I watched an ethnic geneticist guy on Tiktok, who was doing a 'live', his audience being majorly of Moslems wanting to be told that the Palestinians are the true indigenous people of the Levant, and yet he couldn't give them that. Rather they align more with the Bedouins of Arabia; Israeli Jews have themselves some Mesopotamian alignment. Even religious history backs this up. Indeed the most indigenous peoples, still in the land, appeared to be a few minority Christian groups, kind of like the Copts in Egypt also being indigenous there, the Druze and the Samaritans. The Samaritans shared an origin way back with Jewish peoples, with their holy mountain being Mount Gerizim, atop which they had sacrificed animals to God. Whereas the modern Jews at some point relocated their holiest mountain to Jerusalems Mount Zion instead. Samaritan and Jewish men do indeed have the same male Ydna. It is said that when Jewish people were historically kidnapped into Babylonia, they were the town dwellers, and that the country folk, who remained in the Levant, it is they who would be known separately as the Samaritans. The Samaritans, whose own women were likely enslaved, had to marry women from outside of Judaism, and therefore when the mainstream Jews returned from Babylon they called the Samaritans half breeds and rejected any alignment with them As for the original Palestinians, as in the Philistines of Peleset, they were Sea Peoples, and although modern Palestinians had assumed their name, really there was no connection genetically between the old and the new. Rather, the original people of Palesta had dna closer to the Italians primarily and the Greeks secondly, the closest comparisons being to Italians of Campania, then Basilicata, and in continuing order, West Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Lazio, Molise, Abruzzo, Umbria (all Italian so far), and then Dodecanese Greek. Palestine is maybe, anyway, not an appropriate name to identify with for these modern 'Palestinians', because they claim to be indigenous according to a people they have no connection to. Although Palestinians often enough identify with their Arab identities, this in itself becomes an over simplification. Yes, as it is to be expected there is majorly the influence of Arab colonisers, the similarities hereon being mostly to the people of Yemen, there is also African dna in the mix, with other than that much similarity even to their Jewish neighbours, that is to Semitic Canaanites, for which, yes, that Mesopotamian element is in there too. This is likely due to some Jews, and Samaritans too, converting or being forced into Islam, maybe inbetween such eras having firstly adopted Christianity. Like really, one does wonder what happened to all those Samaritans, now a tiny community, and to all the Christians, the Middle East having been at one time a greatly Christian land. Thus it may be so that present Levantine Moslems were at one time pressured to to change their religious outlook and indeed did so in order to survive. The Jewish groups with the most Canaanite influence are Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, Syrian Jews, and all other Mizrahi Jews really, the Mizrahi being all those Jews who never left the middle east, as did the Sephardi's and Ashkenazi's. Ashkenazi Jews have 20% Canaanite dna, their European component being more closely aligned to Italians and Greeks, with their male Ydna shown to be of Middle Eastern origin. So Abraham, we know from scripture he had come from elsewhere, from the north-east, but Jews anyway are Canannites, in part, along with Mesopotamian. I'm curious as to how it is that, with the Jews having kept their purity during captivity, they would be of more distance from the homeland than their more mixed Samaritan cousins. Maybe always the poorer country folk, if that's indeed what the Samaritans were, were less of foreign influence, the wealthier townsfolk being more cosmopolitan. Even some of the Jewish male Ydna, a small part, comes from the Pathans, a people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Was Abraham from even further afield? Much struggle is reflected in the early scriptures, in the times when local peoples were pressured into being monotheistic, despite their natural preference to worship a variety of gods and goddesses, as well as the holy cow and the pillars of Asherah. In later centuries we can see that the locals were reigned in again, this time by Islam. One does wonder whether those locals, subsumed into yet another new religion, were captured enslaved women, sex slaves as such, for this being an Islamic endorsement. Because quite some of the Gazan patriarchal lineage is Arabic. Even a fair amount of the matriarchal dna is East African, indicating that the Arabic men who settled here brought with them not their own women family members from Arabia, but rather slave women from Africa. In this way one can see there has indeed been outside colonisation.
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In Montpellier, staying with my friend Francois, I got stuck into his genealogy, into his maternal lineage, he having had a Russian Bessarabian Jewish grandmother Anna Roitman, originally Shperberg. Her husband Felix alias Ephim Roitman was gassed in Auschwitz by the Nazi's. He was a lovely man, an artist, and Francois had some decorative paintings of his, flowers upon trays and on a lampstand. Felix's wife, Anna, and daughter Lucile escaped but 15 minutes before the Nazi's would have taken them away, warned by the concierge of their building, for which they took flight to free France, far from Paris. They took refuge in a monastery and there converted to Christianity. Anna's conversion was simply for survival, she and Felix having been athiests, whereas Lucile (Francois's mother) took the Christian experience deeply into her heart. In Bessarabia, modern Moldova, the family came from Kishinev where they were petit bourgeois. It took a while of detective work and some stamina, to then discover much upon the Shperberg line. Annas's parents had run a paint shop. Her father Bentsion appears to also have been a victim of the holocaust. His own father, Shimon, son of Avram, died in his 50's of a lung infection. A couple of days later I worked even more on Francois's genealogy. Up till now I'd looked only at his Bessarabian side, which did fascinate. Now I got to look at his French side, for which we visited his elderly father Pierre Joly who produced a whole grand tree of his ancestry which was from Burgundy, German Switzerland and the Jura. Besides I was able to inspire Pierre to talk of family stories. As a boy, Pierre had been so close to his Swiss granny Julia Joly née Kuhn, who eventually would die from asthma. She had previously worked as head chef for the nobility and one day there had arrived a handsome hussar, who on delivering a package of money to the countess was rewarded by being sent to the kitchen for a meal. It was on setting eyes upon this good looking man, Charles Felix Joly, that Julia fell in love. As she would later say 'The devil tempted me into loving this man'. Having taken her to her room and become pregnant they would marry and this she would regret, for she was from a good Swiss family and he was a poor 'good for nothing'. There was no work for him at his home in Burgundy, so Julia brought him to Switzerland so her family could find him work, only for his mother, Marie Claudine, to get furious and make such a fuss that they returned to France. He was her only son. His father had died when he was but 11 years of age. Even Pierre would say of his Hussar grandfather Charles Felix Joly, he was 'not a pleasant man and wasn't often at home.' Whereas Pierre loved his Swiss granny and even lived with her for some years when he was a small boy. Pierre's father Arthur Jean Auguste Joly was a miller, mechanic and mender of bikes. He was hard working and wasn't at home much either. He died from a heart attack, while in recovery from an appendicitis operation. Pierre's mother Aimée née Lamy was a discreet woman, always exhausted with her six children who she announced would bring her to her death for all their noise and naughtiness, and yet she would live a long life, as would Hussar Charles Felix Joly. Aimée's maiden name, Lamy, was as common a surname in the Jura as Smith was in England. Aimée's mother Leonie, Pierre would never know as she died before he was born, aged 55, from breast cancer. Louis 'Old man' Lamy, Aimée's father, was stately and pompous, with a little moustache. He had a machine factory, where Arthur Joly worked from the age of 12, and on there meeting Louis's daughter, Aimée, he'd fallen in love. When they wanted to marry, Louis said he would never accept his daughter marrying a worker, so they had to wait till they were of age, marrying against his will, for which Old Man Lamy was forbidden to come to their house (though he would when his son in law was at work and besides, Pierre often met him when returning from school and would sit on his knees chatting with him and liked him a lot). So there was the tale of a French Swiss family. Pierre himself was good looking and a ladies man. He met Lucile Roitman when they were both students at the Sorbonne. He was a village boy and she was a sophisticated Parisian and an adept organiser, for which he admired her. They were both religiously active in converting people to catholicism, both devout, although in later life Pierre became an athiest. Despite her Jewish origins, from a young age Lucille had loved Christianity, which she always remained true to. I'd heard the story from Francois and now heard of this from Pierre, that the parish vicar who had been hiding Lucille and her mother Anna from the Nazi's, whom Anna had worked for as his servant, converted Lucile when she was aged 11. I emotionally connect with the ancestors I research, and felt it deeply, the loss of their beloved kind Felix to the Nazi holocaust. When the concierge had warned Anna that Jews in the area were being rounded up, thus enabling their escape, Felix was in hospital getting a check up for a minor ailment and he was taken prisoner from there. All these French Jews were put in a camp near Paris called Drancy, whole families with their children being crowded in there and some famous Jews. Anna would send parcels of provisions for him. Even she'd recieve his dirty laundry, wash it and send it back clean. Felix occupied himself while there in doing portraits. There was ever hope in those days, illustrated in their letters to one another, which Francois showed me later; a hope that the war situation would reverse and they would be reunited. Their photographs I got to see, visions of a lovely family. But under SS Nazi dominion, they suddenely having taken over command of Drancy, wagons of inmates began to be sent far away to Auchwitz, most of the occupants to be gassed immediately on arrival. It breaks ones heart to read of this and that Felix was one of those sent to Auchwitz himself. He was part of convoy number 32, journeying in a convoy of 1,000 Jews to Auschwitz on September 14th 1942, 893 of them who were gassed at the end of their journey, dear Felix being one of them. Anna was a single mother now, considered to be a Christian. She would be quite well off ultimately, being compensated by the Germans for them having killed her husband. It was Francois who cleared Anna's Montpellier apartment when she died, selling her furniture and paintings. He never found any documents of hers or Felix's Bessarabian origins. As a genealogist this to me is tragic, the loss of such papers. Like, in regard to Felix, I can find nothing of his own Roitman ancestry, there being no birth record, or of his marriage to Anna, nothing; a complete standstill.
I settled into trying to understand more these genetic tools on Gedmatch, specifically the Eurogenes K13 and the Dodecad 3, one of my aims being to discern what is from my mothers side and what is of my fathers. Not that I really work out so much, but there are some things I do see. One marker which I have, but my mum doesn't, and which therefore is from my father, is of the Red Sea. And there I had been previously, holidaying for a month right by the Red Sea in Egypt. Both the Eurogenes and the Dodecad reveal a lot of West Asian, which is considerably higher in me than in my mother. Thus it does look to be that my huge Caucasus heritage, and quite likely the Anatolian/Armenian too, is from my father, or at least a greater portion of the Caucasus is. And isn't that a surprise, considering that mine and my mothers matriarchal DNA is from there, and yet my more recent connections to that land come through my father. Naturally western-northern European is our highest genetics, after which comes a high Mediterranean, which includes some Greek from my father and East European shores of the Black Sea from my mother. South Asian is in my mother and father, and south west Asian is only through my dad. North East Asian is from both my parents, which does get me thinking of Mongol invasions. No paleo-Pygmy African presence shows up after all on the Dodecad. There is, though, north west African from my mum (Moroccan) and north east African (Egyptian) from my dad. Among the Gedmatch tools are oracles for predicting likely origins of the four grandparents, and looking firstly at my mums, her Shetland grandparents are no doubt responsible for the Orcadian, West Scottish, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. All is not so straightforward for grandparents Mary Ann Seagrove and D'Auvergne Bane. There is a considerable amount of south west English, pinpointed to Cornwall, that I'm not sure how to account for. This could be tagged onto either of grandparent I suppose. Like I don't yet know the place Mary Ann's ancestors dwelt in as yet before they came to London. The Irish is accounted for by Mary Ann's 'Sugrue' fathers side from County Kerry, and the Spanish with considerable Basque may or may not have come through the Irish connection. The Dodecad reveals that there is French other than just the Basque, and with a name like D'Auvergne naturally I wonder if that grandfather did have some secret French connection. As far as his Norfolk Banes and Beans are concerned, this would be covered by both south east English and Dutch, the Norfolk cloth merchants (a trade to which my people were linked) being from there, and this could also account for traces of German and Austrian. Although not to forget that the Hanseatic merchants also traded with Shetland. The conclusion of my mothers oracle is a quite present Cornish, Scottish and Danish, and a French Basque which is potentially through the Irish. In my own oracle Irish is the strongest, enormously so. Although my mum's Irish would appear to have a strong Basque and Spanish influence, my dads (which is from Westmeath) would be very grass roots Irish. So for my own grandparents in this: Shetland grandfather Lyall Inkster accounts for West Scottish and Orcadian; Granny Isabelle accounts for Irish, Cornwall, French and Spanish. Then, for my other two grandparents, pop and nanny Eileen, would come so much Irish. For pop surely Welsh would show, but maybe Welsh hasn't been sampled as yet and so has been lumped in with the Irish. Unless, that is, my Welsh Harrisons and Forest of Dean Hawkins were of Irish traveller derivation. So much Irish, it being the closest of all ethnic types to me inclines me to think my nanny Eileen's mystery father to be Irish as well. Somewhere on my dads side also comes in some distant Hungarian, according to Eurogenes, so it may be that the Maxteds came from a gypsy heritage after all, but I have to drop gypsyness for now as a consideration due to a lack of proof. Interestingly, beyond the strong French Basque, the most potent influence of all the Spanish areas is Catalan. And where I live now in the south of France was once part of the Spanish Catalan territories, before being snatched away by France. My coming to this land suddenly holds a significance I'd not before been aware of. The Dodecad points not only to Cornwall and Hungary, but also to Slovenia. And Sardinia is there through my mother, as well as north Italian. As Les Batt had pointed out, this appears to point out a route taken to Spain, being via Sardinia, a route of old sea traders, such as the Phoenicians. Certainly the Phoenicians come to mind with such locations, from the Levant to the islands of the Mediterranean to Spain. The Dodecad embroiders yet again on my mothers strong Iberian secondary ancestry, along with Sardinian and Italian. Whereas my own, presumably enriched by my fathers DNA, is increasingly exotic. The Eurogenes has pointed out for me strong Caucasus and central Asian ancestry, along with Anatolian. The Dodecad finds me markers in a more European and Mediterranean context and these are richly ethnic in variety. Primarily there are Greek, Romanian and Hungarian. So would that then relate to my maybe gypsy Kent-London ancestors? But, oh, they are a right melting pot of cultures, just as one may imagine Londoners to be. And I never thought there was any Jewish ancestry in me at all, for nothing else had shown this, but the Dodecad has made of me links to them. Beyond the stronger Greek-Romanian-Hungarian there comes Slovenian, Ashkenazi Jew, Cyprus, Sephardic Jew, the Balkans, Sicily, Lebanon, Moroccan Jew, south Italy, Cornwall (lol, so exotic), and Egypt. What to say of this, well, ones ancestry is not linear, nor easily determined. In these hundreds of years so many families are joined by the marriages and affairs of the ancestors. The Dodecad grandparent predictor oracle for my mother still emphasises a French Basque probability, with Slovenian coming up too, and naturally Irish. Mine brings in, from my father then, an addition of Romanian and the Balkans. At which point I take a break. Because my friend Omani comes to visit. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I focused on Stephen Marcus's genealogy, enjoying the peace, calm and quiet. Stephen Marcus is totally Jewish in his ancestry and had already done much on his fathers line, so I looked at his mothers side and made quite some headway, linking that family, Supran, to the Zhupran's of Vilnius in modern day Lithuania, which before the holocaust was a city of great Jewish learning, 'the Jerusalem of Lithuania', and it also being an environment of tolerance and openness. Another morning spun past, occupied with my research in updating Stephen Marcus's genealogy, the findings of which he much appreciated. His well to do Jewish family provided a full and elegant range of materials for London's theatres, evolving from Supran & Company, to Leff & Jason, to Theatreland, and all this from having begun as impoverished immigrant cap makers. Lord Sugar is another Jewish lad-made-good from similar impoverished family origins. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I met up with Martin Lowe, who like me was interested in the story of humans, their DNA and explorations out of Africa. A brother enthusiastically unravels his own family history, his father being from Berlin, and his mother from what was once the Czech republic. I straight away guessed they were Jewish and he confirmed this, and he did have that Eastern European Jewish kind of physiology, shared by the Lincoln-Soskin's. Just as I have been reflecting on alternatives for the old theory that our ancestors evolved as carnivores chasing after red-meated fauna on the Savannah's, so had he. As I said to him, if meat is still carcinogenic to us it shows we never did have as much exposure to it as presumed, otherwise after some thousands of years we'd have more efficiently adapted to it. No doubt men have hunted, but possibly for sacrifices to their bloodthirsty gods and for initiation rituals, making passage from boyhood to manhood. This is one angle I have. It can be seen in travels out of Africa and the progress of our DNA that humankind always followed rivers and seashores. This supports more a pescaterian diet, fish, seaweeds, shellfish and riverside plants and fruits. I have always felt an indefinable difference between the eating of meat and fish, though I eat neither. Fish consumption does not horrify me as much as does meat eating, maybe because I had plenty of fishing ancestors in Shetland, Greenwich and on the Essex coast, but I still would not be able to bash a fish to death in order to eat it. It was so good discussing this subject with Martin. He totally believes the waterside non-meat eating ancient story of mankind. Our absence of fur is due to our time spent in water, he says, like with the seals. It was the seas and rivers that supported us for tens of thousands of years. I recall that wonderful lavabread, still eaten around Wales, a remnant of ancient times. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I was also connecting with Marc, providing me another genealogy to look at, my hobby. And so I delved into the detective work of unravelling his family tree. It was yet another Jewish genealogy, like Ray, Henry and Stephen. They were ones, again, to have escaped the holocaust, from the luck of having migrated already to the safety of England. Marc's family were chazzans, cantors, of the synagogues in which they led the soulful prayers. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. ![]() I buried myself in some genealogical research, polishing up on the family tree I've been compiling for my friend Zia. Her family surname, Musaphia, is a Sephardic Jewish name originating from Portugal. Life under the Moslems had been beneficial for the Jews of Spain and Portugal, but when the Christians took back power in the Iberian peninsular the Jews lives were under threat of violence and pogroms. The Musaphia's and so many others had to pretend to convert to Christianity to survive, only carrying on the Judaic ways in privacy and secrecy. When Holland became a land of religious tolerance, Zia's ancestors moved there and readopted their Jewish lifestyles. One of Zia's relatives was famed doctor and kabbalist Benjamin Musaphia. Another famous one, a direct descendant, was Moses Zacuto, also a kabbalist. At that time, back in the 1600's, with so much prejudice and threats against the Jewish people, many of them, and that included Zia's ancestors, followed a self proclaimed messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. In an era when millenarian ideas were spreading, the Jewish people expected to soon return in glory to their ancient holy land. They would be led by a messiah and it was Sabbati Zevi who claimed to be this holy being. And so I bury myself in some interesting Jewish history. As ever, genealogy proves to be fascinating. Burying myself once more in Zia's genealogy I found another famous ancestor for her, Abraham Zacuto, astronomer of Salamanca. He had to flee both Spain and Portugal for the fate of being a Jew, and in heading for Africa was twice captured by pirates. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I had a look at the genealogy of esoteric researcher Henry Lincoln and it so turned out that he was very pure Jewish, from the Polish Russian community which had settled in the east end of London. He dropped the Jewish surname 'Soskin', which his sons nevertheless retained, to get on in the acting and broadcasting world without having to be typecast as a Jew.
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