There Never Was A Jewish People
February 1 2010

“There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”

Above is from the book jacket description for the international best seller titled “The Invention of the Jewish People” written by Shlomo Sand, the History Professor of the Tel Aviv University.
The book remained on the best seller list in Israel (it was originally written in Hebrew, later translated in English and French) for 19 weeks, in which even the author himself was astonished by the ferocity of Israelis interest on the subject.

Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born British jazz musician and author, praised the book saying that it is one of the most important exposures of the Jewish Zionist lethal fantasy...in his book, Professor Sand proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never share a common origin, but instead they are a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

Constantly and laboriously, world has historically been taught, persuaded, and brain-washed by the Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist institution, the Jewish-managed mainstream media, the Jewish academic scholars, and other pro-Zionist propagandists who collectively hijacked the spiritual and religious meanings of the Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament) into viewing these events in the Bible as a real chain of events in the past and unanimously rendered the Jews a title of the Palestinian Land as “a land without the people for a people without the land”.

For Professor Sand, it was not easy for him as a Jew to challenge and rebuke against the matters of the Jewish identity, arguing that “Jews were never a people, never exiled from the Holy Land, most of Jews actually descended from proselytes whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe and have no historical connection to the land, so that Jews have no right to ‘make aliyah’ to the Palestinian region.”
It goes without saying that the subject he raised is absolutely a taboo in the contemporary Western world where Israel is the only country to be allowed to engage in the colonial occupation on other people’s land for decades and still to be called a democratic country, not the ethnocentric and apartheid sovereignty.

Debunking the Biblical Myth

First of all, Professor Sand has debunked the biblical myth of unique nation of Israel that had expelled, wandered, and finally returned home after two millennia.
Dr Sand has trashed the nexus of the Old Testament from the wanderings of Abraham and Jacob, the Exodus from Egypt, appearances of Philistines, Aramaeans, camels in the region, to the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.

According to the Bible, Abraham migrated to Canaan in the 21st or 20th century BCE, while all the archaeological and epigraphical evidences indicated otherwise: that Philistines appeared in the region no earlier than the 12th century BCE.
Aramaeans, who played a significant role in the Book of Genesis, first appeared in Near Eastern inscriptions from the 11th century BCE and became a notable presence from the 9th Century BCE onward.
The camel was first domesticated at the start of the first millennium BCE and as beasts of burden in commercial activity from the 8th century BCE.

The camels gave big trouble to the writers of the Old Testament...in Genesis Chapter 24, when Abraham had sent his servant to fetch his son, Isaac’s wife, ten camels followed the servant to Nahor, in Mesopotamia and there are numerous episodes about camels drinking water etc.
The Exodus from Egypt gives another significant trouble to the very definition of Jewish identity...in the 13th century BCE, the purported time of the Exodus, Canaan was still ruled by the Egyptian pharaohs.
In other words, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into Egypt?
Biblical narrative depicts Moses leading through wilderness for 40 years with army of 600.000 warriors (3 million if you include their wives and kids) with no epigraphic or archaeological traces whatsoever in the Sinai Peninsula.

Then the fearless David and wise Solomon kingdom crumbled after the excavations in Jerusalem by the post 1967 archaeologists failed to find any traces of an important tenth Century BCE Kingdoms, the presumed time of David and Solomon.
The carbon-14 test confirmed that the famous Solomon gates and other colossal structures in the area date not from Solomon reign but from the time of northern Kingdom of Israel.
In other words, if there was a political entity in tenth-century BCE Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, not the glorious age in Jewish history.

Inventing the Diaspora

Secondly and most importantly, Dr. Sand emphatically called the Jewish exile a myth concocted by Christians who depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospels and for the crucifixion of Jesus.
There is no literature regarding the exile, not even in the New Testament that describes the mass exodus of Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
The reason is that the Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trucks, trains or other means to deport entire population. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century.

For Jews, the concept of exile becomes essential to claim that they, as the original Jerusalem deportees, belong to the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so their standing as the “chosen people” was connected genetically.
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration it of their political freedom.”--thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
In fact, the supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of the people of the Bible that preceded it.

Dr. Sand also emphasized that Jews historically did not always seek to return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile and the second exile in the 70s, even though they were not prohibited to do so...during the Babylonian exile many Jews went to Baghdad instead of Jerusalem, Jewish deportees from Spain migrated to all around the Mediterranean, but only a few chose to go to Zion, in ferocious pogrom and the rise of aggressive nationalism in Eastern Europe, the masses of Yiddish-speaking Jews migrated to westward Europe and United States.

The rabbinical Judaism does not accept the salvation of the world that Jesus brought with his sacrifice...the anticipated salvation would come only when the messiah king of the seed of David arrived, and with this a mass return to Jerusalem.
This was the reason Jews did not always seek to return to their homeland.
Thus, it is clearer than the sun at the noonday that Jews were not forcibly deported from their homeland and there was no voluntarily return to it.

Then, how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Europe?

First, there is a gross misconception about Jewish religion that it does not convert people to Judaism...conversely, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others starting the Hasmonean Dynasty producing large number of Jews through mass conversion under the influence of Hellenism.
After the wide spread dissemination of Christianity, Judaism moved to the pagan world, including Yemen and North Africa, flooding with the Judaic faith.
The deep-rooted sources of the large Jewish community in Spain were the Berber soldiers in North Africa who converted to Judaism earlier.

These Maghreb (modern-day Algeria, Tunis, Morocco) Jews were the descendants of Judaized Berbers and Judaized Arabs who accompanied the armies of Islam and later becoming Spanish Jewry, the Sephardic Jews.
The most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the Kingdom of Khazaria—a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes on the Volga River in the eight century reaching toward Kiev and modern day Georgia, and these Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe becoming a “Diaspora mother”, the Ashkenazi Jews after mixing with the Slavs.

Zionist Jews were aware from the beginning that the Biblical myth of the exile and wandering is the valuable sources of legitimization for Jews being in Palestinian land, and any attempt to destroy the connectivity, genetically or historically, of the Jews to the land undermines their rights to establish the Jewish State of Israel.
There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist projects, like the Kibbutz Settlement, should it widely known that settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendants of the “Children of Israel”—such de-legitimization might lead to the broad challenge against the State of Israel’s right to exist.
Thus in Israel, the Khazaria research on Jewish culture, Himyarite (Yemeni) and Maghreb (Berber tribe) Jewry were treated a taboo that the Israeli historians have not taken up the subjects.

For Zionist Jews who hold the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) in their hand and ‘the exile of the Jewish people’ in their memory, it was a god-given chance to expand, occupy, and settle in the Arab land.
“We Came, We Won, and We are Here” is the way Americans, white South Africans and Australians boasted legitimizing their invasions to the indigenous lands, but unfortunately no longer available to the Jews claiming to the Palestinian land.

Therefore, during the early years of the State of Israel, Bible became a key factor in the formation of reborn state of Israel, justifying for the Jewish presence and the colonization in modern times; the description of the Exodus and the march through the Sinai Desert are interwoven with the modern war of 1956.
The conquest of Canaan is thrillingly described and is naturally associated with the conquest of the West Bank in 1967.
The victory of little David over gigantic Goliath symbolizes all the wars of Israel against the Arabs.

In other words, the Bible was given in early 19th Century by Zionists to play a leading role in the drama of the rise of the modern Jewish nation transferring the Book from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section as an incontrovertible truth.

And after the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the Bible was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past and the school children read to learn about their ancient forefathers—children who would later march proudly as soldiers fighting wars of colonization.
Civil servants also were pressured to change their names to Hebrew ones, usually chosen from the Bible, and the rest of the population, seeking to emulate the established elites, did so willingly, even enthusiastically.

When was the Jewish people invented and who are the Jews?

According to Professor Sand, the Zionist intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people retrospectively, out of thirst to create a modern Jewish people...that is, the Jewish people is a made up notion consisting of a fictional (biblical) and imaginary (illusory) past with very little to back it up forensically, historically, or textually.

Professor Sand also came to the conclusion that the present-day Palestinians (a majority of them Arabs), though no population remains pure over a period of thousands of years, , are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs. (Even Ben Gurion, the father of state of Israel, admitted that Palestinian fellahin (peasants) were his potential brothers.)

Professor Sand mainly argues that most current Jews actually descended from converts whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, not mostly from the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, so that there is no racial continuum among themselves but a hodgepodge collection of different ethnicity along the religious faith line, Judaism.
For example, the Yiddish speaking Jews in Easter Europe are rather a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward than a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms, because it can explain the massive concentration (three million) of Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century the total Jewish population of the world amount to about one million. This seems to indicate that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars.
A substantial part of this majority, after conquered by the Mongols, went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Balkans where they founded the Easter Jewish community (Ashkenazim) which in turn became the dominant majority of World Jewry.
In other words, the Khazar-Turkic connection to the World Jewry appears to be predominant factor in the Eastern Europe compared with a meager numbers of Jewish immigrants from other regions such as Rhineland, France, and England.
Otherwise, there could see no other way to account for emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe.
The conventional view of the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from Franco-Rheinish origin belongs to the category of historic errors which are awaiting correction.

However, Zionist Jews wished to believe that genuine Jews of Semitic origin had gone to Poland on board ‘the Mayflower” as the chosen people, and later returned massively to claim their god-given land with their blood-line pure and original with biblical Tribes.
There are cumulative and historical evidences rebuking their wish that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian but of Caucasian origin, in which the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of Ashkenazi Jews must be substantial and all likelihood dominant. (In common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jews, even though Jews of our time fall into two divisions: Sephardim 20% and Ashkenazim 80 %.)

Are Jews of Pure Race, as a Jewish People?

Under the “Chosen –Race” doctrine of orthodox Jewry, Zionist Jews took the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) the first and foremost the narratives of Israeli history: its credo is tribal rather than universal; every prayer and ritual observance only devote to Chosen race which automatically separate Jews from others where they live; the Jewish faith is nationally and socially self-segregating.
Beginning with biblical narratives, Jews, “the chosen people”, did not have a distinct racial entity but a hybrid collection of tribes in the region: even the first patriarch, Abraham cohabited with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath who was not only Egyptian but the daughter of a priest; Moses married a Midianite, Zipporah; Samson whose mother was a Hittite was a Philistine; King David’s mother was a Moabite, and he married a princess of Geshur;
The Babylonian exile did not improve racial purity; even members of priestly families married Gentile women. In short, at the beginning of the Diaspora, the Israelites were already a hybridized race.

Another important sources of inbreeding were the vast numbers of people of most varied races converted Judaism.
As noted above, Judaism was a jealously proselytizing religion in earlier time...from black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of Kai-Feng, Yemenite Jews with their dark olive complexion, Jewish Berber tribe of Sahara down to Khazars.
Everywhere from Antioch and Athens to Asia Minor and Rome until the spread of the hegemonic Christianity, the fervor of proselytism was one of the most distinctive traits of Judaism during the Greco-Roman epoch that could not be achieved without the infusion of Gentile blood.

To sum up, There is a wicked little fact that the further we move from religious norms and the more we focus our research on diverse daily practices, the more we discover that there never was a secular ethnographic common denominator between the Jewish believers in Asia, Africa and Europe.
In other words, world Jewry have always been a major religious culture, not a strange wandering nation, and they are mostly of Khazar-Turkish rather than Semitic origin that refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe.
Therefore, the word “Anti-Semitism” is devoid of meaning, just an empty signifier.

The Ethnocracy NOT A Democracy in Israel

In ethnocratic country like the Jewish State of Israel, the minority ethnic group (Arab-Israeli Citizens) is systematically discriminated against by the state and face repression or violations of human and civil rights at the hands of state organs.
No one can deny the fact that the state of Israel is the apartheid regime instituted on the basis with particular Jewish ethnic affiliation (defined in terms of race, descent, religion or language) as the distinguishing principle.

Imagine that you are an Israeli citizen but a non-Jew living in the country where there is no civil marriage or no ownership right of properties, even a lot in a cemetery to bury your dead body...you are discriminated even after your death, if you are not a Jew.
While the Israeli state explicitly allows the World Jewry making aliyah anywhere around the globe, non-Jewish citizens are forbidden to bring their brides from out side of Israeli boundary.
You, as a non-Jewish citizen, have less rights and privileges than a Jew living in Brooklyn in New York City who declines to make aliyah and lives a life of the rich and comfortable Diaspora.

On the other hand, the Israeli Government has been employing the fast-track immigration of so-called “the lost tribes” in order to fill the Jewish Settlements in the occupied Arab land. The program includes 100 Peruvian converts to Judaism, and other groups from Spain, South America, Russia, and China.
For example, Bnei Menashe, a group of more than 9,000 in the northeastern India bordering Burma who was headhunters and animists before they were converted to Christianity by the missionaries, was settled mostly in the West Bank, Hebron, and Gaza area in the last two decades, where most Israelis would not want to venture out to live.
The obvious reason for accepting these Tibeto-Burman animists as World Jewry appears to help solve the Israel’s demographic problem of recruiting more manpower to do dirty jobs and to fight against the indigenous Arabs. .

Can Israel be defined as a democratic entity? Absolutely Not!

For any state to be a democracy, sovereignty and equality for ALL human beings living together in civil society became the minimum requirement.
The Jewish exclusivity that dominates Israel society is not an open, inclusive ideology that invites to others to become part of it or to coexist with it on a basis of equality and in symbiosis.
On the contrary, it explicitly and culturally segregates the majority (Jews) from the minority (Non-Jewish Arab-Israeli citizens), and repeatedly asserts that the state belongs only to the majority; moreover, as noted above, it promises eternal proprietary rights to the World Jewry that does not choose to live in it.

Without the de-Zionization and de-Judaification in the Israeli state and society, there will be no peace in the Middle East region, but instead a permanent peace process industry continues to flourish while millions of people perish in a series of wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, because brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and no room within the concept of Jewish and Zionistic nationalism.

Frankly speaking, I feel much more pessimistic than hopeful at the end of this essay, as the mainstream media in the US are busy preparing us for an Iranian War for the sake of the Jewish Israeli interests.

And I read the following news story in the AP wire:
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid claim to the disputed territory where the tree-planting ceremony occurred in the Jewish Settlement just south of Jerusalem that it once belonged to the Palestinian Arabs.
“Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel for ETERNITY.”