This Day in Goodlove History, June 21, 2014

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Jeffery Lee Goodlove email address: Jefferygoodlove@aol.com

Surnames associated with the name Goodlove have been spelled the following different ways; Cutliff, Cutloaf, Cutlofe, Cutloff, Cutlove, Cutlow, Godlib, Godlof, Godlop, Godlove, Goodfriend, Goodlove, Gotleb, Gotlib, Gotlibowicz, Gotlibs, Gotlieb, Gotlob, Gotlobe, Gotloeb, Gotthilf, Gottlieb, Gottliebova, Gottlob, Gottlober, Gottlow, Gutfrajnd, Gutleben, Gutlove

The Chronology of the Goodlove, Godlove, Gottlob, Gottlober, Gottlieb (Germany, Russia, Czech etc.), and Allied Families of Battaile, (France), Crawford (Scotland), Harrison (England), Jackson (Ireland), Jefferson, LeClere (France), Lefevre (France), McKinnon (Scotland), Plantagenets (England), Smith (England), Stephenson (England?), Vance (Ireland from Normandy), Washington, Winch (England, traditionally Wales), including correspondence with George Rogers Clark, and including ancestors William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Van Buren, Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison “The Signer”, Benjamin Harrison, Jimmy Carter, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, William Taft, John Tyler (10th President), James Polk (11th President)Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln.

The Goodlove Family History Website:

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/g/o/o/Jeffery-Goodlove/index.html

The Goodlove/Godlove/Gottlieb families and their connection to the Cohenim/Surname project:

• New Address! http://wwwfamilytreedna.com/public/goodlove/default.aspx

• • Books written about our unique DNA include:

• “Abraham’s Children, Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People” by Jon Entine.
•
• “ DNA & Tradition, The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews” by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman, 2004.



Birthdays on June 21…

Catharine Aylesworth Hunt

Clara Crawford Hoop

Henry Godlove

Retta Godlove

Nellie R. Hunt Nix

Fannie F. Mckinnon

James P. Preston

Becky Stechert Cunningham

Reva J. Young Nix

Elizabeth Younkin

June 21, 356 B.C.E.: Birthdate of Alexander the Great. Alexander traveled back forth across Judea; first when he went down to conquer Egypt and then when he came back from his Egyptian conquest and moved east to conquer more of the Persian Empire. There is a tale about him coming to Jerusalem, but it is a myth that illustrates the positive attitude the Jews of that time had towards Alexander. He is treatment of the Jews was tolerant since he left them to practice their religion in peace and Jews found it easy to settle throughout his newly conquered domains.[1]

350BCE: Yehoshua HaKohen HaGadol, first Kohen Dadol of the Second Temple.[2]



350BCE: The Persians captured Jerusalem.[3]

350BC: Artaxerses III settles some Judeans in northern Persia, extending the Diaspora.[4]

350 BCE: The Book Tobit, part of the Apocrypha, is composed in Aramaic (though it survives only in Greek and Hebrew of fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Weaving together a variety of folklore motifs and drawing on biblical history, the bittersweet story relates the misfortunes of the family of Tobit, a Jew in the long gone Assyrian Empire and uncle of the legendary sage Ahiqar. The tale bespeaks the irony of a pious Jewish life, as Tobit, for example, is blinded by bird droppings after having made extraordinary efforts to bury the Jewish dead at Nineveh. Tobit reveres the Jerusalem Temple but does not journey there. Angels and demons appear routinely; an organized Jewish community is not in evidence. Hope is expressed that gentile nations will come to acknowledge the soverignty of Israel’s God, echoing perhaps the sentiment of Zechariah 14:9.[5]

340 B.C.

[6]

[7]

217BC June 21, Carthaginian forces led by Hannibal destroyed a Roman army under consul Gaius Flaminicy in a battle at Lake Trasimenus in central Italy. Hannibal of Carthage attacked Roman Consul Flaminio at Tuoro on Lake Trasimeno in Umbria. Hannibal’s army of Numidians, Berbers, Libyans, Gascons, and Iberians was down to one elephant after crossing the Alps with 39. His army of 40,000 drove the Romans into the lake where 15,000 died as opposed to 1,500 of Hannibal’s men. Two nearby towns were named Ossaia (boneyard) and Sanguineto (bloodied).
(SFEM, 10/12/97, p.37)(HN, 6/21/98)[8]

June 21, 120 (18 Sivan 3881 on the Jewish calendar): This date marked the passing of Rabbi Gamliel II. Rabbi Gamliel was the successor to Rabbi Johanan Ben-Zakkai who had set up the Talmudic Academy in Yavneh after the war against Rome. Gamliel helped establish a new spiritual leadership and designed the foundation for survival in the Diaspora. He played a key role in keeping the peace between the Jewish community and Rome.[9]

June 21, 1529: – Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon appear together at the Lagatine Court. [10]



June 21, 1553: – Councillors sign the letters patent proclaiming Lady Jane Grey as Edward’s heir[11]
When the 15-year-old Edward VI lay dying in the early summer of 1553, his Catholic half-sister Mary was still the heiress presumptive to the throne. However, Edward, in a draft will composed earlier in 1553, had first restricted the succession to (non-existent) male descendants of Frances Brandon and her daughters, before he named his Protestant cousin Jane Grey as his successor on his deathbed,[21] perhaps under the persuasion of Northumberland.[23] Edward VI personally supervised the copying of his will which was finally issued as letters patent on June 21, and signed by 102 notables, among them the whole Privy Council, peers, bishops, judges, and London aldermen.[24] Edward also announced to have his "declaration" passed in parliament in September, and the necessary writs were prepared.[25]

Many contemporary legal theorists believed the monarch could not contravene an Act of Parliament without passing a new one that would have established the altered succession;[citation needed] Jane's claim to the throne therefore remained weak.[12]

June 21, 1568: M. de Montmorin, who had come to visit Mary on the part of Charles IX, leaves Carlisle for London, and thence for France, vs^ith letters from this princess for the Queen of England, the King of

France, the Duke of Anjou, and the Cardinal of Lorraine.



At the commencement of her residence at Carlisle, Mary was apparently treated with much respect ; but, in reality, she was already the object of a most vigilant superintendence, and imperceptibly Lord

Scrope adopted daily severer measures on his own account, so that she soon became, in fact, a complete prisoner. [13]





June 21, 1568: To THE Cardinal of Lorraine. [14]



From Carlisle, the 21st June, 1568.

My uncle, — If you have not pity on me now, I may say with reason that it is all over with my son, my country, and myself; and that I shall be as ill off in another quarter of this country, as in Lochleven. I entreat you to consider that my enemies are few, and that all the rest of the nobility are with me ; their people begin to desert them, had I ever so little support ! For they know well that their quarrel is unjust, and that in Scotland and here, where I have little to say in

reply to their calumnies and false reports, they are esteemed traitors and liars ; and, on this account, they strive to prevent me from quitting the kingdom, and confine me here. Those whom the queen sends to put a stop to and pursue my enemies, on the contrary aid and abet them ; so that they, as it were, hold me until the others have beat me, although I have offered to prove the false accusers and myself nnocent,

as the bearer of this will inform you, to whom I shall trust myself in consequence of the credit which I give him. I beseech you to hasten to send us some support in earnest, as he will demonstrate to you the need of it which is felt by all my good servants (and these are not few), and, among others, poor Lord Seaton, who runs a risk of having his head cut off, for having assisted me to escape from prison. Treat Beaton

well, for I dare not send for him till I am more secure ; for they threaten that they will kill him if they can, and George Douglas, who has been removed from me also. Wherefore, I shall send him to you as soon as he can obtain a passport. for which I have written to the French ambassador ; for they have prevented Lord Fleming, who is there, from going to the king. If George goes, I will send you, at full length, an account of their conduct and mine, since the beginning of

the troubles ; for he has heard their fine account of me, and I shall inform him of the rest. I commend him to you ; give him honourable maintenance. For otherwise very few will cast away their friends, to serve me at the risk of their lives. He is faithful ; of that I assure you, and that he will do what you bid him. I entreat you, send frequently to enquire for the duke ;*[15] for his relatives have served me extremely well, and, if they are not rescued, there are eight gentlemen, all of his name, condemned to be hung, and their houses razed to the ground : for every one who does not obey them is guilty

of the crime which they themselves have committed. From

day to day they openly invent falsehoods against me, and

secretly offer to say no more evil of me, if I will yield to

them the government. But either I shall die, or they shall

confess that they have invented all the villanies which they

have cast against me. I now commit myself to the compe-

tency of the bearer hereof, and beseech you to have compas-

sion for the honour of your poor niece, and provide the

assistance which the bearer will mention to you ; and, in the

meantime, send money, for I have not wherewith to purchase

bread, nor linen, nor clothes.



The queen has sent me hither a little linen, and provides

me with one dish. The rest 1 have borrowed, but I cannot

do so any more. You will participate in this disgrace. Sandy

Clerk, who was in France on behalf of this false bastard, boasts that you will neither provide me with money, nor meddle in my affairs. God tries me severely ; however, rest assured that I shall die a Catholic : God will relieve me from these miseries very soon. For I have endured injuries, calumnies, imprisonment, famine, cold, heat, flight, not knowing whither, ninety-two miles across the country without stopping or alighting, and then I have had to sleep upon the ground, and drink sour milk, and eat oatmeal without bread, and have been three nights like the owls, without a female in this country, where, to crown all, I am little else than a prisoner. And, in the meanwhile, they demolish all the houses of my servants, and I cannot aid them ; and hang their owners, and I cannot compensate them : and yet they all remain faithful to me, abominating these cruel traitors, who have not three thousand men at their command ; and, if I had support, the one-half would assuredly leave them. I pray that God may send relief when it pleases Him, and that He may give you health and long life.



From Carlisle, this 21st of June.



Your humble and obedient niece,

Marie E.



I beg you will present my very humble remembrances to madame my aunt. I will write to her a week hence by George Douglas, who will go to inform her of my miserable state. I w^ill not forget that when I parted from my people in Scotland, I promised to send them assistance at the end of

August. For God's sake let them not be both denied and deceived ! But send it to them with the duke, and some Frenchman of rank, and, among others. Captain Sarlabous would be much required. It is all one for myself, but let not my subjects be deceived and ruined ; for I have a son, whom it would be a pity to leave in the hands of these

traitors. [16]

June 21, 1621: The Dutch West India Company is formed with the right to colonize the New World.[17]

Summer, 1621

A little less than a year after the Wampinah saw a small group of strangers land on their shores there was celebration of their survival, and a celebration lasting three days was had by the Pilgrims and Wampinah. That they found each other in 1621 looked like a boon to each. The Wampinah had been decimated by diseases and tribal warfare. The event would not reoccur again, anywhere. The first Thanksgiving would enter into national mythology. It was two separate stories, and would be about cruelty, power, and betrayal. [18]

1622: In 1622, fully five years after the plague had abated, Thomas Morton was sickened by the skeletons he encountered in his travels in New England and wrote, after a particularly trying day of encountering untold hundreds of them, “that as I travaeled in that Forrest nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha.”[19] [20]

AD 1622 - Emperor Susenyos declares Ethiopia a Catholic country; civil war ensues .[21]



June 21, 1631: John Smith (explorer)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/John_Smith_after_Simon_De_Passe.jpg/250px-John_Smith_after_Simon_De_Passe.jpg

http://bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.22wmf3/skins/common/images/magnify-clip.png

Captain John Smith, after an early portrait by Simon de Passe, 18th century

John Smith (c. January 1580 – June 21, 1631) Admiral of New England was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania and his friend Mózes Székely. He was considered to have played an important part in the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in North America.[22]

June 21, 1684

King Charles II of England revokes the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter, accusing the Colony of discriminating against the Church of England.[23]



1685

Lawrence Harrison was a lawyer of the counties of York and Gloucester in 1685.[24]



1685: Louis XIV claimed devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and vowed to completely destroy the Huguenots remaining in France. He revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and began enforcing the new restrictions on the Huguenots. [25]

Even under fear of death, about 400,000 Huguenots were ( ) while countless thousands more were martyred “killed” when they refused to follow the new restrictions. Abraham LeFevre (1632) and his family, except his son, who escaped, were martyred in 1685.[26]

Some of the new rules and restrictions were: 1) Huguenots could not hold public office, 2) Protestant marriages were declared illegal, 3) preachers had 15 days to leave the country, 4) parents could not teach their children about the Protestant faith and were compelled to have the children baptized and instructed only by priests, 5) Protestants could not leave the country, if they did, their lands were confiscated, 6) churches and their records were to be destroyed.

Issac LeFevre escaped France carrying only the family bible he concealed in a loaf of bread. He joined with the Daniel Ferree family as they escaped into Bavaria, where they remained there a few years, then traveled into Holland. Fearing their children would be brought up in the Dutch tradition they moved on to England.[27]

While in England, Daniel Feree’s ( ? ) introduced her to Queen Anne. Wiliam Penn granted her a tract of land (about 200 acres) for colonization in Pennsylvania. The Ferree family and Issac LeFevre’s family, and others joined the Rev. Joshua Kocherthal and his group in their journey to America.[28]

Elizabeth Taliaferro9 [Sarah Smith8, Lawrence Smith7, Christopher Smith6, Thomas Smythe5, Thomas Smythe4, John Smythe3, Richard2, William1] (b. 1691 in Powhatan Plantation, Essex Co. VA / d. 1751) married Thomas Stripling. She later remarried to John Catlett in 1703 in VA.

More on Elizabeth Taliaferro
Elizabeth Taliaferro 1691-1715 married John Catlett 1677-1739 son of John Catlett IV 1658-1724. According to "Some Virginia Families," by Hugh Milton McIlhany (Call Number: R929.2 M15) Stone burner and Prufer Printers, 1903: ...Elizabeth (who married THOMAS STRIBLING). It is this last named Robert Taliaferro of St. Paul's Parish, Stafford County, who, in his will dated December 3, 1725 and recorded in the Essex Court June 21, 1726, mentions his sister Elizabeth, the wife of "Thomas Stripling", and her sons Francis, William and Taliaferro "Stripling."

A. Children of Elizabeth Taliaferro and Thomas Stripling
. i. Francis Stripling
. ii. William Stripling
. iii. Taliaferro Stripling[29]





June 21, 1749: Founding Halifax, Nova Scotia.[30]



To South Carolina: 1749

George arrived on October 17, 1749 at Charleston, SC aboard a ship from Saxe-Gotha in what is today north-central Germany. The name of the ship was not preserved, but the list of 33 "heads of families" of passengers was. Immigration records indicate there were three people in the "Geo. Gottlieb" family. We assume he had a wife and one ten-year-old son. (He may have had no wife and two children, or some other "family of three.") A little over a year later, in 1751, he was granted a 150-acre homestead (50 acres for each adult family member) in Amelia Township near the Congaree River among a concentration of German immigrants. However, the stay in SC was brief. Nothing more appears in public records.[31] George Gotlieb and his family, along with other German and German-Swiss settlers, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina to settle in Amelia Co., Saxe-Gotha Township (From Ships Passenger Lists: The South, Carl Boyer, ed., Family Line Publications, Westminster, Md.)[32]



June 21, 1752: In the first significant offensive action of the French and Indian War, a force of two Frenchmen and about 240 Indians attacked Pickawillany on June 21, 1752 and destroyed

the trading post, killing or capturing a number of individuals.[33]



June 21, 1752: Pickawillany was attacked by the French on June 21, 1752, and the English post there was destroyed. Page 33 of Goodman‘s book states:

Early in 1752, the Miamis suffered severely from the small-pox. During the year

occurred the destruction of the English post at Pickawillany, all of which is detailed

elsewhere. Soon after this, in a communication to his government, the governor of

Canada expressed the opinion that, unless the alliance between the English and Miamis

was broken off, the fall of Detroit would eventually ensue. In 1753, a large body of

French from Canada moved to the southwest, and erected Forts Presque Isle, Le Boeuf,

and Venango.

An early British account of the attack on Pickawillany

The 1757 book ―The Contest in America between Great Britain and France…‖, while

certainly written from the English point of view (and not without error), describes the situation as

follows:

…they began to commit hostilities upon our people everywhere. They began first with

plundering and pillaging our Indian traders, wherever they met with them; seized several

of them by force of arms, confined them in prison there, and sent them to France as they

do prisoners of war; laying a premium upon the heads of others, and threatening

destruction to all the English that offered to come among the Indians.

With this they attacked and burnt our fort at Pickawillany upon the river Miamis in 1751,

roasting our people alive that were in it, in the barbarous and inhuman manner of the

Canadians and savages. All this was done in open violation, not only of the treaty of Aix,

but of the treaty of Utrecht likewise, by which both nations are to enjoy full liberty of

frequenting those countries for the sake of trade.

The above secondhand account is inaccurate in regard to the date of the Pickawillany attack,

which actually occurred in 1752, but nevertheless captures the British perspective.[34]



Friday June 21, 1754:

The conference concludes unsuccessfully with the Indians not agreeing to support the expedition of the Virginia Regiment. Washington attributes its failure to not having enough gifts for the Indians and that the French were stronger than the English in the area so the Indian tribes were leery of supporting what could easily become the losing side.[35]



Washington clears a road toward Redstone

On June 21, 1754, or sometime between that date and June 25, Washington wrote in his journal

about clearing a road to Redstone, and giving misleading information to Indian spies. His journal

reads as follows:

As those Indians, who were spies sent by the French, were very inquisitive, and asked us

many questions in order to learn by what way we proposed to go to the Fort, and at what

time we expected to arrive there, I left off working any further on our road, and told them

we intended to continue it through the woods as far as the Fort, felling the trees, etc. That

we were waiting here for reinforcements which were coming to us, our artillery, and our

wagons to accompany us there, but as soon as they were gone I set about marking out

and clearing a road towards Red-Stone.



As previously noted, his actual intent was to transport the artillery by water when it became

convenient to attack Fort Duquesne.[36]



June 21, 1754

Valentine applied for one hundred acres in Frederick County, Virginia. On June 21, 1754, he paid for the land.



Valentine Crawford obtained a patent for one hundred acres in old Frederick County, Virginia, which was applied for in 1748 and dated June 21, 1754. He and his wife Sarah, sold the one hundred acres in question, to Jacob Townsend, September 8, 1762. Witnesses were: David Shepherd and Elijah Garis. [37]



Notes for VALENTINE CRAWFORD, SR.:
Notes for Valentine Crawford, Sr:
Acted as a secretary or an assistant to George Washington. He is reported to have been elected to the
Virginia House of Burgess and voted in that body in 1758.

More About Valentine Crawford, Sr:
Fact 2: 1748, Applied for 100 acres of land in Frederick Co., VA
Fact 3: June 21, 1754, Paid for the 100 acres.

Children of VALENTINE CRAWFORD and HONORA GRIMES are:
39. i. MARY24 CRAWFORD, b. Abt. 1716, Westmoreland County, Virginia.
ii. ELIZABETH CRAWFORD, b. 1718, Virginia; m. UFN ROSS.
40. iii. MARTHA CRAWFORD, b. 1720, Westmoreland County, Virginia.
41. iv. COLONEL WILLIAM CRAWFORD, b. September 02, 1722, Westmoreland County, Virginia; d. June 11, 1782, Crawford, Ohio.
42. v. VALENTINE CRAWFORD, JR., b. Abt. 1724, Fredrick County, Virginia; d. January 07, 1777, Fayette county, Pennsylvania. [38]

June 21, 1774: James Patton Preston (b. June 21, 1774 / d. May 4, 1843).[39]



June 21, 1783

(A point of reference)

I went on the Officers’ watch, which , on orders of Colonel Seybothen, made arrests; namely, of Grnadier Captain von Molitor and First Lieutenant von Altenstein, for marrying American women, permission for which had not been granted.[40]



June 21, 1787; New Hampshire becomes the 9th state to ratify the United States Constitution which means the Constitution has been ratified by enough states to make it the law of the land.[41]



June 21, 1788: United States Constitution




United States Constitution


Description: Page one of the original copy of the Constitution

Page one of the original copy of the Constitution


Created

September 17, 1787


Ratified

June 21, 1788


Location

National Archives,
Washington, D.C.


Author(s)

twelve state delegations in
Philadelphia Convention


Signatories

39 of the 55 Philadelphia Convention delegates


Purpose

Federal constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation (1777)





United States of America


Description: Great Seal of the United States



This article is part of the series:
United States Constitution


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. The first three Articles of the Constitution establish the rules and separate powers of the three branches of the federal government: a legislature, the bicameral Congress; an executive branch led by the President; and a federal judiciary headed by the Supreme Court. The last four Articles frame the principle of federalism. The Tenth Amendment confirms its federal characteristics. [42]



June 21, 1791: The outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789 led to Joseph II seeking to help the family of his estranged sister Queen Marie Antoinette of France and her husband King Louis XVI of France. Joseph, who kept an eye on the development of the revolution, became actively involved in the planning of a rescue attempt. However many drawn up plans failed with either Marie Antoinette's refusal to leave her children behind in favor of a faster carriage or Louis XVI's reluctance to become a fugitive King. After Joseph died in 1790, making negotiations with Austria about possible rescue attempts and Austria's funding of them became more difficult and were often shunned. It was not until June 21, 1791 that a rescue attempt was made, with the help of Count Fersen, a Swedish general who had been favored at both Marie Antoinette's court and Joseph's. The attempt failed after the King was recognized from the back of a coin. Marie Antoinette became increasingly desperate for help from her homeland, even giving Austria France's military secrets. Austria however, even though at war with France at this time, refused to directly help the by now completely estranged French Queen.

In addition, Joseph abolished serfdom in 1781. Later, in 1789, he decreed that peasants must be paid in cash payments rather than labor obligations. These policies were violently rejected by both the nobility and the peasants,[7] since their barter economy lacked money.

He also abolished the death penalty in 1787, and this reform remained until 1795. [43]

June 21, 1791: Flight to Varennes (1791)

On June 21, 1791, Louis attempted to secretly flee with his family from Paris to the royalist fortress town of Montmédy on the northeastern border of France, where he would join the exiles and be protected by Austria. While the National Assembly worked painstakingly towards a constitution, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were involved in plans of their own. Louis had appointed the baron de Breteuil to act as plenipotentiary, dealing with other foreign heads of state in an attempt to bring about a counter-revolution. Louis himself held reservations against depending on foreign assistance. Like his mother and father, Louis thought that the Austrians were treacherous and the Prussians were overly ambitious.[33] As tensions in Paris rose and Louis was pressured to accept measures from the Assembly against his will, the King and Queen plotted to secretly escape from France. Beyond escape, they hoped to raise an "armed congress" with the help of the émigrés who had fled, as well as assistance from other nations, with which they could return and, in essence, recapture France. This degree of planning reveals Louis’ political determination; unfortunately it was for this determined plot that he was eventually convicted of high treason.[34] However, his indecision and misunderstanding of France were responsible for the failure of the escape. The royal family was arrested at Varennes-en-Argonne shortly after Jean-Baptiste Drouet, who recognised the king from his profile on paper money, had given the alert. [44]



On June 21, 1791, Louis XVI was arrested at Varennes after which the Assemblée nationale constituante accordingly declared that all possessions of the royal family had been abandoned. To safeguard the palace, the Assemblée nationale constituante ordered the palace of Versailles to be sealed. [45]



June 21, 1794: According to the Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Volume 2, pp. 60-61), on March 25, 1794, the district commissioners requested that the city surveyor "have a large stone lettered 'The beginning of the Territory of Columbia,' prepared and fixed at the beginning of the territory, in the presence of some of the gentlemen who were present at the fixing of the small stone now there." By June 21, 1794, this new corner stone had replaced the original ceremonial corner stone from 1791.



June 21, 1807:


23

1190

Harrison, William Henry, 1773-1841 (negotiable instrument; A.L.S.), June 21, 1807; October 27, 1835 [46]



June 21, 1810: Taylor met Margaret Mackall Smith of Maryland in early 1810, and they were married on June 21, 1810. They had one son and five daughters, two of whom died in infancy.

12TH. PRESIDENT, UNITED S ZACHARY * (12TH US PRESIDENT)10 TAYLOR (RICHARD *9, ZACHARY *8, JAMES *7, JAMES *6, JOHN *5, THOMAS *4, THOMAS *3, ROWLAND *2, JOHN *1) was born November 24, 1784 in HARE FOREST, ORANGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES, and died July 9, 1850 in WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES. He met (1) MARY (SLAVE) * MULATTO. He married (2) MARGARET MACKALL SMITH June 21, 1810 in LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, UNITED STATES, daughter of WALTER SMITH and ANNE MACKAL. [47]



June 21, 1810: Zachary10 Taylor (Richard9, Zachary8, James7, James6, John5, Thomas4, Thomas3, Rowland2, John1); born November 24, 1784 at Montecello, Orange Co., VA;180 married Margaret Smith, daughter of Walter Smith and Margaret Mackall, June 21, 1810 at Jefferson Co., KY;181 died July 9, 1850 at Wash. DC at age 65.182

Zachary was a Member of the "Aztec Club of 1847" aka "The Military Society of the Mexican War" (1847).

He was also a Hereditary Member of the Society of the Cincinnati" (1783).

He was a Member of the "General Society of Mayflower
Descendants (1897)". [48]


June 21, 1834: Cyrus McCormick is awarded a patent for an improved version of the reaper.[49]



Tues. June 21, 1864

Started at 4 am and marched 10 miles to kennyville[50] on the railroad and river 10

Miles from Orleans a pretty place[51]

Suther came to reg

Had honey to eat for breakfast

(William Harrison Goodlove Civil War Diary, 24th Iowa Infantry)[52]



June 21, 1875: The US Post Office released the first postage stamp issue honoring Zachary Taylor on June 21, 1875, 25 years after his death. In 1938, Taylor would appear again on a US Postage stamp, this time on the 12-cent Presidential Issue of 1938. Taylor's last appearance (to date, 2010) on a US postage stamp occurred in 1986 when he was honored on the AMERIPEX presidential issue. After Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln, Zachary Taylor was the fifth American president to appear on US postage.[84]

He is the namesake for several names and places throughout the United States, including:
•Camp Taylor in Kentucky and Fort Taylor in Florida.
•The SS Zachary Taylor, a World War II Liberty ship
•Zachary Taylor Parkway in Louisiana [85] and in Zachary Taylor Hall at Southeastern Louisiana University.[86][87]
•Taylor County in Georgia
•Taylor County, Iowa
•Rough and Ready, California

Zachary Taylor Highway in Virginia[53]

June 21, 1882: James Milton Nix, Jr.14 [John Nix13, John A. Nix12, Grace Louisa Francis Smith11, Gabriel Smith10, John “LR” Smith9, Ambrose J. Smith8, Christopher Smith7, Christopher Smith6, Thomas Smythe5, Thomas Smythe4, John Smythe3, Richard2, William1] (b. November 21, 1876 / d. April 2, 1935 in Wedowee, Randolph Co. AL) married Reva Jane Young (b. June 21, 1882 / d. October 6, 1946 in Randolph Co. AL). [54]
•





Golden Jubilee: June 21, 1887, at Buckingham Palace

This very eventful day has come and is passed. It will be very difficult to

describe it, but all went off admirably. This day, fifty years ago, I had to go

with a full Sovereign's escort to St James's Palace, to appear at my

proclamation, which was very painful to me, and is no longer to take place.

The morning was beautiful and bright with a fresh air. Troops began passing

early with bands playing, and one heard constant cheering ... The scene

outside was most animated, and reminded me of the opening of the Great

Exhibition, which also took place on a very fine day. Received many beautiful

nosegays and presents ... Then dressed, wearing a dress and bonnet

trimmed with white point d'Alençon, diamond ornaments in my bonnet, and

pearls around my neck, with all my orders.

At half-past eleven we left the Palace, I driving in a handsomely gilt landau

drawn by six of the Creams, with dear Vicky (her eldest daughter) and Alex

(her daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales), who sat on the back seat. Just in

front of my carriage rode the 12 Indian officers, and in front of them my 3

sons, 5 sons-in-law, 9 grandsons and grandsons-in-law. Then came the

carriages containing my 3 other daughters ... All the other Royalties went in a

separate procession. George Cambridge rode the whole way next to my

carriage, and the Master of the Horse, Equerries, etc., behind it with of course

a Sovereign's escort. It was a really magnificent sight ...

At the door (of Westminster Abbey) I was received by the clergy, with the

Archbishop of Canterbury and Dean at their head, in the copes of rich velvet

and gold, which had been worn at the Coronation ... The crowds from the

Palace gates up to the Abbey were enormous, and there was such an

extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm as I had hardly ever seen in London

before; all the people seemed to be in such good humour. The old Chelsea

Pensioners were in a stand near the Arch. The decorations along Piccadilly

were quite beautiful, and there were most touching inscriptions. Seats and

platforms were arranged up to the tops of the houses, and such waving of

hands ... Many schools out, and many well-known faces were seen.

When all was ready, the procession was formed ... God Save the Queen was

played ... as I walked slowly up the Nave and Choir, which looked beautiful, all

filled with people. The Royalties of highest rank were seated within the altar

rails. The House of Commons was below us to the left, and I recognised

several persons amongst them, but did not see Mr Gladstone, thought he was

there. The Ambassadors and the Household were to the right.

I sat alone (oh! without my beloved husband, for whom this would have been

such a proud day!) where I sat forty-nine years ago and received the homage

of the Princes and Peers, but in the old Coronation Chair of Edward III, with

the old stone brought from Scotland, on which the old Kings of Scotland used

to be crowned. My robes were beautifully draped on the chair. The service

was very well done and arranged. The Te Deum, by my darling Albert,

sounded beautiful ... When the service was concluded, each of my sons,

sons-in-law, grandsons (including little Alfred), and grandsons-in-law, stepped

forward, bowed, and in succession kissed my hand, I kissing each; and the

same with the daughters, daughters-in-law, grand-daughters, and the

granddaughter-in-law. They curtsied as they came up and I embraced them

warmly. It was a very moving moment, and tears were in some of their eyes.

The procession then reformed, and we went out as we came in, resting a

moment in the waiting-room, whilst the Princes were all getting on their

horses. The whole ceremony, particularly the outside procession and

progress, took twenty minutes longer than was expected ... There were many

stoppages, which is almost unavoidable in long processions ... The heat of the

sun was very great, but there was a good deal of wind, which was a great

relief ... We only got back at a quarter to three. Went at once to my room to

take off my bonnet and put on my cap. Gave Jubilee brooches to all my

daughters ... and pins to all my sons ...

Only at four did we sit down to luncheon, to which all came. The King of

Saxony led me in, and the King of Denmark with Marie of Belgium sat on my

other side. After luncheon, I stood on the small balcony of the Blue Room,

which looks out on the garden, and saw the Bluejackets march past. After this

we went into the small Ball-room, where the present given me by all my

children was placed. It is a very handsome piece of plate. The Queen of

Hawaii gave me a present of very rare feathers, but very strangely arranged

as a wreath about my monogram, also in feathers on a black ground, framed.

I felt quite exhausted by this time and ready to faint, so I got into my rolling

chair and was rolled back to my room. Here I lay down on the sofa and rested,

doing nothing but opening telegrams, coming from every part of the country,

so that they could no longer be acknowledged, and this will have to be done

through the papers.

Dinner was again in the Supper-room. I wore a dress with rose, thistle, and

shamrock embroidered in silver on it, and my large diamonds. The King of

Denmark led me in, and I sat between him and Leopold of Belgium. The King

of Denmark, who is so kind and amiable, gave out my health at dessert

saying, "I beg to propose the health of Her Majesty - God bless her". And after

God Save the Queen had been played, Bertie (the Prince of Wales) proposed

the healths of the Sovereigns and Royal guests now assembled here, doing

so in my name ... The pipers walked round the table. We went into the Ballroom,

where I spoke to the Indian Princes and received all the Corps

Diplomatique, Foreign Envoys and suites, the latter being each presented by

their Princes. I was half dead with fatigue, and after sitting down a moment

with Marie of Belgium, slipped away and was rolled back to my room, and to

the Chinese room to try and see something of the very general illuminations,

but could not see much. The noise of the crowd, which began yesterday, went

on till late. Felt truly grateful that all had passed off so admirably, and this

never-to-be-forgotten day will always leave the most gratifying and heartstirring

memories behind. [55]



Diamond Jubilee: June 21, 1897, at Buckingham Palace

The 10th anniversary of the celebration of my fifty years Jubilee. Breakfasted

with my three daughters at the Cottage at Frogmore (Windsor Park). A fine

warm morning.

At quarter to twelve we drove to the station to start for London. The town was

very prettily decorated, and there were great crowds, who cheered very much.

At Paddington I was received by Lord Cork and other Directors of GWR

(Great Western Railway). Drove, going at a fast pace to the Paddington

XI

Vestry platform, where an address was presented by the Vicar of Paddington.

Then we proceeded at a slow trot, with a Sovereign's escort of the 1st Life

Guards. Passed through dense crowds, who gave me a most enthusiastic

reception. It was like a triumphal entry. We passed down Cambridge Terrace,

under a lovely arch, bearing the motto, "Our hearts thy Throne". The streets

were beautifully decorated, also the balconies of the houses with flowers,

flags, and draperies of every hue ... The streets, the windows, the roofs of the

houses, were one mass of beaming faces, and the cheers never ceased. On

entering the park, through the Marble Arch, the crowd was even greater,

carriages were drawn up amongst the people on foot, even on the pretty little

lodges well-dressed people were perched. Hyde Park Corner and Constitution

Hill were densely crowded. All vied with one another to give me a heartfelt,

loyal and affectionate welcome. I was deeply touched and gratified. The day

had become very fine and very hot.

Reaching the Palace shortly after 1, and Vicky [her eldest daughter] at once

brought me her three daughters ... [Queen Victoria is then given a diamond

pendant with sapphires, a 'very handsome' book cover and a 'beautiful

diamond brooch' as Jubilee presents by her family] ... Then I was taken round

in my wheeled chair to the Bow Room, where all my family awaited me ...

Seated in my chair, as I cannot stand long, I received all the foreign Princes in

succession, beginning with Archduke Franz Ferdinand [whose assassination

in 1914 at Sarajevo marked the beginning of the First World War] ... after

which Lord Salisbury presented all the special Ambassadors and Envoys ... I

got back to my room a little before four, quite exhausted. Telegrams kept

pouring in. It was quite impossible even to open them ... Had tea in the garden

...

Dressed for dinner. I wore a dress of which the whole front was embroidered

in gold, which had been specially worked in India, diamonds in my cap, and a

diamond necklace, etc. The dinner was in the Supper-room at little tables of

twelve each. All the family, foreign royalties, special Ambassadors and

Envoys were invited. I sat between the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the

Prince of Naples. After dinner went into Ball-room, where my private band

played and the following were presented to me: the Colonial Premiers with

their wives, the Special Envoys, the three Indian Princes, and all the officers

of the two Indian escorts, who, as usual, held out their swords to be touched

by me, and the different foreign suites. The Ball-room was very full and

dreadfully hot, and the light very inefficient. It was only a little after eleven,

when I got back to my room, feeling very tired. There was a deal of noise in

the streets, and we were told that many were sleeping out in the parks.[56]



June 21, 1904:











June 21, 1924: Edward Franklin Nix15 [Thomas Nix14, Marion F. Nix13, John A. Nix12, Grace Louisa Francis Smith11, Gabriel Smith10, John “LR” Smith9, Ambrose J. Smith8, Christopher Smith7, Christopher Smith6, Thomas Smythe5, Thomas Smythe4, John Smythe3, Richard2, William1] (b. November 14, 1921 in Bangor, Blount Co., AL / d. May 19, 1993 in Muscle Shoals, Colbert Co., AL) married Nellie Ruth Hunt (b. June 21, 1924 in Cullman Co. AL / d. September 1, 1989 in Colbert Co. AL), the daughter of Harvey Hunt and Violet Coffman, on August 9, 1941 in Blount Co. AL. [57]




June 21, 1935: m18

872

Mary Jane Nix (b. October 23, 1868 in AL / d. June 21, 1935 in TX)




Mary Jane Nix14 [John Nix13, John A. Nix12, Grace Louisa Francis Smith11, Gabriel Smith10, John “LR” Smith9, Ambrose J. Smith8, Christopher Smith7, Christopher Smith6, Thomas Smythe5, Thomas Smythe4, John Smythe3, Richard2, William1] (b. October 23, 1868 in Randolph Co. AL / d. June 21, 1935 in TX) married John C. Commander Burch (b. September 25, 1868 in Randolph Co. AL / d. June 8, 1951 in TX), the son of Edward Burch and Elizabeth Taylor, on September 15, 1887 in Cullman Co. AL. [58]



• June 21th, , 1942

“The entire day of Saturday the 20th and the morning of Sunday 21st of June, until noon, were devoted to the evacuation of the first five staircases and the relocation of the occupants elsewhere in the camp, a delicate operation perfectly executed by the French Police within the time limits accorded, and including a precise count of all the occupants of each room, for the roll=call could not be conducted in a useful manner without this count.

“The same Sunday, the 21st of this month, from noon to 5:00 PM was dedicated to checking the baggage of the inmates who were to depart. The search was made in the cafeteria and in the package room by 25 inspectors from the Police for Jewish Questions.

“I must tell you that this time the operation executed in a way entirely to my satisfaction.

“After the search, the 930 departing persons were sent towards the first five stairwells, and pursuant to orders received, were strictly isolated from the time of the search until the departure the next morning.[59]



One thousand Jews deported from Paris, reached Auschwitz. Many of them were Polish Jews living in France. Six hundred and twenty-five were gassed while 375 selected for labor battalions. Only seventeen would survive the war. [60]



June 21, 1942

No one is hurt as a Japanese submarine shells the coast of Oregon, during World War II.[61]



June 21, 1942

‘ German General Irwin Rommel’s Africa Corps captures Tobruk, along with 30,000 British soldiers, during World War II.[62]



Summer 1942: In the summer of 1942, the Nazis marched into Azerbaijan intent on capturing the oilfields of Baku; for whatever reason, however, they never reached Georgia to the west. Consequently, the Georgian Jews were one of the very few Jewish communities to escape major losses during the holocaust.[63]



June 21, 1963 David Ferrie calls G. Wray Gill’s office twice today. Ferrie is in Dallas

and Bay City on this day.

J. Edgar Hoover sends RFK a memo detailing the “highlights” of the John Profumo

scandal. RK[64]



June 21, 1992: Ada Ruth Stephenson: Born on October 22, 1905 in Chariton County, Missouri. Ada Ruth died in Wichita, Kansas on June 21, 1992; she was 86. [65]





June 21, 2012: New Deglaciation Data Opens Door for Earlier First Americans Migration

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2012) — A new study of lake sediment cores from Sanak Island in the western Gulf of Alaska suggests that deglaciation there from the last Ice Age took place as much as 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, opening the door for earlier coastal migration models for the Americas.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Sanak Island Biocomplexity Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, also concluded that the maximum thickness of the ice sheet in the Sanak Island region during the last glacial maximum was 70 meters -- or about half that previously projected -- suggesting that deglaciation could have happened more rapidly than earlier models predicted.

Results of the study were just published in the professional journal, Quaternary Science Reviews.

The study, led by Nicole Misarti of Oregon State University, is important because it suggests that the possible coastal migration of people from Asia into North America and South America -- popularly known as "First Americans" studies -- could have begun as much as two millennia earlier than the generally accepted date of ice retreat in this area, which was 15,000 years before present.

Well-established archaeology sites at Monte Verde, Chile, and Huaca Prieta, Peru, date back 14,000 to 14,200 years ago, giving little time for expansion if humans had not come to the Americas until 15,000 years before present -- as many models suggest.

The massive ice sheets that covered this part of Earth during the last Ice Age would have prevented widespread migration into the Americas, most archaeologists believe.

"It is important to note that we did not find any archaeological evidence documenting earlier entrance into the continent," said Misarti, a post-doctoral researcher in Oregon State's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. "But we did collect cores from widespread places on the island and determined the lake's age of origin based on 22 radiocarbon dates that clearly document that the retreat of the Alaska Peninsula Glacier Complex was earlier than previously thought."

"Glaciers would have retreated sufficiently so as to not hinder the movement of humans along the southern edge of the Bering land bridge as early as almost 17,000 years ago," added Misarti, who recently accepted a faculty position at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Interestingly, the study began as a way to examine the abundance of ancient salmon runs in the region. As the researchers began examining core samples from Sanak Island lakes looking for evidence of salmon remains, however, they began getting radiocarbon dates much earlier than they had expected. These dates were based on the organic material in the sediments, which was from terrestrial plant macrofossils indicating the region was ice-free earlier than believed.

The researchers were surprised to find the lakes ranged in age from 16,500 to 17,000 years ago.

A third factor influencing the find came from pollen, Misarti said.

"We found a full contingent of pollen that indicated dry tundra vegetation by 16,300 years ago," she said. "That would have been a viable landscape for people to survive on, or move through. It wasn't just bare ice and rock."

The Sanak Island site is remote, about 700 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, and about 40 miles from the coast of the western Alaska Peninsula, where the ice sheets may have been thicker and longer lasting, Misarti pointed out. "The region wasn't one big glacial complex," she said. "The ice was thinner and the glaciers retreated earlier."

Other studies have shown that warmer sea surface temperatures may have preceded the early retreat of the Alaska Peninsula Glacier Complex (APGC), which may have supported productive coastal ecosystems.

Wrote the researchers in their article: "While not proving that first Americans migrated along this corridor, these latest data from Sanak Island show that human migration across this portion of the coastal landscape was unimpeded by the APGC after 17 (thousand years before present), with a viable terrestrial landscape in place by 16.3 (thousand years before present), well before the earliest accepted sites in the Americas were inhabited."

http://images.sciencedaily.com/2012/06/120621141351.jpg

New research suggests that the possible coastal migration of people from Asia into North America and South America could have begun as much as two millennia earlier than thought. (Credit: © David Alary / Fotolia)[66]

Genomics and African Queens: Diversity Within Ethiopian Genomes Reveals Imprints of Historical Events

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2012) — Researchers have started to unveil the genetic heritage of Ethiopian populations, who are among the most diverse in the world, and lie at the gateway from Africa. They found that the genomes of some Ethiopian populations bear striking similarities to those of populations in Israel and Syria, a potential genetic legacy of the Queen of Sheba and her companions.



The team detected mixing between some Ethiopians and non-African populations dating to approximately 3,000 years ago. The origin and date of this genomic admixture, along with previous linguistic studies, is consistent with the legend of the Queen of Sheba, who according to the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast book had a child with King Solomon from Israel and is mentioned in both the Bible and the Qur'an.

Ethiopia is situated in the horn of Africa, and has often been regarded as one of the gateways from Africa to the rest of the world. The Ethiopian region itself has the longest fossil record of human history anywhere in the world. Studying population genetics within this diverse region could help us to understand the origin of the first humans.

"From their geographic location, it is logical to think that migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago began in either Ethiopia or Egypt. Little was previously known about the populations inhabiting the North-East African region from a genomic perspective. This is the first genome study on a representative panel of Ethiopian populations," explains Luca Pagani, first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. "We wanted to compare the genome of Ethiopians with other Africans to provide an essential piece to the African -- and world -- genetic jigsaw."

They found that the Ethiopian genome is not as ancient as was previously thought and less ancient than the genomes of some Southern African populations. There were also links with other populations.

"We found that some Ethiopians have 40-50% of their genome closer to the genomes of populations outside of Africa, while the remaining half of their genome is closer to populations within the African continent," says Dr Toomas Kivisild, co-author from the University of Cambridge. "We calculated genetic distances and found that these non-African regions of the genome are closest to populations in Egypt, Israel and Syria, rather than to the neighbouring Yemeni and Arabs."

The team found that these two groups of African and non-African people mixed approximately 3,000 years ago, well before the historically-documented Islamic expansions and the colonial period of the last centuries.

An earlier study found that Ethio-Semitic, an Ethiopian language belonging to a linguistic family primarily spoken in the Middle East, split from the main Semitic group 3,000 years ago, around the same time as the non-African genomic component arrived in Ethiopia. All this evidence combined fits the time and locations of the legend of the Queen of Sheba, which describes the encounter of the Ethiopian Queen and King Solomon.

"None of this research would have been possible without the superb fieldwork of our Ethiopian colleagues Professor Endashaw Bekele and Dr Ayele Tarekegn over many years. The outstanding genetic diversity present within the peoples of Ethiopia is a rich resource that will contribute greatly, both to our understanding of human evolution and the development of personalised medicine." says Dr Neil Bradman, co-lead author from UCL (University College London). "The Ethiopian Government has a practice of encouraging genetic research, a policy that bodes well for the future."

"Our research gives insights into important evolutionary questions," says Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, co-lead author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We see imprints of historical events on top of much more ancient prehistoric ones that together create a region of rich culture and genetic diversity. The next step for our research has to be to sequence the entire genomes, rather than read individual letters, of both Ethiopian people and others to really understand human origins and the out-of-Africa migration."

http://images.sciencedaily.com/2012/06/120621130645.jpg

Portrait of young Ethiopian woman. Researchers have started to unveil the genetic heritage of Ethiopian populations, who are among the most diverse in the world, and lie at the gateway from Africa. They found that the genomes of some Ethiopian populations bear striking similarities to those of populations in Israel and Syria, a potential genetic legacy of the Queen of Sheba and her companions. (Credit: © derejeb / Fotolia)[67]




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Jews and Their DNA

Hillel Halkin — September 2008
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Eight years ago, I published an article in these pages called “Wandering Jews—and Their Genes” (September 2000). At the time I was working on a book about a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group in the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, many of whose members believe that they descend from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, and about a group of Judaizers among them known as the B’nei Menashe, over a thousand of whom live today in Israel as converts to Judaism.

This led me to an interest in Jewish historical genetics, then a new discipline. Historical genetics itself was still a pioneering field, launched by the discovery that two sources of DNA in the human body, the Y chromosome that determines male sex and the mitochondria that aid cell metabolism, never change (barring rare mutations) in their transmission from fathers to sons and from mothers to children of both sexes. This made it possible to trace paternal and maternal lines of descent far into the past and to learn about the movements and interactions of human populations that originated hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.

In my article, I observed that preliminary studies in Jewish genetics had both “shored up” and “undermined” some conventional ideas about Jewish history. On the one hand, they had indicated that there was a high degree of Y-chromosome similarity among Jewish males from all over the world, coupled with a much lower degree when the comparison was made between Jews and non-Jews in the same region. The one part of the globe in which Jews correlated as highly with many non-Jews as they did with other Jews was the Middle East—precisely what one might expect of a people that claimed to have originated in Palestine (or in Ur of the Chaldees, if you go back to Abraham) and to have spread from it.

Other studies established that the Y chromosomes of kohanim—male Jews said to descend from the priestly caste whose supposed progenitor was the biblical Aaron—had their own unique DNA signature, labeled the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Not only did half of all kohanim, who comprise about four percent of the world’s Jewish population, share this DNA configuration, but minor mutations in it pointed to a common ancestor who lived a few centuries before or after 1000 B.C.E.—that is, close to the period in which Aaron and his brother Moses are situated by biblical chronology.

Such evidence seemed to confirm traditional notions of Jewish origins. It suggested that the Jews, while certainly not a “race,” were indeed, despite the skepticism of many modern historians, the highly endogamous people they had always considered themselves to be, one that had admixed with outsiders relatively little during long centuries of wandering in the Diaspora. It also strengthened the reliability of the Bible as a historical source. Modern critics who contended that the Bible was a late document that imagined a largely non-existent past had always singled out the priestly codes of the Pentateuch as a prime illustration of this. But if the priesthood was really an institution going back to early Israelite history, rather than the backward projection in time of later generations, revisionist Bible criticism itself needed to be revised.

Yet there was contrary evidence, too. Early studies of mitochondrial DNA reported that Jewish women, unlike Jewish men, did not correlate well with one another globally. Furthermore, the greatest demographic mystery of Jewish history—that of the origins of the Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern Europe—had only appeared to deepen.

The standard Jewish version of these origins was that Ashkenazi Jewry had first crystallized in the late first millennium of the Christian era in the French-German borderland along the Rhine; that it had reached the Rhineland from southern France, to which it had come in earlier centuries either directly from Palestine or via Italy and Spain; and that it had then migrated eastward and northward into Central and Eastern Europe.Even before the advent of historical genetics, however, this account had been challenged. There were linguists who argued that East European Yiddish, the Germanic language of most Ashkenazi Jews, had more in common with the dialects of southern and southeastern Germany than with those of the Rhineland in the west. There were demographers who contended that the Jewish population of the Rhineland prior to the appearance of East European Jewry, which would eventually become the world’s largest Jewish community, was too small to account for the latter’s rapid growth.

The early genetic findings appeared to support the challengers. If the Rhineland theory was correct, Ashkenazi DNA should have had greater affinities with non-Jewish DNA from northern France and western Germany than with non-Jewish DNA from elsewhere; no one denied, after all, that wherever and whenever Jews had lived, some Gentiles must have joined them or begotten children with them. Yet there was no sign of this. Where, then, had Ashkenazi Jewry come from?

It was a mixed picture. Since then, eight years have gone by, historical genetics has greatly refined its methods and taxonomy, and several major new studies in Jewish genetic history have been published. What, viewed from their perspective, does Jewish history look like now?

_____________

Two new books address this question. One, David B. Goldstein’s Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, is the work of a scientist who teaches at Duke University and has been personally involved in much Jewish genetic research.1 The other, Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, is by a layman and journalist.2 Yet since Entine has done a serious and responsible job of reporting, and Goldstein has written a non-technical survey for the general reader, the difference between them is one more of style than of substance. They agree on most major points, starting with the puzzling disparity in the distribution patterns of Jewish Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA.

The fact of this disparity is now solidly established. There is no doubt that statistically (and only statistically: it is important to keep in mind that any randomly chosen Jewish individual may prove an exception to the rule), Jewish males with antecedents in such widely separated places as Yemen, Georgia, and Bukhara in Central Asia are far more likely to share similar Y-chromosome DNA with one another than with Yemenite, Georgian, or Bukharan non-Jews. Jewish females from the same backgrounds, on the other hand, yield opposite results: their mitochondrial DNA has markedly less resemblance to that of Jewish women from elsewhere than it does to that of non-Jewish women in the countries their families hailed from. The main difference between them and these Gentile women is that their mitochondrial DNA is less varied—that is, they descend from a small number of maternal ancestors. Geneticists call such a phenomenon, in which a sizable population has developed from a very small number of progenitors, a “founder” or “bottleneck” effect. (In “bottlenecks,” these few progenitors are survivors of larger groups that were drastically reduced by war, famine, plague, or other calamities.)

This calls for a new understanding of the spread of Jewish settlement in the Diaspora. Until now, it has been assumed that nearly all of the world’s Jewish communities began with the migration of cross-sections of older communities, which took their families, institutions, and practices with them and perpetuated their lives in new surroundings. Now, it would seem, as David Goldstein writes, that

[some] Jewish men . . . travel[ed] long distances to establish small Jewish communities [by themselves]. They would settle in new lands and, if unmarried, take local women for wives. The communities might [at a later date] have been augmented by additional male travelers from Jewish source populations. Once they were established, however, the barriers would go up against further input of new mitochondrial DNA, precisely because of female-defined ethnicity [i.e., the halakhic practice of determining Jewishness by the mother]; few [additional] females would be permitted to join.

Presumably, these adventurous bachelors setting out (perhaps on business ventures) for far lands could not persuade Jewish women to come with them, or else they traveled to their destinations with no intention of staying there. In the absence of rabbis to perform conversions, they married local women who, while consenting to live as Jews, were not halakhically Jewish. By halakhic standards, therefore, their descendants were not Jewish, either, even though their Jewishness was not challenged by the rabbinical authorities. Although such communities must, in their first generations, have known the truth about themselves, this does not appear to have bothered them or anyone else very much.

_____________

In a class by itself is the mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi women. It does not correlate closely with the DNA of non-Jewish women in Western, Central, or Eastern Europe and it has a large Middle Eastern component. Yet in their maternal lineage, Ashkenazim, too, exhibit a strong “founder effect.” Over forty percent of them, a 2005 study showed, descend from just four “founding mothers” having Middle-Eastern-profile mitochondrial DNA. Since Ashkenazi Y-chromosome DNA does not exhibit so dramatic a founder’s effect, one can assume that Ashkenazi Jewry, too, began with the migration of a preponderantly male group of Jews to new territories. Because these territories, however, were more contiguous with the old ones than were far-flung regions like Bukhara or Yemen, the men were more able to import wives from existing Jewish communities and less dependent on marrying local Gentiles.

But where did Ashkenazi Jewry, male and female alike, derive from if not from the Rhineland? One possibility that is more consistent with the linguistic data is that it entered southern Germany from northern Italy and pushed further north from there into the Slavic-speaking areas of Europe. Another is that Jews migrated to Slavic lands from the Byzantine Empire. These hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive, can now claim a measure of scientific support, since the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi Jews have more in common with those of Italians and Greeks than with those of West Europeans.

A more dramatic scenario, popularized by Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe, has to do with the Khazars, a Turkish people living between the Black and Caspian Seas, whose royal house adopted Judaism (with what degree of rabbinical supervision, we have no way of knowing) in the 8th century c.e. A great deal is obscure in the history of the Khazar kingdom, which at its apogee ruled much of present-day Ukraine, and the degree of the Judaization of its population is uncertain. Yet Koestler and a small number of historians on whom he based himself were convinced that, following the destruction of this kingdom in the 11th century by its Slavic enemies, many of its Jews fled westward to form the nucleus of what was to become East European Jewry.3

The Khazar theory never had many backers in scholarly circles; there was little evidence to support it and good reasons to be dubious about it. Why, for instance, does medieval rabbinic literature almost never mention the Khazars? Why, if they spoke a Turkish language, did East European Jewry become Yiddish-speaking? “Like virtually every academic I have ever consulted on the subject,” David Goldstein writes, “I was initially quite dismissive of Koestler’s identification of the Khazars [with] Ashkenazi Jewry.” Yet, he continues, “I am no longer so sure. The Khazar connection seems no more farfetched than the spectacular continuity of the Cohen line.”

This is one of the few occasions on which Jon Entine disagrees with him. Abraham’s Children declares:

The studies of the Y-chromosome and [mitochondrial] DNA do not support the . . . notion that Jews are descended in any great numbers from the Khazars or some Slavic group, although it’s evident some Jews do have Khazarian blood. The Khazarian theory has been put to rest, or at least into perspective.

_____________

Who is right? Either could be, for the latest evidence is ambiguous. It consists of two studies. One, “Y-Chromosome Evidence for a Founder Effect in Ashkenazi Jews,” was published in 2004 in the European Journal of Human Genetics by a small team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The other was the work of a larger, American-Israeli-British group to which Goldstein belonged; its report, “Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y-Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries,” appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2003. Both studies discuss a mutation, widely found in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, that occurs in a Y-chromosome classification known as Haplogroup R, at a DNA site labeled M117.

The Hebrew University study states:

Recent genetic studies . . . 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-M117, the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow [into the Ashkenazi population]. In the present study of 495 Y chromosomes of Ashkenazim, 57 (11.5 percent) were found to belong to R-M117.

As for the American-Israeli-British study, it was designed to ascertain whether Levites, who functioned as priests’ assistants in the ancient Temple and are supposedly also descended from Aaron, have a worldwide genetic signature similar to or the same as the Cohen Modal Haplotype.4 The answer turned out to be negative, since the Y chromosomes of Levites from different geographical backgrounds proved to correlate no better with one another than they did with the Y chromosomes of non-Levitic Jews. And yet, rather astonishingly, Ashkenazi Levites, when taken separately, do have a “modal haplotype” of their own—and it is the same R-M117 mutation on which the Hebrew University study centered! Fifty-two percent of them have this mutation, which is rarely found in non-Ashkenazi Jews and has a clear non-Jewish provenance.

_____________

What is one to make of this finding? An 11.5-percent incidence of R-M117 among Ashkenazi Jews in general is easily explainable: the mutation could have entered the Jewish gene pool slowly, in small increments in every generation, during the thousand years of Ashkenazi Jewry’s existence. (This need not necessarily have been via conversion to Judaism and marriage to Jewish women. Pre- and extra-marital sexual relations, and even rape, widespread in times of anti-Jewish violence, were in all likelihood more common.) But the 52-percent rate among Levites is something else. Here we are dealing not with a gradual, long-term process (for no imaginable process could have produced such results), but with a one-time event of some sort.

Such an event could obviously not have been a sudden influx of Levites into the Jewish community from a Gentile society. Both of our studies, therefore, raise the possibility that the original R-M117 Levites were Khazarian Jews who migrated westward upon the fall of the Khazar kingdom. Of course, since all or most Khazarian Jews were converts (although some may have been Jews who came from elsewhere), few could have descended from Aaron. Yet it is quite possible that some became, or were designated, “honorary” Levites in the course of the Judaization of the Khazarian population. As the American-Israeli-British study observes, Jews traditionally held to “a lesser degree of stringency for the assumption of Levite status than for the assumption of Cohen status,” so that self-declared Khazarian Levites might have fathered lineages whose Levitic pedigree came to be accepted.

But if R-M117 did enter the East European Jewish gene pool via a lineage of Khazar Levites, how many Khazars can be assumed to have joined the Ashkenazi community? At this point, it becomes pure guesswork. Analyzing the data, the American-Israeli-British study concludes that the number of R-M117 Levites absorbed by Ashkenazi Jewry ranged from one to fifty individuals. But as much as we might like to do the rest of the arithmetic ourselves, we can’t. For one thing, we have no way of knowing what the percentage of Levites in the Khazarian Jewish population was. Nor do we know the percentage of Khazars possessing M117, which is found in 12 or 13 percent of Russian and Ukrainian males today. If these were also its proportions among the Khazars, there would have been seven non-M117 Khazars joining or founding Ashkenazi Jewry for every Khazar who had the mutation.

In sum, even if the R-M117 Levites are traceable to Khazaria, the total flow of Khazarians into the East European Jewish population could have been anywhere from a single person to many thousands. If it was the latter, the Khazar input was significant, as David Goldstein suspects it was; if the former, it was trivial, as Jon Entine believes. The last eight years of research in Jewish historical genetics have not left us any wiser in this respect.

_____________

Traditional accounts of Jewish history, it would appear, are part true and part myth. Despite their dispersion in space and time, the Jews have continued to be that most curious (and in the eyes of many, preposterous) of combinations: at once a people or nation, fellow communicants in the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, and a family or tribe belonged to only by those born or married into it. They could not have remained such an amalgam had they not clung to strict rules of membership and admission.

Yet these rules were not observed everywhere or always. There were periods and places in which a blind eye was turned to them, most often when violations were not remediable. Had a rabbi arrived in Yemen or Bukhara soon after the founding of its Jewish community, he might have been able to insist on the halakhic conversion of its handful of Jews. But this would no longer have been practicable after several generations had gone by, especially since Yemenite and Bukharan Jews would have forgotten by then that their maternal progenitors were not halakhically Jewish and would have reacted with resentment to such a demand. Similarly, Khazars identifying themselves as Levites were accepted as such without inquiries into their past. It is an old rabbinic adage that one does not inflict demands on the public that the public is incapable of meeting. Better a tolerated myth than an intolerable truth.

Such, at any rate, was the attitude of a pre-modern age in which all Jews accepted rabbinic authority, so that all rabbis felt obliged to find solutions for all Jews. Since the mid-19th century, however, this has progressively ceased to be true. Rabbinic authority itself has fractured and dissipated. Most Jews no longer want rabbis to be responsible for them, and most rabbis no longer feel responsible for most Jews. The consequence of this, as reflected in the “Who Is A Jew?” debate that has racked world Jewry for the past several decades, is that the Jewish tribe is breaking up. In the United States, Orthodox rabbis do not recognize the Jewishness of converts to Reform or Conservative Judaism, Conservative rabbis do not recognize the Jewishness of children born to Jewish fathers but not to Jewish mothers, and Reform rabbis routinely preside over the marriages of Jewish men to non-Jewish women even though they may be creating future generations that they alone will consider Jewish.

In Israel, where non-Orthodox marriages and conversions cannot be performed, the problem is even more severe, for Jewishness in a Jewish state is a secular legal category as well. Israel’s Law of Return, for example, guarantees the right to immigrate and acquire Israeli citizenship to every Jew and his immediate family, including the first two generations of his descendants. Yet the more contentious the question of who is a Jew becomes, the more this law divides Jews rather than unites them.

Meanwhile, already living in Israel are hundreds of thousands of halakhically non-Jewish immigrants, most from the former Soviet Union, who entered the country under the Law of Return because they were either married to Jews or had a Jewish father or grandfather. As matters stand now, they and their children cannot have a Jewish wedding in Israel. Many of them, probably most, would like recognition as Jews, and not a few would be willing to convert in order to obtain it. But Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate has made the conversion procedure so difficult, in part by hinging it on the promise to live an Orthodox life, that most prospective converts have been deterred. Recently, perhaps for the first time in Jewish history, a conversion was retroactively annulled by the rabbinate on the grounds that such a promise was not kept.

For its part, the rabbinate insists that it has been forced to adopt more rigorous standards by the secular nature of Israeli society, which precludes the kind of “honor system” for determining Jewish identity that was operative in Jewish life in the past. Even Israelis whose Jewishness might appear to be beyond question now find themselves questioned about it.

_____________

To take a small personal example: my Israeli-born daughter, whose Israeli ID card lists her as “Jewish” and who is getting married in Israel this month, has been required to provide a letter from an Orthodox rabbi in the United States, where I and my wife were born and raised, attesting to the Orthodox ceremony in which we were wed in New York. The reasoning behind this is simple. Had we been married in Israel, this would have been considered proof of our daughter’s Jewishness, since our own Jewishness would already have been rabbinically certified. But if we were married in a non-Orthodox ceremony in the United States, we would have to bring further proof of our Jewishness since no non-Orthodox rabbi could be trusted to have vetted us properly.

And what could such further proof be? If we could find no Orthodox rabbi to speak for us, it would indeed be difficult to supply. My daughter would then have had the option of either arduously trying to assemble convincing evidence or of getting married outside of Israel (in which case her marriage would be recognized by Israeli secular law). Yet if she were to choose the second of these courses, as an increasing number of young Israelis are doing nowadays in their disinclination to deal with the rabbinate, she would in effect be choosing it for her children, too, since by the time they reached marriageable age, proof of their Jewishness would be even more difficult. In this manner, a growing public is being created in Israel that is losing its Jewish status in the eyes of rabbinic law.

The rabbinate’s position is understandable. Once, when there was no secular advantage in being Jewish, there was no reason to suspect anyone’s declaration of Jewishness; now, such avowals can no longer be taken at face value. And understandable, too, is the position of Israeli secularists who are indifferent to the rabbinate’s attitude or even welcome it.

For such secular Israelis, the idea of biological Jewishness is an embarrassing anachronism. Secular Zionism, after all, set out to normalize Jewish existence. Surely, they reason, its goal should therefore be to make Israelis a people whose identity is based, like that of other peoples, on territory, language, and culture rather than on shared blood ties. If Orthodoxy wishes to hasten this process, so much the better. Perhaps one day Israel will be become the “state of all its citizens” that democratic values require it to be, a country of Hebrew-speaking Jews, Muslims, and Christians, all equal before the law. Although the great majority of secular Israelis do not yet subscribe to this point of view, more and more will come to it if things continue on their present course.

As far as much of the rest of the world is concerned, biological Jewishness has always been an embarrassing anachronism—at least ever since the time of the Roman Empire and early Christianity. For the most part, Jews have nevertheless managed to go their own unembarrassed way. The genetic record shows that they have on the whole succeeded. But this is only, the same record shows, because they have made a point in the past of not embarrassing one another. There is a lot of DNA in the Jewish people that came in, as it were, through the back door. Unless ways are found to keep this door open, the walls of the house may have to be torn down.

_____________

In 2003, a year after the publication of my book Across the Sabbath River, I became involved in a historical genetics-research project myself. I did so at the invitation of two geneticists whose names appear on many of the scientific papers mentioned in this article: Professor Karl Skorecki and Dr. Doron Behar of Rambam Hospital and the Rappaport Research Institute in Haifa. They had read my book and wanted to know how I felt about taking part in a DNA study of the Mizo and Kuki people of northeast India, the purpose of which would be to determine whether there was evidence for a “Jewish”—that is, a Middle Eastern—origin for any of them.

Both men had qualms about the matter. Unlike other genetic investigations they had participated in, this one might have practical consequences. The B’nei Menashe believe that they descend from one of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel that was driven into exile by the Assyrians in the 8th century b.c.e. This belief, which first surfaced in Mizoram and Manipur in the 1950’s, is basic to their identity. Because of it, they have chosen to live Jewish lives and to convert once they have managed to reach Israel.

In my book I had come to the unexpected conclusion that there was a kernel of historical truth in their claim, although I did not think that more than a tiny fraction of Mizos and Kukis might have distant Israelite ancestors. What would happen, Skorecki and Behar asked, when our study was published? Whatever its findings, they would be certain to disappoint the B’nei Menashe and perhaps even to undermine their sense of Jewishness. And what if these findings were seized on by those in the Israeli government who wished to shut the country’s gates to the B’nei Menashe? Did we have the moral right to take such risks?

I answered that I thought we did. (This is the only basis I can imagine for David Goldstein’s strange statement in Jacob’s Legacy that I “agitated for the Mizos to undergo DNA tests in order to vindicate their claims.”) Israel’s gates had already been shut—and, apart from briefly swinging open again in 2006-7, have remained so—and even if one did not agree that the scientific truth was worth pursuing at all costs, someone else would pursue it in this case if we didn’t. It was best for the work to be done by an Israeli team that was sensitive to the issues involved.

In the end, we went ahead. Three rounds of sampling, based on the theories in my book and involving approximately 500 people, were carried out in India in 2003, 2006, and 2007. Although Goldstein writes (on what grounds, I again don’t know) that “most” Mizos and Kukis “resisted” genetic testing, I am aware of only one case in which someone who was asked to be sampled refused to cooperate. The difficulties were of an entirely different nature, such as a suitcase full of samples that was lost for several days in Tashkent, or the fact that at a critical juncture one of our samplers was murdered for reasons having nothing to do with our study.

The final lab results are now being tabulated. They will not, so it seems, be earth-shaking. Nearly all of the samples have turned out to have typically Tibeto-Burmese DNA. Although a very few look Middle Eastern, there may be no way of absolutely ruling out other possible sources for them. After all our effort, the results are inconclusive. And in any case, as historical geneticists are fond of saying, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” There are many reasons why an originally small input of DNA might not turn up in a study: its bearers may have failed to reproduce their lineage, or the sample may be too small, or a crucial population group may be missing from it.

It has not been my impression, however, that the B’nei Menashe are waiting for the results with bated breath. In the five years that have passed since the study was commenced, scarcely any of them has contacted me to ask about it, and there has been, as far as I know, little discussion of it in their community. There appears to be no reason to think that, when eventually published, it will have much of an impact on them or their fate.

This comes as a relief. Despite my assurances to Skorecki and Behar, I too had my doubts. But the B’nei Menashe are more grounded in their own beliefs than we had feared. They will stick to them regardless of what two highly professional geneticists and one sadly amateur historian say in some scientific journal.

_____________

This, I think, is as it should be. There may be a few people who can subsist on an austere regimen of all truth and no myth, and there are all too many people who live on a flabby diet of all myth and no truth. But some indeterminably proportioned combination of the two dispositions is what most of us require for our health. This is as true of societies as it is of individuals.

I myself have long suspected, starting far before I knew anything of historical genetics or Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe, that I have Khazar blood in me. One of my father’s sisters had distinctly slanty eyes. In one of her daughters, these are even more pronounced. The daughter’s daughter has features that could come straight from the steppes of Asia.

I rather like the idea of Khazar forefathers. Far from deconstructing my Jewishness, it romanticizes it even more. The thought that my distant ancestors on the plains of Russia had the intelligence and folly to choose Judaism for their religion; that they prayed to a Jewish God as they rode into battle; that (as the historians tell us) they held back the Muslim invasion of Europe from the east and helped keep the West safe for Dante and Shakespeare. Does it make me feel that, as Arab propaganda would have it, I don’t belong in Palestine? Why should it? We Khazars threw in our lot with the Jews and the Jews embraced us. Since then, we’ve also been Jews.

And who is we? Each of us has had many thousands of forebears, and each of those had many thousands in turn. The traces of millions of human beings are in our minds, our hair, our eyes and noses, our inner organs, the shape of our toes, our trillions of cells. By pure chance, two of these trillions are passed on unchanged and can be given labels like R-M117. Instructive as they are, we needn’t make too much of them.

_____________


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Footnotes

1 Yale, 176 pp., $26.00.

2 Grand Central, 432 pp., $27.99.

3 An assimilationist Jew and at one time of his life an idiosyncratic Zionist, Koestler was attracted to this theory because it demonstrated, so he thought, that the Jews of the Diaspora were a “pseudo-nation” held together by “a system of traditional beliefs based on racial and historical premises which turn out to be illusory.” Either, therefore, they should emigrate to Israel or they should cease to exist. Ironically, however, Koestler’s book was soon enlisted by Arab propaganda in its war against Israel and Zionism. What claim could the Jews have to Palestine, Arab spokesmen asked, if their original ancestors came from southern Russia?

4 Constituting, like priests, about four percent of the world’s Jews, Levites can easily be identified because, again like priests, they are assigned minor tasks in Jewish ritual to this day, so that every religiously observant Levite knows he is one.

About the Author

Hillel Halkin is a columnist for the New York Sun and a veteran contributor to COMMENTARY. Portions of the present essay were delivered at Northwestern University in March as the Klutznick Lecture in Jewish Civilization.[68]



Tracing the Cohanim
Back to Build a Family Tree

Most men can only name their male ancestors going back a few generations. Members of the Jewish priesthood (Cohanim) are an unusual group in that the men of this ancient priestly class can claim descent from a single male ancestor.

According to biblical accounts, the Jewish priesthood began about 3,000 years ago when Moses anointed his older brother Aaron the first high priest. Ever since, the priestly status has been handed down from father to son through the ages.

If this hereditary tradition has been closely followed, the Y chromosomes of the Cohanim today should bear some resemblance to one another because of their unbroken link back to a common ancestor, Aaron.

Genetic studies among Cohanim from all over the world reveal the truth behind this oral tradition. About 50 percent of Cohanim in both Sephardic and Ashkenazic populations have an unusual set of genetic markers on their Y chromosome. What is equally striking is that this genetic signature of the Cohanim is rarely found outside of Jewish populations.



Gene scansGene-scan outputs of microsatellite DNA analysis of genetic samples taken from a Lemba (top) and a member of the Cohanim.See larger version (38k)


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The Y chromosome also keeps track of time. Small mutations occur in the DNA being passed on, and these changes build up with each generation. Like the tick of a clock, the number of these mutations is a measure of time passed. By looking at the differences between Y chromosomes in the Cohanim, researchers can estimate roughly how many generations ago members of the priesthood had a common ancestor. Remarkably, the evidence suggests the Cohanim chromosomes coalesce at a date that corresponds with when the priesthood is thought to have begun.

What researchers may have found is a marker indicating paternal connection to the people from whom the ancient Hebrews emerged—potentially a powerful tool that enables us to look into the history of many Judaic populations[69]

3,000 years ago…Group in Africa Has Jewish Roots, DNA Indicates[70]


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By NICHOLAS WADE

The Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, have a tradition that they were led out of Judea by a man named Buba. They practice circumcision, keep one day a week holy and avoid eating pork or piglike animals, such as the hippopotamus.

Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from Biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection. And there is no Buba in the records of Jewish history.


http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/050999lemba-jewish-genes.1.GIF
The New York Times





But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The priestly genetic signature is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan.

The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.

The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, believes that he has discovered Senna, the mysterious northern city from which Lemba tradition maintains they came, and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.

The genetic side of the story began when Dr. Karl Skorecki, a kidney expert at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was sitting in a synagogue in Toronto. Skorecki, who is a priest, wondered if a fellow cohen who was being called to attend the first Torah reading might be distantly related to him, as the tradition of priestly descent from Aaron implied.

He called Dr. Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona, an expert who studies the genetics of human populations through the male or Y chromosome. Unlike the other chromosomes, the genetic material on the Y chromosome is not shuffled every generation, obscuring the lines of individual descent. Y chromosomes are bequeathed from father to son, more or less unchanged apart from the occasional mutation.

The mutations are particularly helpful for reconstructing population history because each lineage of men has its own distinctive pattern of mutations. It was a Y chromosome study last year that confirmed the oral tradition among the descendants of the slave Sally Hemings that their ancestor was Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third President.

Hammer, Skorecki and their colleagues reported in 1997 that they had analyzed the Y chromosomes of priests and lay Jews (priests, a hereditary caste, are different from rabbis and also from Levites). They found that a particular pattern of DNA changes was much more common among the priests than among laymen. The pattern was equally recognizable in Ashkenazic and Sephardic priests, even though these two branches of the Jewish population have long been geographically separated.

A colleague in Hammer's and Skorecki's research was Neil Bradman, a businessman who is now chairman of the Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College, London. Bradman set about making a wider study of Jewish populations around the world through the lens of the Y chromosome technique.

One recruit to Bradman's project is David B. Goldstein, a population geneticist at Oxford University in England. Goldstein set about refining Hammer's work so as to develop a better genetic signature of Jewish populations.

"The problem is there has been intermingling with host populations, and that has obscured their common ancestry," Goldstein said.

He looked at a set of three Y chromosome sites with stable genetic mutations and six sites at which mutations occur quite often, a mix designed to give good resolution between similar Y chromosomes during historical times. The mutations are all at sites that lie outside the genes, and thus do not contribute in any way to the individual's physical makeup.

He found a particular set of genetic mutations at these nine sites that was strongly associated with the priestly caste, not so common among lay Jews, and very rare among non-Jewish populations. Unlike forensic DNA markers, which are chosen to be almost wholly specific to individuals, this cohen-associated genetic signature cannot be used to say who is or who is not a priest. But it is highly diagnostic of whether a population has Jewish ancestry, Goldstein said.

He finds that 45 percent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 percent of Sephardic priests have the cohen genetic signature, while in Jewish populations in general the frequency is 3 to 5 percent.

Some of his subjects had the cohen genetic signature but with slight variations caused by mutations. From the pattern and number of mutations, Goldstein was able to calculate when the present day bearers of the cohen genetic signature and its variations last shared a common ancestor. This date, when all the branches of the family tree coalesce into a single trunk, has a wide range of uncertainty and depends on several assumptions, like the number of years in a human generation and the rate of mutation. But assuming 25 years to a generation on average, Goldstein calculated the coalescence time as 2,650 years ago, or 3,180 years with a 30-year generation time.

Though they are only rough, these dates make an evocative match with the Jewish tradition that Moses assigned the priesthood to the male descendants of his brother Aaron after the Exodus from Egypt, believed to have occurred some 3,000 years ago. Goldstein and colleagues published this conclusion last July.

"In studying the priesthood, we happened into this tool for distinguishing Jewish from non-Jewish populations," Goldstein said. As part of Bradman's project on the relationship of Jewish populations, he then tested DNA samples collected from the Lemba. And last month, at a conference on human evolution held at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, Goldstein reported that 9 percent of Lemba men carried the cohen genetic signature, and of those who said they belonged to the Buba clan, 53 percent had the distinctive sequences. These proportions are similar to those found among the major Jewish populations.

Because the cohen genetic signature is rare or absent in all non-Jewish populations tested so far, the findings support the Lemba tradition of Jewish ancestry. Goldstein said his findings would be published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

How did a Jewish priestly male chromosome come to be found in a black, Bantu-speaking people that looks very much like its southern African neighbors? Parfitt, who believes he has found the answer, first came across the Lemba while giving a lecture in Johannesburg about Ethiopian Jews. Some people in the audience wearing yarmulkes told him they, too, were Jewish.

Parfitt visited their homes, which are in northern South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of the Lemba, who number more than 50,000 people, are Christians, but they see no contradiction in professing Judaism, too. He learned that they had an enigmatic tradition about their origin: "We came from the north, from a place called Senna. We left Senna, we crossed Pusela, we came to Africa and there we rebuilt Senna."

Parfitt said that he was later traveling in the Hadramawt region, a former site of Jewish communities in Yemen, and mentioned the Lemba tradition of Senna to the religious leader of the holy city of Tarim. The leader was surprised to hear it because, he told Parfitt, there was a nearby village called Senna.

"So I went off to find Senna," Parfitt said. "It's very remote and had never been visited by anyone before. The local tradition is that centuries ago the valley had been very fertile, irrigated by a dam, the ruins of which are still there. And then the dam burst, they think about a thousand years ago, and the people fled."

There is a valley that leads from Senna to a port on the Yemeni coast called Sayhut. If the winds are right, a ship from Sayhut could reach southern Africa in nine days, Parfitt said. And the valley that leads from Senna to Sayhut is called the Wadi al-Masilah. Parfitt believes that Masilah may be the "Pusela" of the Lemba oral tradition.

The Lemba have clan names like Sadiqui and Hamisi that are "clearly Semitic" and that are also found in the eastern Hadramawt, Parfitt said.

Parfitt, who has described his work on the Lemba in a recent book, "Journey to the Vanished City" (Phoenix, London), said he had been excited to hear of Goldstein's genetic results confirming the Lemba tradition. [71]



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[1] http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/


[2] www.cohen-levi.org


[3] Fascinating Facts about the Holy Land by Clarence H. Wagner, Jr.


[4] The Time Tables of Jewish History, A chronology of the Most Important People and Events in Jewish History, by Judah Gribetz, page 33.


[5] The Time Tables of Jewish History, A chronology of the Most Important People and Events in Jewish History, by Judah Gribetz, page 33.


[6] The Art Institute of Chicago, 11/1/2011


[7] The Art Institute of Chicago, 11/1/2011


[8] http://timelines.ws/countries/TUNISIA.HTML


[9] http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/


[10] http://www.tudor-history.com/about-tudors/tudor-timeline/


[11] http://www.tudor-history.com/about-tudors/tudor-timeline/


[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lady_Jane_Grey&oldid=564113422


[13] http://archive.org/stream/lettersofmarystu00mary/lettersofmarystu00mary_djvu.txt


[14] [^Gotemporary copy, — British Museum; MSS, Shane, 3199,fol. 341.]




[15] * Of Cbatelherault


[16] http://archive.org/stream/lettersofmarystu00mary/lettersofmarystu00mary_djvu.txt


[17] On This Day in America by John Wagman.


[18] American Experience, We shall Remain; After the Mayflower, 4/13/2009


[19] That Dark and Bloody River by Allan W. Eckart, 637-638


[20] On This Day in America by John Wagman.


[21] http://www.freewebs.com/bubadutep75/


[22] wikipedia


[23] On this Day in America, by John Wagman.


[24] Jeff Goodlove Familytreemaker


[25] History of Early LeFeveres by Mary Ellen (Miller) Boller, page 1, 1994


[26] History of Early LeFeveres by Mary Ellen (Miller) Boller, page 1, 1994


[27] History of Early LeFeveres by Mary Ellen (Miller) Boller, page 2, 1994


[28] History of Early LeFeveres by Mary Ellen (Miller) Boller, page 2, 1994


[29] Proposed Descendants of William Smythe


[30] http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/


[31] http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~cutlip/database/America.html




[32] http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/d/e/r/Irene-Deroche/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0585.html


[33] In Search of Turkey Foot Road


[34] In Search of Turkey Foot Road, page 34.


[35] http://www.nps.gov/archive/fone/1754.htm


[36] In Search of Turkey Foot Road, pages 78-79.


[37] From River Clyde to Tymochtee and Col. William Crawford by Grace U. Emahiser, 1969 p.20.


[38] http://penningtons.tripod.com/jeptha.htm


[39] Proposed Descendants of William Smythe


[40] A Hessian Dieary of the American Revolution by Johann Conrad Dohla trans. By Bruce E. Burgoyne.


[41] http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/


1. [42] ^ Christian G. Fritz, American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2008) at p. 131 ISBN 978-0-521-88188-3 (noting that "Madison, along with other Americans clearly understood" the Articles of Confederation "to be the first federal Constitution.")

2. ^ a b c d e f Maier 2010, pp. 11-13.

3. ^ Maier 2010, pp. 12-13, 19.

4. ^ Maier 2010, pp. 15-16.

5. ^ Bowen 2010, pp. 129-130.

6. ^ Bowen 2010, p. 31.

7. ^ Maier 2010, p. 13.

8. ^ Wood 1998, pp. 356-367, 359.

9. ^ Maier 2010, pp. 14, 30, 66.

10. ^ Maier, Pauline (2010). Ratification : the people debate the Constitution, 1787–1788. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780684868547 p.21.

11. ^ Bowen, Catherine (2010) [First published 1966]. Miracle at Philadelphia : the story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787. New York: Little, Brown. ISBN 9780316102612. p.11.

12. ^ Morris (1987) pp 298–99.

13. ^ Armstrong, Virginia Irving (1971). I Have Spoken: American History Through the Voices of the Indians. Pocket Books. p. 14. ISBN 671-78555-9. See also, House Concurrent Resolution 331, October 21, 1988. United States Senate. Retrieved 2008-11-23.. In October 1988, the U.S. Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331 to recognize the influence of the Iroquois Constitution upon the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

14. ^ Greymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution 1972. ISBN 0-8156-0083-6, p.vii.

15. ^ Morgan, Edmund S., Benjamin Franklin 2002. ISBN 0-300-10162-7 (pbk) p.80-81 Viewed December 29, 2011.

16. ^ Mee, Charles L., Jr. The Genius of the People. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. p. 237

17. ^ Greymont, Barbara. Op.cit. p.66 These intrigues were mounted by (a) the French and British empires, (b) the colonies, then states of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and (c) the United States as the Continental Congress, the Articles Congress and subsequently.

18. ^ NARA. "National Archives Article on the Bill of Rights". http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters.html. Retrieved 2007-12-16.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Constitution


[43] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor


[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI_of_France


[45] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles


[46]


Series 21: Collector's Items, 1783-1915, bulk 1827-1893


This series consists of letters, autographs, and miscellaneous other documents that were not originally directed to Harrison or his family, but which Harrison collected. There are items from many famous people, most of whom were Americans, including John Quincy Adams, Washington Irving, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Washington, and Noah Webster. The content of the letters in this series tends to not be very substantive, with many of the letters being things such as thank you notes, responses to requests for autographs, and invitations and responses to invitations.


This box is stored in the Vault. The correspondence in this series is arranged alphabetically by the sender's name. Multiple items within a folder are then arranged chronologically. Documents other than correspondence are arranged alphabetically by the name of the person who signed the document, or to whom the document primarily relates.





[47] http://www.geni.com/people/Zachary-S-Taylor-12th-President-of-the-USA/6000000002143404336


[48] http://www.geni.com/people/Zachary-S-Taylor-12th-President-of-the-USA/6000000002143404336


[49] On This Day in America by John Wagman.


[50] Kenneville, a small town on the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad. (A History of the 24th Iowa Infantry 1862-1865 by Harvey H. Kimble Jr. August 1974. page 155)


[51] Leaving their camp near Greenville Station, on the New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad on the 21st, they were subsequently stationed at Kennerville and Thibodeaux, La., until July 6th. (Roster of Iowa Soldiers in the War of the Rebellion Vol. III, 24th Regiment-Infantry. ftp://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgienweb/ia/state/military/civilwar/book/cwbk 24.txt.




[52] Annotated by Jeffery Lee Goodlove


[53] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Taylor


[54] Proposed Descendants of William Smythe


[55] HISTORIC ROYAL SPEECHES AND WRITINGSThe British Monarchy web site [http://www.royal.gov.uk]


[56] HISTORIC ROYAL SPEECHES AND WRITINGS The British Monarchy web site [http://www.royal.gov.uk]


[57] Proposed Descendants of William Smythe.


[58] Proposed Descendants of William Smythy


[59] Memorial des enfants deportes de France” de Serge Klarsfeld


[60] http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/


[61] On This Day in America, by John Wagner.


[62] On This Day in America by John Wagner.


[63] Jacob’s Legacy, A Genetic View of Jewish History, by David B. Goldstein, page 87.


[64] http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v2n1/chrono1.pdf


[65] www.frontierfolk.net/ramsha_research/families/Stephenson.rtf


[66] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120621141351.htm


[67] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120621130645.htm


[68] http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/jews-and-their-dna/


[69] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/israel/familycohanim.html


[70] http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/050999lemba-jewish-genes.html


[71] http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/050999lemba-jewish-genes.html