“Modern Ashkenazi Jew’s ancestral Matriarchs were not Jews” – Part One
Imbedded in the national consciousness of the Jewish people is the a priori thesis that “to be a Jew your mother must be a Jew. The foundation of this belief came when the Jewish people returned with their Jewish Exilarch and newly appointed governor by the Persian Shah, Prince Zerubabbel from their Babylonian-Persian exile to a destroyed Jerusalem and Holy Temple of Solomon in the 5th and 4th century BCE.
The amazing hand of the Divine had already unfolded in their eyes when King Cyrus over the Medes and the Persians toppled the mightiest city in the world, Babylon. It was accomplished by the brilliant maneuvers of King Cyrus’ leading general, General Gobryas, one of the chieftains of the Guti (Tribe of Gad) who diverted the waters of the Tigris River while the armies of King Cyrus invaded the city of Babylon by passing under the walls and through the river gates under the city. While King Belteshazzar of Babylon was holding a great feast in the Royal Banquet Hall celebrating his rule over the Jewish people, using the sacred golden vessels of King Solomon’s Temple, the city of Babylon was being conquered.
King Cyrus, the King of the Pasargadae (Tribe of Gad) captures Babylon
Yes, the evidence is become clearer that it was the armies of the Lost Israelites who rescued the Jewish people and ended their exile in Babylon without shedding a drop of Jewish blood. This fact set forth their soon restoration and redemption back to the city of Jerusalem under the semi-autonomous Persian rule as a Satrap of Persia with their governor, the Jewish Prince of the royal House of Kings David and Solomon; Prince Zerubabbel, the leading Jewish Exilarch in Babylon.
Now it was time to restart and restore a new Jewish homeland in the lands of their forefathers; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Within years the second migration of Jews followed under the leadership of the Jewish Scribe, Ezra and the Jewish clerics who arrived as the new Temple of Zerubabbel was being completed to inaugurate the temple and begin its daily services.
They understanding fully the profound implications of rebuilding a new home just for the Jews, and the memory of the how the Erev Rav that created the Golden Calf and sought to corrupt the great lessons HaShem taught the Children of Israel in route to the mount called Sinai and eventually their Land of Promise. It was the Erev Rav, as Egyptian opportunists or children of Egyptian fathers who married Jewish mothers, who followed the ancient Israelites in their mass Exodus from Egypt about 3,600 years ago. In a newly formed national culture centered on the tribal identity of the father, the Erev Rav had no identity and became known as the “mixed multitude” or the “fifth column”. They held no allegiance to anyone including Israelite authority, no tribal identity and almost aborted the creation of the Nation of the Children of Israel, standing at the base of Mount Horeb (Sinai).
It was understandable that Jewish men who married Babylonian and Persian wives, now taking them to their new homeland was potentially a fatal flaw that could have destroyed the creation of a Nation of Jews rising again in the Land of Israel. These wives could have been converted them to Judaism, but was that an opportunistic moment to become a Jew and not become the heart and soul of being a Jew. This was an opportunistic moment that may have led to corrupting Judaism with the corruption of the pagan-Jewish mixed religion they were observing. Such is the same dilemma of accepting a Muslim or Christian back into the faith of Judaism today.
It was HaShem, the G-d of Israel who chose King Nebuchadnezzar to destroy the city of Jerusalem, even the most opulent Solomon’s Temple; the House of HaShem. For the corruption and sinking to the 49th level of Tuma (degradation) of the Jewish state, this earned the wrath of HaShem upon the Jewish ruling elite through the pen of King Zedekiah’s grandfather, the Prophet Jeremiah for Jeremiah spared no ink to denounce the degradation and apostasy of Jerusalem ruling council in the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
For the Jews to survive, they would have to learn how to be a “separated” people. They could not be just as any other nation or peoples of the nations. They were to be “in the world” but “not of the world”. They were to follow the “God of Israel” and not the “gods” of other religions and social cultural icons that would divert their attention away from the Divine.
The era of “exclusiveness” and “seclusiveness” had now come, not as a divine mandate for all times, but to preserve the Jewish people as they were taken into captivity. Yet, HaShem provided them with the Jewish Prime Minister of Babylon, Daniel, plus another four faithful Babylonian Jewish ministers of state that had places for the newly arriving Jewish slaves to live, yeshiva’s to learn the Torah, and to prepare them for that day, when they would then be prepared to become a people whose relationship with their G-d was so strong that they could now be a “light to the world.”
With a Prince of Kings David and Solomon living in their midst, the “end of days” was also in their expectations for at that time, after the rise of a National Israel, the “time of the end” had once again come. With a Prince of David, there would always be the hope of a messiah to come and dwell within their presence. At that time, they could become a magnet of “light”, “wisdom”, and “understanding” for they would then teach the nations the “ways of the Lord.”
And so, Ezra and the Jewish clerics prescribed the edict that “To be a Jew, your mother must be a Jew” as a protection that could have aborted the founding of a new Jewish State its infancy. This was not just an exceptional rule, for it was the edict and the rule given the Children of Israel by Moses when he divided up the Land of Promise into the separate tribal inheritances of each of the Thirteen Tribes of Israel; included two tribes allocated for the double portion blessing for the House of Joseph; Ephraim and Manasseh. This cleric ruling has now been carried down through the ages to our present age. The question was; were their exceptions and was this ruling for all ages?
The implications upon this ruling, even was and is profound today. Over the centuries, the Northern Ten Tribes had so lost their Israelite identity, that they did not even recognize their own Northern Ten Tribal brother Israelites. In later centuries, they fought among themselves, seeking power, greed and control but amazingly they did keep each to their own tribal identity until the last two centuries, when the nations of the world began to assimilate in mass among each other.
Yet, they Lost Israelites were not lost to their Creator, who as the Holy and Divine One of Israel, was also the guiding Force of all the 70 nations of the world. It was HaShem’s voice that the prophets of Judah and Israel so clearly spoke about of the day in which they will be reclaimed, redeemed and restored back into Klal Yisrael (All Israel) and bring forth the “Day of the L-rd” which many have interpreted as a thousand years of peace.
Restoration of Klal Yisrael (Greater Israel including all 12 Tribes)
So today, the resurrection of the Lost Ten Tribes has now come into full reality. With great scholars as the Orthodox Jewish scholar Yair Davidiy with Brit Am, and the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Avraham Feld along with OvadYah Avrahami, the Orthodox Jewish director with Kol Ha Tor, the reality of the resurrection of the “Dry Bones” of Lost Israel is now raising itself up into a full spiritual and physical reality.
As the Lost Ten Tribes of the House of Israel are now seeking to come closer to their Jewish brothers with many in the multi-faceted process of assimilating into modern Orthodox Jewish life, this has been complicated by the fact that many Jewish fathers who married non-Jewish brides, have discovered that their descendants are not accepted even in familial and cordial relationships with other Jews because at least one of their mothers, grandmothers, or great….grandmothers were not Jewish.
Yet there is also the looming spiritual consciousness that those who are becoming aware of their new Israelite identity have discovered that many time the Jewish people have not accepted them and called them “gentiles” sometimes with great disparity yet in their hearts the Lost Israelites perceive that they are part of the spiritual and physical resurrection of the Lost Ten Tribes of the House of Israel.
The days of exile of the Lost Ten Tribes of the House of Israel are about over. Their spiritual exile will be over when they open their hearts to their brothers and sisters of the House of Judah, in which again will accept them as one of those who kept the covenant of HaShem, the G-d of Israel, preserved the Torah and its halakhic understanding of how to live the life of Torah in the ever changing imperial worlds of cultural domination by the preservation and continuation of the Oral Torah.
With the casting down of the Spirit of HaShem upon his “lost children” people, a new and electric rejuvenation of mass consciousness has been predicted by the prophets of old that the House of Judah (“The Jewish People”) and the House of Lost Ten Israel will again be reunited in a massive family reunion.
Understandably, in the Persian era, the non-Jewish wives were sent back to the region of Babylon or the other satraps of Persia, this time in disgrace of their own families and caused relationship problems that ricocheted through international boundaries. For example, Prince Zerubabbel, the leading Exilarch of that era brought with himself his three wives and this cleric ruling was equally catastrophic.
Prince Zerubabbel had to divorce his 1st Babylonian bride, Princess Amytis. They had grown up as friends when he was a young man. Together, his family from the royal family of King Jeconiah, and the royal family of King Evil-Merodach, the son of King Nebuchadnezzar shared a very closeness of their royal fathers’ relationships. Both of their ancestral fathers were dead. Yet, the entire social culture of Babylon was gone and absorbed into the Media-Persian culture.
King Cyrus the Great and Queen Esther
The effects of the divorce of Amytis with Prince Zerubabbel are not historically known, yet their son, Prince Shazrezzar did remain with his father in Jerusalem. The affects of the divorce with his 2nd Persian bride, Princess Rhodah, was more problematic. It appears that Princess Rhodah was the same person as Rhodogune, the sister to Cyrus the Great.
According to Persian history, Rhodogune was the mother of the current Persian Shah, which made Shah Darius the brother-in-law to Prince Zerubabbel. Returning his wife back to Persia, disgraced with a divorce, there appeared to erupt a crisis in the international relations between Persia and the new Jewish Persian Satrap in Jerusalem. This international relations earthquake apparently affected the Jewish Persian Governor. Prince Zerubabbel was soon after recalled back to Persia. After that he disappears totally from history; maybe imprisoned or his life terminated.
So today, many Lost Tribers seeking to assimilate into Jewish culture and coming from Christian belief backgrounds are discovering a rude awakening. They are seen as gentiles and not of Hebrew Israelite lineages. Yet, a modern Jew, whose mother is of accepted Jewish birth, whether they are observant or not, are still welcome with open arms into Jewish cultural life. They are given a royal welcome “back home” from their prior assimilation in the culture of their present habitation.
Today, most of the Lost Tribers cannot point to their ancestral Israelite genetic lineages yet those lineages do exist. Even if they did, they will have to face the fact, that their forefathers, from the Northern Ten Tribes of the House of Israel rebelled and refused to serve the G-d of Israel, refused to worship in the Temple of Solomon, refused to live under the dynastic rule of the royal descendants of Kings David and Solomon, refused to accept the high priestly authority of the descendants of Zadok, and refused to accept the divine mandate of the Jewish rabbanim to be the Mechoqeck or the “lawgiver of G-d”; to interpret the halakhic laws of Torah and how to live them in a changing world around them.
Click on the Following Link for Higher Resolution: The timescale (ka) is based on ML estimations for mitogenomes. Inset: Bayesian skyline plot of 34 Ashkenazi haplogroup K lineages, showing growth in effective population size (Nef) over time.
It was on October, 2013 that a scholarly article by seventeen scholars of genetic DNA was published in Nature Communications. They made an astounding discovery and assertion that a large percentage of the Ashkenazi Jewry in Central and Eastern Europe have a common ancestry on the maternal side, not from Jewish mothers from the Near East in the Province of Judea as assumed and previously supposed.
Instead, according to the scholarly analysis, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of King Herod in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the females and children were killed in a massive genocide and the large male population was deported from the Land of Israel and transported back to Italy and the surrounding European regions as slaves.
There they married European women principally of Italian and European stock. The children of these Jewish fathers became the principle female founders and female ancestress of the Ashkenazi Jewish community in Europe today.
Like the ancient Jewish populations, the mitochondrial DNA was passed through the maternal lineages but it was discovered that the distinct variations were seen in the Ashkenazim that made them distinctively apart and separate from the more homogeneous Sephardic Jews that lived in Spain that were eventually cast out of Spain on the 9th of Av in 1492. This mass exodus of Sephardic Jews became also the story of Christopher Columbus, who as a Kabbalist Jew with his prime financial Jewish supporters and crew, “sailed the ocean blue in 1492” and became noted as the founder of America and there colonized the Americas with Jewish bloodlines.
The Ashkenazim have four major female founding lineages that make up of 40% of the Ashkenazi mtDNA variations seen in ancient and prehistoric Europe rather than was assumed earlier to have come from the Near East or the regions of the Caucasus.
Even then, the remaining minor genetic foundational gene pools all shared a deep European ancestry, so as the scholars agreed upon, the maternal lineages did not come from the region of the Levant where the Land of Israel is today and all have concluded, came from woman that had assimilated and were part of the indigenous populations within Europe up to hundreds and thousands of years prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The conclusion of the scholars made an amazing and profound discovery as it may seem to be; to be a Jewish person and part of the Nation of Israel and a people’s of the G-d of Israel, one cannot also count on having a mother that is a Jew.
Yet as with all the premises of the ancient Torah law and their halakhic implications, to be a Jew, one must also agree to become part of the Jewish family of G-d and convert to Judaism. In the ancient days, 2000 years ago, as it now appears, the G-d of Israel scattered the Jewish fathers across the Europe and out of their loins, the vibrant Ashkenazi communities were founded by European and Italian matriarchs who chose Judaism as their spiritual life. Out of this came some of the most prominent Jewish rabbanim of Judaism in the last two millenniums.
The discoveries of these genetic lineages that became the foundational lineages of the Ashkenazi Jews today came by decoding the entire mitochondrial genomes of the people from Europe and the Near East surrounding the land of Israel today. It was an earlier DNA research that discovered that the Jewish communities that were scattered around the world were founded by Jewish men whose Y chromosomes bore the DNA patterns are were part of the larger gene pool found in the Near East.
Click to Open a Larger Image: “Phylogenetic Tree of Haplogroup K1a1b1” of the Jewish Ashkenazim
Time scale (ka) based on ML estimations for mitogenome sequences.
Yet, it was the same geneticists, when they came to analyze the mitochondrial DNA, or the genetic elements that are separate from the main human genome and transferred through the female lineages, unlike the Y chromosomes of the male, the female mitochondrial DNA did not share a common pattern as the male Y chromosomes. The male Y Chromosomes were of Near Eastern origins but the mitochondrial DNA of the females came from European origins. This then suggested that the migration pattern of the Jewish males who entered Rome, Italy eventually migrated further to the north in Gaul (Europe). It also depicted that the female lineages came from the indigenous population that were living in Gaul (ancient Europe) antecedent to the arrival of later male Jewish population.
So how did this come to be? Did the Jewish male population that were taken as slaves to Rome become later traders, and traveling salesmen and in their route took local European women to be their wives who later converted to Judaism? This is one of the conclusion that the scholars of this study came to accept.
With close to 16,600 DNA units to analyze in the female mitochondrial DNA, they discovered four mitochondrial lineages that were common among the Ashkenazis that are now rarer in the Near East than in Europe. Because of the rapid change or drift in the mitochondrial DNA, it is difficult to discover if these were the true ancestral origins, and that may also be the mystery that the hand of the Almighty guided throughout the generations.
It was Dr. Martin B. Richards, who did draw up the family tree with the newer genetic analysis of maternal lineages and his family trees did show that the four Ashkenazi lineages did in fact form clusters within descent lineages that were already established in Europe 10,000 to 20,00 years age. This dating potentially carried the same flaws of understanding by secular scholars as the Jewish rabbinic analysis discovered when they tried to find the origins of who were the “Magogs”, that also were lost in antiquity, yet have been so vividly resurrected at the end of days when a Prince of the Land of Magog, called Gog will make the final assault upon the land of Israel before the Maschiah ben Dovid is fully revealed.
“The Land of Magog” from Sea to Shining Sea
What was discovered as outlined in the BibleSearchers Reflections article, “The Mystery of Magog” was the fact that the Tribe of Magog virtually disappeared from the face of the earth yet today has been resurrected as the North American Apache and Navaho Indians in Central and Southwestern United States. As written:
BibleSearchers Reflections – “The tribe of Magog virtually disappears from the Euro-Asian continents. What is now known, the tribe of Magog or Mogog migrated to the northeastern corner of the Asian continent. In this vast migration, the children of Magog about 3800 years ago came to the land bridge of the Bering Straits in Alaska. They bridged over this strait into the vast land mass of North and South America. What clues do we have that this truly did happen?
As noted above, about a thousand years before the Mongol hordes scaled that mighty Great Wall of China, that barrier wall was erected as a shield for the indigenous Chinese to keep out the Magog tribes migrating to their north. As such the Great Wall of China was called by the Arab chroniclers the “Wall of Al Magog”. When Marco Polo showed up on the scene, the Mongol hordes had already successfully scaled this wall one century earlier.
What we do know is that language speaking tribes of Asian descent did migrate across the land mass or by boat across the narrow Bering Strait in Alaska thousands of years ago. Across these straits they carried with them their language, their genes and their molar dental records. The study of the indigenous languages of the American Indian tribe in North America can be traced as coming across the Bering Straits from their original homeland in Asia and the Siberian plains.
According to the anthropologists, there were up to three different migrations of Asians that migrated into the Americas. They dated these three migrations about 25,000, 12,000 or even 6,000 years ago. This dating was influenced by the geologists who claimed that the last great ice age began to recede in this era. Of course, this thesis came with the supposition that the Asian migration of Mongols needed the ice caps to provide a pathway to the new world.
Yet a problem existed. As stated, a crisis arose in opposition to the three migration thesis because the linguists universally agreed that there was no written language prior to 5000 years ago. And so the scientific dialogue began… While geneticist argue for the genetic kinship of the Mongolians with the American Indians, the anthropologists argue that the migration occurred just after the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago and the linguists argue that this migration had to occur within the last 5000 years. Could this really be?”
This is the same question we are impelled to ask today. The genetic DNA study published in Nature Communication postulated that 80 percent of the Ashkenazi maternal lineages came from European origins and that the four European lineages, according to Dr. Martin B Richards from the University of Huddersfield in England, were assimilated into the Jewish communities that later became the Ashkenazi populations in northern Europe.
With this, the vast assimilation the Ashkenazi population was estimated to have been about 25,000 Jews in 1300 CE grew now to more than 8.5 million Jews at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet it was postulated that Dr. Richard’s mitochondrial family trees showed four major Ashkenazi lineages that actually came from clusters within the descent lines that were already settled from the aboriginal populations of ancient Gaul in Northern Europe “some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago” and that this same fact was true also of the minor lineages.
We reflect upon the use of the mitochondrial DNA to identify the historical fact that the ancient Magogs migrated across the Aleutian Straits and later inhabited North America from “sea to shining sea”. They became the ancestors of the modern American Indians. So today many of the modern Jewish rabbis accept the interpretations of the Prophet Ezekiel’s GogUMogog War in Ezekiel 38-39 that allows the fact that North America and the Land of Magog could be one in the same people’s as the North American Indians. Also “Gog of the Land of Magog”, now becomes the ruling “Prince of the Land of Magog” as the President of the United States who sits in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C.
Yet Dr. Richards now has another problem. Is he also willing to postulate that it did not take 10,000 to 20,000 years to assimilate the Ashkenazi blood lines, for modern linguists have universally agreed that there was no written language prior to 5000 years ago. Therefore the maternal mitochondrial DNA links to the modern Ashkenazim could easily have occurred in the last 2,000 to 3,600 years. But who could these ancestral European peoples have been?
So the question we ask, if the Jewish Ashkenazi matriarchs were not Jewish, who were they?
What would happen if we discovered that the Ashkenazi matriarchs were actually Lost Israelites. Did not the Prophet Ezekiel specifically state that the G-d of Israel has given his covenanted promise that was contingent upon HaShem honoring His Holy Name that He would redeem and restore the Lost Israelites when He spoke these words through Ezekiel the Prophet:
Ezekiel 36:24- “I will take you (O House of Israel) from [among] the nations and gather you from all the lands, and I will bring you to your own soil. Then I will sprinkle pure water upon you…I will cleanse you from all your contamination…I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh… I will put My spirit within you, and I will make it so that you will follow my decrees and guard My ordinances and fulfill them.
You will dwell in the in the land that I gave to your forefathers [Shomron (Samaria)], Galilee, Basham (Jordan) Gilead (Syria); you will be a people to Me, and I will be a G-d to you.”
So what will happen when the Lost Israelites are truly redeemed back into brotherhood with the Jews of Judah and the Nation of Israel in its totality and (Klal Yisrael) is reunited and restored? What will happen when the mothers of Israel who are not Jewish but literal Lost Israelites will again have the same rights of the covenant with G-d and their children will no longer be looked upon as bastard children or gentiles who worship idols and false gods? This is the question we will explore next!
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Destination Yisrael invites you to Read the Series:
“Modern Ashkenazi Jew’s ancestral Matriarchs were not Jews”
Part One – “Modern Ashkenazi Jew’s ancestral Matriarchs were not Jews but ancient European Women”
Part Three – “The Hand of G-d placed the Lost Ten Tribes in Europe so that the Israelite Matriarchs could Preserve the “Seed” of Judah”
The G-d of Israel claimed that there are only two groups of people who will be restored back into covenant with Him, the Jews of the House of Israel and the Lost Ten Tribes of the House of Israel. Both families, the Jews and the Israelites were scattered across the face of the earth and would become HaShem emissaries incognito sent to elevate the 70 nations of the world, so that even Righteous Gentiles would become part of the covenant. Even those children of Ishmael will be assimilated into the Jewish culture when deep in their hearts they are “safe to save” and willing to live in peace with their brothers, the descendants of Abraham. Only the G-d of Israel knows who they are.
We are quickly polarizing a world in which there will be only two choices; we are either for the Hebrew Israelites; both now part of the Jews of the house of Judah and the Lost Israelites of the House of Israel or we will be against them. This comes to one sobering conclusion, if you are a descendant of the Lost Ten Tribes of the House of Israel and you still despise your brothers, the Jews, you will be left cohabitating with peoples who will have a genetic hatred to you even though you think you want to be a part of them.
So today, the G-d of Israel is whistling for you to come back home to the brotherhood of Klal Yisra’el (All Israel). To learn more about this redemptive process, you are Welcome to Contact “Kol Ha Tor”, the Voice of the Turtledove. Here is a joint Orthodox Jewish and 10-Triber Vision to bring awareness of the imminent fulfillment of the Biblical Prophecies regarding the Redemption of all Israel (12 Tribes Re-conciled and Re-United). This super Event of all Times will entail establishing in the region of Shomron (the Ancient Bible Heartland of the Patriarchs) and the Judean Wilderness into a new homeland for the Return of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel when All Israel will finally be redeemed.
For inquiries about Kol Ha Tor Vision for the Lost Tribes of Israel, Visit – “Shomron Lives!”, a Spiritual Retreat and Guest House in Samaria, that hosts Shomron (Samaria) Tours to reacquaint the Returning Lost Tribers of the House of Israel.