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Zionists and their white
racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters
justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide
against the native Palestinian population by asserting
that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient
Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.
This belief has no connection to the facts as many
Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an
MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about
the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to
ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot
of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever
conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc
Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which
discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor
Cohen referred.
Conversion is not the only process that
deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians
seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many
worshippers of the high God El as possible within the
fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the
Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks
and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El
Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El
Kronos.
At the time of Jesus the vast majority of
El-worshippers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple
Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever
to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.
In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz
concludes in
Imperialism
and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews,
Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern
World)
that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd
Temple Judaism was
completely shattered. He argues that the
Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen
agrees because in The
Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin
of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th
century.
In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too
early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the
dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean
Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as
God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout
Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such
Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some
form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined
position on matrilineality or on conversion practices
within the Judaism of this time period.
As the Christian late
Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the
Khazar
Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the
seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the
Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs
and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as
slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the
early Islamic Empires as well.
Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated
with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like
later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social
mobility, confer political authority and give social
status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud
Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in
Slavery and
Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar,
Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer
to the later Ottoman system.
Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan
Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have
converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion
may have created problems for the slave trade because as
Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an
obligation to convert Slav subjects to either
Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the
community. Slaving in such a situation is quite
problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far
less committed to proselytization than Christianity or
Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions
between members of the community and gentiles as well as
between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves.
Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the
Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th
century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced
Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish
literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as
Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a
source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim
kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).
In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices,
which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent
with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia
to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert
pattern of choosing names out of scripture as described
in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet.
Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and
Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed
graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such
graveyards in the Balkans and
Hungary.
Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and
Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There
is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of
Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern
European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one
would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants
from Palestine or Mesopotamia.
The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to
have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the
slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such
accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval
Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified
legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible
for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other
forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of
non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout
the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became
agents of the slave trade either directly or through
finance, tax farming, or estate management, which were
all heavily involved in the slave trade in the early
Medieval period or through the medical profession, whose
revenue stream came almost entirely from slave traders
or slave owners during this time frame. The Jewish
slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to
England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not
of Khazar background.
Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism
proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade.
Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived
along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval
Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the
Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and
tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.
Amitav Ghosh translated a lot of Geniza documents
written by or about a Jewish slaver in
India. The
book is called In an
Antique Land, and Ghosh is somewhat
diffident about describing his subject's source of
income.
This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet
et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the
proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the
development of early Islam (Hagarism:
The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia
Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by
Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various
forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains
why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters
forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic
alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group
probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili
Christianity and Catharism were probably
brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved
forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as
Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.
As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders
probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to
assist in the business. A similar process took place in
West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic
territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar
traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and
Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect
to German in order to trade with dominant
German-speaking populations and to separate themselves
from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During
the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older
form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects
of German territories. During this time period, as the
Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more
important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out
as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar
Rabbinical Jews.
As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or
created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar
Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated
to Slavery. In
Spain the
Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to
have been highly valued because Spain expelled its
Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of
Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian
countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of
Constantinople.
The development of sophisticated
heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in
Poland made
Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish
estate management, finance and tax farming remained
important and often thrived in
Poland even
after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave
trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.
As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward
because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation,
the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern
European and Southern Russian Jewish populations (with
the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking
communities in
Slovakia
and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West
Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler
explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in
Two-tiered
Relexification in Yiddish without proposing
any historical reasons for the process. The work of
Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic
studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern
Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development
of East Yiddish may have taken place in German
territories.
By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the
Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking
Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern
European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German
economic depression of the century following the signing
of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was
considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians
and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the
Christian community while some Christians were probably
absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time
period, as
Poland
collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish
Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began
to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate
system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi
ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern
European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly
solid.
This article seems to conflict with genetic
anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar
people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr.
Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in
http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by
Talia Bloch in the
Forward ("One
Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007,
http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ )
indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist
genetics researchers are beginning to concede that
ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct
from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of
ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European
and Southern Russian populations have been exported to
non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.
The rationalization of Zionist crimes against
Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish
ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations
has always been unethical, but even those that believe
genes confer superior rights to one group over another
must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine
are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.
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