Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 5 April 2010

Jews are descended from converts who never set foot in the Holy Land. That has come as a bit of a surprise to many Jews and as a colossal affront to Zionism, Israel’s national ideology. The modern Israeli state was founded on belief in a “Jewish people” as a unified nation, established in biblical times, scattered by Rome, stranded in exile for 2,000 years, then returned to the Promised Land. But… there was no exile… Early Judaism pioneered the art of conversion. To spread as quickly as it did, Christianity must have exploited an earlier Jewish expansion.

Rafael Behr

A Scattered People

Jews worldwide are considered these days a scattered and exiled nation, and after the Nazi attempts to murder them all, western countries were overwhelmed with guilt. Not so overwhelmed that they wanted to open their doors to the Jews who had been uprooted in Europe but escaped the holocaust, but sufficiently overwhelmed that they generously gave Palestine, a country then under the British Mandate to any Jews who wanted to settle there. After all, everyone knew the story told in the bible that God had given the country to the Jews, or rather Hebrews and Israelites, as they were also called, as a land of milk and honey suitable for His Chosen People. The story went on that the Jews had been evicted from their God-given country by the Romans after a bloody war ending in 70 AD, followed by another similar war ending in 135 AD.

So, even though these dispersed Jews had been frequently murdered by Christians long before Christian Germany accepted Hitler’s “Final Solution”, the Christian nations of the west felt obliged to get into God’s good book by allowing His Chosen People to return to the land He had once given them, even though He had contrived to remove them from it at a later date. The motto was “a land without a people for a people without a land”, suggesting that the solution was quite perfect, except for one minor problem—it was not a land without a people, but a land which had been occupied by a people who had lived there as long as anyone knew. These people, however, were merely Arab farmers or fellahin, uneducated, insignificant tillers of the soil who were invisible! These fellahin were not counted as people. They could be ignored, and have been since. They are the Palestinians.

The Christian west righted the crime it felt it had committed against the Jews by committing another crime—the ignoring and then mistreatment of the Palestinians who had lived there for centuries. Yet, for a long time in the intervening history, the Jews were considered to be a people defined by their particular religion, not because they all descended from the people of a particular land. In short, they were not a nation but people who had chosen a distinctive religion—a category with Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and pagans, not a category with French, British, American, Chinese or Indians. People with a particular religion could arise in any country willing to tolerate strange religions within its national boundaries. Jews, Christians, Moslems, and so on, live among the inhabitants of many different nations today, but no nation has been dispersed in that sort of way. People expelled from their own land, or voluntarily migrating from it, find refuge elsewhere and always have adopted the nationality of the adopting country. Attempts by people to settle in another place then to try and claim it is a part of their original home country by virtue of their having settled there has generally been considered illegal. What then is the origin of the idea that a religious group should be considered a scattered nation of people?

The answer is that it is a longstanding myth, going right back to those original biblical myths, that has been revived and used by some Jews to lay claim to their “home” in the Levant that God supposedly gave, and which remains theirs for that reason despite the 3000 years of intervening history. These Jews called themselves Zionists, and Zionism is now a major conspiracy which succeeds in escaping criticism for its odious attitudes by accusing its critics of anti-Semitism, even when the critic is another Jew. Zionists call Jews critical of them self-hating Jews, and self-hating Jews are themselves anti-Semitic.

Shlomo Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv university, is necessarily a self-hating Jew, and is anti-Semitic so far as any Zionist is concerned because he is an honest historian who tries to set out the inconsistencies in the Zionist myth of a linear history of the scattered Jews. Real history is, by definition, not mythical, and real Jewish history is not linear. By linear, we mean that all Jews are directly descended from Abraham. Sand has explained the reality of Jewish history in his book, The Invention of the Jewish People (2009). According to the myth, this people were dispersed and kept being dispersed from one place to another, but wherever they went they remained true to their Jewish religion and breeding, never deviating until this very day. So, all Jews are entitled by birthright to return to the country God gave them.

It is racist nonsense, and is indeed derived from the same nineteenth century roots as Nazi racial purity theory, which it applies to all Jews! The Jews were dispersed, according to conventional history, not even Zionist, by the Romans, causing the Jewish “Diaspora”—the world wide dispersal of the seed of Abraham. Why then were Jews already in a world wide diaspora long before then? The Torah, the Jewish name for the five books of Moses—the Pentateuch—in the Christian Old Testament has:

Yehouah will scatter thee among all peoples, from one end of the earth even unto the other. There you will serve other gods of wood and stone which neither you nor your fathers have known. Among these nations there will be no repose for you…

Deuteronomy 28:64

Believers will imagine this is a prophecy, but the historian knows that, for such a “prophecy” to have been so true, it was already true when it was set down. It is a prophecy written after the fact, and so necessarily impressively correct. When the Torah was published in essentially its present form in the third century BC, Jews were already dispersed, yet in the fifth century BC, Herodotus could find no Jews anywhere, even in Palestine!

The Roman Diaspora

Does it mean the Romans then were not responsible for the scattering of the Jews in 70 AD and 135 AD? It does! Flavius Josephus, the Romanized Jew who wrote The Jewish War, is the only textual source of this alleged dispersion. He says that Titus enslaved 97,000 Judeans and sold them, but says nothing about an expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem or Judea. Only Jerusalem was at all badly affected by the war, and even that is accepted as exaggerated. Josephus says over a million people died, though the population of the city was only about 50,000. There were, indeed, pilgrims there also but nothing like that number even at Passover. The memorials of Titus’s triumph in Rome show the great seven branched candlestick of the temple being carried in procession by legionaries not by Jewish captives. The Romans have no hint in all their documentation of the period of any mass deportation of Jews from Judea, and neither archaeology nor documentation says anything about a large movement of of people from Judea into neighboring countries such as that any form of terrorism against the natives would induce. By the end of the first century AD, the economy of Judea, after the Jewish War, was back to normal. The damage of the war was repaired.

Nor could the population of the region have been greater than its agricultural capacity permitted by the technology of the day—at most a million, and far less is more likely. The population a few hundred years before, after the so called “return”, had been only a couple of myriad, and in those days of high infant mortality, populations grew only slowly. So, the evidence is that no mass dispersal happened after the Jewish War. The uprising of 60 years later led by Bar Kosiba, was another serious battle, but little more is known about it. The only historian of any significance, other than Eusebius, who wrote much later, was Dio Cassius, and he, typically, exaggerated:

Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles…

He does not mention whether any Jews were sent into exile, but does say that many more were killed by famine and disease, leaving no one to be deported. Such slaughter is quite impossible, and, if it were true, and Judea was the only place where Jews lived at the time, it would have meant the end of Judaism. Indeed, if the numbers given by these historians were reasonably correct, then the only conclusion would have to be that Jews from elsewhere came to Judea to fight the Romans in their tens of thousands, itself proving that large numbers of Jews were already dispersed. But that we already know, and many of these diaspora Jews were victimized as a consequence of the wars, especially that of Bar Kosiba. If any native Jews were forced to emigrate from Jerusalem and Judea at the end of the Bar Kosiba war they could have been no more than two per cent of the empire’s Jews. The Romans had not exterminated or exiled all Judean Jews because, following the uprising in 135 AD, Hadrian banned circumcized men from Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina. Circumcized men must have been able to access the city! The Jews exiled from Jerusalem mainly resettled in the villages. The Jews around Jerusalem were oppressed for several more years, but were never exiled.

It was at this time that the Romans abolished the name Judea, and reverted to a name associated with another ancient people of the region, the Philistines, calling it Palestine. Just as the country’s economy recovered after the earlier war, so it did after this one, and the Jewish religion was remodeled with the completion of the Mishnah by the Rabbis from Pharisaism to Rabbinism. Jews were still there in Palestine. There had been no forced exile, and few Jews seem to have left voluntarily. The supposed Roman act of dispersing the Jews is plainly false.

The Biblical Exile and Return

Robert Drews, Professor Emeritus of Classics, Vanderbilt University, writes:

It was in Mesopotamia that the religion of the Judahites became something akin to what we would recognize as Judaism.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Beginnings of Modern Civilization

Jewish history, as testified even by some accomplished Jewish historians did not begin with Abraham or Moses, but with the event recorded in the Jewish scriptures as the “return” from “exile” in Babylonia. Men like Isaac Markus Jost and Leopold Zanz, near the start of the nineteenth century, already knew there was no Judaism before the exile in Babylonia. Jost recognized that the Jewish scriptures had no historical evidence to substantiate them, and were written later than the “exile” and the “return” by different authors and editors. The Israelites in Canaan, despite having the laws of Moses, according to the bible, were historically no different from pagan Canaanites. Jost concluded the Judahites who were deported from Judah by the Babylonians must have adopted the central beliefs of Judaism in Babylonia:

The Jews in Persia studied and learned from the Persians a new religious outlook, a civilized life, language and science.

I M Jost, cited by S Sand

Cyrus set up his mighty empire from 550 BC based on the new Iranian, aniconic religion called Zoroastrianism. Now historians and theologians tell us that, in the first millennium BC, the world underwent a remarkable change, called by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) in The Origin and Goal of History, die Achsenzeit, literally “axle time” but meaning a change of direction in history. Perhaps the main symptom of it was the appearance, within a hundred or so years near the middle of the millennium, of several remarkable religious sages in China, India, supposedly Judah, Greece and Persia, but the common link of them all, and explanation of the phenomenon, is Cyrus and Persia, the first world empire.

Persia was accessible to China, India, Greece and Judah, and so seems the obvious achsen, had Jaspers looked for it. From Persia, news of the remarkable new religion went along the Silk Road into China, inspiring a whole new thinking in Taoism and Confucianism. Cyrus conquered part of India where the same happened in Buddhism. Greece was not conquered, but many Greek colonies in Asia Minor were, and again a new way of thinking was stimulated, not a religious way, but a way plainly based on the new ideas in Zoroastrianism, philosophy and history. In Judah, the Persians set up a temple state for the many people they were converting from nature and fertility religions to a moral one, Judaism. Personal morality was the Persian answer to simply oppressing subjects to conform. Why force people to do what you want, when you can persuade them that it is the right thing to do?

Inspired by the Persian notion of arta (asha), order, a power even gods had to accept, Greek philosophers began to show that the natural world and morality did not require divinities to explain them, and were inclining towards one moral god. Xenophanes of Colophon (c 570-475 BC), who mocked worship of the Olympians, might have been a monotheist, writing:

There is one god, greatest among gods and men, like to men neither in body nor in soul… Without toil he sets all into motion, by the thought of his mind.

Hecataios of Miletus (c 500 BC) called the myths of the Hellenes many and risible, and Heracleitos of Ephesos asked how Greeks could regard statues as gods, and could “pray to these statues, as if one were to have a conversation with houses”. Anaxagoras (488-428 BC) effectively was monotheistic. For him, nous (“mind”) was the power that ordered all things. Soon after, Herodotus and Thucydides were writing history without requiring divine intervention in it, and, in his Metaphysics, Aristotle argued that an “Unmoved Mover” was the origin of all reality. He called it “The God” (ho theos).

Plato was keen on the soul (psyche) that Pythagoras seems to have discovered from the Persian fravashi, and used the notion of the existence of perfect soul-like ideals as a model for the imperfect form of real things. People’s souls were supposed to have been dependent in the afterlife on whatever they had done in life, another Persian idea—a book of life with good and bad deeds inscribed in it, and judgement being on the balance. If the balance was indecisive, the Persian belief may have been—most Persian books were burnt by Alexander, leaving us with The Gathas and recollections and deductions of later times—that a further incarnation was possible, perhaps up to seven times, and the Orphics held such views apparently taken from Pythagoras. In India, the soul or atman could be reincarnated in a lesser life form, or could progress upwards.

It was also the Persians, not the Babylonians, who taught the Jews their religion. The concept of Paradise originated in Persia. Jews were taught of the heavenly place which, at the Day of Judgement, the righteous would enter. In Old Persian it was a beautiful park or garden, pairidaêza, Hellenized as paradeisos, Paradise. Though doctrines about the afterlife are hardly to be found in the Avesta, commentators forget or never learnt that the Avesta is what remains of a much bigger literature which must have answered such questions, but was destroyed by Alexander the Great. Babylonia had succumbed to Cyrus the Persian, but later Persian rulers adopted the great city of Babylon as a capital of the empire, and took Babylonian wives. So, the Jews who “returned” from Babylonia were returning from Persia really, but the authors of the bible did not realize it, or deliberately obscured it.

Nor was it a “return”. It was a deportation from Mesopotamia to Yehud, and it happened well over 100 years after Babylon fell to to Cyrus, in the Jewish “400 year dark age” from the “exile” to the revolt of the Maccabees. It follows that the return from exile could not have been soon after Cyrus conquered Babylon. It is usually set in the time of Cyrus’s successor, Darius the Great, but it was actually in the time of Darius II who used Babylon as a capital city. Curiously, the dark age encompasses the very time that Judaism was established by the Persians with the setting up of the Jewish temple state in Jerusalem in 417 BC.

In the bible, Jeremiah 29:5-8 reports that the exiles were to build houses, plant gardens, marry, beget children, and pray for the good of the country to which they had been exiled. Jost thought, and sought to persuade others, that the most Jews lived outside Judah long before the end of the so-called Second Temple:

They remained Jews, although also members of other nations. They loved their brethren in Jerusalem, and wished them peace and prosperity, but they cherished their new homeland more. They prayed with their blood brothers, but they went to war with their country brothers. They were friendly towards their blood brothers, but they shed their blood for their homeland.

I R Jost, cited by S Sand from R Michael

Jost is accepting the bible story of the “exile”, but saw the “return” as very partial, most Jews being content to remain where they were, scattered about the Babylonian empire. But these widely scattered Jews must have been taught by the Persians, when they found them in the empire they had taken over, a quite different religion from the Canaanite one they had departed from Judah with. It seems most unlikely that they would have been able to round up the scattered Jews of this hypothesis and taught them all Judaism, before deporting some back to their former homeland.

What really happened was that the Persians had built a large empire, partly by force of arms and partly by engineering peaceful submission, and these people were pagans in Zoroastrian terms. The ones who caused trouble, either by resisting or by subsequent revolution, were treated as worshipers of diva gods (devils) and had their idols and temples destroyed, and their rulers and skilled men deported to some bleak part of the empire, often to places whose own rulers had been deported for the same reason. There they had to rule an alien people who did not like them at all. It was the ancient method of pacification of the ANE. Dangerous leaders of rebellious nations were put in charge of other rebellious people, and so had to concentrate on keeping their new subjects in order because they knew that, if they failed, they would be the first to die.

Among their duties in their new province was to “restore” the local religion. This restoration was purely political. The ruling class were told they were being “returned” to their original land, having previously been deported by the previous imperial power. It is doubtful that any of the people being parachuted in were fooled by this story, but they were to use it as cover for the changes they were told to make. Religion was, of course, the life and identity of these people, it was their culture, and the Persians wanted a common malleable culture across their vast empire.

So the rulers whom they imported to places like Yehud claimed to be the guardians of correct worship which the locals had allowed to become corrupt. Under this guise, they religion was to be “restored”, meaning it was changed to something that suited Persian imperial policy. That is why the Jews of the bible claimed to be “returning”, and why the religion with which they returned was utterly different from the Canaanite polytheism they had left behind, and found when they entered their new domain. In Judah, the Canaanites were the Am ha Eretz who wanted to join in the new project of restoration, but were not allowed to do so for fear that they would insist on their traditions.

The people and tribes that had submitted to the Persians did not have their temples and shrines destroyed, and were not forced out of their native lands, but they were told the inverse story of the other one. Their previous imperial rulers had distorted their traditional worship, but there was nothing for them to worry about because the Persians were tolerant and helpful towards such people, they had found all the old records, and would send in experts to restore the religion to how it had been, and even send in some treasure that had been taken from them over a lifetime earlier by the awful Babylonians. As it was over a lifetime ago, no one was alive to recollect anything different and contradict the tale. Again, the restoration was to a form of religion that the Persians considered conducive to good order, one doubtless based on Zoroastrian principles.

Zoroastrianism was the Persian religion, a proselytizing religion as Zoroastrian legend and ancient books confirm, for how otherwise could Zoroaster have built up the religion at all, from his original solitary revelation of Ahuramazda. Zoroastrian myth says Zoroaster failed for a long time before he succeeded in converting the monarch, Hystaspes, who then commanded the conversion of his kingdom. Today, Zoroastrians in the world have long been engaged in an acrimonious dispute as to whether their religion is to permit conversion. Many of the Parsis of India deny it, but they have been strongly influenced by Hindu society, a rigid caste system. The Parsis have been accepted as a caste, and castes are traditionally exclusive, so conversion became impossible. But conversion to Zoroastrianism does not make anyone a Parsi, so the Parsis have no argument.

Even so, it is likely that the Persian Zoroastrian ruling class at the time of the Achaemenid kings would have been chary about admitting such vast numbers of converts to Zoroastrianism so quickly. Many of the subject people would have seen sense in wanting to adopt the religion of their rulers, but, like the Parsis, the Persian ruling caste would have felt threatened. The solution they seem to have adopted is to devise an intermediate status as a new caste whom they would accept as Zoroastrians in a future generation, maybe several generations down the line. Rabbi Hosea, in Palestine, in the third century AD, wrote:

The proselytes coming out of Libya, should they have to wait three generations?

J Talmud, Tractate Kilayim

These were the Juddin, Yehudim, or Judeans. They were taught a religion that was perhaps an attenuated Zoroastrianism in which the peoples continued to worship a local god by name, but one which was given the characteristics of Ahuramazda, a universal god in fact. These Juddin were given their own central temple by Darius II in 417 BC, the Jerusalem Temple, and a mythical history was then devised associating them with the new Temple State.

Whatever the ultimate intention of the Persians is not known, because only 80 years later, the victory of Alexander the Great stopped it from reaching fruition, but nevertheless it did reach a fruition. It meant the Hellenized world of Alexander’s generals was already full of Jews from the outset. Their Persian masters had been destroyed and the ruling caste of Aryan Zoroastrians with their priests, the Magi, killed and scattered, leaving the underclass of Juddin as a substantial body of people with a vague history and a temple. The Greeks were loath to accept anything Persian, and were intent on destroying the legacy of Persia in their attempt to Hellenize the world, but the Jews were too many to be ignored. Jerusalem fell into the administrative sphere of the Egyptian Ptolemies, who were keen to keep the Jews onside, and so favored the Temple.

The Jewish Scriptures

Spinoza thought the Jewish scriptures, or parts of them, were written by Ezra. It is not far off the truth. The scriptures were started by Persians as foundation texts for the Persian colonists who set up the Temple State, and Ezra was the Persian minister responsible. Ezra not Moses—who was invented as a founder by the Ptolemies to replace Ezra—delivered the law to the Judahites. Ezra the Persian was the real Moses, so Spinoza was effectively correct.

The Ptolemies took the foundation texts that the Persian chancellery had supplied and under the pretext of translating them into Greek, they rewrote them completely with the intention of making Egypt the origin of the Jews with the long myth of Moses and the Exodus. The new myths were simultaneously written in Hebrew, by then already effectively a dead language. Hebrew was originally called “the language of Canaan”. It was Canaanite or Phœnician, and had given way in common use to Aramaic. The enemies of the Ptolemies, the Syrian Greeks, called the Seleucids, then briefly had the control of the temple and restored the stories of Abraham and Isaac, the Mesopotamian origins in Judaism that the Ptolemies meant to scratch out.

Finally, the Jewish Hasmoneans rebelled against the Seleucids and created a short lived Jewish state in Judea, but in the course of the uprising, if the books of the Maccabees are to be believed, the temple library, called the Library of Nehemiah, was despoiled, and the holy books scattered. The victorious Maccabees tried to reassemble them from what could be recovered, from the memories of priests and scribes, and from fresh writing, and consequently we have the odd bible we have today with its peculiar repetitions and contradictions. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the Maccabees proved not to be a family loyal to traditional Judaism as the pro-Persian factions had seen it, but loyal to their own power and pretensions, causing divisions between the Hellenized priests, the Sadducees, and the Persian inclined Hasidim, who themselves split into a priestly faction, the Essenes, and a legal faction, the scribes and Pharisees.

Christian archaeologists took care not to find anything that might undermine the Jewish scriptures, for they knew that the New Testament—and therefore Christianity—was build on it, and could fall if the basis of Judaism fell.

Benjamin Mazar, a leading Israeli archaeologist, was worried about inconsistencies between the Jewish scriptures and historical facts from ascertainable sources. The stories of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac mentioned Philistines, Arameans and domesticated camels, yet none of them had arrived in the ANE at the time these tales were supposed to have happened—not later than 1600 BC. The Philistines arrived not before 1200 BC, the Arameans a little later, but did not become a force until about 800 BC, and camels were only domesticated around 1000 BC, and did not become common until the Assyrians made great use of them around 700 BC. It followed that Albright’s chronology, which had seemed to uphold the bible absolutely, was wrong.

Wondrous attempts were made to surmount these inconvenient realities. Mazar tried to put Abraham into the biblical period of the Judges, supposedly around 1100 BC, but the time of the Judges has itself been wrongly assigned. It can only refer to the century between Cyrus and Darius II when the policy of Judaization was first being formulated and put into practice, and the colonization of Judah by Persian Juddin had been unsuccessful—the late sixth and most of the fifth century BC—as the bible itself suggests. T L Thompson and others stunningly revealed the truth 40 years ago, though the clergy of the world are still managing to keep it safe from their congregations—these biblical stories were not ancient myths but theological literary compositions made at a much later date. Genesis is replete with names that did not exist before the seventh century, and many before the sixth. Yet these names were familiar to the authors of Genesis who therefore lived later still—in Hellenistic times.

When Isaac, Abraham’s son was old enough to marry, he could not marry a local Canaanite woman, and a wife had to be brought from Nahor in the Chabur region of the upper Euphrates river. It makes little sense, if Abraham’s family were migrants looking for a place to settle. Maybe the ban was against marrying out of Abraham’s religion, but Abraham’s religion was Yehouaism—Judaism—and Abraham was looking for a place to establish it, according to the legend, so it still makes no sense because the Canaanite women could have converted. It only makes sense if Abraham is a mythologized colonist with a Jewish base in Persian Babylonia where his son could find a wife established in the same faith. Eventually when sufficient Canaanites had converted to Judaism, Canaanite wives must have been acceptable. The same is true of Ezra’s exclusivity. The Canaanite wives in reality were rejected not because they were Canaanite but because they had not converted to Judaism. The problem, it seems from biblical clues, is that infidels could not convert “just like that”, and be accepted as fully Jewish:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I Yehouah Elohim am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

Deuteronomy 5:9

Deuteronomy has it that idolatry pollutes people until the third or fourth generation, then only grandchildren or even great grandchildren of new proselytes were considered fully Jewish. If that is the interpretation, it ties in with the suggestion above that there was a staged conversion of diva people to Zoroastrianism, and indeed the original reference in Deuteronomy might have been to the period for a full conversion to Zoroastrianism, carefully lost by the Yehouistic editor in Ptolemaic times. It explains why Juddin until this day in the Zoroastrian religion seems to mean both a non-Zoroastrian and a convert!

Scholars and archaeologists know that the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt are utterly impossible as history, not only for its ridiculous miracles, but because nothing in history supports it. Yet it, and the most important Jewish feast, the Passover, that it explains are central to Judaism and to Christianity, so all sorts of excruciating excuses and explanations are constantly being invented for it. The real inspiration for the idea was obviously the expulsion of the Asiatic Hyksos from Egypt, but the Hyksos were a ruling class, not slaves, so the story for the bible had to be utterly changed. It must have been told by people who knew about the Hyksos, those who kept the Egyptian archives, the priests of the Schools of Life attached to the temples.

Pithom, a city mentioned in the Moses story, was only significant towards the end of the 500s BC. This part of the story, therefore, could not have been written before the 400s BC, the Persian period, and the subsequent Hellenistic period. It did not actually emerge into recorded history until the times of the Egyptian Ptolemies. Ezion Geber and Arad, also later cities, betray the late composition. Moreover, if the escape happened in the thirteenth century BC, the most favored date, then the Israelite slaves were not escaping from Egypt at all by crossing the Sinai desert into Palestine for the destination had been annexed by Egypt, and remained an Egyptian colony for three or four hundred years. On this fact, archaeological excavations, particularly at Bethshean and Gaza are incontrovertible, and that being the case, it is peculiar that the bible should be silent on it. The simple explanation is that it was written later, when Palestine was independent of Egypt.

The empires of David and Solomon are also myths. No archaeological excavations anywhere around the temple mount or, indeed, anywhere in Jerusalem have found a trace of the tenth century kingdom, nothing from grand buildings to decent pottery. The biblicist excuse that later building, especially Herod’s temple, destroyed all that went before is false. Earlier periods of Jerusalem’s history have been found! If the Tel Dan stele which some think mentions a “house of David” is not a fake—as most such things found in the last few decades have proved to be, and no skeptic has been allowed to examine this stone forensically—then the best that can be offered for the Davidic “empire” is a small area controlled by a local bandit. Archaeologists have faced the inevitable conclusion that the mighty empire of David and Solomon never existed. It was a theological romance to give a false history to the Jews who were actually colonists with no single history of their own. The whole of the Jewish scriptures up until the introduction of king Omri has no foundation in ascertainable history. It is fiction!

In the fourteenth century BC el Amarna tablets, two city states in Canaan are mentioned, Jerusalem and Shechem, and the Merneptah stele, if its reading and date are not wishful thinking, says some entity called Israel had existed in Palestine towards the end of the thirteenth century, but it seems to say the Pharaoh destroyed it. Archaeological surveys in the West Bank in the 1980s show the north (Samaria) was populated in the tenth and ninth centuries but only about 20 villages existed in the south (Judah). Judah seems to have been a minor adjunct to Israel until the latter was annexed by Assyria. Then, briefly, Judah flourished in its own right, before it too fell to Babylon. Moreover, the archaeology shows that the Judahites and the Samarians were both worshipers of multiple gods. They were polytheists, and one of these gods only was Yehouah, and he had a consort called Asherah!

The authors of the biblical books mentioned the other gods and goddesses, but as if the worship of them was an anachronism and an abomination, but it was, of course, the way everyone in the ANE worshiped until the Persians took over as victors. The Persians worshiped one chief God, Ahuramazda, but accepted that his principle qualities were also supernatural spirits, just as the Holy Ghost is the spirit of God. But Ahuramazda also had opponents, opposing spirits who were old Iranian gods, the chief of whom was Ahriman.

The emergence of a single chief god was a symptom of empire. Long before the Persians, polytheists usually had a favorite god, and there was a sort of competition among the worshipers of different gods, a sort of proselytism among them, to get others to favor their own favorite. And the different gods and goddesses had their own specialist areas, like Catholic saints, healing, love, war, and so on, so that people could seek, beside their favored god, the attention of an appropriate god according to the problem they had.

Cyrus was deferential to the local gods, because he wanted to endear himself to the people he conquered. The Assyrians favored their imperial god, Ashur. The Babylonian chief god was Marduk, but the last Babylonian king was obsessed by the moon god, Sin, a failing which Cyrus the Persian took advantage of in promising to “restore” the worship of Marduk to the Babylonians, who responded by surrendering with little resistance. Cyrus meant by “restore” to restore Marduk as the chief god, but in a form that suited imperial unity. Years later, in the early 470s BC, the Babylonians rebelled against Xerxes, taking advantage of his military failure against the Greeks in 479 BC, but the rebellion was put down, and Xerxes treated the Babylonians as worshipers of a diva (a daeva or devil) god, and destroyed his temple, the Tower of Babel. Plainly Genesis was written after this event.

The Israeli archaeologists fell back upon the biblical story of Josiah’s reform after the discovery of a missing book of the law in temple renovations. They allege the biblical tale is a cover for the law (Deuteronomy) having been composed then. Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian, rightly says this theory “offers attractive conclusions but much of the interpretation and reasoning is less than solid”.

Josiah’s reign in biblical chronology is towards the end of the seventh century BC, and Israeli specialists, careful archaeologists, like Israel Finkelstein, say little in the bible could have been written before the beginning of the seventh century. Sand points out that the archaeologists’ theory requires an anachronistic Josiah. No king of the time could have imagined that inventing the myth of the discovery of a law book could have united any kingdom at a time before the concept of the modern state existed. Most people were, in any case, illiterate. They worked their allotments as peasant farmers, not knowing much about rulers, or giving a hoot about their laws. The means of communication from the center just did not exist to propagate such myths—certainly with the speed needed.

Maybe it was possible nevertheless in such a small kingdom, but these archaeologists have been unable to find in situ a jot of evidence of any cultic reform at the time. So, there is neither evidence of it in the ground, nor is the theory likely without imagining a thoroughly modern state over 2000 years before one actually formed in early modern Europe. Essentially the theory postulates as a hidden assumption that peasants were able to read copies of the new law themselves, as if they had it in hand, or at least newspaper summaries of it, and were keen to know it. It also rather assumes what it is trying to replace—the idea that the people already lived according to a sacred law, and readily saw the new one as a vast improvement on the old. Yet religions are always deeply conservative. It is impossible to believe that people who had followed traditional rituals, festivities and customs from time immemorial would just drop it all because a king says new customs have just been found. Such sudden changes have to be imposed, and even then with a degree of subtlety.

The ruler’s appeal to the good will of his subjects is also modern. It requires a feeling of patriotism or religious identity to work, but here the king is proposing to tear up the the ancient Canaanite religious identity of the Judahites. No one will have been able to comprehend the point of it. It had no point in that context. In ancient times the peasants were largely irrelevant. Only the ruling nobility mattered to the king. Conceivably a small ruling class could have adopted a new form of religion, as happened in Europe with Christianity, but the underclass of peasant farmers in Europe took centuries to adopt their rulers’ novelty, so it is unimaginable that it could have happened here, and, to repeat, there is no evidence that it did.

Finally, it is unlikely that countries like ancient Israel and Judah had any detailed archives that Josiah could have drawn on. If the more advanced entity of Israel had any, the Assyrians will have confiscated or destroyed them. The same is true of whatever Josiah was supposed to have drawn upon in the subsequent century. The ruling elite of Judah was exiled, according to the myth, along with its abundant national archives, so that the displaced Judahites could dream and plot a return contrary to the aims of their conquerors. It supposes that the ancient imperialisms were ruled by idiots. They were not.

The whole of it was worked out by clever and scheming conquerors plotting how to keep their many and divers subjects under control—the Persians. Even the Josiah myth was an invention of the Persian chancellery to help persuade the Jews that the religion being imposed towards the end of the fifth century BC was not new. Josiah, 200 years before had done it first, but the ignorant locals had reverted, necessitating the Persian restoration of Jewish customs. How odd it is that the Hebrew word for religion is the Persian word for law—dat?

Persian Imperialism

R J Z Werblowsky and G Wigoder of the Hebrew University tell us (The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, 1965) that only in the Second Temple period, that is after the Persian conquest, did the word Torah come to mean law. In fact Torah does not look like a Canaanite word at all, and it actually originated in the Persian period probably as a mishearing of dat Ahuramazda as ha Torah Moishe. Ezra and Nehemiah were born in Persia, but were appointed by the Persian king to establish a temple state in Yehud.

Ezra was a sofer, a “scribe learned in the Torah of the Lord”. In 417 BC, he brought from Mesopotamia to Jerusalem a deportation of colonists with much treasure, allegedly stolen from the temple 200 years earlier by Nebuchadrezzar, and supposedly being returned by the Persian king to restore the proper worship of Yehouah in a newly dedicated temple. Ezra also brought with him the sacred books of the law—the Torah. In Yehud, Judah, the Am ha Aretz, the People of the Land, the local people knew nothing of a Torah, whereas people supposedly descended from those exiled to Babylonia 200 years earlier had kept the sacred law that the locals had forgotten all about!

Ezra also found that some Jews who had already settled in Judah, possibly in earlier less well organized attempts at colonization, had married gentile wives, something forbidden under Mazdaism, and a rule also of the new semi-Mazdaism called Judaism. Ezra dissolved these marriages not because he did not approve of Canaanites, but because these wives had apparently not converted to Judaism first. Ezra summoned all the people of Yehud to the Water Gate of Jerusalem for a reading of the Torah, the law that they had never previously heard of. As Ezra evidently spoke in Old Persian, translators had to be present so that the Canaanite or Aramaic speakers of the land could understand what Ezra was telling them. They wept. The local people were being subjugated to the colonists.

In 2 Maccabees 15:36, 14 Adar is called the day of Mordecai, the day after the day of Nicanor, celebrated for their victory over this villain in 1 and 2 Maccabees. Mordecai is Marduk, the Babylonian imperial god, and the Babylonians always celebrated their god, and the goddess Ishtar, his cousin, on the 14 and 15 Adar. These are the very days that the Jews celebrate their holiday of Purim (Lots) when, according to the book of Esther, the Jews were victorious over enemies led by Haman in Persia who intended to butcher them. The name Esther is, of course, cognate with Ishtar. So, here is a tale of Jewish heroes, Mordecai and Esther, his cousin, to explain why Jews celebrate on the two days of the festival of the Babylonian gods, Marduk and Ishtar. The purpose of Esther seems to be an aetiological explanation of the origin of Purim, but the festival is not mentioned in Maccabees. Indeed, it is mentioned nowhere in the Jewish scriptures except in Esther.

The Greek version of the book of Esther dates itself to 114 BC, decades after the books of the Maccabees—it is a Hellenistic romance which has nothing to say about the Jewish God, or even mentions Him—but the events described in it do not match anything known of the Persia of the time of the Achaemenids. It does match Persia at a much later date between about 150 and 100 BC when the Parthians ruled, but the Zoroastrians of Persis had become very defensive, and defended their religion by persecuting people with other religions. The Jews might easily have been a main target. The situation in Parsis would also explain the book’s apparently good, but yet imperfect knowledge of Persia in the earlier period.

In the fifth century BC reigns of Xerxes (485-465) and Artaxerxes I (465-424 BC), conversions to Judaism seemed to increase. Detailed cuneiform tablets from the second half of the fifth century BC, records of a family company, Murashu, that rented out royal land to people around Nippur, sixty miles south of Babylon, show that names theophoric in Iah and El, assumed to be Judahite names, were getting popular. Among those who rented royal land from 455 to 403 BC, about eight per cent had such names. Suddenly, for some unknown reason, people had begun to make a commitment to a different god. Biblicists assume they were the exiled Judahites beginning to call their children by traditionally Hebrew names. It more probably suggests a new fashion for the worship of these gods.

At the Yeb military colony in Egypt, Some Egyptians certainly seem to have adopted Hebrew names—very likely cases of conversion, although the religion of these people was not monotheistic—at the very time when the Persians brought monotheistic Judaism to the Jerusalem Temple. Yeb (Elephantine) island is near Aswan and the First Cataract on the Nile, and a Persian garrison there, consisting of Judahite soldiers, guarded Egypt’s southern border. Some papyri archives in Aramaic, dating from shortly before 400 BC and belonging to a religious functionary named Hananiah were found. He lived in the time of the Persian kings Darius II (424-405 BC) and Artaxerxes II (405-359 BC). None of the papyri suggests observation of the Sabbath, and intermarriage occurred between the Egyptians and the Judahite community, apparently without disapproval. In a “Passover Letter”, Hananiah’s objective was to teach proper observation of Passover—this in a people, biblicists tell us, who had observed the law of Moses for a thousand years by then! And Hananiah hopes that “the gods” will look favorably on the Judahites. The Yeb correspondence gives no hint that the bible had yet been written. The correspondents make no reference to it, or cite anything recognizably from it. The book found there was the book of Ahiqar.

Esther 8:17 describes a mass conversion to Judaism in Persia, so the bible itself, albeit in one of its less popular books, admits of mass conversions to Judaism albeit in faraway Persia. It is the only example of mass conversion in the bible, and significantly, it is in Persia. Is the author telling us something?

If the bible is to be accepted as true, around 20,000 men, women and children deported into Mesopotamia in 587 BC, maybe one per cent of the population of Babylonia, had grown to eight per cent in about 150 years. Moreover, sometime around 520 BC, according to biblical experts, some of the Judahites had returned to Judah. Drews notes that “such dramatic growth could not have occurred unless tens of thousands of Mesopotamians had in the meantime become Judeans”—or Juddin! And this was just when Judean or Juddin began to be used. The noun yehudi (plural: yehudim) was introduced in the fifth century BC, and an accompanying verb, yahad meant “to become a Judean”—to convert. The Zoroastrian word, Juddin, for a convert is plainly cognate with it.

Shlomo Sand cites an unpublished, “brilliant” work in Hebrew written in 1965 by Uriel Rapoport:

Given its great scale, the expansion of Judaism in the ancient world cannot be accounted for by natural increase, by migration from the homeland, or any other explanation that does not include outsiders joining it.

The clues as a whole amount to the foundation and initial propagation of Judaism in the Persian period particularly around the time of Darius II. Sand actually implies it when he writes:

If propagating the faith began in the late Persian period, under the Hasmoneans it became official policy.

What Sand misses is that it was official policy under the Achaemenids, Persian kings!

The Hellenistic Period

Many of the leading cities of the ANE had large numbers of Jews among their populations already at the start of Hellenistic times. It seems there was a diaspora of Jews from the outset. Josephus implies cities like Damascus and Antioch had converted many Greeks, and Antioch even had a local temple! By the end of the Hellenistic age, Judaism was important enough to influence whole countries via their ruling family and its nobility.

In 312 BC, at the Battle of Gaza, Ptolemy I Soter defeated the Antigonid king. Judah was now a part of the Greek kingdom of Egypt, and Josephus (Contra Apionem) says Hecataeus of Abdera had recorded that, after this battle, many Syrians and Jews were keen to associate with Ptolemy I Soter (323-282 BC). During the Persian period Judah had been Yehud, a province of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara—“Beyond the (Euphrates) River”. The Persian kings had created Yehud as a temple state like those of Anatolia, based on one large city, Jerusalem, with a population which had reached around 50,000. For a century until 200 BC, the Jewish temple state was favored by the Ptolemies, who wanted the Jews on their side for good order, because of the number of them there were in Egypt, and as a buffer against the Seleucids.

The Ptolemies, like the Persian shahs, made the high priest at the Jerusalem temple the governor of Judea. They were content to leave the administration of Judea local as long as order was kept, so tax collection was left to private contractors, usually leading families. The Tobiad family mentioned in the bible collected 300 silver talents a year in Judea. The high priest maintained law and order on the basis of the traditional law given to them by Ezra, the Persian minister, and called the “laws of Moses”. Perhaps there was also a council of elders as there was later, called the Sanhedrin (synhedrion). This was a peaceful and prosperous period for the Jerusalem temple. By the end of the Ptolemaic period the Jerusalem temple was rich.

Jews served in the armies of the Ptolemies. The supposed piety of the Jews for the sabbath had led many experts into thinking Jews could never have served as soldiers—they would not fight on the sabbath because of the Torah proscription of work on the Sabbath. Ptolemy Soter recruited 30,000 Jews for military service and, allegedly brought a hundred thousand people from Judah to Egypt. He manned his armies with Jews because he did not trust the Egyptians who had proved difficult for the Persians to keep subdued. Jews had been loyal to the Persians, and they were glad to help their new ruler, Ptolemy, and he paid them well! Jews were settled throughout Egypt, plainly as much to guard against Egyptian rebellion as to guard against external threat. Four papyri, dating from 259, 226, 210, and 111 BC, mention Jewish garrisons in Ptolemaic Egypt, so the Jews remained loyal to Ptolemy, just as they had been to the shahs.

The city of Samaria, 35 miles north of Jerusalem, was a well fortified Ptolemaic center. Samaria had been the center of the kingdom of Israel until the Assyrians destroyed it. A rival to the Jewish Temple on Mount Zion had been built in Samaria, perhaps in Persian times, on Mount Gerizim, where the excavation of many pots made in the Greek island of Rhodes suggested a Greek element in the population. Alexander is believed to have settled some of his Macedonian veterans there. The local Jews disapproved of the Gerizim temple and the people who worshiped there whom they called Samaritans—a sect not a nation.

An ancient Phœnician seaport of Akko (later Acre), just north of Mount Carmel, was renovated by the Ptolemies as an important Egyptian military base. It was renamed Ptolemais. Most Phœnicians knew Greek, so that, by the second century BC, Phœnician cites were bilingual. From Ptolemais, a road ran east through Galilee, past the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee, then passing southeast through the wilderness. Along this route, ten Greek cities were built or Hellenized from older ones, the deka poleis or Decapolis as a Ptolemaic contribution to the Hellenization of the region. Among them were Philadelphia (ancient Rabbath Ammon, now Amman), Gerasa (Jerash), Gadara, and Sepphoris in Galilee.

Before the third century BC, Jews outside Judah were required to send to the Jerusalem temple an annual “temple tax” of half a shekel, the equivalent of two silver drachmas. All Jewish men from 20 to 50 had to pay it, and were to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year, for the festivals of Passover (pesach), Weeks (shavuoth) and Tabernacles (sukkoth). As a compromise a diaspora Jew made the pilgrimage at least once in his lifetime. Jews living in Judah could visit the temple at these festivals to offer up an animal for sacrifice instead of paying the tax. So the tax was considered a substitute for sacrificing an animal, which was impossible for Jews living far off. It is further proof, though, that by then there were already large numbers of Jews in the diaspora. Moreover, it was a tax most surely set up originally by the Persians to collect for the chancellery, and became a free gift to the temple once the Persian kingdom had fallen. Thereafter, the tax enriched the temple, and by 200 BC, amounted to more than a hundred talents a year. With the direct aid of the Ptolemies too, the temple became very grand, but much of the inflowing cash enriched the Jerusalem priesthood. By the 180s and 170s BC, Greek names were common for upper class Jews, most of whom lived in Jerusalem.

The Ptolemies fought five serious wars with the descendants of Ptolemy’s rival Seleucid, the Syrian Greeks. Below Mount Hermon, near the source of the Jordan river, the Battle of Panion in 200 BC, ended the fifth of them. The Seleucid king Antiochus III, the Great (223-187 BC), defeated Ptolemy V Epiphanes, who was only a boy. Continuing the tradition of favoring the Jews, and impressed by the Jews of Babylon, Antiochus immediately declared tax immunities for all the priests, scribes and cantors of the Jerusalem temple, and reduced the annual tribute of Judea. Providing that taxes were collected annually from all other Jews, Jerusalem had much autonomy. It was the job of the high priest, whose appointment had to be approved by Antiochus, to supervise tax collection.

The growing power in the west, Rome, was watchful for threats from the east, and feared the rise of Antiochus, who fell foul of the geopolitics of the day. The Roman Senate devised a pretext to engage Antiochus in Magnesia in Anatolia (Asia Minor). The Romans were making military discipline a fine art, and the Syrian army was no match for it. Antiochus lost the battle and was told by Rome to pay vast reparations, and surrender Anatolia to the Romans. To raise the money, Antiochus had to raise taxes, including those paid by the Jews. Antiochus’s son, Seleucus IV, had to increase the tribute paid by Judea to 300 talents a year. The Seleucid kings had ruled from the Aegean sea to the border of Parthia, and had a large Jewish population, but Seleucus IV (187-175 BC) was a much weaker king than his father had been at the beginning. Increasing the tax on the Jews and their temple state left the Greek kings singularly weak.

Curiously, from the third until the first century BC, many Judean Jews thought they were kin to the Spartans. According to 1 Maccabees 12:6-18, the high priest Jonathan wrote a letter to the Spartans to renew the relationship they had had, and assure the Spartans that sacrifices and prayers were continually offered for them at the Jerusalem temple. 1 Maccabees quotes another from Areios, a basileus of Sparta, sent in the early third century BC to the Jerusalem high priest Onias. It records that a document had been found proving the Spartans and Judeans were both descended from Abraham! This belief in the Judeans’ kinship with the Spartans is echoed at 2 Maccabees. The only likely basis for this, especially in the light of the alleged kinship with Abraham, is that Spartan Greeks had been among the deportees sent into Judah by the Persians.

Jews were favored to greater and lesser degrees by various Ptolemies and Seleucids, but it did indeed become an official policy again to convert people to Judaism, even forcibly, under the Jewish kings called the Hasmonaeans. John Hyrcanus annexed Edom to Judah in 125 BC, allowing the native people to remain in their homeland only if they converted to Judaism. What is the meaning of “Hyrcanus”? No one seems to know, but it is a curious fact that Hyrcania is a region of Persia near the Caspian Sea! Who were these Edomites or Idumaeans? The sources are ambiguous, some suggesting they were Arabs, some Canaanites, and some Aramaeans. The truth is they were probably a mixed population becoming increasingly Arabic.

Not long afterwards in history, important Jewish leaders were descended from Idumaeans, Herod the Great being the most well known. In 103 BC, Hyrcanus’s son, Judas Aristobulus, forced the Galileans to convert to Judaism. The people of Galilee were Itureans, again a people of mixed descent, probably Canaanite and Arab. Jesus Christ, if he was born in Nazareth, was a Galilean, though the story of his birth in Nazareth is an aetiological myth meant to explain his appellative “the Nazarene”. The brother of Aristobulus, Alexander Jannaeus, succeeded him and tried to force several Greek cities to convert, but most refused, and he scattered their populations.

The Septuagint

Around the middle of the third century BC, the Jews of Egypt gained access to the Jewish scriptures in Greek. No public copies of the Jewish scriptures had existed before. The Persians seem to have initiated the compiling of the bible with Deuteronomy, the law, and then the Deuteronomic History, but these books were for reading out to the worshipers congregated in the temple. There was no public access to this version of the bible.

Ptolemy II Phildelphus (282-246 BC), the Greek king of Egypt, according to the Babylonian Talmud, and the Letter of Aristeas, translated the bible into colloquial, “common” (koine) Greek. As there were already many Jews in Egypt, and because Palestine was the buffer state between the kingdom of the Ptolemies (Egypt) and their rivals, the Seleucids, rulers of Syria, the Ptolemies favored the Jews and their temple. But the Jews in Egypt had supposedly only recently been moved there, or had moved there voluntarily, from Judah. Why then could they not read the bible in Hebrew, supposedly their own language? Hebrew cannot have been their native tongue. Even a high status and highly educated Jew like Philo of Alexandria could not speak or read Hebrew, and depended on the Septuagint. The language of the Assyrian and Persian empires had been Aramaic (sometimes called Assyrian), and, after Alexander’s Macedonians had taken over Persia, the common language became Greek, though ordinary peasants and day laborers continued to speak Aramaic for centuries afterwards. The promotion of Greek among Jews was an aim of the publication of the Septuagint.

It seems, though, it was also rendered into Hebrew, a version of Canaanite, in support of Jewish myths, and as a sacred language for the Jews. The Canaanite dialects, of which Hebrew was one, were squeezed out by Aramaic in the Assyrian and Persian periods, so that, by the time of the Greeks, it was no longer in use except in remote enclaves, and except for relics of Canaanite remaining in the local Aramaic. Otherwise Canaanite was only spoken by Phœnician merchants trading with places like north Africa where the Phœnicians had set up colonies. The Septuagint made available the myths of the Jews to Jews everywhere, many of whom had never been to Judah and knew no Hebrew, but whom the Greeks were keen to encourage to read and speak Greek. The Jews were becoming the connective tissue of the Greek world, just as the Persians seem to have intended them to be in the Persian world. The Persian plan was spoilt by Alexander, and it then came to fruition in the Hellenistic age and world—an irony of history. Alexander’s torching of Persepolis will have destroyed any Persian records of their founding of Judaism.

Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Job, had not been written in the third century BC, and the Septuagint did not include Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, though the tradition of Ezra and Nehemiah obviously existed, the Greek Ptolemies did not wish to include them because they made it too plain that the Persians founded Judaism. The Maccabees seem to have added these when they were victorious against the Syrian Greeks after the middle of the second century BC. Writing about 180 BC, Ben Sirach left Ezra and Nehemiah out of his list of Great Jews. Though Esther had been written by about 100 BC, it was hardly used for another 300 years, and was not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It apparently came from the Jews of Parthia.

Jews could have had little idea of their history before the Septuagint was published to give them a false one. Until the third century BC, only those who had ever gone to Jerusalem could have had anything to offer as proof of their origins, and that would have been the traditional story of Abraham. The Ptolemaic priests invented the story of the Exodus to show that the Jews were originally Egyptians.

If Philo of Alexandria is to be believed, even in his day, 300 years later, people, not only Jews, assembled at Pharos in Egypt to celebrate the publication of the Septuagint, so Egypt was recognized as its source already in classical times. Philo speaks of Jews as an ethnos, translated as nation, in those days not a nation state, but a people of a common culture, and then culture was largely religion, so it was essentially a community associated with particular gods and their manner of worship.

Archaeologists found what they consider the first known synagogue on Delos, an Aegean island. It seems that, around 100 BC, a house was converted to a synagogue for local Jews. They had bought a house and knocked out some walls to make an assembly room. Such places have usually been called a synagogue (Greek, synagoge) though a different word, proseuche, is also translated as synagogue. It seems likely that the two were different in function originally, and the idea of locally congregating or assembling might originally have been associated more with the Essene approach to worship than the Rabbinic one. The word used exclusively in the New Testament is synagoge.

An inscription found at Schedia, a suburb of Alexandria, honors Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-221 BC) and his queen, reading, “In honor of King Ptolemy and Queen Berenike, his sister and wife, and their children”. Like all Egyptian rulers, the Ptolemies claimed to be gods themselves, and these Jews were honoring them in what seems to be a synagogue. Moreover, this Greek couple had followed the pharaonic example of marrying each other, though they were brother and sister, just like Osiris and Isis.

Fourteen synagogues have been excavated from Hellenistic and classical times, and only a couple can be dated before the first century AD, though contemporary literature tells us there were synagogues even in modest Greek cities, and large cities would have several. According to the New Testament, Paul, the Christian apostle to the gentiles, found Jewish communities everywhere he went in Galatia and Thessaly. The larger cities had correspondingly large synagogues with refectories and dormitories. This too hints at Essene origins for it was the Essenes who undertook to provide for other Essenes who were traveling. Such synagogues had a board of elders (presbyteroi) and a manager called an archisynagogos or head of the synagogue. This position is rather like that of the Christian bishop (episcopos) who corresponded to the Essene mebaqqer, each a leader of the congregation and a teacher:

Leadership of a synagogue by a rabbi, schooled in the oral as well as the written Torah, was a much later development (it followed the Christianization of the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries).

R Drews, op cit

So, Jews did not begin to follow rabbinic rules until the late fourth or the fifth century AD. Synagogues, then, would have started as specifically Essenic institutions rather than Pharisaic ones, a valid but controversial conclusion.

The Myth of Exile

The word used by the Jews of “exile” is galat, its use since the supposed exile in Babylon by the Jews who “returned”. These Jews still used the description galat of their continuing state, even though they were supposed to have returned from exile! In short, they behaved as if they remained exiled! It suggests they were indeed exiled—from their previous homeland, apparently around Harran in the Khabur river region of Mesopotamia. They had actually been deported to Yehud to found the Jewish temple state. Be that as it may, the Jews, even those who had returned, considered themselves in exile, and had that sense about themselves though they were, as Jews in Judah, at home. The feeling could have simply reflected the fact that Jews were already a dispersed people, and they knew it, even though they were being given a temple state to suit Persian policy.

At any rate, the Jewish sense of being exiled was a feeling that history, with the rise of Christianity, was about to endorse. Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and the first Christians understood that Jewish feeling of exile. In the wider Roman empire, they began to distinguish themselves from the Jews by speaking of them as having been exiled because they had murdered the Son of God. Exile was their punishment:

You Jews did crucify him. But after he died on the cross, he then destroyed your city. It was then that he dispersed your people. It was then that he scattered your nation over the face of the earth.

John Chrysostom

Those who propagated this myth did not know there had been many Jews who lived apart from Judea even before Jesus was born. Even before 70 AD the diaspora was numbered in millions, so later the reality seemed to match the Christian myth. Justin Martyr seems to have started the myth of the Jewish exile being a punishment of God. Over many decades, the oppressed Jews came to accept it, so that by the third century AD, galat had become synonymous with subjection as well as with exile. Christianity also gave rise to the allegorical myth of the Wandering Jew cursed to walk the earth until Christ himself returned.

The Jewish mirror of all this was that exile was the denial of salvation. When the messiah came all the exiled Jews would be called by him to Jerusalem, including the righteous dead who would be resurrected, the very myth that the horrific picture of the saints coming from their tombs, after the resurrection of Christ in Matthew, was meant to illustrate.

The rabbis always consider the Jewish mainstream to have been Pharisaic Judaism which became Rabbinism, yet the Pharisees were a small minority of the Jews who were rivaled in piety by the Essenes who rejected the Pharisaic aim to build a “wall around the law” in the oral law. Essenes thought that righteousness was not advanced by hiding from the law but by accepting it and by seeking ways to obey and effect it. It had to be consciously upheld not slyly evaded.

So, Essenes were not inclined to follow any Pharisaic practices, and retained their own tradition, which became Christianity in the west. In the east, it remained as a Jewish sect, the Qaraites, for a thousand years before it disappeared. The Essenes and Qaraites did not build a wall about the law but had strict rules about how law abiding Jews should interact with unclean gentiles without being polluted. Pharisees were different:

The Pharisees were… adamantly opposed to having or permitting the kind of contact with Gentiles that was a prerequisite for proselytizing. Socializing or even conversing with Gentiles was for the Pharisee a risky business.

R Drews

Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism from the beginning exhorted the Jews to be separate from the gentile world. The later Mishnah and Talmud had elaborate instructions about avoiding contact with gentiles, so as not to compromise Pharisaic purity. This separation from the gentile world was quite different to the intercourse that must have occurred in Mesopotamia and Persia. That gentile God-fearers worshiped alongside Jews in Hellenistic synagogues was a scandal for Pharisaic rabbis. With this sort of attitude how is it possible that Pharisaic Jews could have engaged with gentiles to recruit them as proselytes at all, let alone to the extent that they claim happened.

Pharisees avoided gentiles but Essenes and Qaraites were comfortable in their company, so could become traders and merchants, and spread among the gentiles while going about their business. They therefore seem likely to have been the majority of the diaspora Jews, Pharisaic influence originally being dominant only in Jerusalem. Among the Pharisaic attitudes the Qaraites denied was their interpretation of exile as something inevitable and permanent, so they were quite happy to reoccupy Jerusalem as soon as they could, becoming the main Jewish sect in Jerusalem for several centuries at the end of the first millennium, and in the east generally.

Joseph Klausner was another prominent Jewish historian (The History of the Second Temple, 5 Vols, 1952, in Hebrew) honest enough not to end the history of the so called Second Temple with the deportation of the Jews, because there is no evidence that it happened, and, in fact, there is evidence that the Jews remained in in Palestine in sufficient numbers after the Jewish War to fight another one only 60 years later. In an earlier book, Yehezkel Kaufmann, according to Sand, wrote of “Israel that was exiled from its country and scattered” and of the Jews as a “weird and scattered community”, but he says nothing of how this scattering happened or when. We are still faced with this uncomfortable fact:

Long before 70 CE there were large Jewish communities outside Judea.

S Sand

There were, Josephus tells us, in the first century AD, myriads of Jews in Parthia, the country that occupied the same space as old Persia a few centuries before. And the Jewish scriptures themselves, according to Jeremiah writing in the time of the Persians, tell us that many Jews were already living in Egypt. The biblical explanation is that they had fled before the Babylonian armies, but Judaism did not then exist. It was a product of the Persian conquest of Babylonia, half a century later. If anyone fled, they were Judahites whose language and religion was Canaanite, and Jeremiah confirms that they were idolatrous! In fact, a little before 400 BC, a colony existed at Yeb (Elephantine), on the Nile in southern Egypt, of worshipers of Yehouah and some associated divinities, and they were in correspondence with authorities in Jerusalem and Samaria. These people were Persian Jews in a military colony which had its own temple, which they alleged preceded Cambyses. In the thesis of these pages, this was just the time that the Persians had set up a temple state in Jerusalem. The colony was seeking clarity. Shortly afterwards, in the Egyptian rebellion against the Persians that put Amyrtaeus on the throne, the Egyptians destroyed the foreign enclave.

Later, there were very many Jews in Egypt—Philo of Alexandria says a million—especially at the new Greek foundation of Alexandria. The population of Alexandria in Philo’s time (40s AD) was about half a million, and over a third were Jews. Josephus says Ptolemy, Alexander’s general, had taken captives to Egypt from Judah and Samaria, but he adds that Jews went to Egypt voluntarily. It sounds like two different attempts to explain the plethora of Jews in Egypt. By the first century AD, the assumption was that Jews came from Judah. Philo (Flaccus) was explicit about it. He called Jerusalem the “mother city” of Jews everywhere, and described diaspora Jews as “colonists” from Jerusalem. Philo was an important propagator of the myth that all Jews came from Judah, if not the inventor of it.

Josephus also tells of the many Jews that lived in Asia Minor, saying, apparently in explanation, that Antiochus had taken 2000 Jewish families from Babylonia to Lydia and Phrygia. It was, of course, no explanation of the numbers, even if it were true, but it confirms that there were large numbers of Jews in Babylonia in the second century BC, and large colonies existed also in Cyrenaica in north Africa, in Antioch and Damascus in Syria, in Thessaly, north of Greece, and in the coastal cities of the Aegean, all places that had been part of the Persian empire at the time the Jews first emerged. Then, in the time of the Roman Republic, reports of the influx of Jews into Italy began to appear. Strabo wrote, according to Josephus:

Now these Jews are already gotten into all cities, and it is hard to find a place in the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe (phylon) of men, and is not possessed of them.

Sand notes that the word phylon means a small group of people constituting a cultic community, showing that the Jews were considered an alien cult rather than an alien people or nation, an ethnos. Cicero, around 59 BC, wrote in similar vein:

You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is its unanimity, and of what weight it is in the popular assemblies.

Cicero, Oration for Flaccus

What many people do not realize is that the Roman catacombs were used by Jews before the Christians, who were, of course, originally Jews themselves. The Jewish catacomb inscriptions show that the Jewish yahad in Rome was extensive and wealthy. Sand summarizes:

Just before the fall of the Second Temple, there were Jewish believers all over the Roman empire, as well as in the Parthian territory in the east, in numbers vastly exceeding those of the inhabitants of Judea.

The number of Jews in the Roman empire by the end of the Augustan Age (31 BC-14 AD), is thought to have been four to seven million, or seven to thirteen per cent of the population. Julius Beloch (1886) estimated that there were 54,000,000 people in the Roman empire at Augustus’ death. Adolf von Harnack (1905) very conservatively thought there were about 4,000,000 Jews in the empire at that time.

In the first century some five to six million Jews were living in Diaspora, that is, more or less permanently settled outside Palestine… There was a substantial Jewish population in virtually every town of any size in the lands bordering the Mediterranean. Estimates run from 10 to 15 percent of the total population of a city—in the case of Alexandria, perhaps even higher.

Meeks (1983), cited by R Drews

Salo Baron, Encyclopedia Judaica 13 (1971), sv “Population”, thought there were, all together, 8,000,000 Jews in the world at the death of Augustus, of which 1,000,000 lived in Parthia. He thought the number of Jews in 500 BC was 150,000, presumably the population of Yehud. In fact the population of Yehud was about 20,000, if that. The rate of increase of almost 1 per cent per annum is impossible. In the Roman empire, the population in the third century AD was barely larger than it had been in the third century BC.

Studies of population growth in the ancient world show populations were mainly stable, with long-term growth rates in most places usually about 0.1 per cent a year, rarely as high as 0.3 per cent, and never reaching the 1 per cent growth rate of the modern world made possible by medicine and hygiene. Thus Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein (BASOR 287, 1992) studied the population of Palestine in Iron II, concluding that in the eighth century BC the population of all of Palestine, from upper Galilee in the north to Beersheba in the south, Israelites and Judahites in Biblical terms, was no more than 340,000. The population of Palestine in Byzantine times was about a million. This rate of increase of less than 0.1 per cent is typical of the rates of population growth in ancient times.

Most Jews were in the Greek-speaking eastern provinces of the Roman empire, Egypt, Anatolia and Syria, and in Parthia. The population of the Roman province of Asia in western Anatolia included about 300,000 Jews in the middle of the first century BC. By the end of the first century AD, the population of Jews in Cyprus had almost reached 200,000, about a third of the island’s population. In Cyrene (Cyrenaica) in north Africa, the population was divided into four classes, citizens, farmers, metics (resident aliens), and Jews. More than 100,000 were Jews all supposedly descended from a garrison of Jewish soldiers sent there by Ptolemy Soter around 300 BC. If it is true, it proves that a Jew does not have to have a Jewish mother. Soldiers in those days were never women. Of course it cannot be true, but as the Jews were not regarded as aliens, they must have been natives and others who had chosen to be Jews. If they were natives, then they had converted to Judaism in the time of the Persian empire, which extended into Libya, or Ptolemy had colonized Cyrenaica with Jews from elsewhere, male and female, and not just a garrison.

For the few people aware of the supposed miraculous increase in the Jewish population in Hellenistic times, most will be believers and accept it as miraculous, while more rational types will say the Jews were peculiarly fecund. The Judean Jews bred so quickly that they poured out of Judea populating foreign cities, particularly in places that had once been in the Persian empire, then the Hellenistic world, and especially the Roman empire. From the fourth century to the first century AD, Jews had far more children than any other ancient people, and Jewish children were extraordinarily tough surviving when others died. Then the Jewish birthrate or survival rate fell so much that from the first century AD on, Jewish populations remained constant or fell.

From the tiny country of Judea under the Persians, we are invited to believe there were millions of Jews by the first century AD. It is impossible that the later population of Jews in the world could have come from a population of only about 17,000 people in the fifth century BC. It is not impossible if that tiny country is simply the temple state of all of those who had adopted a special religion created by the Persians as suitable for worshipers of diva gods to civilize them as a stepping stone to their eventually becoming Mazdaites. They were not yet Zoroastrians, but were converts from idolatrous religions to one that had purity standards similar to those of the Zoroastrians, allowing them to serve the ruling class without them having to be constantly on guard against becoming unclean. Nehemiah was the shah’s cup bearer, something that would have been quite impossible unless Nehemiah was subject to the same laws of purity as the Zoroastrian king! These people were Juddin, non-Zoroastrian converts to Zoroastrianism. In the Zoroastrian religion, the meaning remains the same!

Moreover, the myth of exile has other unlikely aspects. The Judahites were supposedly peasant farmers, with no peculiar interest in seafaring or travel. That was the domain of their Canaanite neighbors, called, by the Greeks, the Phœnicians. Indeed the example of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, their rivals in the Mediterranean, who also formed colonies everywhere in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, was the model of the mythical dispersal of the Jews. The habits of merchanting people who relied on commerce for a living were transferred to the peasants of the Palestinian hills who were actually trying to earn a living growing olives and vines to trade with their Phœnician neighbors. But even if the model of the myth were true, it does not require that the original homeland should be denuded of Jews in a total dispersal—an exile. Then again, the Phœnicians, Greeks and Romans who succeeded them did not give up their own language while forming centers abroad, whereas the Jews took the language of the country they chose to live in. Josephus was a Judean who had actually taken part in a delegation to Rome. Presumably such a prominent man knew his own people, and he described them in these terms:

As for ourselves, we neither inhabit a maritime country, nor do we delight in merchandise… the cities we dwell in are remote from the sea.

Josephus, Contra Apion

Can these be the Jews we know? Yet none of the supposed emigrant farmers went on to become farmers in their adopted homes. Whoever the Jews were who were scattered all over the world by about 200 BC, they were not formerly Judahite farmers. Nor did the Jews have extra wives, have peculiarly large families, or were in any way unusually fecund. Some say they were peculiar in refusing to expose unwanted children. At an earlier period, the Canaanites had sacrificed their children to Moloch, handing the gift of the god back to him as a socially acceptable means of family planning, but the Persians may have been responsible for stopping it. The Romans, however, left family planning to the head of the household. Unwanted children were exposed. Such exposure was a common practice which lasted until modern times in parts of the world, and occurred in Christian Europe in medieval times.

As there is no evidence that Jewish families were unusually prolific in bringing forth or protecting their children, nor irresponsible in impoverishing themselves by having unusually large families, either they followed conventional ways of controlling family size, or they abstained from sexual relationships with their wives to avoid poverty by overproduction of children. Essene leaders did not marry at all, and celibacy was the recommended condition for Christian men according to S Paul, marriage only being resorted to when men could not abstain from sex. Whatever method was used, having so many children that the family was impoverished, Catholic fashion, was and remains, idiotic, and no one intelligent did even in those days.

Some of the Jews left Judea as soldiers in the imperial armies. A few may have left as successful merchants, and more still left as scholars and holy men—Jerusalem naturally becoming one of the main centers of Jewish scholarship—to service the many Jewish communities in the world, but none of this could have produced all those millions of foreign Jews. Judah could never have been the source of the world’s Jews as the myth requires, but, contrary to popular opinion, Judaism was originally a proselytizing religion. It was a religion of converts for converts, and only when the Christians made conversion to Judaism a capital crime did the rabbis call for Jewish proselytism to cease—at least in Christendom.

Several of the Biblical books prove that Judaism was not considered at all exclusive, and the call to convert is explicit in others. The exclusivity is most pronounced in the rage of Ezra that Jewish colonists in Yehud had taken local wives, the truth being that the wives had not first converted. The Jewish colonists had compromised the Persian plan of ensuring diva gods were excluded from popular worship by ensuring that everyone in the administrative class were converts. Persians, and especially the Persian nobility were Zoroastrian, and Zoroastrians loathed diva gods as devils. So, everyone in authority, if not those at the very base of society, had to be converted to gods cast in the mold of the Persian idea of a moral god—Ahuramazda.

Possibly, at some stage, these people could have been accepted as Zoroastrians, but as Zoroastrians had strict rules of purity, it is certain that the Juddin could not be intimately associated with people who were impure worshipers of devils (divas). So Ezra and Nehemiah were not ruling against proselytizing at all. They were like modern Catholics. Jews were required to marry within their own faith and to raise their children in it, so as not to introduce uncleanness into the family, which would contaminate others and stop the breadwinner from being suitable to hold a top job among the Persian elite.

Monotheism almost necessitates proselytizing. When people believe there is only a single god, those who do not worship him must be worshiping devils. So monotheistic believers want to persuade people away from their devilish worship. Deuteronomy 7:3, 6 seems to forbid marriage with pagans, but they are not pagans once they have converted. In individual cases of biblical heroes, they are described as making wives of pagan women, but the wives have been expected to follow the men’s way, and any children produced too. Of course, it is quite impossible to expect the bible to be unerringly consistent when it is a compilation of different books, written in different places, at different times, and multiply edited, but the overall sense is consistent with the thesis that Jews could marry pagan wives as long as they converted first to Judaism. Thus Judith effects the conversion of Achior the Ammonite to Judaism, even though Deuteronomy 23:3 seems to forbid it.

Jewish Kingdoms

Early in the first century AD, Anileus and Asineus were Jewish bandits but became a guerrilla army forcing Artabanos III, king of the Parthians, to recognize them as his vassal satraps of Babylonia. Anileus and Asineus were brothers, natives of Nehardea—a sizable city on the middle Euphrates river near the present city of Fallujah. Most of the people living in Nehardea in the first century were Jews, and the city had a Rabbinic academy. It also was one of the places where the half shekel temple tax that every adult Judean male was required to send each year to the Jerusalem temple, was collected. Nisibis was another city with a similar function. No doubt, these collection centers had originally been set up by the Persians as part of their taxation system for Jews. Odenathus destroyed Nehardea, in 259 AD, and the rabbinic academy was moved to Pumbeditha, Fallujah. From the third century AD, the most renowned rabbinic academies were at Pumbeditha and Sura, and there the Babylonian Talmud was compiled and published. Eventually, Anileus over extended his power, fought Mithridates, a son in law of Artabanos III, lost the battle and was killed.

Another state ruled by Jews was Adiabene (Hadyab), the land along the left bank of the Tigris between the Great Zab and the Little Zab rivers, where Nineveh had been, and where Alexander the Great was victorious against Darius III of Persia at the battle of Gaugamela. Nearby Armenia also converted. Both had been part of the Persian empire. Adiabene again was a vassal of the Parthian king, but was essentially autonomous, and its rulers converted to Judaism. Josephus dated the conversion in Claudius’s reign as Roman emperor, about 45 AD. The story is legendary, that the king, Izates, and the queen mother, Helene, first converted, followed by the whole royal family, but the conversion is hardly likely to have been without cause or motive. Jacob Neusner thinks there must have been some political advantage to it. The obvious one is that many of the Adiabene people were Jews! Izates ruled until his death in 58 AD when his mother also died. Izates’s brother, Monobazos II, removed their bones to Jerusalem, and buried them in grand tombs in the Kidron valley outside the city walls. They still attract tourists. In 66 AD, when the Jewish War began, the rebels called to their “kin” in Adiabene for assistance, and they responded, sending even royal princes who were taken to Rome as captives. Josephus’s references to the Jews’ kinsmen (homophyloi) from Adiabene, in the Jewish War, suggests they were numerous. The Jewish royal family ruled Adiabene until Trajan invaded Mesopotamia in 115 AD and annexed it to the Roman empire in 116 AD. The Jews of Adiabene were important among those resisting Trajan’s invasion.

By the time the Roman empire had consolidated, approaching 10 per cent of its population were Jews, and, quite unlike the image given of Judahites who were peasant farmers and herders, these Jews were urbanites who took no interest at all in the countryside, which consisted of latifundia owned by fabulously rich Romans but operated by slaves. Both Dio Cassius and Origen explained that they were Jews by choice (Origen), people who “affect their customs”, meaning they were converts.

Valerius Maximus, at the time of the first emperor, Augustus, recorded that Jews had been banished from Rome, in 139 BC, along with astrologers because they wanted to infect Roman customs with the cult of “Jupiter Sabazius”, and one called Hispalus had cast down their private altars from public places. The word “Sabazius” is thought possibly to refer to “sabbath”, so “Jupiter Sabazius” would mean the “God of the Sabbath”. Subsequently, Jews were periodically expelled from Rome until Claudius expelled the messianic Jews called christiani, whom Christians always identify as Christians! From the times described by Valerius Maximus, in the second century BC, and Cicero, in the first century BC, there had been large numbers of Jews in Rome. They could not, therefore, have been there from an exile that happened in the first century AD, after the Jewish War, or from an exile in the second century AD, after Bar Kosiba’s uprising in Palestina.

A Land without a People

If no Jews remained in Palestine, but they were not expelled by Romans, where did they go? Some Zionists historians, like Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, moved the expulsion to the time of the Moslem conquests, so Jews remained in Palestine for another 600 years after the Jewish War. In fact, many Jews converted to Christianity, in the first few centuries of the era, and the main cities of Palestine, especially Jerusalem, had large Christian communities. Even in 614 AD, there were still enough Jews in Palestine to support a serious uprising led by Benjamin of Tiberias against their Byzantine Christian rulers. Having suffered repression and persecution at the hands of the Byzantines, Palestinian Jews welcomed Moslems as saviors. They assisted the conquering Arabs. The Moslems introduced a taxation system in which all Moslems paid none! As a result, the conquered people were keen to convert to Islam, and most people did convert, until eventually, Moslems had to be taxed too, or the Arab treasuries would have been empty. That is what happened to the Palestinian Jews—they converted to Islam.

The evidence of conversion is the gradual disappearance of synagogues, though there is little evidence to suggest the country was depopulating, and none that Arabs settled in place of the native population. Like conquerors generally, the Arabs took the leading positions in the lands they conquered, not the least ones. The people of the land remained the same. They simply changed their religion. Over the years, assuredly there has been some admixture of other races,but the “am ha eretz” of Palestine remained mainly demographically unchanged from Roman times to the present. It was the view of Abraham Polak, a notable historian of Tel Aviv university, and it had been the view of many Zionists until the local fellahin made it clear they were content to be Moslems, and were not honored to be seen as lapsed Jews.

The land was abandoned by the upper strata, the scholars, the Torah men, to whom religion came before the country. Perhaps too, so did many of the mobile urban people. But the tillers of the soil remained attached to the land.

Israel Belkind, cited by S Sand

Sand also cites Bar Berocher:

The local population in Palestine is racially more closely related to the Jews than to any other people, even among the Semitic ones. It is quite possible that the fellahin in Palestine are direct descendants of the Jewish and Canaanite rural population, with a slight admixture of Arab blood.

And again, David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, cited by Sand, wrote:

The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming…

Later Ben-Zvi noted that not all of the fellahin would have been directly descended from Jews, “but it can be said of most of them, or their core”.

The uprooting and exile of the Jews from Palestine is a Christian myth which suits Zionist racial ideology. Jews are entirely converts, the very world coming from the Persian word for a convert, but the biblical myth disposed the converts to forget their origins in favor of the biblical romance of an exiled people.

Under the Romans, in 115-117 AD, there had been a Jewish revolt in north Africa led by an Hellenized Jew called Lucas or Andreas. Cyrenaica was held for awhile until the Romans countered, and savagely suppressed the messianic uprising. There was a large population of Jews already at this time only 50 years after the Jewish War. If that war was the cause of the Jewish diaspora, how could it be? How could it be especially as the dispersal of Jews from Judea after the war is mythical? Shlomo Sand attributes it to the northern litoral of Africa having been mainly Phœnician—Canaanite!

The principle Phœnician city of north Africa was Carthage which had fought the Punic (Phœnician) Wars with Rome for control of the Mediterranean. The Romans won the series of Wars and razed the city, but they did not massacre the city’s inhabitants, the Carthaginians. They mostly fled, some abroad, but many inland to emerge again later and rebuild their city, which was to become an important trading center again. The French historian, Marcel Simon, thought the surviving Canaanites who rebuilt Carthage converted to the religion of their contemporary Canaanites in Palestine—they became Jews. Sand adds that an important factor was that Hebrew and Phœnician are the same language—Canaanite—just slightly different dialects— and that some Carthaginians were already circumcized. Surely it is equally, if not more probable, that Phœnicians had already become Jews under the Persians and the Greeks, and from the kinship ties of Phœnicia and Carthage, some Carthaginians had become Jews through Phœnician merchants settling in the African colony, and others had been converted by their Jewish neighbors. After the demise of old Carthage, the survivors had opted for the newer, more fashionable, religion, one that was licit in Roman law.

As Rome’s sphere of influence expanded, and especially from the time of Julius Caesar, who favored the Jews, the people of conquered and assimilated lands had an incentive to convert to Judaism. North Africa was a success story in this respect. An important symbol, found in excavations in the Mediterranean coast of north Africa, is the seven stemmed candelabra, centrally important to Judaism, but a symbol that means more in the Persian religion—it represents Ahuramazda and the six Amesha Spends that are aspects of Him. Inscribed tombstones and other inscriptions show that people with Latin and Greek names in Africa were Jews.

Some gentiles were always reluctant to convert fully because of the need for circumcision, which men found scary. What is fairly safe at eight days of age when one is unaware of what is going on, is frightfully obvious and painful, and potentially dangerous, for an adult male. In the first century AD, the New Testament (Acts 2:10) calls gentiles impressed by Judaism but reluctant to convert “God Fearers”, and elsewhere, presumed to be the same people, “Heaven Worshipers” (coelicolae), and they are distinct from Jews and proselytes. Possibly, though, the Heaven Worshipers were a sect of Christians, more influenced by the Persian religion and Mithraism even than the Essenes. S Augustine seems to regard them as a Christian heresy.

The Arian Christian Vandals occupied north Africa for a century until Justinian’s great generals brought Africa back under Byzantine rule. Arian Christianity was not as intolerant of Jews as Orthodox Christianity, so the Vandals seem not to have molested the African Jews, but they were forced to flee again when the Byzantines returned. They could only flee to the interior or to Spain. The interior is the home of the Berbers, whom, the Arab Historian, Ibn Khaldun, in the fourteenth century, thought had fought the Israelites in Syria and escapes then to the west, taking a version of Judaism with them. It seems more likely that the Berbers were influenced by the Canaanites of Carthage and other north African seaports, some at least of which were Jews, then had themselves become proselytes and fully Jewish. He describes several Jewish Berber tribes—Jerawa (Djeraoua), Nefouça, Mediouna, Fendelaoua, Behloula, etc. These large and powerful tribes extended from Morocco to modern Libya, but their culture was oral not written, so there is no written evidence on their side, though some customs, superstitions and names were common to Jews and Berbers.

Israeli professor, Paul Wexler, used the philological analysis of language to make historical deductions, and thereby discovered that, in the first millennium AD, European Jews knew no Hebrew or Aramaic. Neither appeared in Jewish texts until the millennium was up, and there seems to have been no trace left of them in the natural language. So, Jews must have introduced Hebrew as a sacred language with the canonization of Arabic for Moslems and Latin for Catholics. Wexler was interested in Spanish and other Sephardic (Mediterranean) Jews (The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, 1966) and concluded that they were almost all Arab, Berber and European converts. In short, the Sephardic Jews came from north Africa with the Moslems in the eighth century AD. He decided the Ashkenazim were also gentile converts. The Spanish Jews cannot have been descended from Canaanite speakers from Africa, though they might have been Latin speaking Jews.

Sand thinks Jewish proselytes among Roman soldiers, slaves and merchants settled in Spain, and Paul’s statement (Romans 15:24) implied that there were indeed already Jewish communities in Spain. He planned to begin to convert them to the Jewish Christian faith, as he had done in Anatolia and Greece. Later, the Jews of Spain were oppressed by the Visigoths, when they invaded from the north east, and will have fled to Africa. Not many decades later, the Arabs would invade Spain from the south, and among them were the Berbers, some of them at least being Jewish—some Spanish soldiers saying all were—and the Jews who remained in Spain under Visigothic oppression welcomed them into the cities, an act considered betrayal by Ferdinand and Isabella. Then the Moslems appointed Jews as governors in parts of Spain, and, indeed, Islamic Spain was a refuge for Jews who headed there in numbers from southern Europe and north Africa. Under the Spanish caliphs, Jewish culture perhaps reached its zenith since Persian and Parthian times, without a trace of Judahite blood!

A Jewish kingdom existed in Yemen in southern Arabia for 200 years.

The Khazars

An extensive Jewish kingdom existed for over 200 years, much larger than the kingdom of the Hasmoneans in Palestine, and recorded by many more verifiable contemporary sources than the imaginary empire of David and Solomon in the bible, yet many Jews and Christians know little or nothing about it. It seems to be wilfully ignored. It was Khazaria. The Khazars were a Turkish tribe among the Asian tribes called the Huns moving west in the fourth century AD. They were destroyed eventually by an even more irresistible movement of Asian tribes—the Mongol Horde of the thirteenth century, though the Jewish kingdom had actually fallen already, two hundred years before.

An important document, now called the Cambridge Document, was found among the old scripts disposed of in a Cairo genizah (repository of disused Jewish sacred texts) in 1912. The Hebrew document, written around the tenth century AD, states that the Jews came to Khazaria from Baghdad, Khorasan, and Greece to encourage the “men of the land” to convert to Judaism and appoint a “judge” over them whom they called the Kagan (Khakan). Khorasan, southeast of the Caspian sea, was a province of ancient Persia, and, by the coincidence too often repeated, had become the home of a myriad Jews—evidently Persian Juddin.

Sand writes that the arrival of Jewish believers from Armenia (parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq), Mesopotamia, Khorasan (parts of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Byzantium led to the adoption of Judaism by the Khazars. All of these places with evidently substantial Jewish populations were once in the Persian empire! Many Jews with Greek names lived in Crimea, again probably former Juddin from across the water, and proselytized Jews who had come within the Greek sphere of influence. Jews were still proselytizing in the eighth century AD in what is now the Ukraine and southern Russia, whereas Jews were prevented from proselytizing in Christian and Islamic lands.

The Khazars settled down among the indigenous Scythians between the Caspian Sea and the Crimea. Among them were Bulgars and Slavs, and Hungarians, Magyars and Alans, but the Khazars were the ruling class, led by a king called the Kagan. They raided the Sassanid kingdom of the Persians through the Caucasus, getting as far as Mosul in Kurdistan, as we know from Persian records. This part of the ancient Achaemenid Persian empire seems to have been a center of Jewish conversion, the region which later had provided Jewish kingdoms in Armenia and Adiabene, ancient Urartu (Ararat). Eventually a treaty was settled that the Caucasus passes were to be the limit of the Khazar kingdom. The Persians fortified the frontier, the structures still being visible.

The Khazars irrigated their fields from the great rivers that crossed the steppes, growing rice as a staple, and vines for wine. Fish provided much of their protein. Otherwise the basis of the country’s power was its strategic position with respect to the east-west trade (the Silk Road) and the north-south trade of furs and slaves along the rivers. Such wealth allowed the Kagan to support a strong army, and a wealthy nobility. Though the Khazar spoken language was from the Turkic family, the sacred language in use was Hebrew (Canaanite), and their script was evidently the Aramaic scrip in which Hebrew was written. Arab writers confirm it.

The route of the Khazars into Moslem lands was the only one available—through the Caucasus mountains, through Armenia and the lands occupied by the Kurds into Mesopotamia where was Baghdad. On one occasion (730 AD), the Khazar armies again got as far as Mosul before the Arabs repulsed them. Like the Persians, the Arabs were able to stop the Khazars at Mosul in Kurdistan. From raids like these, as well as ordinary trade, the Jews of Armenia and Persia got to know of Khazaria. Many Jews still remained in the lands of the Persian converts originally called Juddin. But, of course, the earlier kingdom of Adiabene in this same area had become Jewish. It was the descendants of all of these converts who later went north to Khazaria and began to convert the Khazars.

The Khazars made an alliance with Byzantium against the Persians. The marriage arranged to cement the alliance led to a Byzantine emperor being called Leo the Khazar (775-780 AD). What the Byzantines gained from the alliance was a powerful state north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus that could resist the incursions of the Moslem armies that otherwise might have passed through the Caucasus and over the steppe along the northern shores of the Black Sea to attack Byzantium from the north where it was vulnerable. Khazaria therefore helped preserve the eastern remnants of the Roman empire from the Moslems, holding back the Moslem invasion of eastern Europe for hundreds of years.

Again the Caucasus was agreed as the boundary between Khazaria and the Islamic empire, but the Kagan was forced to become a Moslem, and the Islamic religion was accepted within the kingdom. All this is historical. The Kagan was a holy leader rather than an executive, though he was highly respected as the titular head of state. The practical head, the CEO, was called the Kagan Bey. He was the head of the army and effectively the real king. The capital city at the mouth of the Volga river, was called Itil, a city of tents and huts but with a triangular shaped fortress. It has only recently been found.

Khazaria was at first pagan, but Khazars were ready to adopt monotheism, Jewish, Christian, or Moslem. The Arab historian, Al Mas’udi, relates how the Khazar king converted in the time of the caliphate of Harun al Rashid (c 763-809 AD) when many Jews who had heard of it migrated from all the Moslem cities, and Byzantium when the Christians began forcing Jews to convert to Christianity in the tenth century. So the immigration of Jews from what had been Persia and Greece continued for over 100 years.

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi wrote a book on the Khazars called The Kuzari. An account in France about 864 AD called them the “Gazari”—oddly an alternative name for the Cathars. King Bulan was the first Kagan, but it was several generations before Kagan Obediah organized Khazaria as a proper Jewish state, inviting in Jewish sages from abroad to introduce Rabbinic orthodoxy, the Mishnah and the Talmud.

The question is, why Judaism when Christianity and Islam were much bigger and less demanding religions? That is the answer. By adopting either of the big religions, they tied Khazaria to Baghdad or to Byzantium. By choosing Judaism, they could remain independent, but they could not have remained pagan without being a constant invitation to the aggressive Moslems to conquer them and force them into Islam.

At first, it seemed the Qaraites were significant in Khazaria, especially in Crimea, but the Kagans, by bringing in orthodox Rabbinical scholars, ensured Khazaria became essentially orthodox. Qaraism might have been a relic of mainstream Judaism before the Rabbis changed the religion—Essenism. Sand writes:

At the time of the Khazar conversion, copies of the Talmud were still a rarity, which enabled many proselytes to take up ancient rites, even priestly sacrifices.

Evidence of the latter is the exhumation of bodies dressed in the leather garments described in the Jewish scriptures for certain temple functionaries.

Yet the kingdom was multi religious, and its law required seven judges to cover the different religions of the defendants. Moreover, some of the Khazar legends traced them to one or another of the missing ten tribes of Israel, the standard explanation of the widespread diaspora of the Jews long before they had ever been dispersed from Judea. Of course, the missing ten tribes were not Jews, they were pagan Canaanites, so the hints are that some of the original Jews of Khazaria were original Juddin of Persia. Eventually Khazaria became known, to Russians at least, not as the land of the Khazars but as the land of the Jews—Zemlya Zhidovskaya. But, if there were Christians, Moslems and a variety of pagans in the country besides Jews, all Khazars were obviously not Jews! Who then were?

Some contemporary Arabs said the Jewish Khazars were the ruling class and the smallest but most powerful religious group. Other claimed the majority of the Khazar nation were Jews. It seems likely, if the conversion was essentially from the top down, that initially the Kagan and a few loyal nobles converted, with just a small proportion of Jews in the general population, but proselytizing among the nobility led to them all following their king. The evidence is that when this became well known to Jews elsewhere, they began to emigrate to Khazaria and spread the religion at the grass roots. The conversion to Christianity in northern Europe was similar—the ruling class first with the peasantry following slowly. In Khazaria, Jews will have been already partially established from Armenia and the Black Sea ports, but Jewish immigration was a speeding up factor too. Another was that the Khazars traded in slaves who were always obliged to take up their master’s religion. The Khazar ruling class must have had many slaves, who had to become Jews when their masters did.

The Jewish state lasted about 300 years, so Jews were probably a significant proportion of the population by the end. Some of the Alans, a tribe related to the Magyars, were also partly Judaized, as were the Kabars who left the Khazar federation for some reason with the Magyars and moved further west into central Europe to set up Hungary, a state with a large population of Jews. Kiev was at the western edge of Khazaria. It became the first capital of Russia, and inherited a large Jewish population from Khazaria. Kiev had both a Jewish quarter and a Khazar quarter, suggesting that all Khazars were, indeed, not Jews, and a Jews’ Gate.

The Khazar kingdom had gone by the time Rabbi Petahiah, in the twelfth century, reported on his journey from Ratisbon in Germany to Baghdad. He found that the Jews of Kedar were heretics who could not be described as Jews. They explained to him that they had never been taught Rabbinical Judaism by their parents, and had never heard of the Talmud. The heretical Jews must have been Qaraites, or they were some other local variety with traditions going back to the Persian Juddin.

The growth of Russia and its alliance with Byzantium against the Khazars led to the destruction of Khazaria in 1016 AD. Of course, the demise of the state did not mean the destruction of the Khazar Jews. Their continued existence is well documented. It was the Mongol Horde in the thirteenth century that put paid to the old political and economic system causing the people to flee. The rice paddies and vineyards were spoilt and thereafter neglected for hundreds of years. Many Jewish Khazars fled across the steppe and marshes to Poland and Lithuania, while others hid in the Caucasus mountains. The Zionists among Jewish historians hope to find descendants of Palestinian Jews in all Jewish history, to uphold their view of the Jews as a wandering people exiled from home. In fact the Jews of Khazaria, at their most ancient, were from Persia and Armenia, not Judea:

There had been Jewish settlements in the country before the Khazars’ conversion, even before the Khazar conquest. There had been a process of Judaization in the kingdom among other non-Khazar people. There was Jewish immigration from other countries, mainly from Moslem Central Asia, Eastern Iran, and Byzantium. Thus a large Jewish community grew there, of which the proselyte Khazars were only a part, and whose cultural character was shaped mainly by the old population of the northern Caucasus and Crimea.

A Polak, Khazaria (in Hebrew, 1951, cited by S Sand)

Polak is bowing politely to Zionist myth. The proselyte Khazars were obviously only a part of the Khazar Jewish community, but they became the largest part, and the Jews from the Caucasus (Armenia), Moslem Central Asia, and Eastern Iran were all from places that had been part of the Persian empire, and so had Juddin among their populations in the fourth century BC. All of the Persian Juddin were converts. They were the Jews.

Arthur Koestler wrote, in The Thirteenth tribe;

The large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European—and thus mainly Khazar—origin.

It is a thesis that the scholars had widely accepted until the Zionist propaganda machine set out to cut it down. Since the 1970s, Shlomo Sand says it has been reviled as “scandalous, disgraceful and anti-Semitic”, because anything that is anti-Zionist has been defined as being anti-Semitic. But, in the past, even Zionist historians accepted it:

The first Jews who came to the southern regions from Russia did not originate in Germany… but from the Greek cities on the shores of the Black Sea, and from Asia via the mountains of the Caucasus.

A Harkavy, The Jews and the Languages of the Slavs, cited by S Sand

Yiddish

The Jews coming from the east met Jews moving from the Mediterranean through southern Europe and Germany in Poland and Lithuania. So, the southern Jews already spoke German when they met the Khazar Jews. German was the language of trade and business, so became the common language of eastern European Jews. It became Yiddish, Harkavy thought. Yitzhak Schipper, a Polish Zionist, also accepted the Khazar origin of eastern European Jews. Naturally, there had been the core of Ur-Jews who introduced the Khazars to the religion, but thereafter, it was proselyte all the way, and the Ur-Jews were themselves converts! Salo Baron, another Zionist historian, also had to acknowledge Khazaria as a significant branch off from the conventional Zionist linear Jewish history:

From Khazaria, Jews began drifting into the open steppes of Eastern Europe, during both the period of the country’s affluence and that of its decline… After… the decline of the Khazar empire… refugees from the devastated districts, including Jews, sought shelter in the very lands of their conquerors. Here they met other Jewish groups and individuals migrating from the west and south. Together with these arrivals from Germany and the Balkans, they began laying the foundations for a Jewish community which, especially in sixteenth century Poland, outstripped all the other contemporary areas of Jewish settlement in population density as well as in economic and cultural power.

S Baron, cited by S Sand

Ben-Zion Dinur, an Israeli Minister of Education concurred with Polak and Baron. Russia diminished the Khazar kingdom, absorbing it, but that did not mean an wholesale slaughter of the people. It became “a diaspora mother”, the mother of the Jewish diaspora in Russia, Poland and Lithuania.

The Yiddish language is 80 per cent German, but there is no direct evidence that German Jews had gone east as Harkavy thought. The evidence is that, until the seventeenth century, the eastern Jews spoke the local Slavonic language. What was also true was that Germans had moved east setting up German colonies all the way to the Volga river in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it seems that it was the displaced Jews who acted as intermediaries between the German artisans and merchants and the local people. Four million Germans lived in Poland. Jews became carters, woodworkers and coin makers, serving the German colonists. They spoke Polish naturally, but had to learn German to serve their clients. They started then speaking a mixture at home and in their own community to teach their kids the language of the traders. They then began to use German in their own transactions. Thus Yiddish evolved.

Now, as Yiddish has no western European words in it, it is certain that the German Jews from the Rhineland had no influence on it. Paul Wexler, the Israeli linguist, traces Yiddish words to their Slavonic languages, and to southeastern German. He sees Yiddish as akin to Sorb, a different mixture of Slav and German. As to the source of such large numbers of eastern European Jews, it is quite impossible that they could have come from Germany. In the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when the Khazar kingdom was in decay and could offer a large pool of Jews for migration west, there were only a few thousand Jews at the most in the west of Germany. Occasionally they were persecuted in pogroms, but they rarely had to flee far or for long, and most returned home when the xenophobia had calmed down.

For Yiddish to develop, whole Jewish communities were needed. They did not exist in the west. In Western Europe, Jews were present in quite small groups in urban areas working for others and speaking their language, yes. But the Yiddish speakers in the east were larger communities, whole villages in which the hybrid language could develop a life of its own. They were separate settlements with their own synagogue topped with a cupola of typical eastern style. Their dress was eastern differing significantly from that of Slav peasants, and Yiddish has a peculiar preponderance of words of Turkic origins, like yarmulka and davenen.

Finally, Sand tells us that 80 per cent of the Jews of the world were Yiddish speakers at the turn of the twentieth century. So we have Jewish Khazaria succumbing to Slavic conquerors, the Russians, then a few years later, Jews began to be recorded as appearing in Poland and Lithuania. Of course, from the local Catholics, they all had the Christian story of the diaspora of Vespasian after the Jewish War, and it did not take many generations before their real origins in Khazaria, and ultimately Armenia and Persia were forgotten.

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