Are The Israelis Killing Off A Jewish Remnant?

Back in January this year, Ron Unz published an article entitled "Prof. John Beaty and the True Origin of the Jews." This is not another article suggesting that modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars--a Turkic kingdom of the Middle Ages that allegedly converted to Judaism--which theory has largely been debunked due to genetic research. Rather, he raises the point that the Palestinian peoples are descended from the Jews of the Roman period. That is, "the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine [after the destruction of Jerusalem] was merely a myth, modern Jews were very substantially the descendants of later converts, and today’s Palestinians were indeed probably the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans." He then reasons:

Palestine had never been a very populous land and its inhabitants had overwhelmingly consisted of peasant farmers. Once we recognize that they had remained in place following the failure of their repeated revolts against Roman rule, the large Jewish populations we later find spread across the shores of the Mediterranean basin only become explicable as a result of large-scale religious conversions. Such a development was hardly surprising given the decline of traditional paganism and the rise of various new cults during those same centuries of the later Roman Empire. Thus, it seems undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the Jews of that era had little if any Judean ancestry.

    On the other hand, "there seems overwhelming genetic evidence that Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews do indeed trace much of their ancestry back to the Holy Land, apparently being the descendants of a few hundred (presumably Jewish) Middle Easterners, mostly male, who settled in Southern Europe some time after the Fall of Rome and took local Northern Italian wives, afterward remaining largely endogamous for the next thousand-plus years of their growing presence in Central and Eastern Europe." But Unz added a caveat:

 According to Entine [author of Abraham’s Children], the crucial financial backing for the ground-breaking genetic research had come from a wealthy Jewish business tycoon in Britain, who had an intense personal focus on Jewish ancestry and therefore funded a project that seemed to demonstrate that all present-day members of the Jewish priestly caste—the Cohanim—were apparently direct male descendants of High Priest Aaron of the Old Testament. Moreover, the chief scientist on that effort was a fervently-devout Jewish researcher who traced his personal ancestry to exactly that sacred line. Although there was nothing to suggest that these strong ideological beliefs had skewed their scientific findings, the skepticism of someone like Sand is hardly unreasonable. And indeed a book published several years later by a leading genetics researcher, himself also Jewish, seemed to thoroughly debunk that exciting Biblical hypothesis, which had made global news headlines when it was announced.

After reviewing further sources, Unz concludes: "Based upon all this evidence, there seems little indication that the Ashkenazi Jews have any substantial Khazar ancestry, and strong support for the view that they are a hybrid Middle Eastern/European population, exactly as mainstream researchers have long asserted." 

     Nevertheless, Unz continues:

    ... in reviewing this genetic evidence I saw an obvious puzzle that seemed to have passed unnoticed in all of the discussions I’d read.

    Most mainstream experts seemed to quietly concede that Sand was correct in arguing that by the time of the Roman Empire the overwhelming majority of the Jews living along the shores of the Mediterranean were probably of convert stock, having little ancestry from the Israelites of Palestine. Yet the genetic evidence painted a very different picture for the major subsequent Jewish populations.

    As mentioned, the Ashkenazi Jews seem to derive from Middle Eastern males who took European wives in the centuries after the Fall of Rome. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews of Muslim Spain are also of Middle Eastern ancestry, and they were the wealthiest and most numerous component of Jewry throughout much of the Middle Ages prior to their 1492 expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella. So if only a small fraction of Jews had roots in Palestine, it appears quite odd that these would have become the progenitors of both the Sephardic and male Ashkenazi lines. Genetic evidence seems to conflict with strong literary and historical evidence.

    I think the solution to this apparent mystery comes from considering a very simple question. If millions of pagans across the Mediterranean world probably converted to Judaism during the centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of Rome, we should ask ourselves which pagans were the most likely to do so.

    Unz suggests that these pagans were Phoenicians--one of the Canaanite peoples--who went on to establish a trading empire around the Mediterranean, including the city of Carthage. He argues that as a Semitic people and due to their long ties with Israel, the Phoenicians would have been more open to converting to Judaism, particularly as the Phoenicians already practiced male circumcision which otherwise was an impediment to gaining converts. I would also explain the dispersion of "Jews" around the Roman Empire as the Phoenician converts were already wide spread due to their former colonies and trade settlements. In this regard, he notes that "[o]utside the vicinity of the Middle East, those regions that later became centers of large Jewish populations were Spain and portions of the North African coast, both of which had been Carthaginian territory, a very suggestive pattern."

So unless modern DNA testing has become sufficiently precise to distinguish the genetics of the ancient Judeans from that of their close Phoenician cousins, I think the latter group should be treated as a leading candidate for the true origin of the modern Jews, including both the Sephardics of Spain and the male line of the Ashkenazis of Eastern Europe.

(Interestingly, Unz notes, H.G. Wells had advanced this theory in his book on The Outline of History, a scholarly work intended to create a unified history of the world from its beginning to the time Wells wrote it). 

    It is an interesting and compelling theory, although not without some possible issues. For instance, we know that at the the time of the Babylonian invasion, not all Jews returned were taken into Egypt: some--peasants mostly--were left in Judah, while others fled to Egypt (taking Jeremiah with them). This latter group was probably the genesis of the large Jewish community in Egypt to which Jesus and his family fled from Herod when Jesus was a toddler. Undoubtedly other Jews had migrated into Egypt over the years to flee from prosecution or pursue trades. Certainly, over the centuries, these communities could have shifted from farming to urban trades and pursuits. Combined with traditional Jewish xenophobia, it is quite possible that such groups would have been insular and maintained relatively pure bloodlines. 

    Of course, my criticism only pertains to the theory on the origins of the European Jews and has nothing to do with the Palestinian population in Israel and whether they are descendants of the Jews. The consensus seems to be that the Palestinians are the remnants of, or at least closely related to, the ancient Jewish population in Israel. (See, e.g., "Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots"--Haaretz; "Most Palestinians Are Descendants Of Jews"--The Times of Israel).