Excerpts' Christian Zionism … Enraptured Around a Golden Calf, Chapter 3: A Shared Identity

That Jews are not a pure nation-race and that some Palestinians are more Israelites than most Jews might be too much of a bitter pill to swallow. Things of the heart are not easy to let go. Very few thoughtful scholars in recent times believe that the Jews and, for that matter, the Palestinians are not a single ethnobiological people or 'race.'

Often, myths persist despite clear contradictory evidence. Facts, though concrete, are sometimes inconvenient. Fiction, especially when opportune, can be shaped and reshaped into entrenched make-believe. A mingling of myth, memory, truth, and aspiration conjured on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records enveloped Jewish history.

Does Israeli nationalism contain an ancient historical core, or is it a fabrication of the 19th century? Relax! Professor Anita Shapira, Chair of the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University, says: "We [in the institute eds.] teach based on an established historical concept that there was, in fact, a Jewish collective, which considered itself a people not only in the religious sense but in the sense of an entity whose essence transcends the merely religious.

The expression 'All Jews are responsible for each other' is not a religious one."

3.3 Encountering Our Own Flesh and Blood …

The people of Israel – Palestine have been intertwined for millennia. Won't it be an ironic twist if the indigenous people in the Region are genetically connected to the ancient Israelites? Though the original twelve tribes are lost, their gene pools still exist. They have lived in the same region from the beginning. Don't people living contiguously beget others, one after the other? Palestinians could be as much if not more Israelite than the Jews in today's Israel, and an estimated 17 percent of the Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora are Christians. Many could be the ancestors of today's indigenous Palestinians, including the Palestinian Christians.

Israeli Historian Israel Belkind, one of the first 'Zionists' and settlers in Palestine, coordinator of the Bilu4 movement, whose members arrived in Palestine in 1882 before the emergence of Palestinian nationalism, wrote that the Arabs were descended from the ancient Hebrews. He and the first Bilu group "encountered a good many of our people, our flesh and blood," suggesting that Palestinian villagers were descended from the original Israelites.⁵

3.4 Ancestral Links …

Even the young David Ben Gurion, writing in New York City in 1918, recognized that the Jewish peasantry was never completely uprooted and exiled by the Romans from what was by this time Palestine6. "The ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam … for material reasons … Indeed, by clinging to their soil, they remained loyal to their homeland." ⁷ Though no final consensus had emerged on the ancestral link between Palestinians and Israelites. Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University Langone Medical Center, who had been studying the genetic organization of Jews, said, "The assumption of lineal descent seems reasonable."

Nonetheless, Jewish public consciousness persisted that Jews were exiled from Israel by the Romans, ignoring the estimated two million Jews who continued to live in or near the land until the fall of the Roman Empire. "The Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers." ⁸ What would happen to them if the agricultural population was not exiled en masse? Many became the ancestors of today's indigenous Palestinians.

In 'A Diverse Collection of Peoples,' Daniel Lazare writes: "Jewry's amazing expansion between 150 BCE and 70 CE was the result of an extensive migration of Judeans to all parts of the world … [a] dynamic, if painful, process that produced the thriving Israelite diaspora." Spreading the national faith, they won growingnumbers to their side through the strength of argument or perhaps by force.

In ancient times, when the Persian Jews went forth to slaughter their enemies, "many people of other nationalities became Jews because a fear of the Jews had seized them (Esther 8:17)." Lazare adds: "But the more people they converted, the more the original ethnic stock was lost." "Long before 70 CE, sizeable Jewish and Christian communities dotted the countryside outside Judea – Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere." ⁹

Where, then, did the European Jews come from, considering that few, voluntarily or involuntarily, abandoned Judea over the ages? Between 150 BCE and 70 CE, Judaism possessed a "strong proselytizing zeal." This, along with the population movements characteristic during and after the Hellenistic wars, contributed to a Jewish "population explosion" throughout the Mediterranean world.¹⁰ Indeed, a significant portion of Jewry in the Roman Empire were gentiles who converted to Judaism. Hence, most Jews today are unlikely to be descendants of the Judeans who inhabited the land two thousand years ago.

3.6 Jews A Progeny of Converts Outside the Land …

Likely, the ancestry of most contemporary Jews stems mainly from outside the Land of Israel. A 'nation-race' of Jews with a common origin nominally has existed. Just as most Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, many Jews are also descended from converts. Mass conversions to Judaism occurred among the Khazars¹⁵ in the Caucasus, Berber tribes in North Africa, and the Himyarite Kingdom of the Arabian Peninsula.

"A large part of Eastern European Jewry might have originated in the territories of the Khazar Empire." ¹⁶ "Khazaria, that 'Strange Empire,' flourishing in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries CE," says Raymond Deane of 'Electronic Intifada,' "has long intrigued writers and historians." In 1976, Arthur Koestler¹⁷ wrote 'The Thirteenth Tribe' to combat anti-Semitism. If contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus' Crucifixion. By the eighth century, the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and "at some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, they … adopted Jewish monotheism." ¹⁸

This conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. "The Khazars likely engendered many Ashkenazi Jews of central and Eastern Europe who," suggested by Deane, "would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine," land to which they reportedly had "no ethnic connection." ¹⁹

Daniel Lazare: "We know very little about this 'steppe Atlantis,' as the Soviet historian Lev Gumilev called Khazaria. The Khazars' adoption of Judaism is not in dispute. In 837-38, the empire issued imitation Abbasid dirhams stamped with the Muslim-influenced formula, 'There is no god but God; and Moses is his messenger.'" ²⁰

One of several studies on European Jewish population genetics, published in 2012 (Elhaik et al.), concludes that European Jews stem from the Caucasus and Mesopotamia. Dan Graur, professor of molecular evolution at the University of Houston and Elhaik's doctoral supervisor, calls Elhaik's conclusion –Ashkenazi Jews originate in the Caucasus region and not the Middle East – "a reasonable estimate." Furthermore, Graur said: Elhaik "writes more provocatively than may be needed, but it's his style." ²¹

Expectedly, geneticists still waving the flag of the pure race theory, defending the Zionist party line, cannot yet fully agree. Religion, belief, and culture unite the Jews more than a unifying genetic strand. Jews in the Diaspora, likely descendants who converted to Judaism, flagrantly challenge Israel's Declaration of Independence:

               "Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel – Palestine, was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave the world the eternal Book of Books." ²²

Van Kempen, Abraham A. Christian Zionism ... Enraptured Around a Golden Calf - 2nd Edition: Evangelicals Rediscovering New Testament Revelations (p. 139-150). Fast Pencil Publishing. Kindle Edition.

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