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Appreciate the ping.

Always nice to end one's day with a healthy dose of Anglo-Israelism ;)

As to the original topic of discussion (the ADL and Foxman's antics), I personally think that Foxman's energies, as well as his wallet, would be better spent fighting the relentless tide of Wahhabi missionary programs and pamphlets from Saudi Arabia designed to tell American Muslims the "real" story about the Middle East. You know, the ones that come with a copy of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

That being said, onto the topic of Anglo-Israelism (and I'm still not sure why exactly this became a topic of discussion in a thread about the ADL, but okay ...), let me just lay out my basic understanding of it.

First of all, my use of the term Anglo-Israelism to describe the beliefs of LostTribe in others concerning the Jews is not intended as denigrating these beliefs but rather to classify them into a belief system rather than as simply Lost Tribe's own belief system. If he has a more preferred term for this belief, he can post it and I'll use that.

Without going to far, let me just say that I don't buy it, primarily because there seems to be a number of lapses in both logic and history to the data that Lost Tribe has provided for us in the various links above:

"But the Tribes 'couldn't all get along' there, so ~922 BC these 5 Million Israelites split into the Northern and Southern Kingdoms."

Here and in various other sections of the canonical Bible (with or without the deuterocanonicals), we see rather exact figures like 5 million Israelites at the time of the schism. The biblical accounts schism within the Israelite Kingdom in 1 Kings 12 and 2 Chronicles 10 provide no such figures, so I'd be very interested as to where he's getting his numbers from.

"Israelites helped the Medes and Persians overthrow the Assyrians, then escaped north through the Caucasus Mountains and around the Black and Caspian Seas, to explode into history ~610 BC as The Celts. These Celts mixed with (and fought against) each other, and with other scattered Israelites (proto-Celts) who had escaped from Egypt by sea nearly a thousand years earlier, before the overland Exodus."

A couple of points here. First of all, I fail to find any record, biblical or otherwise, of Israelites leaving Egypt prior to the Exodus, so here again there is a question of source material. The second thing is that the Celtic Bituriges, Arverni, Senones, Aedui, Ambarri, Carnutes, and Aulerci tribes were already settled in what is today Switzerland and France and moving into Italy by 600 BC to accomodate a growing population according to Pliny. Needless to say, there was no way that the Celts could get from the Black Sea to Western Europe, establish a stable infrastructure, and then breed to the point of over-population. Even in our own era civilizations do not just bounce back from the kind of very near genocide and slavery that the Assyrians were known to practice.

Also, Lost Tribe's overview references Hallstatt in Austria as a major center of Celtic civilization, presumably post-610 BC. However, most archeologists date the Hallstatt site as having been inhabited by the same people from 1100-450 BC, which quite a bit longer than Lost Tribe's data.

These are my two major arguments just from reading the cursory overview of his material, but I'd recommend "The Ancient Celts" (1997) by Barry Cunliffe as being a fairly decent argument against your overall thesis when it comes to Celtic history.

Now, just to take one of the later posting (his comments to the Great Civilizations Stuff) and put down my arguments against it:

" maybe they learned something about 'international' business from the Assyrians"

I honestly doubt it because Assyrian society was rather tightly stratified and their belief system makes the Wahhabis look tolerant. I doubt they would have allowed subject nations to learn anything more than what they needed to produce for the good of the empire.

"aka separate Tribes"

A clan is a specific family group, roughly equivalent to the medieval concept of a "house." In the traditional (i.e. Greco-Roman) set-up, there is the immediate family, then to the extended family, then to the gens or clan (or house), and then to the tribe.

"they were still in tribes. Had apparently not assimilated even among themselves"

"Tribe" in the context of groups like the Celts or the Germanics refers to homogeneous non-settled groups.

"ED: named after the tribe of Dan?"

Dan is rerived from the Hebrew word for "to judge." Danu is derived from the shortened form of the Celtic "Danand mathair na ndeeu" or ("Earth, Mother of the Gods"). More to the point, Danu is a goddess while the biblical Dan was a male.

Just based on this, I have to say that I find the Anglo-Israeli thesis rather lacking in terms of supporting evidence. Which does not, however, excuse the extreme skepticism that certain posters have used in reference to the Bible, which is generally accepted, polemics aside, by many a historian and an archeologist as an accurate insight into the world of past. To ignore it simply on the basis of ideology betrays an underlying prejudice that is unbefitting to serious historical discussion.