could be about archetypes — I specifically wanted to point out the ethnic descents. Ethnically the Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese are ethnic cousins of Jewish people -— and Jewish people from Yemen and north Africa have more semitic inheritance than Sephardic or Ashkenazi jews — there was some mixing of european blood with european jews.
“More Semitic inheritance” is a claim not significantly borne out. DNA indicates less than one-half of one percent intermarriage between Europeans and Jews in Europe over 50 generations! I suppose that’s more than .005% of European intermarriage with Jews not living in Europe, but really?
Honestly, I’ve been many times to Hebron. There are among Arabs more than a few blonde-haired kids that I’ve seen. A big glass factory there is owned by a family that 200 years ago came from Germany, opened up shop, and converted to Islam. Islam is a religion that aggressively proselytizes, and has for centuries. The notion that all “Arabs” are of pure Middle-Eastern stock is nonsense.
Jews have accepted converts when they come to us, once we know they are sincere, but we do not go looking for them, much less coercing their conversion. An entire nation, the Khazars, converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages, and that engendered the myth that the Jews of Europe are all descended from the Khazars, which became very popular after Arthur Koestler’s The 13th Tribe was published. But seriously, the fact that Khazars joined the Jewish community does not mean that the Jewish community became subsumed within the Khazars. Their empire faded, many backslided to heathenism, but some stayed and married within the larger Jewish community. Koestler is a great novelist, but not a historian or geneologist.