Ashkenazi Jews of Today Are 30th Cousins

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                  

Rabbi Solomon Yitzhaki (1040-1105) born in Troyes, France, Studied in Rhineland (Germany)in Worms.  He is better known as RASHI, the great biblical scholar and commentator.  

       I have some chromosomes I share with either Rabbi Samson Wertheimer (January 17, 1658-August 6, 1724)  or his brother, Moshe.  Samson was the chief rabbi of Hungary and Moravia and a rabbi of Eisenstadt.  He was also an Austrain financier, court Jew and Shtadlan to the Austrian Emperor, Leopold I.  He was born in Worms, Germany, the son of Joseph Josel Wertheimer (1626-Maya 2, 1713) and was educated in the Yeshiva at Worms and also at Frankfurt am Main, in Germany.  I'm Ashkenazi Jewish as my grandfather lived in Telsiai, Lithuania.  These brothers are descendants of Rashi.

The Jewish Press newspaper told of a study about Ashkenazi Jews authored by Shai Carmi at Columbia U and medical researchers whose genes were compared with non-Jewish Europeans and found unique genetic markers of the Ashkenazim.  Itaik Pe'er concluded that everyone of Ashkenazi Jews is at least a 30th cousin.
We can trace our ancestry to a "bottleneck" of just 350 Jews dating back about 600 to 800 years ago.  Another study had taken us to only 4 females from another bottleneck.  Bottlenecks are when a whole community is killed and only a few are left in which our genes generate from.  It shows we've lost a lot of potential genes from other who were not able to produce offspring.

800 years ago brings us to the year 1214; the Middle Ages.  to 1414.  What happened between these years? From 1146 to 1391 the Jews of Spain were forcibly converted to Christianity.  Many kept the faith and became Marranos or hidden Jews, now called Anusim who have recently gone back to Judaism.  The big bang for Spanish Jews came in 1492 with the edict to convert, leave, or remain Jewish and die.   For starters, the Jewish community in Jerusalem was massacred by the Crusaders in 1099.  This wasn't a good sign, but showed others that our lives didn't matter to them.  So, by 1290, England threw all of the Jews out for the next 400 years.  Jews were thrown out of France in 1306.  In Toledo, Spain, 12,000 Jews were massacred by their mob in 1355.  Jews were thrown out of Hungary from 1349 to 1360.

Resource: The Jewish Press, Friday, September 19, 2014,  page 54, International News, Study:  Ashkenazi Jews share Close Genetic Ties, Week in Review page edited by Jason Maoz.
http://israel-nadene.blogspot.com/2014/08/jews-living-in-judea-samaria-and-other.html  Timeline of Jews

Jews Persecuted With Rockets and Missiles Today

Nadene Goldfoot
While we Jews are enjoying our morning coffees and plans for the day safely in the United States, we have cousins living in southern Israel who face rockets and missiles interrupting theirs.  During the past two months 145 rockets and missiles have been aimed and have fallen into southern Israel.  One would be enough to ruin my whole month if not the next five years!  Roughly that means 72 fell in one week or 10 a day!  When does one have time to do anything!   PTSD is becoming prevalent among the children.  It's no wonder.

When the bloodcurdling siren goes off, people have less than 15 seconds to run quickly to a bomb shelter if one has such a luxury.  the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) ,with Rabbi Eckstein's plea,  has donated Fellowship bomb shelters to many places and is taking donations.  Israel hasn't been able to get this done through the state to all places and needs help in this.

I remember living in Israel from 1980 till almost 1986 in Haifa and Tzfat and living in a government apartment building on David Eleazar Street of many stories high that had a bomb shelter in it.  My German shepherd wasn't allowed entrance, though.  Most all buildings were built this way.  I lived on the very bottom floor and had metal bars over the windows in case of terrorists trying to break in.  The apartment came like this.

When I say cousin, I am not theorizing.  In DNA studies, we're finding that we Jews might have a common ancestor if we go back about 5 generations with the same person we are married to if that person is also Jewish.  We're one big family!  Besides these close cousins, I personally am finding a few distant cousins from way back that are from Pakistan and Afghanistan and even Saudi Arabia as well! Finding that we are on the same haplogroup or of the same haplotype (twig off the same branch of the tree of man) is pretty exciting.   That certainly gives me a new perspective on our relatives.  Our extended family is growing!

Now, if we could just convince our neighbors to stop using those living in southern Israel as target practice and converse like our group does in talking about our DNA, life would be much cheerier.

Research: http://www.ifcj.org/site/PageNavigator/eng/USENG_homenew