Goldfoot Genealogy

                                                                       

Pashtun People

We Jews with Q (the Y haplogroup DNA)  make up only 5% of the Jewish male population today.  Being the Cohen gene is J1, often J1c3d, from Aaron, brother of Moses and his lineage, we wonder.

Our Goldfoot line's Y haplogroup DNA testing  was labeled as Q-L245 when we started.
Is Q-L245 found in modern Arab populations?  Yes
Is Q-L245 found in modern Anatolian populatons?  Yes
Is Q-L245 found in modern Iran and Iraq?  Yes
Is Q-L245 found from the modern locations of the Ancient city of Ur down to the tip of Saudi Arabia and Oman?  Yes
Does that cover the places where ancient Israel, Judah, and Sumaria were?  Yes.

There you are. I figure we were in Ur, now a part of Iraq, where Abraham was found to be in the Bible.  We were with him in his journeys, maybe married into the family or as a servant, for Abraham, I expect, would have been a J1, of the Cohen gene, for Moses is a direct descendant of his as well.  We wound up in Egypt with the rest, and were taken by the Assyrians in 721 BCE eastward again, where Abraham originally came from.  Those of the northern tribes taken by Assyrians were called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.  My family became one of the Ashkenazi Jews that went to Germany instead.  
Questions were answered by Rebekah Canada, leader of our group on FTDNA.

My brother's Y haplogroup titles have been updated  through various stages of higher testing:
1. Q1b1a
2. Q-(M 242)
3. Q-(M 378)
4. Q-L245
5.Q-Y2200
***6. QBZ67

I have found that at the level of testing of 12 alleles of Q, my brother matches:
1. someone from Republic of Dagistan, Kaitak
2. someone from Republic of Dagistan, Avar
3. someone from Turkey
4. someone with an Arabic name
5. someone from Baghdad

And now, it has been found that many Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan share Q-M242.
"Paragroup Q-M242 (xMEH2, xM378) (of Haplogroup Q-M242 (Y-DNA)) was found at 16.3% in Pashtuns. Haplogroup Q-M242 is also found at a frequency of 18% in Pashtuns in the Afghan capital of Kabul.

"Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan as well as its largest city, located in the eastern section of the country. According to a 2015 estimate, the population of the city was around 3,678,033 which includes all the major ethnic groups. Wikipedia.  So our matches are 18% of the people of Kabul, the Pashtuns.  

"Over the past decade, Kabul has become one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. The toppling of the Taliban in 2001 and the hope of increased security and economic possibilities enticed many Afghans to move here: people displaced by fighting in the countryside, refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran, and hordes of labourers simply looking for a better life."

"The Pashtuns (ethnic Afghans) make up the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, comprising between 42% and 60% of the country's population. Their main territory, sometimes called Pashtunistan,^{[by whom?]} is between the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan and the Indus River in neighboring Pakistan, where they are the second largest ethnic group. After the rise of the Hotaki dynasty in 1709 and the Durrani Empire in 1747, Pashtuns expanded by forming communities north of the Hindu Kush and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

The term "Afghan" is synonymous with the ethnonym "Pashtun" and has been mentioned as early as the 3rd century, referring to the tribes inhabiting the lands south of the Hindu Kush around the Sulaiman Mountains."  

Pashtuns make up  an estimated 27.7 million (15%) of Pakistan's total population. The largest urban population of Pashtuns is interestingly found in the southern coastal city of Karachi with a fluctuating population estimated up to 7 million. This is then followed by Peshawar, Quetta, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and Lahore in descending order
                                                                   

One characteristic my father had was a cleft in his chin.  I just saw that this morning on a Middle Easterner.  Another thing is that my brother, myself and my 1st cousin Goldfoot are all left-handed.  I wonder what the % of our matches of Q also have this left-handedness.  It sure makes writing Hebrew from right to left easier!  Are there any other lefties in our family?  Maybe it's from our grandmother's Jermulowske side.  

Resource: http://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2017/03/pashtos-of-afghanistan-and-pakistan-and.html
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/dec/11/kabul-afghanistan-fifth-fastest-growing-city-world-rapid-urbanisation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Afghanistan
also, from 2010, http://goldfoot_genealogy.blogspot.com/2010/11/few-hazara-and-sindhi-people-with-our.html
https://www.familytreedna.com/public/dna_afghan_pak?iframe=ycolorized  (results of DNA test on Pashtuns-excellent)  (Report from FTDNA on Pashtun DNA-Qs.  Excellenst

By GIL SHEFLER
01/02/2012 21:49
Scholar hopes findings might shed light on medieval merchants.

An Afghan shepherd enters a wolves den perched high in the mountains of Samangan province looking for a sheep that went astray.

Inside, he doesn’t find what he is looking for, but just as he is about to leave he notices something strange: Pieces of old parchment lie strewn on the dirt floor.

So goes one of the stories behind the recent discovery of about 150 manuscripts and artifacts in a remote cave that belonged to a medieval Jewish community.
“But there are several and they are always the same about shepherds looking for sheep,” admitted Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai of the Hebrew University on Sunday.
“Who knows how they were really found?” Scholars are currently in the early stages of poring over the texts dating from the 11th century and written in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian.
“They have dates so we can date them precisely,” said Prof. Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University.
“There’s no doubt that they are authentic. They correspond with similar findings from the past.”

One expert in ancient Persian languages said the scrolls included an ancient copy of the book of Jeremiah; hitherto unknown scholarly works by the medieval sage Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon; personal poems of loss and mourning and even bookkeeping records that could teach us about everyday life in the community.
“The person who wrote it, a Jewish merchant, keeps track of who owed him and how much,” said Shaked.
He added that the texts show the community may have been Karaite, a sect of Judaism which strictly adheres to the bible rather than the Talmud and other later Jewish texts, and name several early Karaite leaders.

Channel 2, which first reported the find on Friday, likened the discovery in Afghanistan to that of the find in the Cairo geniza, but scholars say such a comparison is exaggerated.
The number of documents, about 150, is tiny when compared to the hundreds of thousands found in the Egyptian synagogues.
Furthermore, they are in various stages of decay.
Many are illegible fragments that suffered the ravages of time. But Shaked believes the Afghani scrolls may be “the tip of the iceberg.”
He said there may be many more findings in that part of the world that would provide valuable information about ancient Jewish communities.

Prof. Robert Eisenman, a noted scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, hopes such findings might shed light on the Rhadanites, a group of early medieval Jewish merchants who set up an expansive trade network that connected Europe and Asia. He said the Jewish community that penned the documents found in Afghanistan might be a “left over” of the Rhadanites, which had mostly disappeared by the 11th century. Moreover, he said such discoveries might teach us about the historical origins of peoples in Central Asia.

“In Afghanistan and northern Pakistan they all say they are the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel and I never knew what they were talking about,” said Eisenman, who visited the country in the ’60s. “If this was part of a Jewish permanent settlement then to my mind it reinforces the mythology that the 10 Lost Tribes were in that part of the world.”
Resource:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/uk-afghanistan-jewish-scrolls-idUSLNE80M02T20120123