly recent times. 

What counts are the genes we've picked up in the last 1,000 years.   Think of it.  Homo Sapiens have been around for H. sapiens is very recent, having originated in Africa more than 315,000 years ago (315 kya).  Thank goodness those genes haven't popped up.  Scientists today can find our very ancient genes in GedMatchgenesis.com  They have the tools for us to use and discover our origins.  

Resource:

https://pediaa.com/what-is-the-difference-between-tribe-and-clan/#Tribe

https://www.britannica.com/topic/endogamy

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/468337/jewish/Prohibited-Marriages.htm

https://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/can-you-marry-cousin

DNA & Genealogy by Colleen Fitzpatrick & Andrew Yeiser

http://www.increasinglearning.com/blog/population-abraham