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The Myth of a Jewish Race with Direct Ancestry to Abraham

Zionist believe that those who are Jewish are the heirs to the promises to Abraham and Jacob. They typically believe that to be Jewish means you are either a distinctly different race from other humans on the planet. Or they believe to be Jewish is to be genetically the direct kin of Abraham. Thus, many Zionist believe we should support the Israelis, because this political state was established as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. And if you do not support the Israelis, then you are typically labeled a racist and are anti-semetic.

However, both of these views are wrong and actually promote anti-semetism and racist ideas.  As we will show, races do not exist. They are nothing more than a modern social construct, often used to promote racism. Likewise, direct lineage to Abraham can be claimed by all humans on the planet today.

Below we have listed quotes from Jewish sources, Encyclopedia’s, DNA research and Genealogy to debunk the Zionist misconceptions on race and lineage.

Judaism is a Religion that is inclusive of all people. As such, many people histocially adopted Judaism as their faith through the ages. This debunks the idea that being Jewish means you are of a different race: 

“The findings of physical anthropology show that, contrary to the popular view, there is no Jewish race” (Patai, R., Director of Research, Theodor Herzl Institute, New York. “Encyclopedia Britanica”, 12: 1054, 1969).

“A common error and persistent modern myth is the designation of the Jews as a ‘race’” (Roth, C., Oxford University Reader in Jewish Studies, 1939- 1964, in: “Jews”, “Collier’s Encyclopedia”, 13: 574, 1991).

“It is a common assumption, and one that sometimes seems ineradicable even in the face of evidence to the contrary, that the Jews of today constitute a race, a homogeneous entity easily recognizable. From the preceding discussion of the origin and early history of the Jews, it should be clear that in the course of their formation as a people and a nation they had already assimilated a variety of racial strains from people moving into the general area they occupied. This had taken place by interbreeding and then by conversion to Judaism of a considerable number of communities…Thus, the diversity of the racial and genetic attributes of various Jewish colonies of today renders any unified racial classification of them a contradiction in terms. (Encyclopedia Judaica Jerusalem, 1971, vol. 3, p. 50).

Historically,  there has been mass conversions in Judaism, just as there were mass conversions – sometimes sadly by force, – in Islam and Christianity:

“There can be little doubt that the scattered Phoenicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin to Hebrew and being deprived of their authentic political rights, became proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous proselytism alternated with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish history. On one occasion the Idumeans, being conquered, were all forcibly made Jews. There were Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkish people who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered peoples – mainly Semitic…. The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea” – H.G. Wells (The Outline of History, p. 505).

Viewing Jews as a race comes to us from Darwinism.  Darwinsim, or evolution, was part of Nazi propaganda against other ethniticities were below the “Aryan race”:

“Humans differentiate, classify, and discriminate: social interaction is a basic property of human Darwinian evolution. Presumably inherent differential physical as well as behavioral properties have always been criteria for identifying friend or foe. Yet, biological determinism is a relatively modern term, and scientific racism is, oddly enough, largely a consequence or a product of the Age of Enlightenment and the establishment of the notion of human equality. In recent decades ever-increasing efforts and ingenuity were invested in identifying Biblical Israelite genotypic common denominators by analysing an assortment of phenotypes, like facial patterns, blood types, diseases, DNA-sequences, and more. It becomes overwhelmingly clear that although Jews maintained detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship, also intensive horizontal genetic relations were maintained both between Jewish communities and with the gentile surrounding. Thus, in spite of considerable consanguinity, there is no Jewish genotype to identify.” – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301023/

Genetics can be studied due to population pooling of our ancestors who resided in the same area for long periods of time.  However, this does not constitute a seperate race of people. Israelis show this genetic pooling in their DNA, which shows that they are European:

“The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe.

Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England.” -https://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html

Curiously, a 2013 study of the maternal origins of Ashkenazi Jews suggests that their ancestors were prehistoric European women from the Northern Mediterranean—and not the Middle East or the Caucasus, as other research has posited. The study analyzed mitochondrial DNA (loops of genetic material passed down from mother to child in tiny organelles carried by their eggs).

Led by Martin B. Richards of the University of Leeds in the UK, the research suggests that 40 percent of the variation in Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA can be traced to prehistoric Europe, indicating that the maternal ancestors of most modern Ashkenazi Jews converted to Judaism some 2,000 years ago. – https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/07/09/are-jews-a-genetic-race-or-population-12-examples-of-jewish-genetic-distinctiveness/

There are no races among humans:

As a trained geneticist, he became convinced that there are not and never were human races. In the last twenty years, an increasing number of anthropologists and biologists have reached the same conclusion. They argue that there is no way to genetically characterize race, because no human population has ever been isolated long enough from other populations to avoid “crossbreeding.” The history of the Jews, in particular, supports this thesis. From Day One they had children with non-Jews. Hence, biologically, Jews are not different from non-Jews. – https://lupress.cas2.lehigh.edu/content/myth-jewish-race

Race and genetics form their own double helix, twisting together through history. The Nazis, as everyone knows, justified the death camps on the grounds that Jews and Gypsies were genetically inferior—but what is less known is that the Nazis took their cue from eugenics legislation passed in the United States. Here, race is defined primarily by skin color. Since that’s a genetic trait, the logic goes, race itself must be genetic, and there must be differences that are more than skin deep.

But that’s not what modern genetics reveals. Quite the contrary, it shows that race is truly skin deep. Indeed, genetics undermines the whole concept that humanity is composed of ”races”—pure and static groups that are significantly different from one another. Genetics has proven otherwise by tracing human ancestry, as it is inscribed on DNA……

Mitochondrial DNA indicates that all living humans descend from one maternal source—christened Mitochondrial Eve—who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Similarly, the Y chromosome shows that all men have a common ancestor, Y-chromosome Adam, who lived at the same time. (Actually, both analyses indicate that modern humans descend from a small founding population of about 5000 men and an equal number of women.) The time estimates are based on assumptions on how frequently genetic mutations occur. The mutation clocks of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome tick at different speeds, so the fact that they both indicate humans emerged at the same historical moment makes this evidence much more convincing……http://web.mit.edu/racescience/in_media/what_dna_says_about_human/

Judaism traces lineages via the maternal line. DNA has proven that the maternal line of Ashkenazi Jews is European:

A 2013 study at the University of Huddersfield, led by Professor Martin B. Richards, concluded that 65%-81% of Ashkenazi Mt-DNA is European in origin, including all four founding mothers, and that most of the remaining lineages are also European. The results were published in Nature Communications in October 2013. The team analyzed about 2,500 complete and 28,000 partial Mt-DNA genomes of mostly non-Jews, and 836 partial Mt-DNA genomes of Ashkenazi Jews. The study claims that only 8% of Ashkenazi Mt-DNA could be identified as Middle Eastern in origin, with the origin of the rest being unclear.[66]

They wrote:

If we allow for the possibility that K1a9 and N1b2 might have a Near Eastern source, then we can estimate the overall fraction of European maternal ancestry at ~65%. Given the strength of the case for even these founders having a European source, however, our best estimate is to assign ~81% of Ashkenazi lineages to a European source, ~8% to the Near East and ~1% further to the east in Asia, with ~10% remaining ambiguous… Thus at least two-thirds and most likely more than four-fifths of Ashkenazi maternal lineages have a European ancestry.[64] – Wikipedia, and NY Times

See also:  A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages

We can ALL trace our lineage back to the Old Testament and to Abraham – no matter if one is Jewish, a Christian or a Muslim. Or if you are Italian, Russian or American. 

Some Zionist claim that modern Jews are the direct ancestors of Abraham,  which gives them exclusive rights to the land.  Tracing genealogy back only a few generations is possible, but tracing it back thousands of years is impossible. So while Jews can sometimes share recent ancestral heritage, they can not claim ancestry back to Abraham exclusively against other people on the planet, because after so many generations back we are ALL related. Ancestry.com has a post explaining how they trace ethnicity and in it they state this:

At seven generations back, less than 1% of your DNA is likely to come from any given ancestor. – ancestry.com

In other recent studies on genealogy it has been found that going back only a few thousand years, we all came from the same ancestors:

Ralph and Coop identified 1.9 million shared segments of DNA that were millions of base pairs long, proving their owners were related. They were then able to estimate how long ago their common ancestor lived from the length of the segment.

“The length of a shared DNA sequence shows how closely, or distantly, two people are related,” Ralph said. “Thus DNA sequences shared with parents are the longest, those shared with grandparents are half as long and those shared with great-grandparents half as long again and so on.

“So the longer ago an ancestor is, the shorter the chunk is likely to be.”

“Our research confirmed what Chang suspected—that everybody who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago and who had children, is an ancestor of everyone alive today who has some European ancestry,” Ralph said.

Ralph and Coop calculated that these shared segments showed ancestors stretching back some 3,000 years, or 100 generations. This lends support to Chang’s calculation that by expanding his model from living Europeans to everyone alive on Earth, an all-ancestor generation would have occurred some 3,400 years ago. – phys.org

Abraham lived roughly 3,900 years ago. However, at only 3,400 years ago, we all came from the same ancestors. Genealogically, we are ALL Abraham’s descendants.

On the same research:

A British computational biologist recently confirmed that everyone living on earth today is related to everyone else on the planet, much more closely than previously thought…..Twenty generations ago, approximately 1400 AD, it is estimated that the world population was about 10,000,000 people. Going back another four generations, we find each person alive today has 16,777,216 direct line ancestors, or over ½ million more ancestors than there were people in the world. – gvnews.com

We are crossed over with the same ancestors,  which would render it impossible for some of us to be more closely related to ancestors from long ago compared than other people on the planet today:

All humans can trace their family tree back to a surprisingly small group of common ancestors. Every person on Earth’s most recent common ancestor might have died less than 2000 years ago….-i09.Gizmodo.com

In fact about 80% of the people at that time in the past will be the ancestors of everyone in the present. The remaining 20% are those who have had no children, or whose children have had no children, and so on – in other words, people who were genetic dead-ends…….

Zionist can not claim that the Jews remained on their own and thus are completely distinct genealogically,  because even being isolated for small periods of time still brings us all back to the same ancestors from just after Abraham’s lifetime:

How far do we have to go back to find the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today? Again, estimates are remarkably short. Even taking account of distant isolation and local inbreeding, the quoted figures are 100 or so generations in the past: a mere 3,000 years ago.. – bbc.com

A new DNA study shows that everyone alive on the earth today shares common ancestors only 1,000 to 2,000 years ago…..genealogybank.com

In conclusion, the stance of the Church for the last 2,000 plus years is that there is only one Israel – the Church. And it is not about race or ancestry.  Judaism is a religion. If you are Jewish,  it is because you practice Judaism or perhaps your family practiced Judaism. Just as a Catholic either became Catholic by conversion or was Christened as one as a baby.As a side note, it should be recognized that the other tribes of the Old Testament were not Jewish as well. The Tribe of Judah, was only ONE tribe of the ancient Israelites. In other words,  not all Israel was Jewish.

The Church did not replace Old Testament Israel, but is the fullness of it and what it was meant to be. It is inclusive of both Israelites of the OT who were waiting for the Messiah and those who came to belief in the Messiah after His time. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the sole heir to the promises God made to Abraham. We become heirs when we come to faith in Jesus and follow Him.

Other Links for Further Study:

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/are-jews-a-nation-or-a-religion

https://www.truetorahjews.org/

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