The most mysterious drowned woman. Stranger from the Seine

Jews are aliens. According to various sources, they flew to Earth either from Mars, or from the constellation Scorpio, or from asteroid No. 1181, which is sometimes called Lilith. There seems to be no topic of discussion among people that does not involve Jews. Apparently, theories about aliens could not do without them.

Where did the Jews actually come from? The most widespread document on Earth, which illuminates this question- This is the Bible, but the facts stated in it are not considered reliable. Let's turn to a more objective source, for example, to, naturally, to the extent that history itself claims to be objective.

What does history say about the Jews?

It is curious that, despite all the confrontations between science and religion, historical research in this area, as a rule, is carried out starting from biblical texts, and oddly enough, not at all in order to refute them.

On a purely scientific basis, confirmed by archaeological, anthropological, linguistic and other studies, the following is known today.

The Mesopotamia region was truly the cradle of earthly civilization. All development processes took place here earlier and faster than in other regions. Animal husbandry, agriculture, and manufacturing first appeared in Mesopotamia. The first cities arose here and metal was first discovered. There really were the cities of Ur and Harran, as well as cities whose names are consonant with the names of Abraham's ancestors - Falig (Peleg), Sarugi (Segug), Nahor (Nachor) and Turaki (Terah). In this territory there was originally one language, which from about the 14th century. BC. began to divide into many dialects.

Jews are one of the peoples of the Semitic group. Their ancestors are considered to be the Amorites, among whom proper names were common - Abram, Isaac, Jacob, as well as the names of his sons. In the first half of the 18th century. BC. in the territory of Upper Mesopotamia, as a result of the wars that took place there, strict administrative rule was introduced in an attempt to subjugate those living on these lands tribal unions. Some Amorite tribes refused to carry out the duties prescribed to them, and went west beyond the Euphrates. These tribes began to be called Ibrim - “crossed”, in singular Ibri, which later transformed into Ivri. These were the first Jews.

Jewish genetics

Recent studies conducted at American universities have once again confirmed the biblical version of the origin of the Jews. According to these studies, 5 thousand years ago there were no peoples in their modern sense. In the 2nd millennium BC. Arabs and Jews represented a single genotype in the male line, then they separated. All three main ethnic groups that exist today – Sephardim, Mizrahi and Ashkenazim – are genetically similar to each other and descend from common Middle Eastern roots. As you can see, the earthly origin of the Jews is completely justified and scientifically confirmed.

Jewish question

Then why are Jews always singled out from the general mass, so much so that someone begins to see them as aliens, and why Jewish theme arouses such keen interest, without exaggeration, among the entire world community? This question is as ancient as the Jews themselves, but one thing can always be traced in it - humanity is so interested in Jews that it constantly demands and expects something from them.

Today no one doubts that any person, like any nation, has its own specific function in this world. And the answer to the eternal question can be found if you try to determine it from this perspective. By the way, this is not so difficult to do - in the Bible this mission is spelled out in literally every chapter.

The Chosenness of the Jews

Nowadays it is difficult to even imagine Jews as... This is a multitude of ethnic groups that are different in language, mentality and skin color; it is simply impossible to bring them under any definition of a people.

But there is something that has united all these different and dissimilar people for thousands of years - this is faith in the One Creator, who gave people the Torah, faith in the unity of the Universe, which is built on love for one’s neighbor.

And the Jews also have one memory, common to all. The memory of standing under Mount Sinai. When people, having completely surrendered themselves to the will of the Almighty, rallied their souls and destinies together, and became like one person with one heart. This was the birth of the people.

Today the world is rapidly entering new, still unknown, forms of its development, and the time is coming when the people of Israel, the state of unity received at Sinai and now forgotten, must revive within themselves again and pass it on to all humanity. It is in this, and in nothing else, that his function lies, and it is for this that he was once chosen.

Semyon Shoikhet

The word "Jew" in Hebrew means "Zarechensky", "one who lives across the river." According to the most common version, the ancient Jews were a small tribe that lived in Bronze Age on lands controlled by Ancient Egypt; a tribe that gradually gained independence, replaced a sedentary lifestyle with a partly nomadic one, escaped from under the yoke of the damned Egyptians in one way or another, grew stronger and even founded its own small but aggressive state.

To live in ancient world exactly between Egypt and Mesopotamia is a risky business, so the Jews eventually found themselves forced to huddle in a very deserted area and endlessly butt heads with also quite aggressive local tribes. There were many peoples, peoples and peoples on the Fertile Crescent between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, but in fact only the Jews managed to survive and survive - primarily thanks to their ideology.

Firstly, from the Egyptians and Babylonians they learned legal norms, including ideas private property, proto-statehood, social hierarchy and other extremely advanced ideas for those times.

Secondly, they also possessed highly developed technologies, also borrowed from the most powerful civilizations in the world at that time. Their military affairs, agriculture, and tool making were, by those standards, extremely advanced.

And thirdly, they had their own, very jealous deity, who did not tolerate any rivals and did not like foreigners. Jehovah was the personal God of one single people and treated other nations with hostility. (The fact that as a result Jehovah became the God of both Christians and Muslims, turning into the most cosmopolitan deity of the planet, is, of course, a great joke of history.) Therefore, the Jews practically did not mix with other tribes, maintaining exceptional ethnic monolithicity, and acquired such an interesting thing, as national identity already by the first millennium BC (for comparison, it is worth noting that countries modern Europe, say, they began to understand what it was around the 16th century AD). Judaism was a religion of blood, family books were sacred here, the Jews did not support any multiculturalism and ethnic diversity even in the heyday of their kingdoms, they practically did not know any colonies, and the defeated tribes preferred to destroy or expel, making an exception only in in rare cases. Well, they endlessly fought for the purity of the ties, traditionalism and so that there were exactly as many hooks on the ceremonial curtain as indicated in Leviticus.

In this state of affairs, the Jews could dominate small tribes. But when faced with new powerful civilizations, they found themselves helpless. The Persians, the Greeks, the Ptolemaic troops - everyone who wanted, did whatever they wanted on the Jewish lands, without, however, completely destroying the Jewish statehood and even bringing there some cultural innovations on spears.

In the end, Judea was conquered by Rome, and the Latin pagans, tired of fighting unrest in a province that was inert and not amenable to real reforms, simply expelled virtually all the Jews from there to run away wherever they looked. The Jews had already been scattered by that time, consider it, throughout Asia and the Hellenic world (thanks to the previous conquerors), so, sighing and packing their belongings, they left - some to Aunt Sarah in Damascus, some to their uncle in Armenia, some to former business partner in Anatolia, and some to his wife’s relatives in the Pyrenees. Thus began the almost two-thousand-year journey of the Jewish people around the world.

Why are there Jews, but not others?

The Jews were not the only people who did not have their own land or lost it. But only Jews human memory managed to exist for two thousand years without dissolving into foreign peoples, without losing (well, almost) their language, preserving their religion, maintaining a relative, but still undeniable genetic unity and recognizing themselves as Jews.

We must thank for this, firstly, their initial desire for such cultural and ethnic isolation, and secondly, those who created the Mishnah and Talmud - collections of religious instructions and explanations for them. Every Jew had to follow these instructions. These collections began to be compiled and edited in the 1st-2nd centuries AD, immediately after the Roman expulsion, and they were written with an amazingly thoughtful goal - to preserve the Jewish people in their journey.

If we study the holy book of the Jews, the Torah (which is, in fact, almost the entire Old Testament of Christians and a significant part of the Koran of Muslims), we will find there only a very small number of prohibitions and rules. But in the Mishnah, and then in the Talmud, these rules were so expanded and supplemented that now being an Orthodox Jew is very dreary and labor-intensive task. You can only eat kosher in a special way cooked food, you must use not only separate utensils, but even separate fireplaces for cooking meat and dairy, you must dress in such a way that people on the streets will run after you in order to take a colorful selfie against your background, on Saturday you turn into a complete disabled person, unable to even turn off the light in the toilet, and so on and so forth.

All these very inconvenient, cumbersome rules, for all their ludicrousness, played a role, however, vital role in the matter of preserving the Jews as a people. From childhood, a Jew was accustomed to the fact that he was different from other people, he could not come to a non-Christian for dinner (but it’s easy to invite one), he was forced to live next to Jewish butchers, milkmen, bakers and winemakers, since only their food was allowed to him, he could only marry a Jewish woman. A Jew who violated these rules was ultimately expelled from his people, and they mourned him more than the dead.

Of course, the prohibitions gradually weakened and traditions collapsed, but this happened very slowly. True, the 19th and 20th centuries caused enormous damage to Jewish identity; the people’s reserve of nomadic strength was already on the wane. But then the journey ended: the UN created Israel and the Jews returned home. Although not all.

Despite the ban on marriages with goyim, Jews, naturally, still mixed with the local population - slowly and sadly. U different groups Jews we see completely different types of appearance. Nevertheless, they all consider themselves one people (and they have a genetic relationship).

Why Jews were so often disliked

Diaspora is a group of people united by some characteristic into another, larger group- will always enjoy certain advantages due to its unity. It's a simple mechanic: together we are strong and the like. Therefore, diasporas, especially large and strong ones, generally do not enjoy much sympathy from the main population. The Jews, so demonstratively isolated and limited in the ability to contact, make friends and enter into family ties with the aborigines, were perceived as 100% aliens, not their own, incomprehensible and sinister. In this state of affairs, anti-Semitism was an inevitable evil, and in the end, during the Second World War, it took on completely monstrous forms. Today, being an anti-Semite is positively uncool. As, indeed, to show any other xenophobia.

Why are there so many Nobel laureates among Jews, not to mention musicians, poets and stand-up comedians?

In fact, the entire harvest Nobel Prizes(26% of total number issued in general) went to only one group of Jews - Ashkenazim, immigrants from Central Germany, Poland, etc. All Ashkenazim are very close relatives. According to the calculations of scientists from Yale, the Albert Einstein Institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who studied the genetic formula of Ashkenazi Jews in 2013, total number The original Ashkenazi group consisted of about 350 people; subsequently, their descendants interbred mainly with each other. In Christian Northern Europe dark ages, where the Ashkenazi community took shape, living conditions for Jews were extremely difficult. While their fellow tribesmen in Asia and Byzantium enjoyed virtually all the rights of citizens, the Jews of this part of Europe were severely persecuted and limited in their activities (for example, they were prohibited from cultivating and owning land); only a few of them could exist here, tolerated by local authorities for exceptional merit or on special petitions. Therefore, it is not surprising that Ashkenazim are often descendants of influential merchants, state advisers, large moneylenders, revered rabbis and other medieval intellectual and business elite. After the flight of the Jews from Constantinople, the situation did not change much, and it was then that this subethnic group finally took shape. Guild rules prohibited them from being artisans in many professions; cultivating the land and serving in the army were also closed to them, so the Ashkenazim occupied other niches - primarily trade, banking, medicine, and law.

Later, when the Ashkenazim had the opportunity to more or less safely settle in Poland and Germany, they continued to have an evolutionary advantage for people with increased intelligence. The rich preferred to marry their daughters to the most successful students of the religious school - the yeshiva, even if this beacon of wisdom was naked as a falcon.

So yes, Ashkenazis have a genetic history of increased intellectual ability. But do not rush to envy: centuries-old consanguineous marriages have led to the fact that Ashkenazis suffer from many genetic diseases, from which representatives of other ethnic groups are practically immune. Now that the Ashkenazim have broken off their marital isolation, the situation is beginning to level out, and in a couple of centuries they will no longer be any different from ordinary earthlings.

Everyone knows about Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. But what are these - too, yes, did you know?

How to become a Jew

Unlike Christians or Muslims, Jews never sought to turn everyone around them into Jews. On the contrary, they tried to avoid such metamorphoses at all costs. Nevertheless, they have a ritual of “giyur”, which makes the one who has undergone it one hundred percent Jew - both in the religious, social and legal sense.

Going through conversion is an extremely tedious task. First you need to find three rabbis who will agree to make you a Jew. Moreover, the rabbis will refuse you, intimidate you, dissuade you and tell you what a terrible thing it is to be a Jew. But if a Jewish candidate is stubborn as a bull and is not afraid of anything, he must learn 613 commandments of the Torah (yeah, that’s not ten Christian commandments), undergo training in the religious canon and then clearly out loud before the religious court pronounce kabbalat - an oath of acceptance of these commandments. If he cannot pronounce it (for example, he is deaf and dumb), then he cannot become a Jew. In addition, men will have to part with one part of their body, you know what. A converted convert is immersed in a ritual container (mikvah) and becomes a Jew, a “her” - this is the name given to those who converted to Jewry after being a goy from birth. Yes, by the way, if you know for certain that you had ancient Amalekites in your family, refrain from reporting this. The Torah clearly states that an Amalekite cannot be a Jew. True, now there are no Amalekites in nature, and it is not known exactly who they are.

Is it true that Jews despise goyim?

Do you despise elephants? Jews believe that Jews on Earth special function- maintain the harmony of the world, bringing it into line with the wishes of the Creator. They are the chosen ones, they are different from other people, just as other people are different from animals. IN ideal world, which will come after the coming of the Messiah, the Jews will do nothing but pray incessantly. And other nations will feed and serve them in gratitude for the fact that the Jews are saving this world, which generally exists only because God loves the Jews. But being a favorite of the Jewish God is a suicidal occupation, for this almighty sadist cruelly punishes his people for any disobedience. Therefore, the lot of the Jew - at least at this historical moment, before the Advent - is suffering. All other nations live better because they are not counted. The elephants, you know, also settled down very well.

10 Misconceptions About Jews

Let's talk about the DNA genealogy of Jews

Jews are one of the most active players in the field of DNA genealogy. This applies to the authors of academic articles on DNA genealogy, a significant part of whom are Jews themselves, and to their articles about Jews and the history of the Jews, and to the people themselves who want to find out their haplotype and haplogroup, and understand where they, the Jews, come from. happened. The fact is that they themselves, in fact, do not know this. Due to my commitment to DNA genealogy, and out of general interest, I often visit Jewish discussion sites. And one of the hottest topics there is who are the Jews, what are the criteria for being classified as Jews, whether there are deep differences between Jews and non-Jews, including at the genetic level. The Jews, I repeat, do not know this themselves, but it interests them very much. I must say that Jewish discussion sites are some of the most intelligent. And there, not without this, fights and quarrels occur, but orders of magnitude less than on ordinary Russian online “forums”. In general, the information level of discussions between Jews - and Russian-speaking Jews from all over the world participate in them - from Canada and the USA to Russia, Australia and South Africa- exceptionally high. And, what is important, he is generally friendly, even when they agree different points vision. And I am by no means an outside observer there, I also put in place (or so it seems to me) Jewish nationalists (and there are many of them) when they “bring a blizzard”, such as that the Russian language came from Hebrew, or that the Jews established metallurgy in Southern Urals in general and in Arkaim in particular, and that Jews were at the heart of the creation Kievan Rus. I must admit that I conduct discussions with Jewish nationalists quite harshly, as is customary in science, which not everyone knows about. And the rest of the Jews on the site treat this with understanding and kindness, a sign of this is three annual laureate titles received on the main and most famous Jewish site over the past few years, for popular science and educational activities, including (and especially) for articles on the history of the Jewish people.

The interest of Jews in DNA genealogy is understandable. The fact is that most of them do not even know their relatively close ancestors. And there are sad reasons for this - Jews have been persecuted at all times and by all peoples. Often they were forced to run away from pogroms, persecution, and often mass murders. Somehow I was puzzled by the fact that Jewish populations (I am talking, first of all, about men, because I study mainly the DNA genealogy of Y-chromosome carriers, and these are men) in Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, which were quite numerous in recent centuries, all have common ancestors mainly in the mid-14th century AD. In other words, shtetl Jews in those regions date back to that time. Why is that?

An explanation has been found. The mid-14th century is the height of the plague in Europe (1346-1351), with more than 25 million people dying from the plague. There was a persistent rumor that this was the work of Jews, who allegedly contaminated the wells. Went mass pogroms and massacres, and the surviving Jews rushed to flee, but where? Of many European countries They had already been expelled, there was only one way left - to the east. The rulers of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania responded favorably to accepting the fugitives, and it was then that the Jews who arrived in those lands became the first ancestors of the quickly expanding Jewish populations. It is them, these first ancestors, that DNA genealogy identifies based on the haplotypes of modern Jews. And their haplogroups turned out to be very different - E, G, I1, I2, J1, J2, N, R1a, R1b, T... Those were hard times. This is how the Ashkenazis, that is, European Jews, received a whole bunch of haplogroups.

But the common ancestors of the Jews of the Middle East go back far to pre-Jewish times, to the times of the Bedouins, from whom, in particular, a significant part of the Jews originated. The oldest haplogroups Middle Eastern Jews - E1b, J1, J2, their common ancestors among modern Jews are far back 10 thousand years. One of the main haplogroups of the modern Middle East, haplogroup J, split into haplogroups J1 and J2 about 20 thousand years ago. Then, much later, haplogroups R1b and R1a appeared in the Middle East, which transmitted their haplogroups to the ancestors of modern Jews approximately 5500 and 4000 years ago, respectively. These were Bedouins, Sumerians, Akkadians, and everyone who lived there then.

About 4,000 years ago, the common ancestor of the future Jews and Arabs was born in Mesopotamia, and according to the Bible (Old Testament), Torah and Koran, his name was Abraham. By that time, the population of Mesopotamia had long lived in numerous villages and even cities, the most significant of which were Uruk and Babylon, and the Sumerian state was already fading away. The earliest settlements in northern Mesopotamia date back to approximately 9 thousand years ago. In southern Mesopotamia - about 6 thousand years ago. The first direct mention of Mesopotamia in the Bible says, when describing the kingdom of Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah: “His kingdom at first consisted of: Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Chalne in the land of Shinar. From this land came Assur...” (Ashur). This is about the Assyrians.

So, millennia have passed, and one of the owners of haplogroup J1 (although this is only one of the assumptions, but already deeply imposed by population geneticists - Jews of haplogroup J1; Jews of haplogroup J2 object, which will be discussed below), a resident ancient city Ur, one of the most ancient cities of Sumer, left the city with his family and went northwest, to Canaan, on the Mediterranean coast. His name was Abram, and he was a descendant of Eber, the great-grandson of Shem, the first son of Noah, as the Bible tells. With him were his father Terah, his wife Sarai, and his nephew Lot. The reasons he left hometown, unknown. But it is known that in those days, approximately 3800-4000 years ago, Ur fell into economic decline, and many inhabitants who were not engaged in agricultural labor and were not tied to their land holdings migrated from Ur.

Abram's life was full of events, detailed in the Bible. In short, these events made Abram the founder of the Jewish people. According to legend, God gave him the name Abraham (“the father of many nations”), and his wife Sarah instead of Sarai, and bequeathed to him and his descendants “the whole land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.” The land of Canaan is approximately present-day Israel.

Let's move on to genealogy. Abraham, the son of Terah, the grandson of Nahor and the great-grandson of Serukh, and seven more generations before Shem, the son of Noah, who, as is known, had two more sons, Ham and Japheth (Ham’s son, by the way, was called Canaan, and he, and then his descendants According to legend, they owned the land of Canaan), and so, Abraham gave birth to two sons from two wives - Ishmael (from the Egyptian maid Hagar) and Isaac (from Sarah). Since women do not make any contribution to the male haplogroup and haplotype, Ishmael and Isaac continued their father's, Abraham's, haplotypes and haplogroup. Ishmael was further expelled from the family, took an Egyptian wife, and gave birth to sons named: Nebaioth, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Duma, Massa, Hadad, Thema, Jetur, Naphish and Kedma, numbering 12 souls. “They lived from Havilah to Shur, which is before Egypt, as you go to Assyria,” the Bible tells us, and adds: “These are the sons of Ishmael... These are the twelve princes of their tribes.” This is an Arabic line. One of their descendants, according to the interpreters of the Koran - after 30 generations, was the prophet Mohammed, also known as Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

Isaac gave birth to Esau and his brother Jacob (Ishmael was their uncle). Jacob gave birth to 12 sons, the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. These are Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin (the names are given in the version of the Russian synodal translation; in Judaic studies slightly different spellings of names are accepted - Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Yosef and Benjamin). There was also a daughter, Dinah, but she is not considered in this context, since she carried the haplotype not of Jacob, but of her mother Leah. After the death of Joseph, his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, born in Egypt even before Jacob and his family arrived there, adopted by Jacob before his death, and equal in rights with his other twelve sons, also became the ancestors of the tribes of Israel. In total - after the death of Joseph - there should be 13 tribes.

However, in fact, only combat units were considered tribes; they had their own battle standards, which they deployed in campaigns and battles. They were sort of like divisions. And Levi's great-grandsons, Moses and Aaron, were not included in the tribes. They received another task, according to the Bible - from the Lord himself. The task was not easy - to negotiate with Pharaoh and bring all the sons of Israel out of Egypt in their twelve armies. And further, God commanded Aaron to become the high priest, and his descendants to become priests. And so it happened - 12 tribes of Israel, plus hereditary priests, Kohanim, or Kohanim.

So, the genealogical framework has been determined. Since Y-chromosomal markers and their alleles (the same numbers in haplotypes) are transmitted in a straight line, from father to son, then, naturally, all siblings should have had the same markers and alleles (that is, numbers in haplotypes) as theirs father. This means that if the genealogy is set out in the Bible correctly, then identical markers and alleles in the form of corresponding chains of numbers should be identical for all 12 tribes and their direct descendants to this day, as well as for Ishmael and his descendants. This must be so since Ishmael is the son of Abraham and the brother (paternal) of Isaac. And Isaac, let me remind you, is the father of Jacob and the grandfather of the ancestors of the 12 tribes (and the great-grandfather of Ephraim and Manasseh, who also led the corresponding tribes of Israel).

In other words, if Ishmael is truly related as described in the Bible, then the Arabs, the direct descendants of Ishmael, and the Jews, the direct descendants of the 12 tribes, including the Kohanim, the direct descendants of Aaron, the great-grandson of Levi, should have identical haplotypes in our day. time.

The matter, however, is somewhat complicated by the fact that over the past 3,600 years, mutations have definitely occurred in the markers of this haplotype. In the six-digit haplotypes that researchers operated on 10-15 years ago, one mutation occurs on average every three thousand years. This is a statistical assessment; no one can give an exact answer. This means that there will either be no mutations (in a minority of haplotypes), or there may be from one to five mutations, within 99% of haplotypes. This will cause the haplotype numbers to shift up and down, different numbers differently. As a result, we get a whole cloud of haplotypes, at least several dozen.

What kind further history 12 tribes in the Bible? Jacob had twelve children. They came to Egypt to settle as a group of 75 people, including women and children. After 210 years they left Egypt (the Bible gives 430 years of stay in Egypt, but this includes a wider period, from the birth of Abraham). In the second year after the exodus, in the Sinai desert, Moses and Aaron counted all available male personnel, according to the tribes of Israel, from 20 years old and above, and a total of 603 thousand 550 people came out. The Bible accurately lists each tribe, from the smallest, Benjamin, 35,400, to the largest, Judah, 74,600. This total did not include the descendants of Levi. According to the Bible, the Lord said to Moses: “Just do not include the tribes of Levi in ​​the census and do not count them along with the children of Israel; But give the Levites the tabernacle of the testimony and all its utensils... and the Levites will stand guard over the tabernacle of the testimony” (Numbers 1:49-53).

The image below shows a diagram of the placement of the 12 tribes of Israel around the Tabernacle of the Covenant in the Sinai Desert.

Yes, we must also recall how, during the exodus from Egypt, the pharaoh and his army chased the fugitives, but the waters of the sea parted, let in the “multi-tribal people,” and then closed again, swallowing up the pharaoh and his army. Thus, the Egyptian yoke was finally ended. At least that's what the Bible says.

After all the decades of walking in the desert, the army of Israel on the plains of Moab near the Jordan was again counted, and it turned out to be 601 thousand 730 people in total. All those previously counted in the Sinai desert died, except four people. The greatest losses were suffered by the tribe of Simeon, which was reduced almost threefold; the largest family continued to be Judah. The Levites, the male descendants of Levi, were also listed, but not as warriors, as was customary, from 20 years of age and older, but including boys aged a month and above, and their number was 23 thousand people. Approximately the minimum size of Simeon's knee.

After arriving in the land on both sides of the Jordan, all 12 tribes received inheritances, as shown on the medieval map:

After about five hundred years, from the described 3300 years ago, or 1300s BC, until the 800s BC, united Judea, after the death of King Solomon, split into two parts - the southern kingdom, Judea proper with its capital in Jerusalem , and the northern kingdom, Israel itself. The southern kingdom was inhabited mainly by the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (whose inheritance included Jerusalem), the northern kingdom was inhabited by the descendants of the remaining ten tribes, largely by the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph. The tribe of Simeon lived “in the midst of the inheritance of the sons of Judah” (Joshua 19:1), but for our consideration this is not so important. What is important is that the northern and then the southern kingdoms were subjected to catastrophic devastation at least twice, which led to the captivity, deportation and subsequent disappearance of the ten tribes of Israel.

In 735-701 BC, the northern kingdom of Israel (or Samaria) was repeatedly ravaged by Assyria and the people were driven en masse into the internal regions of the empire. Instead, other tribes were brought into the devastated Jewish territories from Arabia and Mesopotamia, giving rise, in particular, to the Samaritans, who exist there to this day. Such relocations were practiced by the Assyrians, and not only by them, as a means against possible uprisings and to increase human resources in certain territories. Part of the kingdom of Judah was also subjected to devastation and resettlement. According to Assyrian annals, from there in 701 BC, more than 200 thousand people were driven to Assyria, settled in the territories of the former Aramaic kingdoms. Their fate remained largely unknown. According to documents, some of the exiles were enlisted in the Assyrian army, some became Assyrian officials, sometimes high-ranking ones. Some of their descendants later returned to their homeland along with the later Babylonian exiles, two hundred years later.

The second major forced resettlement of Jews in the form of a series of expulsions was already from the Kingdom of Judah, a hundred years later. extra years after the Assyrian, in 598-582. BC. This happened shortly after Judah became effectively independent from Assyria. After the capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, mass captivity and the forced deportation of people to Babylonia, the kingdom of Judah ceased to exist. However, fifty years after the fall of Babylon under the attacks of the Persians, King Cyrus, by decree, allowed the exiles to return to Judea. Thousands of people returned, and this was an unprecedented case in those days when a hijacked people returned to their homeland, according to biblical sources. Those who remained were mainly those who did not have land ownership in Judea, or finally settled in Babylon.

In general, according to sources, only two tribes of Israel continued to exist. These are the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The descendants of Levi, the Levites, continued to exist and perform public worship and teach the people the law of the Torah, but they did not belong to the tribes. The remaining ten tribes disappeared. The search for them has attracted the attention of researchers, both professional and amateur, for two thousand years.

Since according to the Bible, Jews and Arabs come from the same common ancestor, named Abraham, then this should be verifiable using DNA genealogy methods. Several years ago I did just that - I collected the available haplotypes of Jews and Arabs of haplogroup J1, put everything in one file, and launched a program to build a haplotype tree.

The program distributes haplotypes based on the principle of similarity and the formation of some haplotypes from others through mutations. Thus, related haplotypes go into one branch on the tree, arranged in the order of their formation, and the ancestral haplotype is automatically located at the base of the branch, or the ancestral one is obtained by extrapolation. Haplotypes unrelated to the first branch are built into another branch, which also consists of a pyramid of their related haplotypes with their common ancestor of the branch. So, Jews and Arabs of haplogroup J1 formed a complex tree with many branches, mostly young, several centuries old, and what was characteristic of these branches was that they were either exclusively Arab or exclusively Jewish. There were no mixed branches older than two or three thousand years. And this shows that the situation between Jews and Arabs is really complex, for centuries and millennia. Let's say, on the tree of Slavic haplotypes, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians are mixed in the same branches, there is no antagonism between them - they easily marry and get married, they are not disturbed. Not so with Jews and Arabs; cases of mixed marriages are statistically very insignificant.

In short, only one branch on the tree of haplotypes of Jews and Arabs of haplogroup J1, the oldest, although it was double, that is, in one half there were Jews, in the other - Arabs, converged to one point, that is, to one common ancestor. Calculations immediately showed that he lived approximately four thousand years ago. This is the time of the life of the biblical Abraham, although the haplotypes, of course, do not name him. So we showed that Abraham, or whatever his real name was, belonged to haplogroup J1, right?

No, that's not entirely true. Because exactly the same picture - in principle - turned out with the haplotype tree of haplogroup J2. Again, non-mixing branches of Jews and Arabs, and again one common double branch, which converges on one common ancestor who lived the same 4000 years ago.

What is especially interesting is that exactly the same picture emerged in haplogroup R1a. On the haplotype tree of this haplogroup there is again a double branch, Jews and Arabs, with the following ancestral 67-marker haplotypes - Jews:

It turns out that there were three Abrahams - one in haplogroup J1, another in haplogroup J2, the third in haplogroup R1a. This can be interpreted to mean that Abraham was a collective figure, although the time of his life coincides with biblical descriptions and interpretations Jewish sages. It is clear that Jews and Arabs, and their genealogical lines, diverged precisely at that time, as the Bible tells the story of the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, aka Ishmael, who led, respectively, the lines of Jews and Arabs. Thus, these calculations confirmed that, despite all the mythical Bible stories, a number of provisions in the Bible and the Torah are reflected correctly - both the origin of Jews and Arabs from one ancestor (in their haplogroups), and the lifespan of this ancestor.

It becomes clear why searching for the missing ten tribes of Israel using DNA genealogy methods is difficult, if not impossible. What to look for? Whom? Owners of which haplogroups? We already have at least three haplogroups of candidates for the DNA line of the biblical Abraham, and therefore for the 12 tribes of Israel, J1, J2 and R1a. Let's figure out where haplogroup R1a came from there.

Ten years ago, data was published in the academic literature that among Ashkenazi Jews, approximately 10% have haplogroup R1a (Behar et al., 2003). But Jews have many different haplogroups, so 10% is comparatively large value for one haplogroup. Moreover, it turned out that haplogroup R1a is mainly carried by Levites, descendants of Levi, whose roots lead directly to Jacob, Isaac and Abraham. At the end of last year, 2013, a detailed article about the Levites was published (Rootsi et al, 2013), and it was made public that of all the “multi-tribal” Ashkenazim, 15% have haplogroup R1a (87 people out of 600 tested Ashkenazim), and among the Levites this percentage , having haplogroup R1a, rises to 65%, that is, two thirds of all. At first it was announced that the Slavs were to blame for this, who allegedly introduced their Slavic haplogroup R1a into the Jewish environment, apparently through the Levite family, and then it multiplied there.

In general, there is still a prevailing belief among popgeneticists that haplogroup R1a is the Slavs. In their 2010 article (Atzmon et al, 2010), they, popgeneticists, write this: “these admixtures could have come from Ukrainians, Poles or Russians.” But the authors, speaking about the R1a haplogroup among the Jews, did not bother to look at their haplotypes, which are noticeably different from those of the R1a haplogroup among the Slavs. Let's take a look, and at the same time move on to more accurate 111-marker haplotypes. The basic (i.e. ancestral) 111-marker haplotype of modern Jews with the dating of the common ancestor, as indicated above, approximately 1300 years ago:

Now - another interesting find. The basic 111-marker haplotype of Arabs and other peoples of the Middle East of haplogroup R1a has the following form, and the age of the common ancestor is approximately 4050 years (Rozhanskii and Klyosov, 2012):

It is no coincidence that I mentioned the R1a haplogroup among the Arabs. The fact is that the Aryans, who went south from the Russian Plain, passing through Mesopotamia, and reached the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Oman, where the countries listed above are now, and the Arabs there, having received DNA testing results, look with amazement at the testing certificate with the haplotype and haplogroup R1a. However, they looked with amazement a few years ago. Now they look with understanding. They already understand that their certificates define the boundaries of the area of ​​​​the campaigns of the ancient Aryans. The times of these campaigns in Arabia are approximately 4 thousand years ago. The haplotypes are typical Aryan, from the Russian Plain, the same as those of the Indian and Iranian descendants of the Aryans. Proto-Slavic haplotypes of the R1a group. Indeed, compare the above ancestral haplotypes from the Russian Plain (4900 years ago) and the haplotypes of the Arabs of the Middle East (4050 years ago):

Currently, haplogroup R1a among Arabs reaches 9% of the male population, including in such famous clans as the Qureish clan, from which came the Prophet Mohammed (aka Muhammad), the founder of Islam, and his clan is mentioned in the Koran. I receive many letters from well-born Arabs, who were initially shocked by their own haplogroup R1a, it was even hidden from others, but gradually it became prestigious. An analogy suggests itself with the upper castes in India, where haplogroup R1a reaches 72%. It seems that the story of the arrival of the Aryans, who, in fact, entered the upper caste, was also on the Arabian Peninsula, only it is not yet as well known as the story of the Indian and Iranian Aryans. Now the hottest Arab heads are raising the question whether Mohammed himself was not of haplogroup R1a, which means that Ismail (Ishmael), the son of the biblical Abraham, the “ancestor of the Arabs” according to the Bible, and therefore Abraham himself. Strictly speaking, there is no answer to this question yet. But considering that Abraham (or whatever the common ancestor of the main male line of Jews and Arabs was actually called) lived four thousand years ago, right at the time of the Middle Eastern campaigns of the Aryans, then such a possibility is not at all excluded. Although, to be honest, I doubt this option. It would be too complicated if Abraham is the youngest descendant of the Proto-Slavs, so to speak, the bastard son of the military campaigns of the Aryans.

Original taken from stassavenkov in Who are the Jews and where did they come from?

The word "Jew" in Hebrew means "Zarechensky", "one who lives across the river." According to the most common version, the ancient Jews were a small tribe that lived in the Bronze Age in lands controlled by Ancient Egypt; a tribe that gradually gained independence, replaced a sedentary lifestyle with a partly nomadic one, escaped from under the yoke of the damned Egyptians in one way or another, grew stronger and even founded its own small but aggressive state.

Living in the ancient world, exactly between Egypt and Mesopotamia, is a risky business, so the Jews eventually found themselves forced to huddle in a very deserted area and endlessly butt heads with also quite aggressive local tribes. There were many peoples, peoples and peoples on the Fertile Crescent between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, but in fact only the Jews managed to survive and survive - primarily thanks to their ideology.

Firstly, from the Egyptians and Babylonians they learned legislative norms, including the ideas of private property, proto-statehood, social hierarchy and other ideas that were extremely advanced at that time.

Secondly, they also owned highly developed technologies, also borrowed from the most powerful civilizations in the world at that time. Their military affairs, agriculture, and tool making were, by those standards, extremely advanced.

And thirdly, they had their own, very jealous deity, who did not tolerate any rivals and did not like foreigners. Jehovah was the personal God of one single people and treated other nations with hostility. (The fact that as a result Jehovah became the God of both Christians and Muslims, becoming the most cosmopolitan deity on the planet, is, of course, a great joke of history.)

Therefore, Jews practically did not mix with other tribes, maintaining exceptional ethnic monolithicity, and acquired such an interesting thing as national identity by the first millennium BC (for comparison, it is worth noting that the countries of modern Europe, say, began to understand what it is, around the 16th century AD). Judaism was a religion of blood, family books were sacred here, Jews did not support any multiculturalism and ethnic diversity even in the heyday of their kingdoms, they practically did not know any colonies, and the defeated tribes preferred to be destroyed or expelled, making exceptions only in rare cases. Well, they endlessly fought for the purity of the ties, traditionalism and so that there were exactly as many hooks on the ceremonial curtain as indicated in Leviticus.

In this state of affairs, the Jews could dominate small tribes. But when faced with new powerful civilizations, they found themselves helpless. The Persians, the Greeks, the Ptolemaic troops - everyone who wanted, did whatever they wanted on the Jewish lands, without, however, completely destroying the Jewish statehood and even bringing there some cultural innovations on spears.

In the end, Judea was conquered by Rome, and the Latin pagans, tired of fighting unrest in a province that was inert and not amenable to real reforms, simply expelled virtually all the Jews from there to run away wherever they looked. The Jews had already been scattered by that time, consider it, all over Asia and the Hellenic world (thanks to the previous conquerors), so, sighing and packing their belongings, they left - some to Aunt Sarah in Damascus, some to their uncle in Armenia, some to former business partner in Anatolia, and some to his wife’s relatives in the Pyrenees. Thus began the almost two-thousand-year journey of the Jewish people around the world.

Why are there Jews, but not others?

The Jews were not the only people who did not have their own land or lost it. But only the Jews, in human memory, managed to exist for two thousand years without dissolving into foreign peoples, without losing (well, almost) their language, preserving their religion, preserving a relative, but still undeniable genetic unity and recognizing themselves as Jews.

We must thank for this, firstly, their initial desire for such cultural and ethnic isolation, and secondly, those who created the Mishnah and Talmud - collections of religious instructions and explanations for them. Every Jew had to follow these instructions. These collections began to be compiled and edited in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, immediately after the Roman expulsion, and they were written with an amazingly thoughtful purpose - to preserve the Jewish people in their journey.

If we study the holy book of the Jews, the Torah (which is, in fact, almost the entire Old Testament of Christians and a significant part of the Koran of Muslims), we will find there only a very small number of prohibitions and rules. But in the Mishnah, and then in the Talmud, these rules were so expanded and supplemented that now being an Orthodox Jew is a very dreary and time-consuming task. You can only eat kosher, specially prepared food, you must use not only separate utensils, but even separate fireplaces for cooking meat and dairy, you must dress in such a way that people on the streets will run after you in order to take a colorful selfie against your background, on Saturday you turn into a complete invalid, unable to even turn off the light in the toilet, and so on and so forth.

All these very inconvenient, cumbersome rules, for all their ludicrousness, nevertheless played a crucial role in preserving the Jews as a people. From childhood, a Jew was accustomed to the fact that he was different from other people, he could not come to a non-Christian for dinner (but it’s easy to invite one), he was forced to live next to Jewish butchers, milkmen, bakers and winemakers, since only their food was allowed to him, he could only marry a Jewish woman. A Jew who violated these rules was ultimately expelled from his people, and they mourned him more than the dead.

Of course, the prohibitions gradually weakened and traditions collapsed, but this happened very slowly. True, the 19th and 20th centuries caused enormous damage to Jewish identity; the people’s reserve of nomadic strength was already on the wane. But then the journey ended: the UN created Israel and the Jews returned home. Although not all.

What do Jews look like?

Despite the ban on marriages with goyim, Jews, naturally, still mixed with the local population - slowly and sadly. In different groups of Jews we see completely different types of appearance. Nevertheless, they all consider themselves one people (and they have a genetic relationship).

Why Jews were so often disliked

A diaspora - a group of people united on some basis in another, larger group - will always enjoy certain advantages due to their unity. It's a simple mechanic: together we are strong and the like. Therefore, diasporas, especially large and strong ones, generally do not enjoy much sympathy from the main population.

The Jews, so demonstratively isolated and limited in the ability to contact, make friends and enter into family ties with the aborigines, were perceived as 100% aliens, not their own, incomprehensible and sinister. In this state of affairs, anti-Semitism was an inevitable evil, and in the end, during the Second World War, it took on completely monstrous forms. Today, being an anti-Semite is positively uncool. As, indeed, to show any other xenophobia.

Why are there so many Nobel laureates among Jews, not to mention musicians, poets and stand-up comedians?

In fact, the entire crop of Nobel Prizes (26% of the total number awarded in general) went to only one group of Jews - Ashkenazim, immigrants from Central Germany, Poland, etc. All Ashkenazim are very close relatives. According to the calculations of scientists from Yale, the Albert Einstein Institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who studied the genetic formula of Ashkenazi Jews in 2013, the total number of the original Ashkenazi group was about 350 people, and subsequently their descendants interbred mainly with each other.

In the Christian Northern Europe of the Dark Ages, where the Ashkenazi community developed, living conditions for Jews were extremely difficult. While their fellow tribesmen in Asia and Byzantium enjoyed virtually all the rights of citizens, the Jews of this part of Europe were severely persecuted and limited in their activities (for example, they were prohibited from cultivating and owning land); only a few of them could exist here, tolerated by local authorities for exceptional merit or on special petitions. Therefore, it is not surprising that Ashkenazim are often descendants of influential merchants, state advisers, large moneylenders, revered rabbis and other medieval intellectual and business elite.

After the flight of the Jews from Constantinople, the situation did not change much, and it was then that this subethnic group finally took shape. Guild rules prohibited them from being artisans in many professions; cultivating the land and serving in the army were also closed to them, so the Ashkenazim occupied other niches - primarily trade, banking, medicine, and law.

Later, when the Ashkenazim had the opportunity to more or less safely settle in Poland and Germany, they continued to have an evolutionary advantage for people with increased intelligence. The rich preferred to marry their daughters to the most successful students of the religious school - the yeshiva, even if this beacon of wisdom was naked as a falcon.

So yes, Ashkenazis have a genetic history of increased intellectual ability. But do not rush to envy: centuries-old consanguineous marriages have led to the fact that Ashkenazis suffer from many genetic diseases, from which representatives of other ethnic groups are practically immune. Now that the Ashkenazim have broken off their marital isolation, the situation is beginning to level out, and in a couple of centuries they will no longer be any different from ordinary earthlings.

10 unexpected Jews

Everyone knows about Karl Marx and Albert Einstein. But what are these - too, yes, did you know?

How to become a Jew

Unlike Christians or Muslims, Jews never sought to turn everyone around them into Jews. On the contrary, they tried to avoid such metamorphoses at all costs. Nevertheless, they have a ritual of “giyur”, which makes the one who has undergone it one hundred percent Jew - both in the religious and in the social and legal sense.

Conversion is an extremely tedious task. First you need to find three rabbis who will agree to make you a Jew. Moreover, the rabbis will refuse you, intimidate you, dissuade you and tell you what a terrible thing it is to be a Jew. But if a Jewish candidate is stubborn as a bull and is not afraid of anything, he must learn 613 commandments of the Torah (yeah, that’s not ten Christian commandments), undergo training in the religious canon and then clearly out loud before the religious court pronounce kabbalat - an oath of acceptance of these commandments. If he cannot pronounce it (for example, he is deaf and dumb), then he cannot become a Jew.

In addition, men will have to part with one part of their body, you know what. A converted convert is immersed in a ritual container (mikvah) and becomes a Jew, a “her” - this is the name given to those who converted to Jewry after being a goy from birth. Yes, by the way, if you know for certain that you had ancient Amalekites in your family, refrain from reporting this. The Torah clearly states that an Amalekite cannot be a Jew. True, now there are no Amalekites in nature, and it is not known exactly who they are.

Is it true that Jews despise goyim?

Do you despise elephants? Jews believe that Jews on Earth have a special function - to maintain the harmony of the world, bringing it into conformity with the wishes of the Creator. They are the chosen ones, they are different from other people, just as other people are different from animals. In the ideal world that will come after the coming of the Messiah, Jews will do nothing but pray incessantly. And other nations will feed and serve them in gratitude for the fact that the Jews are saving this world, which generally exists only because God loves the Jews.

But being a favorite of the Jewish God is a self-destructive occupation, for this almighty sadist cruelly punishes his people for any disobedience. Therefore, the lot of the Jew - at least at this historical moment, before the Advent - is suffering. All other nations live better because they are not counted. The elephants, you know, also settled down very well.

Jews are greedy.

No more than other nations. But to the Jews for a long time It was allowed what was prohibited for religious reasons to Christians and Muslims - to lend money at interest. Therefore, they stood at the origins of the banking business in most regions of the world.

There are so many Jews in Russia because they have always been well received here.

No, the entry of Jews into Russia has been extremely difficult and most often impossible since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Jews ended up here because Russia was conquering the territories in which they had traditionally lived, primarily the Caucasus and Poland. Jews who did not renounce their religion were denied rights almost until the revolution: they were prohibited from moving freely, owning certain types of real estate, living in most cities, etc.

Yiddish is a Jewish language.

Yiddish is just a dialect form German language, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. There are two Jewish languages: Aramaic and Hebrew. They are both very ancient and very similar.

Jewish women have big breasts.

According to Wonderbra research conducted in 2004, UK women confidently hold the lead in the consumption of bras with D+ cups. Israel was not even close.

All Jews burr.

There was a time when they lisped - and for the same reason that the Russian nobility lisped. The Jews had Yiddish as their native language - with a guttural "r". Russian nobility chatted in the nursery in French, which also has difficult relationships with this letter. But if a Jew (or nobleman) grew up in a Russian-speaking environment with traditional pronunciation, he has no problems with “r”.

Jews drink the blood of Christian babies and make matzah from it.

Blood among Jews, like among Muslims, is a completely forbidden substance for consumption, no matter who it belongs to. Therefore, a religious Jew is forever deprived of the happiness of dining on blood sausage or matzo with the blood of a Christian baby.

Push. Let me add that there are Nazis in every nation, including Jews. So they do not recognize those who have converted as full-fledged Jews. But they are a minority, just like the Nazis in any other nation.