Our political culture insists on seeing the Jews as the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews. But the Jews never existed as a ‘people’ – still less as a nation
Shlomo Sand says there are no pure races and we all have mixture of genes.
Dislosure: Even when I believed, mistakenly, that the “Jewish people” was exiled by the Romans in 70 C.E. or 132 C.E., I didn’t think that this conferred on the Jews some sort of imagined “historic right” to the Holy Land. If we seek to organize the world as it was 2,000 years ago, we will turn it into one big madhouse. Why not bring Native Americans back to Manhattan, for example, or restore the Arabs to Spain and the Serbs to Kosovo? Of course, such twisted logic of “historic right” will also commit us to supporting the continued settlement/colonization of Hebron, Jericho and Bethlehem.
As I pursued my research, my realization that the Exodus from Egypt never happened and that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah were not exiled by the Romans, left me nonplussed. There is not one study by a historian who specializes in antiquity that recounts that “exile” or any serious historiographic study that reconstructs a mass migration from the place. The “exile” is a formative event that never took place, otherwise it would be the subject of dozens of research studies. Judahite farmers, who constituted an absolute majority of the population at the first century C.E., were not seafarers like the Greeks or the Phoenicians, and did not spread across the world. It was Jahwist monotheism, which since the Hasmonean era had become a dynamic religion engaged in conversion, which laid the foundations for the Jews’ age-old existence around the globe.
Haaretz
Shlomo Sand - The Twisted Logic of the Jewish ‘Historic Right’ to Israel
As an aside, my father is English and had dark hair and my mother came from South Wales and also had dark hair. Most of the people in South Wales apparently descended from English people who went there to work in the coal mines.
As an aside, my father is English and had dark hair and my mother came from South Wales and also had dark hair. Most of the people in South Wales apparently descended from English people who went there to work in the coal mines.
In North Wales many of people there have olive coloured skin and dark hair and are said to descendents of the Spanish who went there during the Ice Age.
Anyway, although I have medium to dark brown hair lots of people have commented that I look Spanish because of my dark olive skin. So I reckon my mother was descendent from North Welsh people.
When I went on holiday to North Wales a few years ago I noted how many of the people there were olive skinned with dark hair and tended to be short. The women were very pretty and everyone were friendly. Lovely people!
I liked a band once who had this great song and they were from North Wales, but they looked totally Spanish to me and I was intrigued by it. It got me thinking because people had always said that I look Spanish.
So you can see that although I'm English I seem to have some Spanish in me. But the Spanish were apparently white European too until many North Africans emigrated there centuries ago. So I might even have some African genes in me as well. Shlomo Sand is right about how diverse we are.
Anyway, because of my Welsh relatives I got used to their lovely strong accent. The people in North Wales are said to be less diverse as they had lower immigration compared to the rest of Britain so when I went there I expected an even stronger Welsh accent, but I was astonished when they sounded almost like we do in Surrey, South England, with only just a slight accent.
4 comments:
“In North Wales many of people there have olive coloured skin and dark hair and are said to descendents of the Spanish who went there during the Ice Age.”
Spaniards extended to parts of Ireland too, especially a region known as Connemara. My own eyes are blue, and my hair is medium brown from my Scotch side, but my late mother was of Irish heritage. She had black hair and very dark brown eyes. Their genetic stock is colloquially known as “black Irish,” because they look like Northern Spaniards, with fair skin and black hair. I look like my father. My twin sister looks like my mother. Black hair and dark eyes.
“When I went on holiday to North Wales a few years ago I noted how many of the people there were olive skinned with dark hair and tended to be short. The women were very pretty and everyone were friendly. Lovely people!”
Agreed. The Welsh seemed friendlier to me than did than eastern Britons. The women were far less stand-offish. My journey from the eastern UK out to Wales was like a journey back in time. I thought, “This must have been what the UK was like in the 1950s and 1960s.” I visited places from Swansea in the south to Colwyn Bay in the north. I even saw Portmeirion, where the 1960s TV program “The Prisoner” was filmed. The UK region I most wanted to see was the Lake District in the northwest, but I ran out of time and money, and I never made it north of Sheffield. I spent too much time in Wales.
For people who noticed the beautiful New Zealand scenery in the “Lord of the Rings,” one can see the same beauty in the UK Lake District.
Kaivey mentioned Welsh people’s accent. I had no problem with it, but I struggled with uneducated Britons whose spoken English hardly sounded like English at all. Many Americans imagine that a British accent makes one “refined.” Americans who have never traveled imagine that all Britons speak like professional stage-trained actors, or like the famous British actors. In reality, only the most intelligent and educated Britons speak in a clear manner.
Spain is the same. Very sloppy. I speak Mexican Spanish, which is the international form of Spanish, since it is pronounced very clearly. Professional actors and football (soccer) players in Latin America often spend time in Mexico in order to improve their Spanish. Singers too. If you can speak like a Mexican, then everyone in the Spanish-speaking world can understand you. This is not the case if you come from Chile, or Venezuela, or Cuba, or Argentina. When I watch movies from Spain, I need subtitles. (Urban Colombians speak pretty good Spanish.)
Regarding Schlomo Sand, he has proven irrefutably that Ashkenazi Jews have no historical or genetic connection with Palestine, or with ancient Judeans. None whatsoever.
The Jewish notion that Palestine is “their land” is a product of hate, hostility, and arrogance (just like the “holocaust”™ myth).
I absolutely loved North Wales!
“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
Good quote, Nebris.
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