Theory re Origins in Arabia

Meir Garbarz Gover has noted that, at 12- and 25-marker levels, R1a-Y2619 Ashkenazi Levites closely or fully match members of some Arab tribes from Saudi Arabia.

There were a number of Jewish tribes who lived in Arabia, some from at least as far back as the time of the Babylonian Exile. According to tradition, after the Assyrians destroyed Israel in 723 BCE, some members of the Ten Lost Tribes made their way to the Arabian Peninsula. Archaeological evidence suggests that there were Jews in Arabia at the time of the Babylonian Exile.

Gover notes that one of the most prominent of those tribes was the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe of Levites that lived in northern Arabia, in what was then known as Yathrib and was later known as Medina. The Banu Qurayza is one of two tribes in northern Arabia identified by Arab historians as a tribe of priests.

In 627 CE, followers of Mohammed besieged that tribe and took them captive, beheading most of the men (except for those who converted to Islam) and enslaving the women and children.

Gover hypothesizes that an R1a-Y2619 progenitor living about 1,500 to 1,700 years ago could have been a descendant of a Levite man from a Jewish tribe that lived in Arabia in the 7th century. He suggests that a Levite from Arabia could have arrived in Iberia with the Moors – Muslim conquerors who invaded the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa in the 8th century, and controlled large portions of it for some 500 years.

Szlomo Halevi Garbarz

1920 Konstantynow Podlaski, Poland - 1980 Haifa, Israel

1/31/1939 - 9/30/1939 High School Senior Student Warsaw Tram Pass

Wehrmacht siege on Warsaw prevented tram traffic in September 1939