Caleb Wallis on the twentieth-century Israelis:
"'A mongrel people, racially no relation to the Hebrews of the Bible, but tough fighters and clever.'" (p. 69)
A great many years ago, I attended a debate between a Palestinian who said that modern Israelis were not descended from Biblical Hebrews and a Chief Rabbi who maintained that they were. I think that the Palestinian claimed that Israelis were descended from Tatars but that is where my knowledge of this subject ends and I would welcome some input. Religiously, it is possible to convert to Judaism or to any other religion irrespective of descent. Personally, I do not set any great store by descent because each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight grandparents etc so I am conscious of our relatedness to everyone and everything else - in fact, common descent from an original self-replicating molecule. An Irish Catholic priest told me that I was Irish because my mother was Irish whereas I am primarily conscious of being a human being. However, I know that descent matters to some.
10 comments:
Sean,
Maybe the speaker I heard said Khazars, not Tatars. He definitely thought that all modern Jews were descended from a particular group of converts.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul! What I do recall is that some think Jews of eastern European/Ashkenazim and Hasidim origins descend from Turkic Khazars who converted to Judaism possibly in the AD 800's. There are older strains of Judaism, such as the Sephardim who are probably more literally descended from the Biblical Jews. And nations DO matter. To me, being an American or Briton has to come first. Because we do not have anything like a global state or nation. Ad astra! Sean
(I replied to Sean's comment but then found that it had disappeared so I have retrieved it.)
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks for retrieving my mysteriously vanished comments!
Your interlocutor was wrong. Not all Jews descended from the Ashkenazim/Hasidim. Older strains of Judaism exist, such as the Falashas of Ethiopia (I might have gotten their name wrong).
Ad astra! Sean
Jewish origins have been settled by DNA research.
Most Jews -- both Sephardic and Ashkenazic -- are closely related, more closely related to each other than to the populations they've been living among.
Eg., Ashkenazim from Poland and Mizrahi Jews from Yemen are more closely genetically related to each other than to Poles or Yemeni Arabs.
(There are exceptions like the Falasha of Ethiopia, who are just typical Ethiopians in genetic terms.)
The bulk of Jews are closely related, and their closest kin are the contemporary populations of the Levant -- Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians.
The genetics seem to indicate that a varying percentage, but usually more that 50%, of Jewish DNA stems form a small migration from what's now Israel/Palestine about 2000-2500 years ago.
The rest was "picked up along thew way" by conversion and intermarriage.
So there was a very high degree of endogamy among Jews for a very, very long time; it only began to break down in the past two centuries. Before then, genetic influence from outsiders was a trickle -- significant, but only over a scale of thousands of years.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected. And, I'm surprised! I thought the Ashkenazim would not be so closely related to the other "strains" of Judaism.
So Caleb Wallis was mostly wrong doubting the Jews he knew were descended from the Biblical Jews.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Wallis was mostly wrong. Modern Jews are not -solely- descended from ancient Israelites, but they are -predominantly-.
Ashkenazic Jews in particular are descended from a rather -small- founding group. There seems to have been an intermarriage event on the female side (with the males being Jews descended from emigrants traceable to ancient Israel) early on in their development, but one limited in duration; after that, it was marriage back into those lines.
the Khazar thing is entirely imaginary.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting, what you said about the Ashkenazim. There was a small group of male Jews who had no choice but to accept non Jewish women as wives. And thus became the Ashkenazim.
So we have to dismiss the Khazar hypothesis.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Sean, and others!
I recall reading something about that. It turns out that Ashkenazim do not match DNA from excavated Khazar remains, so basically no, the Khazar hypothesis doesn’t fit. As to “no choice but to accept non-Jewish women as wives,” we don’t know exactly how events transpired, or whether the women in question first converted to Judaism.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
But my idea was that refugees, exiles, forced emigrants, etc., tends to be mostly (tho not entirely) adult males. Which means Jews exiled by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, or the Jewish mercenaries which served the XXVI Dynasty of Egypt had to take non Jewish women wives and mothers of their children. That would fit in with what Stirling sketched out.
Ad astra and best regards! Sean
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