Sunday, June 21, 2009
Continually Discovering My Roots through DNA
by Nadene Goldfoot
Edited again 10/5/2012
Q1b1's haplogroup make up 5% of the entire Jewish population which amounts to about 1% or less of the world population, so I’m in a very small group of people. Through DNA at familytreedna in Houston, I’ve discovered my roots go back thousands of years to one man from the Altay Mountains in Mongolia, Siberia and a little of Turkey. This was done by testing my brother for our grandfather’s origins, and is only done with the male, called a Ydna test. Besides my brother, I had found a 2nd cousin of Stanley Goldfoot, another Goldfoot, thank goodness, working right in Houston, Texas having immigrated there from South Africa. I had already met Stanley in Jerusalem when I lived in Israel from 1980-1985. Stanley turned out to be the former Chief of Intelligence for the Stern Group, a fighting group of Jews helping Israel to become a state. Both my brother and the 2nd cousin were tested and both were found to be Q1b’s, or Q1b1a or Q L245, so I’ve known we are related, but lacked a paper trail.
At first we thought we were of the Khazarian Jews. The Chinese held the records of Khazarian Jews. . The Ashina Turkic people were acting more as a noble or royal line which played the role of a political entity unifying various Turkic speaking tribes. It was also known as a Desert aristocracy and it was a ruling class of a number of central Asian empires, and eventually it became the ruling class or nobility known as khagans or emperors of the Khazarian Khaganate in the early middle ages in the year 656 AD after the collapse of the Gokturk Empire under pressure from the resurgent Uyghurs. Then branches of the Ashina clan moved westward to Europe where they became the kaghans of the Khazars. From there it was easy to get into Russia. My grandfather, I presume, was from Lithuania and Ashkenazi, and to find that my roots lie in Mongolia and Siberia thousands of years ago was quite a surprise. But my Q line is not thought today to be from Khazaria. More likely it is from the Middle East around Ur, which today is in Iraq. Another dna grouping, the R1's are thought to be from Khazaria's royal line that converted to Judaism.
It was Arthur Koestler who wrote "The Thirteenth Tribe" in 1976 that caused people to think that all Ashkenazi Jews were actually from Khazaria and not directly from the tribe of Judah. DNA evidence since then shows he was very wrong. The haplogroup of R1b is thought to be from Khazaria. Our Q line has evidence that suggests it is more likely to be from the Mediterranean area, probably around Ur. The largest group of Jews today are of the haplogroup J1, which is called the Cohen gene. Yes, the Jews living in Israel today are mostly from the tribe of Judah.
Actually, I am reminded that if I go back even farther, we really did start in the Middle East with our male line being P haplogroup. It had the two lines branch off of it which were Q and R.
What happened was that the ruling class of the Khazarian Empire (Khagan Bulan and 4,000 of his nobles, converted to Judaism in the 8th century AD. Originally they were people who were practicing Turkish shamanism. The head Khagan heard speakers of Christianity, Muslims and Jews speak and he chose Judasim. They did not force any conversion. It seems that only the ruling class of the Khazars became Jews. Abba Eban stated that it appears that the majority of the population remained either Christian or Moslem. I can take it then that being Jewish was a royal thing to be.
You may remember that one of our past speakers was Kevin Alan Brook who wrote "The Jews of Khazaria." For some time we haven’t really been sure about whether or not our rare dna really came from Khazaria, but we have now come to this conclusion. We are all marked by a rare mutation called M378 and fit into a haplotype-a sequence of genetic markers-peculiar to us. Not surprising to me, we’re all a rather learned group. I’ve just gone for the 67 allele marker test and will receive the results around July 6th. We are likely to find that many of the 300 people so far discovered will easily be my 7th or 8th cousins, having an ancestor less than 300 years ago.
The group is organized with several heads that have taken various aspects on as responsibilites..
PS: 1/26/10: There are known skeletons of Khazars from the Don-valley (Sarkel, Semikarakovskoye, etc.) and from the Crimea (e.g., Sudak). It is important to note that Khazarian skeletons and North Caucasian Turks have not yet been used to compare Jewish genes with likely traces of the Khazars. Thus, the Khazar theory has not really been put to the genetic test yet. Some historians and scientists are starting to recognize the need for specifically testing the Khazar theory, rather than generalizing based on studies of other non-Khazar populations:
.
Edited again 10/5/2012
Q1b1's haplogroup make up 5% of the entire Jewish population which amounts to about 1% or less of the world population, so I’m in a very small group of people. Through DNA at familytreedna in Houston, I’ve discovered my roots go back thousands of years to one man from the Altay Mountains in Mongolia, Siberia and a little of Turkey. This was done by testing my brother for our grandfather’s origins, and is only done with the male, called a Ydna test. Besides my brother, I had found a 2nd cousin of Stanley Goldfoot, another Goldfoot, thank goodness, working right in Houston, Texas having immigrated there from South Africa. I had already met Stanley in Jerusalem when I lived in Israel from 1980-1985. Stanley turned out to be the former Chief of Intelligence for the Stern Group, a fighting group of Jews helping Israel to become a state. Both my brother and the 2nd cousin were tested and both were found to be Q1b’s, or Q1b1a or Q L245, so I’ve known we are related, but lacked a paper trail.
At first we thought we were of the Khazarian Jews. The Chinese held the records of Khazarian Jews. . The Ashina Turkic people were acting more as a noble or royal line which played the role of a political entity unifying various Turkic speaking tribes. It was also known as a Desert aristocracy and it was a ruling class of a number of central Asian empires, and eventually it became the ruling class or nobility known as khagans or emperors of the Khazarian Khaganate in the early middle ages in the year 656 AD after the collapse of the Gokturk Empire under pressure from the resurgent Uyghurs. Then branches of the Ashina clan moved westward to Europe where they became the kaghans of the Khazars. From there it was easy to get into Russia. My grandfather, I presume, was from Lithuania and Ashkenazi, and to find that my roots lie in Mongolia and Siberia thousands of years ago was quite a surprise. But my Q line is not thought today to be from Khazaria. More likely it is from the Middle East around Ur, which today is in Iraq. Another dna grouping, the R1's are thought to be from Khazaria's royal line that converted to Judaism.
It was Arthur Koestler who wrote "The Thirteenth Tribe" in 1976 that caused people to think that all Ashkenazi Jews were actually from Khazaria and not directly from the tribe of Judah. DNA evidence since then shows he was very wrong. The haplogroup of R1b is thought to be from Khazaria. Our Q line has evidence that suggests it is more likely to be from the Mediterranean area, probably around Ur. The largest group of Jews today are of the haplogroup J1, which is called the Cohen gene. Yes, the Jews living in Israel today are mostly from the tribe of Judah.
Actually, I am reminded that if I go back even farther, we really did start in the Middle East with our male line being P haplogroup. It had the two lines branch off of it which were Q and R.
What happened was that the ruling class of the Khazarian Empire (Khagan Bulan and 4,000 of his nobles, converted to Judaism in the 8th century AD. Originally they were people who were practicing Turkish shamanism. The head Khagan heard speakers of Christianity, Muslims and Jews speak and he chose Judasim. They did not force any conversion. It seems that only the ruling class of the Khazars became Jews. Abba Eban stated that it appears that the majority of the population remained either Christian or Moslem. I can take it then that being Jewish was a royal thing to be.
You may remember that one of our past speakers was Kevin Alan Brook who wrote "The Jews of Khazaria." For some time we haven’t really been sure about whether or not our rare dna really came from Khazaria, but we have now come to this conclusion. We are all marked by a rare mutation called M378 and fit into a haplotype-a sequence of genetic markers-peculiar to us. Not surprising to me, we’re all a rather learned group. I’ve just gone for the 67 allele marker test and will receive the results around July 6th. We are likely to find that many of the 300 people so far discovered will easily be my 7th or 8th cousins, having an ancestor less than 300 years ago.
The group is organized with several heads that have taken various aspects on as responsibilites..
PS: 1/26/10: There are known skeletons of Khazars from the Don-valley (Sarkel, Semikarakovskoye, etc.) and from the Crimea (e.g., Sudak). It is important to note that Khazarian skeletons and North Caucasian Turks have not yet been used to compare Jewish genes with likely traces of the Khazars. Thus, the Khazar theory has not really been put to the genetic test yet. Some historians and scientists are starting to recognize the need for specifically testing the Khazar theory, rather than generalizing based on studies of other non-Khazar populations:
.
Labels: DNA test, evidence, Khazaria, present dna conclusions, Q1b haplogroup, Royal Ashina Dynasty, Ur
