Goldfoot Genealogy

 Nadene Goldfoot                                      

  Yehudi Menuhin, famous violist,  was born in New York City to a family of Lithuanian Jews. Through his father Moshe, he was descended from a rabbinical dynasty. In late 1919, Moshe and his wife Marutha (née Sher) became American citizens, and changed the family name from Mnuchin to Menuhin.                                     

American-born violinist and conductor;  Born on April 22, 1916 in Manhattan, New York City , United States, Died on March 12, 1999 in Berlin , Germany.  Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Lithuanian Jews. Through his father Moshe, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist, he was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty.  Actually, many Jews from Lithuania have this same claim.  

18th Century Lithuanian rabbis include Ezekiel Katzenellenbogen that my father connects to, and Abraham ben Elijah of Vilna, (Gaon of Vilna).  19th century had Zvi Yaakov Oppenheim, and we do have Oppenheim on the tree.  

 Menuhin's sisters were concert pianist and human rights activist Hephzibah, and pianist, painter and poet Yaltah.

Jews first came from Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia.  Abraham lived there and migrated to Canaan, following the Hyksos and  they both ended up in Egypt, living there for 400 years as slaves. They were freed by Moses and taken back to Canaan, which had dramatically changed.  Our  male line of Y haplogroup  is the small group of Qs with ours being exactly QBZ67.  Being  Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Germany, they also later migrated to Eastern Europe's  Lithuania in late 1700.s.

 Our paternal grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfoot,  came from  Telsiai, Lithuania and our grandmother, Zlata Jermulowske  came from Lazdijai, Lithuania which was on the border with Poland.  In fact, her records wound up in Poland. 

"When we first started we were bewildered men of northern European descent most of us with a Jewish heritage who were members of Haplogroup Q. If we paid the extra money and had our SNPs tested we found that in addition to the M242 SNP that put us into Haplogroup Q , we were offshoots of Q3-L275, the oldest known split within Eurasian/American haplogroup Q, most likely occurred in West or Central Asia in the upper paleolithic Period. 

During the Mesolithic and Neolithic epochs, Q3 remained a minor component of the West Asian Y chromosome pool and gave rise to 5 branches;  Q3a to Q3e.  They spread across West, Central and parts of South Asia.

Rebekah Canada is the head of our Q group at FTDNA and has given us much of this information.  

Around 3-4 millennia ago (Bronze Age) the Q3a branch underwent a rapid expansion, splitting into 7 branches, some of which entered Europe.  One of these branches, Q3a1, was acquired by a population ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews and grew within this population during the 1st millennium reaching up to 5% in present day Ashkenazim.  

To the best of our knowledge, only a few studies based on full Y-chromosome sequencing include Y-chromosomes belonging to haplogroup Q  and none of them focused specifically on it. This haplogroup is well known because it makes up about 90% of indigenous Native American Y-chromosomes, but is also present in North Eurasia . A rare clade called Q3 has been detected in Y-chromosomal resequencing studies  and was found at low frequencies in Iraqis , Iranians , Israelis , Indian Brahmins  and Pashtuns . Rare haplogroups can be very informative for tracing human migration routes , and here we concentrate on improving resolution in the Q3-L275 portion of the first Q1’2 versus Q3 bifurcation of haplogroup Q-M242 . We combined the efforts of population geneticists and genetic genealogists to use the potential of full Y-chromosome sequencing for reconstructing haplogroup Q3-L275 phylogeography and suggest possible linkages to events in population history.                       Other Jews in Lithuania

Recent genetic studies, based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to their host populations in Europe. However, Ashkenazim have an elevated frequency of R-M17, the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow. In the present study of 495 Y chromosomes of Ashkenazim, 57 (11.5%) were found to belong to R-M17. Detailed analyses of haplotype structure, diversity and geographic distribution suggest a founder effect for this haplogroup, introduced at an early stage into the evolving Ashkenazi community in Europe. R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazim may represent vestiges of the mysterious Khazars.

Resource
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333174/

Jacqueline Kent, An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin, pp. 11, 158, 190 (sister, pianist of Yehudi)

Labels: Ezekiel Katzenellenbogen, Jews, Lithuania, Nathan Goldfoot, Vilna Gaon, Yehudi Menuhin

# posted by Nadene Goldfoot @ 5:16 PM 0 comments