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.
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.
