The Invention of the Jewish People was a book written by Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv.
The author wasn’t probing a belief system, but Zionist fabrications of a spurious common lineage for people of the Jewish faith.
Sand argues the implausibility of Jews having a common ethnic identity as Judaism was originally, like Christianity and later Islam, a “proselytising religion”.
The notion of Judaism as a “race”, rather than a religion of various races, is incompatible.
The results of a recently published study by Israeli-American geneticist Dr Eran IsraeliElhaik at John Hopkins University have scientifically and genetically validated Sand’s research.
The idea of a “nation race” was progressively developed and reinforced over centuries of segregated Jewish communities in Europe.
With the rise of German nationalism in the 19th century, Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz”retrospectively” crafted a discrete identity for the ghettoised people – mapping their origin to an old kingdom and wandering exiles.
The exile tales transpired from a Christian myth of “divine punishment” imposed on Jews for rejecting the new religion.
The parable was likely to have originated from the Old Testament story of Jews wandering the desert for disobeying God and worshipping the golden calf.
Christians propagated the concept of exile to lure “disobeying” Jews to a new religion, becoming their saviour from another eternal banishment.
Modern political Zionism, which otherwise rejects the Christian Bible, adopted the untested story of “Jewish exile” to establish mythical linkage between European Jews and the Middle East.
But Jewish history tells us that Romans did not expel the original Jews from Palestine when they crushed the Simon bar Kokhba revolt in 136 AD, instead barring them only from city of Jerusalem – and even then they were allowed to visit it during Tisha B’Bv, the annual fast day on the ninth day of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar.
Followers of the first monotheistic religion continued to have a presence in Palestine hundreds of years after the waning of the Roman empire.
The last recorded history of an autonomous Jewish entity was under the tutelage of the Persian empire in 614 AD, before it was dismantled by Byzantine forces in 625 AD.
A little over 10 years later Palestine was conquered by the Muslims and became part of the new Arab and Muslim nation.
Under Christianity and during the Roman empire, a large number of native Jews converted to Christianity and – with the advent of Islam – most adopted the new religion and assimilated under the new power.
In addition to the descendants of the Canaanites, the original denizens before patriarch Abraham’s arrival from Mesopotamia, Sand concludes that today’s Muslim and Christian Palestinians are actually the true progenies of the original Jews.
So if there was no exile, where did European Jews come from?
Sand suggested that most of today’s Jews did not originate from the Middle East.
He argues that the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish ancestry can be traced back to the Caucasus region.
In the 8th century, the Khazar’s subjects and subordinate tribes experienced the largest religious conversion in the history of Judaism.
The recent study by John Hopkins geneticist Dr Elhaik confirmed that the common genome structure of the Ashkenazi (European) Jew gravitated towards an origin in oldKhazaria.
“The majority of Jews do not have Middle Eastern genetic component,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Founded on a mélange of myths and manufactured historical tales, Israel has failed the archaeological test of time and is now exposed by DNA science.
Today’s genetics prove unequivocally that in 1948, “the children of the original Jews” were replaced by 8th century converts with no roots in the Middle East.
Mr. Jamal Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) who is one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media writes weekly newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab world issues. He is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.