this crank claims so based purely on coincidental evidence, can anyone summon genetic evidence to prove him wrong?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HF2FkRE-PU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HF2FkRE-PU
Japan was founded by Jews
- Thread starter ElectricFetus
- Start date
Not exactly on target, but the message is there. Last sentence, Abstract - sig Fst b/wn 'European' (I'll call Jews this for the moment - Sam may do a few ignorant cartwheels, but it's only out of geographic convenience, since the Mediterranean is not such a big place after all) and East Asian populations.
Typically, no samples were collected in East Korea. Because we're on to your tricks.
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000886
Typically, no samples were collected in East Korea. Because we're on to your tricks.
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000886
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The Jews were originally an ethnic group and the genetic markers are still identifiable, statistically, among people who consider themselves Jewish. They are most closely related to the Palestinians and Lebanese, who regard themselves as Arabs but were originally descended from Canaanites, like the original Hebrew people.
"Jew" has three overlapping meanings:
- A descendant of the Hebrew people, regardless of centuries of genetic dilution due to intermarriage, rape, etc.
- A practitioner of the Jewish religion which alone among the Abrahamic faiths is not evangelical and therefore is largely limited to descendants of the original population, with attrition into the surrounding majority population as in the United States.
- An acknowledged and accepted member of a Jewish community, regardless of religion or ancestry.
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You need to watch PBS Nova Unearthing the Bible. Cos you're confusing mythology with facts.
Judaea was a pagan community, not an ethnic group. Judaeans were an ethnic group like Americans are an ethnic group.
They were variously under the Phoenicians, Persians and Egyptians, followed by the Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs and Turks.
It was a geographical highway. All that genetic markers show is that today, most people who call themselves Jews [race not religion] have markers more in common with Kurds, Turks and Armenians, which is not surprising considering the pattern of immigrations. Indo Aryans spread out from Asia to North, South, East and West and like Mongols who embraced Islam, adopted the religion of the people they occupied.
There is no evidence that Judaism came from any tribe, except for the biblical narrative
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/
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Give us a little more time and we may well be. My children's ancestry is Spanish/Swedish/Norwegian/English/Scottish/Jewish. Where else would you find someone with that sort of mix but America?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Much as I generally respect the scholarship behind PBS programs, I have read numerous reports of DNA analysis in the past few years, all of which indicate a common ancestral line for a Jewish people. Wikipedia summarizes it reasonably well:
This article disagrees, and so, respectfully, do I.S.A.M. said:
Again, the sources I have read over the years disagree. Jews share DNA with the Lebanese and especially with the Palestinians.
We call them Indo-Europeans today. "Indo-Aryan" is a linguistic term, the name of the subgroup of Indo-Iranian languages spoken in northwestern India (and by the Rom), descendants of Sanskrit.
The diaspora of the Indo-European tribes was already well underway at the time when the Canaanite tribes split into Jews and various other groups. The Germanic, Greek, Celtic and Italic tribes were already settled in Europe, the Indic and Persian tribes had already established civilizations, and the Slavs had not yet left the Pontic Steppe (the easternmost part of Europe, west of the Urals and north of the Caucasus and Caspian and Black seas), the original Indo-European homeland. Most of the warring and conquering tribes who ran roughshod over Canaan in the first millennium BCE were Semitic, the biggest exception being the Persians.
And the 21st century genetic evidence that there was a more-or-less well defined tribe at that place in that time.
Migration to the USA from Spain is negligible. It's more proper to say "Latin American," and colloquially the term "Latin" is acceptable since the Roman Empire is long defunct. This means we're finally picking up some DNA from the New World gene pool. The Protestants who conquered North America preferred to kill their Indians, but the Catholics who conquered Central and South America intermarried prodigiously with theirs.
We've had this discussion before and I summarized the outcome in a previous post for those who missed it, so please stop trolling your poorly substantiated point of view. You routinely present yourself as an expert on Jewish history, culture, religion and politics, yet you consistently display an embarrassingly small knowledge of that rich topic. Please stop.
"Jewish" can mean either:
- A much-diluted gene pool
- A religion
- A cultural community.
It comes from the Greek word for "nation," but "nation" didn't have the same meaning in those days; more like the way the American Indians use the word when speaking English.
Since they share a culture that goes back more than a thousand years, have a language of their own, consider themselves a nation, and have reasonably well defined genetic lineage, demographers count them as an ethnic group.
You won't find too many demographers or anthropologists who would argue against that premise, regardless of whether they're Iranians who hate Jews, Americans who love them, or Chinese who are indifferent to them.
They're generally called "Russian Jews," to differentiate them from ethnic Russians and from Jews who live elsewhere. But they have to maintain their membership in the local or international Jewish community in order to keep that label, for example by practicing Judaism or marrying within the shtetl. Jews everywhere have been expatriating themselves from the Jewish community and assimilating to the majority, for centuries--as my own grandfather and mother-in-law did. In some countries (not mine) people who knew their origin were not always ready to stop calling them "Jews," but their children were usually accepted. Russian Jews who forgo their ties to the Jewish community are simply Russians, and there are thousands of them.
Check the Wikipedia article I referenced above. It is rife with footnotes to more scholarly sources. They can even tell an Asheknazi from a Sephardi with considerable reliability.
Perhaps not. With all the waves of immigration, our gene pool is almost as large as that of the Africans. We're getting a significant infusion of Native American DNA from the Latinos, we already have a huge East Asian population, we're getting a slow but steady trickle from the Middle East, and we're just starting to receive a huge influx of Africans with their vast and ancient genetic diversity. The difference in appearance between two randomly selected Americans will be much greater than, say, two randomly selected Japanese.
"Jew" is just the English form of the Hebrew name Yehuda, the patriarch of one of the Twelve Tribes whose territory lay in the south and due to the vagaries of history and politics came to be used as a name for the entire people. We call that region "Judea."
In the past the entire land encompassing all twelve tribes was known as "Israel," which means "wrestles with God," the name which (in biblical legend) was given to Jacob after literally wrestling with God. In those days they were referred to as Israelites. When they were exiled from Israel by the Roman conquerors and began their Diaspora to other countries, the name "Jew" became more common. The religion itself is known as "Judaism."
But the point is that the Jews do have a national origin. To quibble over the fact that their nation is named Israel but we call them "Jews" is sophomoric. We call the people of Hellas "Greeks," the people of Deutschland "Germans," the people of Suomi "Finns," the people of Shqiperia "Albanians,: the people of Nederland "Dutch," the people of Hayastan "Armenians," etc.
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I wrote a very long post then I deleted it.
Lets do peer review. Can we see these reports?
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You can start by doing what others are doing: going directly to the Wikipedia article I cited and navigating to the copious footnotes. I edited them out of the quoted text because I wasn't sure they'd work out of context. Sure, some of them are not published online but others are. I'm sure you'll find some disagreement there.
I've had to learn to stop repeating things I learned about human evolution in the recent past, because DNA analysis is rewriting all the texts. You should be careful to do the same thing. They have identified the single African tribe (the San or "Bushmen") whose forefathers were the ancestors of all non-Africans, and they've even found the Siberian tribe from whom the Navajo are descended--and possibly other Native Americans yet to be identified.
The same is true in other areas. It turns out that the dog self-domesticated in Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Revolution, not in China during the Paleolithic Era. He came into our farming villages as a lazy scavenger, to clean up the trash, rather than courageously augmenting our nomadic hunting parties with his superior senses of smell and hearing.
Do you have a link to this documentary? I looked for it but couldn't find it. (title correct?)
kmguru
Staff member
It is more likely Jews came from Africa (like everybody else) via Turkmenistan down to one branch to India and the other to present Israel area via Iraq. The Kaballah and Upanishads have a lot in common...
If you look back in my posts you'll find many many posts where I have discussed the genetic markers and what I consider to be the drawbacks of these studies - I am curious to know which literature convinced you that Jews all originated from one ethnic group and why.
Jeez Michael, I linked it
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/
I think you may have to rent it. Unless you know where its available online.
In much of biblical archaeology, you have to look at the data separately from the interpretation of it. eg when they speak confidently of the Hasmonean kingdom remember there isn't any actual evidence that there was one. And that every generation is capable of fiction and propaganda
In fact, I have been trying to locate a timeline when Canaanite paganism became the Jewish religion and I have yet to find it. When was the term Judaism first used? When did Jew come to mean the religion of Abraham? Who used it? There is plenty of confusion between Judaeans, Israelites, Pharisees and Jews and looking at the practice of the religion, its hard to tell whether there is any real connection between the groups, there is so much mix up in the historical record and so much fictionalisation of history to create myth.
e.g. when they say:
Are they talking about monotheistic Jews or pagan Judeans with temples dedicated to 70 plus gods? The Jewish concept of God [universal, non-partisian, monotheistic deity]seems to derive from Zoroastrianism so does that indicate Persian influence on the Canaanites?
Similarly, when Nebel tells us about the genetic similarlity between Palestinians and Jews, look at his sample selection, he excluded certain groups from Palestinians and only used Israelites for Jews [the division "Israelite" Jew male coming from Biblical mythology] - You'd be surprised how much non-science there is in these studies. I found Oppenheim's study more rigorous, though her discussion tends towards the fanciful, in that she used a wider gene pool and made less assumptions about what the results denoted. It was her work in Israel which showed a neolithic background for Palestinians and showed that modern Jews are closer to Kurds Turks and Armenians. Its no surprise that Middle Eastern Jews are genetically close to the Palestinians, but the very fact that Arnaiz-Villena's study was buried the way it was is an indication of the politics behind these studies.
Everyone came from Africa originally. The confusion today I think is between people who used to be Jews 2000 or even 1000 years ago and people who are Jews today and treating them as if they were all the same people when both historical and genetic records do not support the contention. Its like insisting every Christian in California and Swaziland genetically is a Nazarene. 80% of Jews today do not originate in the Middle East, much like 80% of Christians and 80% of Muslims. To imply that Jews are somehow, more consanguinous and all going back to one ethnic origin is like the Saeeds insisting they are all related to the Prophet.
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I'm not the biologist here, you are. I have some narrow expertise about dogs and the other animals my wife and I have worked with, but I'm hardly qualifed to peer-review a human DNA analysis. All I could see was a strong consensus of multiple scientists. I suppose this will all come out in the wash soon enough, since they're beating everybody's DNA to death these days. In the meantime I will qualify my reporting on this research to include the note, "however, a member of SciForums with a degree in biology finds fault with it and disagrees with the conclusion."
As I noted in a previous post, these words are anglicizations of Norman French words that evolved from Latin words which were phonetically and gramatically normalized Greek words which were phonetic and grammatical normalizations of the Hebrew name Yehuda, later simplified to Judah. Their first appearance is in the Greek translations of the Old Testament and the Greek compositions of the New Testament. If their origin is difficult to discern it's because they've been borrowed and modified from one language to another five times. Judea was the homeland of the tribe of Judah and due to geography it came to mean the entire land of Israel--even among the Jews themselves.
In ancient times Judean and Israelite meant the same thing. Jew is a modern English name deriving from Latin Jehudi, in parallel with the equivalent in many other languages, such as Spanish judío and German Jud, which became the Yiddish word Yid. The Romans called them Jehudi instead of Israelites (whatever the Latin equivalent of that word might be) because they had been expelled from Israel for causing too much trouble. Other languages still call them "Hebrews," such as Italian ebreo and Bulgarian evreiski.
The Pharisees and Saduccees were the common folk and the aristocrats, respectively, among the Jews. The Saduccees believed that they were best qualified to interpret the Torah because of their education, but the Pharisees eventually became dominant. One of the key differences between them is that the Saduccees did not believe in an afterlife whereas the Pharisees do, although devout Orthodox Jews believe that their corpses will rot in the ground for eons before God gets around to reanimating them and taking them to Heaven.
Considering that throughout the Christian Era being Jewish was one step below being a dung beetle, very few people want to be Jewish--including many Jews. I don't understand why it's believed that so many Gentiles chose to become God's Chosen People, putting themselves and their children through his wrath for having broken the Covenant.
Is there a body of respected scientists who doubt this genetic link? In your posts on SciForums regarding the Jewish people, religion, history, culture and politics, your many errors and opinion-influenced assertions have not qualified you as a scholar on this subject so your own objections do not carry enough weight to cast this research in doubt. Citing your doubt in future posts on this subject is, I think, an adequate courtesy.
Or, more accurately, in your responses to them. I cite the Abstract from the actual article, which your response above does not suggest you read. If not, could I ask what source you are drawing this from?
It's actually publically accessible: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1274378/?tool=pubmed
What the above argument would have to do with the issue of the supposed founding of Japan is not at all clear, since Japan's "founding" would predate any introgression of novel alleles into European Jewry. Frankly, these 'differences' are extraordinarily tiny in any event.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Japan is one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, as you might expect on islands which were not easily accessible by Stone Age transportation technology. The Jomon culture goes back to 14000BCE, more than ten thousand years before the Jews were a twinkle in God's eye. Knapp insults the Japanese by suggesting that their cleverness with technology must be due to foreign influence. They were one of the few Mesolithic cultures: only half of the Agricultural Revolution, farming without animal husbandry, which typically occurs in places with bountiful fishing. They were growing crops before the Mesopotamians, and their sedentary lifestyle allowed them to invent the technology of pottery before most other peoples had it.
Once the East Asian mainland completed the Neolithic Era (farming plus animal husbandry, the last Stone Age era) and entered the Bronze Age, the new technologies facilitated more travel between the mainland and Japan. There was a large wave of immigration around 300BCE. The population mushroomed and there was an explosion of new technologies, perhaps most notably rice farming, which could support the newly expanded population.
If there was a window during which it is at least conceivable that Jewish travelers settled in Japan, it would have been just then, at the end of the Jomon Period. Knapp's reference to the monthly Rosh Chadesh celebration does not permit dating this migration before the late Biblical period in Jewish history. Some anthropologists see evidence of Jews in China in the 3rd century BCE, so this hypothesis is not completely ridiculous.
However, Knapp's grasp of anthropology and sociology is very weak and undermines his assertions. He places great importance on the similarity of Jewish and Japanese cultural motifs. Apparently he is the only anthropologist on Earth who is not familiar with the writings of Joseph Campbell, which were popularizations of Carl Jung's work--much less familiar with Jung's own writings, something that in this century would be expected of any scholar of the human sciences, whether he agrees with Jung or not. There are many "coincidental" similarities of cultural motifs among the world's cultures. Jung calls them "archetypes," and genetics (a science that was in its infancy in his day) demystifies them as instincts hard-wired into our synapses by evolution, through survival of the fittest or merely random mutation and genetic drift. We all had a common male ancestor (roughly) 60KYA and a common female ancestor 120KYA, and whatever weird ideas were planted in their cortex are in all of ours.
The very phenomenon of archetypes is probably a survival trait in our species of tribe-social Great Ape, regardless of the specifics of any one preprogrammed motif, belief or behavior. When two hostile tribes encountered each other attempting to hunt or forage in the same territory, it surely would have created a bit of camaraderie to discover that they shared the same ceremonies or the same gods.
As usual when Sam jumps into a discussion, it was knocked off track with--shall we say "unusual and not widely accepted by scholars"--hypotheses about Jews.
I don't disagree in the least, but what I would like is some hard evidence to shut him up.
The Ainu were on the islands but I thought Modern Japanese originate from China/Korea/Mongolia (each adjacent islands tends to have people from the corresponding mainland areas). Which makes sense.
That aside, Greek culture may have had a lasting influence on Japanese society via Buddhism mixed with Greek philosophy traveling along through China. Which I find interesting. Apparently there are some "Japanese" ideas that correspond well with ancient Greek ideas. anyway, something to think about.
@SAM
I am interested in these same sorts of questions but I notice the other thread is a bit bare :shrug:
@Fraggle
So the OT was actually written down by Christians before the Jews wrote the Torah?
Fraggle:
To whom? Where? The only non-biblical reference to Israelite is in the Amarna letters and predates Judaism.
Also, what is the evidence that Yehuda = Jew rather than Judean ie a religious denomination rather than a geographical one? Or that they are an ethnic group? What did the Romans call the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine [if you recall, it was they who named it Palestine]? What did the people of Judah and Samaria call the non-Jews living there? What did the Romans call the Jews not living in Judah?
The Romans called who Jehudi instead of Israelites? The Judeans who lived in Judah and who worshipped Yehwah one of the seventy children of El? Who did Jews call the Israelites? Who were called the Israelites by anyone in non-biblical sources?
Michael:
Give me some time and I'll start inputting the info I have on the exile and exodus and symbols of Judaism and we can move on from that. I'm not an authority on either the Old Testament or archaeology so I will be a little slow - but yeah its exciting stuff.
To whom? Where? The only non-biblical reference to Israelite is in the Amarna letters and predates Judaism.
Also, what is the evidence that Yehuda = Jew rather than Judean ie a religious denomination rather than a geographical one? Or that they are an ethnic group? What did the Romans call the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine [if you recall, it was they who named it Palestine]? What did the people of Judah and Samaria call the non-Jews living there? What did the Romans call the Jews not living in Judah?
The Romans called who Jehudi instead of Israelites? The Judeans who lived in Judah and who worshipped Yehwah one of the seventy children of El? Who did Jews call the Israelites? Who were called the Israelites by anyone in non-biblical sources?
Michael:
Give me some time and I'll start inputting the info I have on the exile and exodus and symbols of Judaism and we can move on from that. I'm not an authority on either the Old Testament or archaeology so I will be a little slow - but yeah its exciting stuff.
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