COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF
You simply cannot say that Jews are not Jews as some do here
in comments – that is rather ridiculous.
What you can say is that most of today's Jews are not the
descendants of the Hebrew people – and that is a very different thing.
The origin of the Ashkenazi has not been definitively shown.
DNA tests suggest a people who arose near Italy about a
thousand years ago and later moved north to Germany.
Other DNA tests do suggest the Khazaria (an empire above the
modern Black and Caspian Seas) hypothesis, again going back roughly a thousand
years.
Quite likely, owing to reasons cited below, today’s main
Jewish population contains bits of both.
There is in fact some Semitic DNA in some Ashkenazi people,
but that is only natural as intermarriage among various early Jewish groups
likely took place.
It is important to remember that the Ashkenazi - the
dominant group of Jews today and the people who rule re-created Israel - speak
as their native tongue a language which is a mix of German and other elements -
Yiddish - and the word Ashkenazi means German.
Hebrew is a technically dead language artificially revived
in re-created Israel, much as Welsh has had some revival in the UK. Hebrew
knowledge was preserved over many centuries mainly by two activities: the work
of Biblical scholars, including many non-Jews, and the practice of teaching
young Jews some Hebrew in Hebrew schools. Hebrew is an almost intrinsic part of
the religion of Judaism in much the same fashion that Arabic is for Islam.
Indeed, Judaism has many of the aspects of an Asian religion
in which ancestor worship is important, the Old Testament being mainly a
collection of historical fragments and myths about Hebrew ancestors. That
shouldn’t surprise because Judaism is thought to have first arisen in the
region around Mesopotamia or Persia, key parts of Western Asia.
Today’s Jews – again, overwhelmingly the Ashkenazi – have little
to no relationship with that ancient people other than sharing some of their
beliefs and using bits of the preserved language as part of religious
celebrations.
Parts of the Old Testament such as Leviticus suggest a harsh
original people with extreme fundamentalist views, perhaps the very nature of
their beliefs being why they left their region of origin, much as a small cult
like the Mormons trekked out to Utah. The most typical Jews of today – even most
of the Orthodox – have very little to do with those ancient views, and the
Jewish people we think of typically are quite worldly in outlook. The
population of Israel is extremely so, except for small minority sects, Judaism
much as other religions over time having become less an intense faith than a
cultural affiliation. We see the same thing with Christians who go to church
only on Easter or Christmas.
What happened to the ancient people called Hebrews, the ones
discussed in the Old Testament? Their main descendants are certainly the
Palestinians. There is no record of Imperial Rome’s having expelled the Hebrews
upon conquest of their territories. Indeed, we know that it was not Rome’s
practice to expel people almost ever from conquered territories. It wanted them
to go on working and even practicing their religion, Rome being extremely
tolerant of non-Roman beliefs so long as the people accepted Rome’s authority
and paid their taxes (recall Jesus’s admonition about rendering unto Rome).
But two millennia of history in a region of the
Mediterranean which has long been very active in trade and migrations and
cultural changes has produced a largely non-Jewish people called the
Palestinians, people who are Christian as well as Muslim.
Of course the great and bitter irony of re-created Israel is
that a largely European people, the Ashkenazi, have driven out the descendants
of the Hebrews whose original religion they claim as their own.
What is almost certain is that, following the great
evangelical success of Christianity – after all, Christianity even eventually
took over the Roman Empire - which originated as a Jewish (Hebrew) sect other
Jews (Hebrews) became evangelical, a quality we do not associate with Jews
today.
That period of evangelicalism resulted in groupings of Jews
arising in a number of places including Khazaria (a region above today’s Black
and Caspian Seas), bits of Europe, and pockets of Africa. It is interesting
that in re-created Israel, the descendants of Jewish converts from Africa are
not generally welcome by the descendants of other Jewish converts, the Ashkenazi.
