The Law of Return to Israel: Who and When Jews Returned

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                    

Jews suffered greatly when Jerusalem was taken by the Romans in 70 CE.  They were taken to Rome or other places as slaves.  Some managed to remain in Judah while others scattered to other parts of the Middle East.  It wasn't till May 14, 1948 that Israel was again re-created out of what the Ottoman Empire had taken of what was renamed as "Palestine."  This was because of the WWI when the Ottomans had lost the war-being they were on Germany's side

                    Israel is for the Ingathering of the Exiles

The Law of Return of 1950 gave legal sanction to all immigrant Jews. Israel was created as a haven for Jews who had suffered for 2,000 years from anti-Semitism in other countries for being what they were;  Jewish.  Judah  had been occupied by the Romans.  Jews had been blamed for killing Christ by causing him to be crucified, which was something that the Romans had done to thousands of Jews in Judah,  but Jews were blamed anyway being he had been Jewish even though they had denied causing this.   Jews had been the object of attacks by the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, and then the Holocaust and actually were expulsed from countries or forcibly converted to Christianity.  Some communities had been annihilated even before the Holocaust.  They had not had the rights of citizens in these 2,000 years until after WWI.  In the Middle East they were treated as Dhimmis, which were not 1st class citizens.  There they were penalized in many ways for being Jewish.  The one country of safety was the USA, which had its share of anti-Semitism.
                                                                         

               Rome, parade of displaying Jewish artifacts stolen from Jerusalem

Now, what is a Jew?  There is no legal definition.  There are halachic concepts (rabinical law) and sociological ones.  By halacha, a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother.  They can also be Jewish by conversion to Judaism.  Under 1970's amendment, the Law of Return grants Israeli nationality also to the spouse of any immigrant Jew and his descendants for 2 generations and to their spouses equally whether they were Jewish by halacha or not.
                                                                           

The population of Israel in May 1948 was 650,000.  By May 1972 it was 3,164,000.  This shows that 1,400,000 were immigrants (olim).  Immigrants entered in 4 large waves of immigration.  They have continued to arrive throughout all these years according to their own needs as well.

1.  May 1948-end of 1951:  754,800 came from :
     a. Holocaust in Europe mainly from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia.
     b. Iraq (121,000 out of 130,000); Yemen (44,000 out of 45,000); Libya (30,500 out of 35,000).

2. 1955-1957:  165,000 came from:
     a. Morocco and Tunisia
     b. Poland and other countries such as Romania

3. 1961-1964:  215,000 came from:
    a. Eastern Europe
    b. North Africa

4. 1967-to end 1972; 200,000 on came from:
   a. North and South America
   b. Western Europe
  c. Soviet Union
                                                                     

1981:  Here I am in my Sachnoot apartment in Safed sitting on my bed-with pillows to look like a sofa in front of my barred window.  That's because we are on the ground floor.  We just moved in after living in Haifa for 10 months attending the ulpan (school).

5.  1980-2013 My husband and I made aliyah in 1980  and were in a large group of teachers of English from the Soviet Union.  We were one of the few actual professional teachers from the West and went through a 10 month program to earn our certification to teach English in Israel first.  There were over 40 in our class that was later divided into Hebrew language groups to bring us up to a level of higher ability.

19,135 olim arrived in 2011
18,691 olim arrives in 2012
Of them 2,432 were from Ethiopia.  Western Europe olim were 3,243 in 2012.  Soviet Union olim were 7,755 and France olim were 1,907.  North America had 3,512 olim in 2011 and 3,389 in 2012.  The UK had 560 in 2011 and 698 in 2012.

 The census now shows that there are 6 million Jews and 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel.  As conditions have become worse towards Jews in France and Sweden with much anti-Semitism, they have been forced to move to Israel. About 3 years after we arrived, Ethiopians were coming to Safed.
                                                                       

                                                               Ethiopian immigrant
   
6.  The Lost 10 Tribes of Israel:-taken by Assyria 721 BCE and Babylon 597-586 BCE
     a. Returning from Ethiopia
     b. Africa-Masai
    c. Asia-Myanmar(Burma), Bnei Israel from Bombay, India, Bnei Menashe of India
    d. Middle East, Mashadi of Mashad, Iran

In integrating Jews from 2 separate cultures from the East (Sephardis, Mizrachim) and from the West (Ashkenazis) ,  we find that the  half of the immigrants that came from Muslim countries in North Africa and Asia had to live in poverty and  the basic values were those of a traditional and authoritarian society similar to the Muslim country they had left.  Most had very large families.

The other half came from European and American countries where the basic values were of a modern democratic and technological society.   This caused a cultural gap which gave immigrants from the developed countries an advantage over the Jews from the Muslim countries so the administration had to be devoted to narrowing this gap.

Education has been the means to do this.  Only 13% of children in 1956 from Asia and Africa attended high school  but by 1969-1970 there were 44% attending.  At the same time, children from Europe and America had 41% attending in 1956 and this went up to 77% by 1969-1970.   By 1970, 18.5% of marriages taking place were of mixed cultural origins.  In other words, the means to even out the disparity was through marriage.  It has increased since then.  Another means is through serving in the IDF.  It has erased differences in sex and in origins.  A Jew is just a Jew today in Israel, back to the way we were before 70 CE.  No differences.

The big population centers in Israel were in the coastal regions between Tel Aviv and Haifa.  New towns and development centers have been built.  This is where many of the immigrants have settled.  They have gone to Eilat, Dimona and Arad in the Negev; Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon and Beit Shemesh in the center;  and Karmiel which is almost all American and Kiryat Sh'mona in the Galilee.  I settled in Safed which is also in the Galilee simply because it reminded me of Oregon with all the fir trees and because it was higher up.  We went where jobs were available.  Being a teacher, I found that Jerusalem, which is a highly desirous city to live in, was already full of teachers and a more expensive place to live.  Teachers were wanted in development towns.  Israel managed to send Russians to the desert and Ethiopians to Safed where it was very cold, but they had to consider where available housing was at that time of immigration.  It gave us lots to laugh about.  Russians preferred to be in Tel Aviv where culture was at the height with music and theater.  We all had our preferences.

It is important to Israel to reclaim Jews who have been found to be still practicing Jewish  beliefs after all these years of separation.  They have been studied by rabbis and even have taken dna tests for their proof.  Through one or both of these tests, they have been accepted as one of our Lost brothers' descendants.  This has been prophesied in the Torah to happen at the end of days.  It's very exciting to us to find that many are still living and claiming their proud connection to the rest of us.  To me, they have gone through much pain to continue their heritage.

Resource: Facts About Israel, Division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem
http://www.jewishvoice.org/messianic-education/messianic-vision/lost-tribes-of-israel.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/11/india-burmas-lost-menashe-tribe-of.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/12/lost-tribe-of-israel-living-in-india.html
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/04/10-lost-tribes-and-what-happened-to.html
http://www.jta.org/2013/01/21/news-opinion/world/israel-sees-slight-drop-in-jewish-immigration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return

Am Yisrael Chi, The Jewish People Live: Explaining Why We Are Still One People

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                             

        Wall painting found in Egypt, topic of video program about Pharoah Ahmose, now thought to be pharaoh in Exodus, which translated means "brother of Moses" in 1500 BCE.  It used to be thought that Ramses had been the Pharaoh.  The problem is that in the Torah the name of the Pharaoh is not given.

Today's science has discovered genetics.  From this we have found the Cohen gene that identifies the descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses.  They were designated to be Cohens, men with certain responsibilities in their new religion.  These were duties to be carried out in the Temple that would someday be built.  Moses lived in c1391-1271 BCE, or earlier since researchers now believe that the Exodus happened in 1500 BCE.  .  Aaron was a little older than Moses.

 Aaron and Moses both were carrying the Cohen gene, identifying their Y dna haplogroup as J1.  This should be traced back to their father, Amram, and his father, Kohath, and then Levi, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, Terah, Nahor, Serug, Reu, Peleg, Eber, Shelah, Arpachahad, Shem, and finally-Noah himself.

Therefore, Aaron and Moses were both from the tribe of Levi.  Their ancestor was Jacob, who had 12 sons and Levi was one of them.  Jacob fathered these twelve through 2 wives, Leah and her sister, Rachel.  Each wife had a handmaiden who also bore Jacob sons.  They were Reuben, Simon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun, sons of Leah; Gad and Asher, sons of Ziphah the handmaiden, Dan and Naphtali, sons of Bilhah, handmaiden,  and Joseph and Benjamin, sons of Rachel.   Joseph became the Vizier of the Pharaoh of Egypt and did not need to receive a portion of land, so Jacob gave his share to Joseph's 2 sons, Manasseh, who was Joseph's first son by Asenath, and Ephraim.    According to DNA, all 12 of these tribal fathers should be carrying the J1 Cohen gene for their haplogroup.

The 12 tribal fathers went into Egypt at a time of famine in Canaan and didn't come out till 400 years later.  They had become very numerous and this caused them to be taken as slaves and kept until Moses was 80 years old and freed them by marching back to Canaan for 40 years where they established themselves again as their ancestor, Jacob,  had lived there.

All these people had been followers of one g-d, the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  This distinguished them from other people of the period.  They were also distinguished by circumcision, started by Abraham  whose tradition was to do this to their male children at the age of 8 days.  Two other sons of the group, Ishmael, first son of Abraham  and Esau, son of Isaac and twin brother of Jacob,  also carried on this tradition of circumcision, but  at the age of 13 years.  They had not followed their fathers but had parted from them to go their separate way.

Moses, son of Jochebed, daughter of Levi,  and Kohath, also a son of Levi, whose son, Amram, was the father of Moses,  wrote the first 5 books of the Bible on his 40 year journey.  Having been born in Egypt to slaves, he had been found in the bulrushes and adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh, so was raised as a prince and was well educated.  He could read and write among other skills.  So he is credited with writing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  He established the Mosaic Law and caused the men to be divided into Cohens who were direct descendants of Aaron, Levites for other direct descendants and the others who were to be called Israelites, for that is what Abraham's people were called when they came to the city of Ur, which happens to be in modern day Iraq.

Today many researchers feel that these were the Hyksos that had been ruling Egypt and that the Exodus itself happened in 1500 BCE.  We know that Abraham's Israelites came from the East.  Cohen meant "Priest."  His role was as the chosen holy instrument to mediate between man and G-d.  Originally it seems that every Israelite family head was consecrated to serve as priest with the first-born son who was regarded as the inheritor of his father's house, a position of great power.  This was maintained until after the Exodus when the first-born became suspect as a result of the Golden Calf incident.  The tribe of Levi was selected in their stead.  Most of the Levites were then employed in work connected with the Tabernacle where the family of Aaron became the actual priests responsible for sacrifices, the supervision of hygienic purity, and instructing the people in the Mosaic Law.  The High Priest or Cohen was also responsible for divination through the Urim and Thummim.  The tribe of Levi was excluded from having their own territory and they made their livelihood from contributions of tithing from the others.  The priest received 1/10th of the Levites' tithe and also a portion of the sacrifices offered.  The priesthood was hereditary and they were subject to strict laws regarding contamination by corpses and the choice of a wife.  They wore distinctive clothing in prayer.  To make sure they didn't all live in one area, but were dispersed throughout the territory, special cities were assigned to them in the territories of the other various tribes.  These laws were written down before they ever took Canaan, and evolved differently when the Israelites settled on the land. Knowing you were a Cohen was handed down orally to the children in the family.

The Levites were to be the teachers and helpers of the Cohens.  It also is a hereditary position, as the Cohens are also.  Each family of Levites was assigned specific duties connected with the transport and assembly of the parts of the Tabernacle in the wilderness which was later transferred to duties in the Temple.  After the conquest of Canaan, the Levites were to teach the Torah to the people..  They received 48 towns they were to work in to cover all the territory, so they were traveling teachers.   Sometimes this didn't always go according to plan.  Ezekiel replaced the non-Jewish Nethinim with the Levite in his Utopian Temple plan but this never came about.  The Temple service was organized by King David and the Levites were divided into groups, each doing some different  job such as singers, instrumentalists, gatekeepers, assistants to the priests during the sacrifice, etc.  Every group was divided into 24 sections, each serving for a week at a time.  During the 2nd Temple period, the priests outnumbered the Levites and shared their tithe.  The Levites were also to wash the priest's hands before the priests blessed the people.

We have the 3 distinct roles today, and we see it in the synagogues.  The Cohens are first to read from the Torah on Shabbat, the Levites are next, and then any Israelites may read to the congregation. There is also a time when the Levites are to wash the feet of the Cohen.   Today we find that half of today's Cohens in the synagogue have the haplogroup of J1c3 or (J-P58), as the geneticists call it.  15% of the Cohens today belong to the haplogroup of J2a.  This goes back a good 3,200 years to 4,200 years ago to Aaron or to his descendants who have morphed into J2 from J1.  Ydna does mutate, and this could be what has happened to show a slight variation.  That takes care of 65% of the Cohens who have actually descended from Aaron, proven through DNA testing.

The Assyrians attacked the 12 tribes in 721 BCE and took away most all of 10 of the tribes.  Knowing that the Exodus occurred in 1500 BCE, that means that these tribes had been living on land originally called Canaan for about 800 years already.  What tribes remained were Judah, who had about 76,500 members and was the largest and strongest of the 12 tribes.  Some Benjamites remained with them.   Benjamin was the youngest son of Jacob and one of the smallest tribes with about 45,600 in it.

Because the tribe of Judah was the main tribe remaining, many of them were also taken as slaves when the Babylonians attacked the weakened state in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE and carried them to Babylonia where they met up with many former tribal relatives as well.  We find that others had become scattered throughout the Middle East.  Finally, Cyrus, king of Persia (Iran) conquered the Babylonians which included Judah and Israel's land.  In 538 BCE  he granted permission to the exiles of Judah living in Babylon to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple.  They thought of him as a Divine agent.  Most did return and rebuild.  So we find that from a huge amount of people  numbering at least 603,500, the Jews, as they are now called from the name of the tribe of Judah, have been narrowed down to a few remaining ones, and in DNA language, this has produced a bottleneck population.  What holds them all together?  They all still share the belief in one G-d.  They have not adopted the belief of the Assyrians or Babylonians of multiple gods.  They all follow the Mosaic Law as laid down by Moses back in 1271 BCE, 733 years previously.

After settling again the Romans arose in power and attacked Jerusalem, the capital of Judah and home of the 2nd Temple and burned both down in 70 CE.  This caused another dispersion of the people.  This time, some stayed in nearby cities and became known as the Mizrachim Jews.  Mizrachi was the name of Egypt.  Some went to nearby Rome as slaves, and then managed to be taken to France and Germany.  They became known as the Ashkenazim Jews because their language, Hebrew, also added a lot of German words to it.  Some managed to get to Spain, and became known as the Sephardi Jews, Sephard being the Hebrew word for Spain. They spoke Hebrew with a lot of Spanish words added.   They also were driven to Portugal later.  So we developed 3 different groups of Jews speaking Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic with Hebrew added.  Each group kept the divisions of Cohen, Levites and Israelites within the religious structure.  Usually we add the Mizrachim to the Sephardim Jews and make it only 2 different groups that have been geographically divided, but not in religion.  We find that 40% of the Sephardim Jews belong to haplogroup J1, the Cohen gene.  Also, we find that some Arabs carry the Cohen gene.  So we find that 35-43% of all Jewish men belong to the J haplogroup and its sub haplogroups.

Ashkenazim share the same DNA with their Middle Eastern brothers.  As a rule they do not share much dna with their non-Jewish population of Europe.  You must remember that Judaism caused them to not mix with others.  Eating would require that they eat with their own group as they kept kosher.  That meant that they wouldn't eat the same foods.  Meat had to  be specially prepared and the animal had to be killed in a certain manner with certain prayers.  Meat and milk were not eaten in the same meal together.  There were these differences that Christianity found deplorable and why they didn't want to follow the Mosaic Law in the first place, so both parties, Jews and non-Jews, did not get it on, as they say, except in rare cases where there were no women to be had.  Then they would have been taught all about Judaism to be proper mothers, because later on the fact that you were a Jew or not was decided if the mother was Jewish or not.  We find that the men remained as the same group as their ancestors with Ashkenazim.  It was with the women that you can find more interbreeding and mixing of mt dna than you will find with Sephardim.  .

Ashkenazim also took in Khazaria's Jews.  Khazaria, situated on the Silk Road, was a nation that was almost like a 2nd Jewish state.  The Bulan or King converted to Judaism and so did his royal house.  Others could choose it or not.  They were free.  Khazaria, a state that was part of southern Russia, existed in the 7th-8th century.  They may account for the R1b found among Jewish Ashkenazim.  Since when the state became part of Russia and many of the Jewish people joined up with others in eastern Europe, many Ashkenazim probably carry some genes of theirs as well.

Today, Israel has 8,012,400 people.  They started with 650,000 in May 1948 when they announced their acceptance as a state by the UN after the big vote. The 12 tribes numbered 603,500 at their highest count.   Only 6,037,700 are Jewish, or 75.4%.  The state of Israel was created as a refuge for Jews.Out of the Jewish population of some 6 million, 2,921,000 are Sephardim and Mizrachim.  They make up 50.2% of the Jewish population of Israel.  Ashkenazim number 2,767,000 or 47.5% of Israel's Jewish population.

70% to 82% of all the Jews share the same DNA haplogroups with Arabs.  The last few thousand years show they have been sharing from the same chromosome pool.  The current Cohens descended from a small number of paternal ancestors.  The estimates of the coalescence time ( united into one time period ) also lends support to the hypothesis that the extended CMH ( Cohen Modal Haplotype) represents a unique founding lineage of the ancient Hebrews that has been paternally inherited along with the Jewish priesthood.

  Jews  have been treated badly for the entire length of time since 70 CE and 6 million were killed by Hitler's Nazis in WWII.  The beautiful thing about establishing Israel again is that it has brought the 3 branches of Jewish people back together.  Today we see the intermarriage taking place between them.  Though having to defend Israel from the very beginning is terrible, but  the Army service has also meshed the three  groups together as one.  It has turned both men and women into warriors.

Work has been going on to find the Lost 10 Tribes, and many have been added to the fold and brought back to Israel after the almost 3,000 years of being apart from each other.  This is probably the most exciting and uplifting project going on.  To find people who still maintain some quality of their long lost brethren and their faith brings joy to all our hearts.   The beauty is that they have wanted to return.  They have wanted to be a part of today's in-gathering.

Carrying the burden of only accepting the one G-d has been difficult on Jewish population numbers as they haven't followed the crowd in their religious belief but have maintained their covenant to follow the Laws of Moses.  Jews make up only 0.02% of the world population.    We haven't been exterminated yet.  Yes, we are up against another bottleneck, and pray to continue to live. What's been important to us in our religion has been what responsibilities  we have.  Are we Cohens, Levites or Israelites?  Not what haplogroup we happen to be a part of.  We are just learning that beautiful fact today, anyway.  We are happily surprised to see that we have done so well, considering we started over 4,000 years ago by accepting G-d's  Covenant.  Much has happened to us since then.  Just ask the population geneticists  and historians.  Am Yisrael Chi, the people of Israel live.

Resource:  http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/03/jacobs-twelve-tribes-of-israel-and-how.html
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/03/from-abraham-back-to-noah-and-our.html
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/cohanim-dna-connection/  Excellent, please read this.
http://www.familytreedna.com/public/dominicansephardim/default.aspx?section=results  update 11/3/13
http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-other-y-and-mt-dna-haplogroups-were.html update: 11/3/13
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjHkk6Xbls  VIDEO  -Excellent
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Tanach, the Stone Edition (Bible)-5 books of Moses and more

Jews That Never Left Israel and Judah

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                   

                                              Old Jerusalem Walls Near Tower of David
                                         
"Sephardim Jews are among the descendants of the line of Jews who chose to return and rebuild Israel after the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian Empire.  About half a millennium later, the Roman Empire conquered ancient Israel for the second time, massacring most of the nation and taking the bulk of the remainder as slaves to Rome. Once the Roman Empire crumbled, descendants of these captives migrated throughout the European continent. Many settled in  Spain (Sepharadi) and Portugal,  where they thrived until the Spanish Inquisition  and Expulsion of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition and Expulsion shortly thereafter.  Others went onto Germany and then on up into Eastern Europe.  Because of their initial contact in Germany and France, they are called the Ashkenazim Jews.  

A misnomer is that Zionism started with Jews living in Europe (Ashkenazi Jews).  The facts are that there were Jews that have always remained in the “Holy Land,” even after 70 CE when Rome destroyed Jerusalem. They were the first to be "Zionists."   Life was not easy for them and in later centuries many came to depend on donations from abroad, but they had remained; remained, prayed and suffered through the centuries waiting for their brothers to return.  .

Those Jews living nearby in Arab countries yearned every day to return to their own land.  When World War I was over in 1918, nearly half of the total Jewish population in Jerusalem were Sephardic Jews–Jews of the Middle East which are often referred to as Mizrachi Jews. Sephardis has become the overall blanket term.

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing from Arab persecution also poured into Israel who also had desired to be back in their country.  Arabs had taken over Rome’s position in a conquest of the Holy Land, but had not settled there.  They had their own well developed lands.

Before Islam came into being in 600 CE, the Sabaeans and the Nabataens,  traders with caravans,  came through into area from Arabia.  Greeks came along and pushed them out of the way in the 1st century CE. In 438 CE, the Jews from Galilee were elated when the Empress Eudocia allowed them to pray again at their holy temple site.  They thought this was the end of the exile of their people.

 The Roman Empire (70-395), who had taken Jerusalem in 70 CE were replaced by the Byzantium Empire (395-636) with Constantinople being their capital.  This was Eastern Orthodox Christianity and they spoke Greek.  Then the Sasanid Iranians, another warring empire took the front page in history.  And so it went.  Islam came into being in 600 CE.  It was in 614 CE  that Jews fought along with the Persian invaders of Palestine and overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem.  They controlled the city for 5 years.  and then the Arabs conquered the land 2 decades later and  the Umayyad Dynasty followed by the Abbasid Empire.  Finally the Ottoman Empire appeared in the 1400's and they owned the property until World War I ended.

The Jews had suffered 3 centuries of Christian intolerance of which violence had been practiced spasmodically during half of that period.  This is when Jews welcomed with lots of hope in their hearts, the Arab conquerors.

Muslim Arabs (636-1072) entering 7th century Jerusalem found a strong Jewish identity.  They found that Jews lived in all parts of the country and on both sides of the Jordan.  They lived in both the towns and the villages as farmers and making many types of handicrafts.  Many lived in Lydda and Ramle-cities Arabs of today think of as Arab towns.  Other larger communities they lived in were Ascalon (Ashkelon today) , Caesarea and Gaza which was their capital when they couldn't get into Jerusalem.  Jericho was home to many Jews.  When Islam was introduced to the world, some Jews became 7th century Jewish refugees escaping from  Khaibar in Arabia.

 Khaibar had been a thriving Jewish community to the north of Mecca and Medina.  They faced death if they did not convert and had to defend their forts and mansions with their heroism as the Prophet Muhammad had "visited upon his beaten enemy inhuman atrocities," by the mass massacre of men, women and children.  What he did was completely exterminate  2 Arabian Jewish tribes.  He did this to Jews who had lived there for centuries living in freedom, peace, labor and trade and now they had been  treated as slaves and  degraded.  They had to see their wives and daughters given out among the Arab men and carried away by these conquerors.  He did this to a people who at  times of famine, would give Arabs who came to them  fruit and water and help them out.  So these Jews that survived struggled back to their Homeland.  When asked later in 1968 at an Arab theologian conference about this detestable act,  a speaker defended it by saying that Mohammad said while dying, "Never do 2 religions exist in Arabia."   He had purified Arabia from Jews.

All this time, it was a struggle for the Jews in the land to survive under these oppressive powers.  The Arabs treated Jews in the Middle East lands as dhimmis or 3rd class people who lived under a lesser quality of life due to the Arab laws.  They also prayed for their return to their homeland.  It was equally desired in both camps; Ashkenazis of Europe and Sephardis of the Middle East.  Both groups had been one in 70 CE when they parted, and both practiced the same religion and did the same things.  There are 2 great compilations of thought on the Five Books of Moses and its Jewish Law.  .  One was the was the Palestinian  or Jerusalem Talmud written before 400 CE..  About 200 years later the Babylonian Talmud  was written before 500 CE  in Iraq with about 2 1/2 million words and more than 3 times as long as the Palestinian Talmud    Each one consists of the Mishnah together with a gemara which is both a commentary on and a supplement to the Mishnah.  Both Talmuds also contain non-legal or aggadic digressions. Ashkenazis were able to study both, though the Babylonian Talmud was much better and longer.

The fact remains that we have had an unceasing strain of “Oriental” or “Palestinian” Jews in “Palestine” for millennia” who hadn’t left.  They were able to stay and hold down the fort in spite of every discouragement.  Jews had not abandoned the land physically, nor did they ever renounce their claim to to their nation.  Their claim to the land is the only continuous claim that exists.  Even though successive conquerors had devastated the Jewish organization structure they once had, the Jews never submitted to assimilation into the various victorious populations even after being devastated.  "Many Jewish scholars living in Roman-controlled Syria Palaestina moved to Persia to escape the harsh decrees against Jews enacted by the emperor Hadrian  after Bar Kokhba's revolt of 132-135.   The remaining scholars who lived in the Galilee area decided to continue their teaching activity in the learning centers that had existed since Mishnaic times".

"Jews arrived in central Europe following the crisis of the 7th century in Byzantine Palestine around the time of Muslim conquest.   Jews probably began settling along the Rhine in Germany, from  Alsace in the south to the Rhineland in the north, during the early Middle Ages."  They were then known as the Ashkenazi Jews.  It's probable that some Jews got to Germany from Rome where they were taken as slaves.  They could have even been sold to Romans going to Germany's Rhineland where the Romans had also conquered.  In their Roman period,  Jewish soldiers were found to be in Roman garrisons there, so slaves had to become soldiers.   In 321 CE, the emperor Constantine issued regulations in Cologne where Jews had settled on the Rhineland.   

It’s like studying the case of twins who have been separated at birth.  The development of Judaism in both camps appear to be exactly alike, and being they were one people originally, this is not surprising at all.  They both had the same education. They were a people separated by a situation facing exile from their homeland.  They had scattered.

The Crusaders ruled from 1099-1291 calling the land the Kingdom of Jerusalem.  Mamluks ruled from 1291 to 1516.  Jews were killed along with Arabs as the Crusaders couldn't tell the difference.  They all looked the same.  Crusaders massacred Jews throughout the Rhineland and nearby areas.  1298 saw many massacres of Jews in Germany and again in 1336 and 1348 when Jews were accused of creating the Black Death.

  In the 1400's many returned to Safed, the city I chose to live in when I made aliyah in 1980.  . Others came later  escaping the Spanish Inquisition.   Safed  was the going capital of Jewish learning and held many Yeshivahs founded by different rabbis where Jews came to study and learn.  Throughout time, Ashkenazis did try and some made it back to the Homeland and were more successful in the late 1880's with the first Aliyah.

Under Turkish rule of the Ottoman Empire (1516-1917)  the Jews in Jerusalem and in Gaza maintained cultural and spiritual unity and Sultan Suleiman I allowed many Jews to return to the Holy Land.  In 1561 Suleiman gave Tiberias, one of the Jewish 4 holy cities, to a "secret Jew," from Portugal, Don Joseph Nasi, who rebuilt the city and the villages around it.  this attracted Jewish people to come and live there from any areas of the Mediterranean.

The post-Roman Christians had turned around and caused physical violence on Jews and pagans alike.  Despite their cruelty, more then 40 Jewish communities survived and could be traced in the 6th century.  They were 12 towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan which was land that was part of the Palestine mandate that Britain held in 1922.  This land had been dubbed "Transjordan then and was declared the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.  He had just taken it and seemed to get away with it.  The Jews were also living in 31 villages in the Galilee and in the Jordan Valley at that time.

On May 14, 1948, we had 650,000 Jews living in Israel and 126,000 Arabs.   Today we have 6 million Jews, the same number we lost in the Holocaust.  In the 24 years since this date, entire Jewish communities from Arab countries have made aliyah to Israel.  Out of Iraq came 121,000 out of the 130,000.  Out of Yemen came 44,000 of their 45,000.  Out of Libya came 30,500 out of their 35,000.    Moroccan, Tunisian, Poland and other countries   had 165,000 Jews return between 1955-1957.  It wasn't until 1994 that the last Syrian Jews were able to get to Israel being they were held like prisoners.  

Resource:From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
 The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Text: Middle East Past and Present by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mejews.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Talmud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

What Genetics Tells Us About Our Ashkenazi Origins

Nadene Goldfoot                                                           

Ashkenazi Jews (from Europe) came originally from Israel and Judea according to historic evidence.    What do DNA studies tell us about our origins?  Arthur Koestler (b: September 5, 1905 in Budapest, d: March 1, 1983) , who wrote the Thirteenth Tribe back in 1976 thought Ashkenazi Jews all came from Khazaria, a southern part of Russia.  He belonged to the Communist Party in Germany and resigned in 1938.  He is also known for his book, "Darkness at Noon", and died of suicide in 1983.  His wife was Jewish but he wasn't.  We learn that in Khazaria, the kagan or king had converted to Judaism and his royal house followed suit.  This happened in about the 7th century CE.  Koestler's book is used against Jews in that he diminishes the fact that Ashkenazim also came from the Middle East and were descendants of Abraham just like the Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews were.  Today some Muslims are trying to use this as reason for Israelis not to be in Israel and that they should all leave since about half the population of Israel is of Ashkenazi descent.

Jews have long felt that their creative zeal comes from living in their own land of Israel and certainly holds to be true.  Many inventions have been rolling out of Israel, much of it being in the medical technologies benefiting all of mankind.  The philosopher Ahad Ha'am (1856-1927) maintained that Jewish cultural creativity would come about when we were speaking our own language and being masters of their own fate in our own land.

We have historic  evidence that Jews settled in many countries outside of  Israel and Judah before 70 CE, but certainly afterwards.  Slaves are bought and sold.  That's what the Jews had become.  They were taken to the many parts of the Roman Empire.

Population geneticists find through the Y chromosome haplotypes of males which show that ancestors of Ashkanazi Jews were Judeans or Israelites and show some European ancestry among them as well and some apparent central Asian and east Asian elements.

A paper published in 2000 by Harry Ostrer and Michael Hamamer, PhD's, showed that Ashkenazis, Italians, North Africans, Iraqi, Iranian, Kurdish and Yemenite Jews often share common Y-DNA haplotypes that are also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.  Only a small % of Jews Ydna originated outside of the Middle East.  The conclusion was that Jews hadn't intermarried with non-Judeans including converts to Judaism outside of the mother country of Judah.  They saw the close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and Italian Jews concluding that the main ancestors of Ashkenazis were the ancient Jews of Rome.  That goes along with the history I had found about the scattering of Jews after 70 CE when Jerusalem was taken by the Romans and the Jews became slaves and were carted away, leaving just  Jews  that could not be rounded up.

Scientists see that Jews from Europe, NW Africa and the Near East look like each other more than they look like their gentile neighbors in Europe.

Now we'll look at the mtDNA carried by both men and women.  There we find results showing the same conclusions as the Ydna except that with the mtDNA, there was a larger degree of European ancestry along with some central Asian and east Asian elements.  There are basically 7 major haplogroups of mtDNA with just a few additional ones found, such as my grandmother's mtDNA (W).  mtDNA  does not mutate as quickly as Ydna.   While Jewish men, wherever they were, remained Jewish, they traveled a lot.  They became traders or peddlers going into unchartered places.  They would then take the native women for their wives.  When they created a stable environment with the women learning about Judaism,  they then considered both parties to be Jewish bearing Jewish children.  So the mtDNA would have picked up more DNA from outside sources.  African mtDNA was not very prevalent among modern Jewish populations.

In 2002's mtDNA study, the Bene Israel of India were very close to 2 mtDNA hapalotypes of Indian people and Ethiopian Jews whose mtDNA matches Ethiopians and Somalians.  A portion of the mtDNA comes from non-Jewish peoples where they had lived.  This also goes in testing Georgian Jews and Ashnkenazic Jews.  It goes to prove that men picked up their women where they were traveling.  The Ydna is usually Judean.  This is why Jews might resemble their neighbors more.  A 2004 study found the most prevalent mtDNA haplogroups among Ashkenazim are K with 32%, H with 21%, N1b with 10%, and J1 with 7%.  K is found in small numbers in Europe and the Middle East. N1b is Middle Eastern origin. K is a subbranch of U believed to have first appeared in the early stages of the Holocene Epoch when populations expanded into Europe after the last glacial maximum.  About 1/3 of people with Ashkenazi ancestry carry a subclade of this haplogroup.  Bryan Sykes calls K, Katrine with fair hair and greenish brown eyes and her clan flourished in northern Italy and beyond.  One of her descendants was "The Iceman."  Today, 6% of native Europeans are K's.  It is still frequent around the Mediterranean with descendants today all over Europe.  W was found in the western Ural Mountains and the eastern Baltic area, though it is also found in India.  My W paternal grandmother came from Poland/Lithuania in the Suwalki area and said she was a Litvak.  She was very short with black curly hair and brown eyes.

A January 2006 study by Doron Behar informed us that about 40% of Ashkenazic Jews descend from the mtDNA of one of 4 women.  One of the 4 women is also found genetically in some non-Jews in the Middle East.  I might add that we have had Assyrians and Babylonians steal our people from Israel in the past.  If they weren't eaten or slaved to death, their descendants would be today's Muslims in the Middle East.

 In one 2000 study, the only  Slavic population tested were Russians.  The only Turkic population tested were Anatolian Turks.  The Medieval empire of Khazaria would need people tested today from Turkics found in tribes from north Caucasus and central Asia.  That has yet to be done.  I note that my own line of Ydna is Q1b1a, said to originate from Siberia, Mongolia and parts of Turkey about 24,000 years ago. Give a group 20,000 years, and they can migrate pretty far for many reasons.  That's what they must have done to wind up in Lithuania and be my family line.

In a 2001 study of Y-dna of 79 Jews, the Kurds were included along with Arabs. Comparisons  were made with data from Slavic Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians, people who lived in the Pale of Settlement.  That was an area of 25 provinces set off for Jews to live in  starting in 1791 as they weren't allowed into Russia during Catherine II's reign.  By 1882 the May Laws were established keeping Jews out of rural areas.  The Pale didn't end until August of 1915 and legally until March 1917, the end of WWI.  In the early 1900's thousands of Jews immigrated to the USA including my Jewish Lithuanian grandfather with his Q1b1a genes.  Others immigrated to "Palestine" or England.  The scientists wrote that Kurdish and Sephardic (Spain, Portugal) Jews were indistinguishable from one another.  Both differed slightly but significantly from Ashkenazi Jews.  There had been a separation of the people for almost 2,000 years starting in 70 CE or even longer.  Babylonian Jews, kidnapped by Babylonia in 597 and 586 BCE were taken to Persia where we find Queen Esther and many Jews.  That would up the chances if their descendants were today's Sephardis.  The scientists explained the happening as "low-level gen flow from the European population and or genetic drift during isolation"...

Jews were more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent such as Kurds, Anatolian Turks and Armenians than to their Arab neighbors.  They identified haplogroup R1a1 as a European marker found in substantial frequencies among Hungarian, Sorbs, Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians and less often among Macedonians, Udmurts (tribe in Russia), and Turkic Chuvashes along with some Kurds and Bedouins.  I might add that a recent DNA test on King Tut of Egypt surprised us all with a result of R1...My own son, whose father was from England is R1b1a2, non Jewish and is 1 point off of being the Atlantic Model Haplotype.  25% of his genes are from Jewish sources and according to Jewish law, having a Jewish mother makes him Jewish as well.  .  The report found 12.7% of Ashkenazic men studied showed R1a may be due to intermarriage with Khazars or eastern Europeans.  I believe they shouldn't ignore the possibilities of picking those up in Great Britain as well.  It's full of R1b's.  My mother's gentile father was R1b1a2a1a1b4.  Jews were in Britain sometime after 70 CE but were all expelled in 1290 CE.  Where did they go?  Possibly Germany or eastern Europe.

In 2005 a study by the same researchers studied 495 Ashkenazic men and R1a1 was found in 11.5% of them.  Kurds were among the closest paternal relatives of Jews.  Both Ashkenazic and Mizrakhi Jews (Egypt)  and Muslim Kurds shared several haplotypes and chromosomes more than Jews and Palestinian Arabs shared.  The mountains of  Turkey, Iran and Iraq have been home to the Kurds.  Our tradition says that the first Jewish settlers went to Kurdistan in the time of Ezra. in the 5th Century BCE. (400 BCE).  Ezra worked for the Persian government.  In 458 BCE he went to Jerusalem.  Jews had been in exile from Jerusalem.  Today's Kurds are Muslims.  This is the group that Iraq's Saddam Hussein killed by gas.  Jews also have a similar relationship with Armenians and Anatolian Turks.

My own study  in 2011 of a 90 year old Ashkenazi Jew in Portland who was a Cohen in the synagogue turns out to be a Cohen by Ydna as well.  His Ydna test was J1c3d, the Cohen gene.  His haplogroup is the same as an Iraqi Muslim with a branch on the Arab showing that connection.  The Cohen gene is found among 45% of Ashkenazic Kohens and 56% of Sephardic Kohens.  It is found in only 3-5% of non Kohen Jewish men from Ashkenazic and Sephardic branches and in the Bene Israel Jews of India.  All Kohens are descendants of the Israelite high priest Aaron, brother of Moses.

The Lembas in South Africa claim Jewish heritage and are thrilled to have it show up in their genes.  Italians in central and southern Italy carry it which is no surprise.  Kurds in Iraq, Armenians, Palestinian Arabs and Hungarians in Budapest also are J1's.  4 out of 5 Samaritans from Israel and Palestine are very closely related to J1 which shows they are descended paternally from the original Israelites.  Jews are either Cohens, Levites or Israelites.  Now, Levites are supposed to be from the tribe of Levi and should have the same DNA as Abraham and Moses.  They are the assistant priests  and 2nd to read the Torah after the Cohens.

52% of Ashkenazic Levites were R1a1.  It is found that 11% of Sorbs have the same dna and 8.5% of Belarusians.  Have the scientists also considered that we lost some Jews to conversion along the way?  Sephardic Levites do not have this dna.  Whoever the founder of R1a1 was probably lived around the year 1,000-1,014 after the separation of Sepharim and Ashkenazim in 70 CE.  Due to so many attacks on Jews, the Jews may have had to take another person  to fill this role.  A few Jews are R1a which is not the same thing as R1a1.  P-M45 Ydna  is found in people of central Siberia and central Asia like the Uzbeks.  5.2% of Ashkenazic men have the Q-P36 haplogroup of Q1b1a.  It's my grandfather's haplogroup.  American Indians are also Q's from farther back.  We broke off from them.  At first it was thought to be of Khazar origin but today it's thought that Hungarians are more likely.

Resource: Robert Gabel, here is the R1a project with all haplotypes assigned to the subclades: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/R1a/default.aspx?section=yresults
The Jews of Khazaria 2nd Edition by Kevin Alan Brook
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_people
The New Jewish Encyclopedia
The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koeestler
Abraham's Children by Jon Entine
The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes
http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2010/01/jewish-genes-what-haplogroup-could-they.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews and How They Came To Be

Nadene Goldfoot
Long ago there were two Jewish kingdoms; Israel and Judah. They came about when King Solomon died in 920 BCE. . The land was divided in half. Israel, in the north, sometimes called the kingdom of Samaria, was led in 933 BCE by King Jeroboam. It was ruled by King Hoshea who reigned from 730-721 BCE. Judah, also created in 933 BCE, and was led by King Rehoboam and later King Zedekiah from 597-586 BCE. Jerusalem was in Judah.

When Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 CE, many of the best of the men were
taken away as slaves, and others stayed, but finally many were dispersed as well. Those that remained in
 the area became known as Mizrahi (East) Jews. The term, Mizrahi, is used in Israel today to denote Jews from mostly Arab-ruled places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Iran/Persia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kurdish areas, India, parts of Sudan and Ethiopia.

Jews that are called Sephardi are from Morocco, Algeria and Turkey though might be grouped into the Mizrahi lists for some historical reasons. Very often Sephardi includes the Mizrahi Jews as well. We connect Sephardi with Spanish as many lived in Spain. They speak Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish.

The Judaism of both groups are generally identical . In Israel, Mizrahi are under the view of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, who usually is a Mizrahi Jew.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and establishment of Israel May 14, 1948, Most Mizrahi Jews numbering 900,000 were either expelled from their Arab countries or chose to leave and emigrated to Israel. About half of Israeli Jews are of Mizrahi origin.

Jews living in the northern regions called themselves  Ashkenazi Jews. Being the main centers of Jewish learning were in Germany, those Jews in Western and Central Europe also came to be called Ashkenazi. Yiddish that they speak is a mixture of Hebrew and German.

Many later migrated eastward Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and other places between the 11th and 19th centuries.

In the 11th century they were only 3% of the world’s Jewish population. By 1931, they made up 92% of the world’s Jews. Today they are 80% of the Jews in the world. Jews who migrated from Europe to other continents in the past two centuries are Ashkenazim, mainly Eastern Ashkenazim.

For the past 1,000 years, the Ashkenazim were isolated reproductively in Europe. There was little conversion or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Since the middle of the 20th century, intermarriage has occurred. Conversion to Judaism has been rare for nearly 2,000 years, has become more common.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews