The Invention of the Jewish People, Khazars

[southernparks]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inv..._Jewish_People

http://www.haaretz.com/general/shatt...ology-1.242055


most of the details I have read are in Hebrew. maybe I'll translate some of them later.
anyway the attempt to create Jewish race in today's Israel doesn't make any sense to me.

another interesting aspect of this story is how it affected the self identity of other European and Asian countries. but it needs more reading.

[Corno Dolce]

Invention you say,

Please remember that the word "Palestine" was a thought construct by Emperor Hadrian of the Roman Empire. He hated Judea so much that he instructed all the scribes and learned men to strike out the word "Judea" on all maps and official documents and write "Palestine" instead. So, that means that Palestine and Palestinians are also "invented".

[southernparks]

the invention according to the book is the story of the Diaspora and the thinking that jews are race, ethnicity (which is not true).


there is a common thinking in Israel that the jews (with all the different origins and looks) are all came from the same place - from Israel. then they were exiled to Europe, Russia, Africa and other Middle Eastern countries by the Roman Empire, and since 1882 they are coming back to their original home land.

the 'new' idea here is that most of the people under the category Jews today are Europeans, Africans and Middle Easterns who have been converted to Judaism since the time of the Hasmoneans.

the suspicion is that no one exiled the Jews from Israel, and "Palestinians" are the original Jews who have been converted over the years to Islam and mixed with the Arabs, Turks and who ever ruled over this country and region.

[Corno Dolce]

Palestinians are arabs (actually bedouins)who embraced Islam not long after it having become codified in the Koran.

[southernparks]

I suppose if not 100% arabs then mixture of arabs and hebrews.

wikipedia, Palestinian people/Politicized lineages:

Salim Tamari notes the paradoxes produced by the search for "nativist" roots among Zionist figures and the so-called Canaanite (anti-Zionist) followers of Yonatan Ratosh. For example, Ber Borochov, one of the key ideological architects of Socialist Zionism, claimed as early as 1905 that, "The Fellahin in Eretz-Israel are the descendants of remnants of the Hebrew agricultural community," believing them to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew and Canaanite residents 'together with a small admixture of Arab blood'". He further believed that the Palestinian peasantry would embrace Zionism and that the lack of a crystallized national consciousness among Palestinian Arabs would result in their likely assimilation into the new Hebrew nationalism. Other founding fathers of Zionism believed that the Palestinian people were descended from the biblical ancient Hebrews. David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later becoming Israel's first Prime Minister and second President, respectively, tried to establish in a 1918 paper written in Yiddish that Palestinian peasants and their mode of life were living historical testimonies to Israelite practices in the biblical period. Tamari notes that "the ideological implications of this claim became very problematic and were soon withdrawn from circulation."
Ahad Ha'am believed that, "the Moslems [of Palestine] are the ancient residents of the land ... who became Christians on the rise of Christianity and became Moslems on the arrival of Islam." Israel Belkind, the founder of the Bilu movement also asserted that the Palestinian Arabs were the blood brothers of the Jews. In his book on the Palestinians, "The Arabs in Eretz-Israel", Belkind advanced the idea that the complete dispersion of Jews out of the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman emperor Titus is a "historic error" that must be corrected. While it dispersed much of the land's Jewish community around the world, those "workers of the land that remained attached to their land," stayed behind and were eventually converted to Christianity and then Islam. He therefore, proposed that this historical wrong be corrected, by embracing the Palestinians as their own and proposed the opening of Hebrew schools for Palestinian Arab Muslims to teach them Arabic, Hebrew and universal culture. Tsvi Misinai, an Israeli researcher, entrepreneur and proponent of a controversial alternative solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, asserts that nearly 90% of all Palestinians living within Israel and the occupied territories (including the Israeli Arabs and Negev Bedouin) are descended from the Jewish Israelite peasantry that remained on the land, after the others, mostly city dwellers, were exiled or left.
Claims emanating from certain circles within Palestinian society and their supporters, proposing that Palestinians have direct ancestral connections to the ancient Canaanites, without an intermediate Israelite link, has been an issue of contention within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In discussing the root of the controversy to the claim of Canaanite lineage, many renowned scholars have hypothesised on the nature of the controversy itself, although not deliberating on the veracity of the claims, as this is a question that shall ultimately be resolved by geneticists, not by scholars in their capacity as historians.
Bernard Lewis explains that "the rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims...In bypassing the biblical Israelites and claiming kinship with the Canaanites, the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Palestine, it is possible to assert a historical claim antedating the biblical promise and possession put forward by the Jews."
Some Palestinian scholars, like Zakariyya Muhammad, have criticized pro-Palestinian arguments based on Canaanite lineage, or what he calls "Canaanite ideology". He states that it is an "intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of ordinary people." By assigning its pursuit to the desire to predate Jewish national claims, he describes Canaanism as a "losing ideology", whether or not it is factual, "when used to manage our conflict with the Zionist movement" since Canaanism "concedes a priori the central thesis of Zionism. Namely that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionism—and hence with the Jewish presence in Palestine—since the Kingdom of Solomon and before ... thus in one stroke Canaanism cancels the assumption that Zionism is a European movement, propelled by modern European contingencies..."

[GoneBaroque]

Professor Sand raises some interesting points. It has always seemed to me that the Jewish people and the Arabs, both being Semitic, are genetically related.

[Corno Dolce]

Hi GoneBaroque,

It is true that arabs and jews are of semitic lineage - With that as the default, the question is as naked as can be: To whom were the lands of Judea promised? The children of the Tribes of Judah or the Tribes from the lineage of Ishmael? Or are we going to witness The Great Struggle on the Plains of Megiddo? Maybe because of God's Mercy on Ishmael, God presented The Children of the Tribes of Judah and the Christians the Great Challenge: The Great Challenge being how the Judaeo-Christian Faith can coexist in peace with Islam.............Islam was founded in 610 A.D. by Muhammed and is therefore a parody of the Judaeo-Christian Faith.

[southernparks]

80% (ashkenazi Jews - Khazars) of the Jewish population aren't Semitic.

[Corno Dolce]

How has such a "Qualification/Quantification" been arrived at?

[southernparks]

the Khazars converted to Judaism because of political reasons (if I'm not mistaken). there was a war between Christians and Muslims, and the Khazars wanted to be neutral so they converted.

the 80% is statistical data. before WW2 it was more than 90%.

most of the sources I found are in Hebrew, I'll see if I can find someone who able to translate one of them, the answers are there.

this is the Jewish ethnic division in Israel from 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_...ons#Statistics

this is the immigration waves since 1948 (the immigration began in 1882):
http://www.cbs.gov.il/shnaton62/st04_04.pdf


outside Israel the big majority of jews are Ashkenazi

I can prove the different ethnic with pictures.

[Corno Dolce]

Thanx for the info about the Khazars. It certainly is fodder for further scholarship and research.

Now, after having consulted with some material gleaned from the web I begin to notice there is a lot of historical revisionism going on to suit the latest political wind that is blowing.

[southernparks]

yes, it always have been like this.

but no need to look at the extremists/politicians in any case. I look at what seems logical to me according to what I personally knows and less on the opinions of the man who tells me them.

[Corno Dolce]

A very wise outlook you have - Too many let themselves be whisked along by the whirlwind.

[GoneBaroque]

CD, you propound a question I wish someone knew the answer to. I most surely do not.

Southernparks, Thank you for your information on the Khazars. I will need to study it more fully. You do need to rely on your own judgement. Too many have their own agenda.

[Corno Dolce]

I can only answer: WWJD?