Ethiopian Jews
A priest carries a replica of the biblical lost Ark of the Covenant in Axum, Ethiopia
Posted on 06/03/2010 12:09:49 PM PDT by decimon
Ethiopian Jews
A priest carries a replica of the biblical lost Ark of the Covenant in Axum, Ethiopia
Some of them were absorbed into Israel (i.e. the Gibeonites, Nethinim, etc). A lot of them were wiped out (though that probably wasn't God's real intention for them...) Depending on some things I read, some of them may have gotten out of Dodge and eventually migrated as far eastward as China.
Even less known is the Muslim attack on Rome in 846 AD and the Sea Battle of Ostia off the port of Rome several years later. Those who wish Christians would stop obeying a central tenent of their faith, to evangelize, should get down on their knees and give a prayer of thanksgiving they are not compelled to face Mecca and pray five times a day.
I would tend to suspect that to be the case. The Khazar story, on the other hand, says that the Khazars - a Turkish group - adopted Judaism wholesale in the 8th or 9th century, so as to establish their independence from both the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate. This much is the case, if I'm recalling my history correctly. However, what is usually added to this is the largely unsubstantiated belief that the Khazars themselves (instead of examples of Jews deported to Assyria) became the European Jews. Usually, the context I've seen this in is as part of an effort to deny to the Ashkenazi (and Sephardic) Jews any lineage from Israel, the idea being that today's Jews are "usurpers" who are really just Turkish Khazars.
It is simply amazing how useful these techniques are to establishing common ancestry and tracking and predicting different genetic diseases and susceptibilities.
Nope, the 10 tribes are still lost. All of today's Jews are descendants of the Southern Kingdom (Judea).
It was almost exactly 2500 years ago that the Kingdom of Judea was conquered by the Babylonians and all of its inhabitants exiled to Babylon. About 70 years later, the Persians conquered Babylon and permitted the Jews to return to Judea, but most did not.
Today's Ashkenazic Jews are descended from those who returned to Judea; when Judea rebelled against Rome in 70 C.E. and again in 135 C.E., the Judeans were taken to Rome as slaves. Their descendants were permitted to move from Italy to Germany by Charlemagne, and from there they spread to Poland, Russia and eventually to the United States.
Meanwhile, the Jews who did not return to Judea stayed in Babylon (today's Iraq) until it was conquered by the Moslems; they then moved throughout the Moslem world (the Middle East, North Africa and Spain). Their descendants became the Sephardim (Jews exiled from Spain in 1492) and the Mizrachim (Jews who remained in Middle Eastern countries until the Arabs expelled them in 1948).
The Kingdom of Khazaria officially adopted Judaism as the state religion, for the reasons you state, but because this was done for political, not religious, reasons, the bulk of the common people never became Jewish and the rest of the Khazars didn't stay Jewish very long. You are right that the claim that today's Jews are descendants of Khazars is spouted chiefly by those trying to deny the legitimacy of Zionism. Genetic studies like those in the posted article debunk that theory.
Yes, I know about the Babylonian exile, but it is probably the case that the dating on this sort of research has at least a 10% to 20% margin of error. In that case, perhaps the traditional story about the Ashkenazic Jews isn’t entirely right. Perhaps the Ashkenazic Jews are descended from both. In any event, there is nothing obvious that would distinguish genetically the part of the Jewish population carried off by the Babylonians from those that weren’t carried off or that would distinguish those that eventually returned from those that didn’t. I realize that there is folklore on the point, but the Babylonians probably just carried off those that they could seize and who were physically fit.
Alternatively, I suppose that the divergence 2,500 years ago could reflect the fact that Ashkenazic Jews are genetically part Babylonian. In any event, as I said, it is all interesting.
I think it's also almost certainly true that many Israelites of the Northern Kingdom escaped the Assyrian conquest and settled in Judea, so that, by the time of the Babylonian Exile, the "Judeans" already included many of the formerly-Northern Kingdom members of the other tribes.
Well put! The Roman Empire forbade the Jews from trying to convert people, probably because the Jewish population of the empire was pretty large at the time, and of course, the Roman Wars (more often called the Jewish Wars, after the book by Josephus) in Judea, which culminated in the Romans’ destruction of the Temple and most of the city of Jerusalem (even its name was changed), led to some animosity toward Judaism. Also, the mincing homosexual Emperor Hadrian didn’t like circumcision.
*ping*
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Thanks decimon. |
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Through the mother. Mitachondrial DNA. We would look back to Sarah, not Abraham. Because of ishmael.
Hebrews are matrilineal. Interestingly, the only other culture on earth that does this are the Indigenous Great Nations of North America.
The Ashkenazi Jews are the ones with the highest IQ in the world.
They represent 80% of the Jewish immigrants to the US.
“It’s yet another (and somewhat cryptic) form of anti-Semitism.”
While the theory may or may not be wrong, the prime exponent in recent memory was Arthur Koestler. I don’t think that there is any anti-semitism involved even if it is wrong (and I hold no position about the theory, but did think Koestler’s book was interesting). Do the Anglo-Israel people use this as part of their claim that the original inhabitants of Britain(or some group of inhabitants of early Britain) were Hebrew? BTW, regarding your point about the lost tribes ending up on the fringes of the Assyrian Empire, the 10th or 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (about 1910), I believe, had some interesting material chronicling Jewish traditions in at least one Afgan tribe.
ph
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